Reid Dossinger

I was sad to see that Picnik is being closed by Google. For several years, I’ve recommended it to people in communications who only have simple image editing needs and think they need Photoshop, and every since the Chrome extension came out, it’s been an awesome way to crop, resize and save web images that saves several steps off of using Photoshop.

Picnik’s functionality is basically already built into Google+, but unless I’m missing something, it seems much more geared towards editing images that are already in your albums and not for the quick editing of images found on the web that the Picnik chrome extension allows for.

What I’m hoping is that it’s just “Picnik” as a named, separate service that’s closing, and that the functionality that’s been baked into Google+ will soon have the same Chrome extension that allows the picking up of web images and saving them locally rather than confining images to albums.

There’s no shortage of articles offering tips for resume writing and interviewing, all by people with a lot more experience in it than me. But after a recent round of interviewing candidates for two jobs, I’ve gotten some pretty strong opinions on some best practices for when you send in a resume and show up for an interview:

• Have your resume in PDF, not Word.
• Keep your resume short (1 page) and leave the talking to your LinkedIn profile. I’ve found that I look to the resume for a brief overview and to the LinkedIn profile for the detail and success stories.
• Have your LinkedIn profile URL in the header of your resume, and make sure that it’s a clickable link. Most of the people who see your resume are going to be looking at it on your computer.
• Keep your LinkedIn profile up to date and detailed.
• In both resume and LinkedIn, focus on successes rather than day-to-day responsibilities.
• Confidence is great—necessary, even—but avoid “I will take your company to the next level” style of language in your cover letter and interview. I understand why people say it, but it rings hollow and comes across as pretty condescending.
• Google yourself to see what shows up. I don’t have any stories about salacious or shocking finds (and wouldn’t tell them even if I did), but your interviewers will search on your name. Have an idea of what they’ll find when they do.