Joe Grimm's News Jobs Café: Ask the recruiter

Selling My Comic Strips?

Q: I'm a 17-year-old senior in high school without a job. The only thing I think I'm good at is drawing my little own individual comic strip. I'll like to publish it and make little money off it as a job but where do I start?

Jay

A: This is hard to do, especially while you're still a senior in high school.

I would keep doing the strip, especially if people tell you that you have talent, but I would get a job, too. That will start to give you the income and security you'll need. I bet you'll find that you're good at more things.

Keep drawing and try to get published closest to home -- the school paper, papers in the area. Those can be steppingstones to bigger venues.

If you haven't already, learn to do your work digitally. This will open whole worlds for you as it will let you e-mail your strips anywhere.

I'd definitely go to college and I'd take art courese and content courses that will feed your strip. They could be in politics, pop culture, history -- whatever subject area you'd like to comment on in your strips. The art courses might show you other areas, such as page or Web design, illustration or informational graphics, that will sustain you as you go down that long, tough road toward syndication.

Even some of the best-known artists had a very tough time breaking in. You've got to be tenacious as well as good.

Note: "Ask the Recruiter" is moving to Poynter's new Career Center. The new home is here. Don't forget to change your bookmark.

We're Moving to Poynter's new Career Center

I think you're going to like this. Ask the Recruiter will be moving to a new home in Poynter's Career Center, launching now.

We'll move your questions and my answers -- as well as a three-year archive of more than a thousand items -- over there.

It'll be convenient to find this, as well as all that Poynter has in its new Career Center and the rest of its site in one location.

Don't worry about losing track of "Ask the Recruiter." We'll keep everything posted in both places for a little while. And I will keep this page up with a redirect to the new home.

Take a peek. And then bookmark it.

Where are the Jobs?

When we confront an unkind job market, we wonder whether it can help to look in another place.

Bizjournals.com has rated job markets top to bottom and shows these 10 as the hottest:

• Cape Coral-Ft. Myers, Fla.
• Las Vegas
• Phoenix
• Sarasota-Bradenton, Fla.
• Orlando
• Riverside-San Bernardino, Calif.
• Lakeland, Fla.
• Boise, Idaho
• Washington, D.C.
• Miami-Ft. Lauderdale

Hiding the Job Interview

A column in the Sun-Sentinel has some hilarious stories about the lnegths to which people go to hide the fact that they're interviewing for another job.

My favorite was the person who changed into their interview clothes in the car -- while the car was going through a car wash.

Treat the Receptionist Right

Be nice to secretaries is not just the name of a holiday.

It is a good thing to keep in mind as you go for a job.

I invariably ask my assistant what she thinks of the people we bring in to interview. After all, she has helped set up flight and hotel arrangements with them and is more likely to see the the side the candidate might try to hide.

An Associated Press article makes the point well.

Read any good books lately?

The New York Daily News has some sound advice -- and some titles -- for answering interviewers who ask, "What have you been reading lately?"

I saw a couple books that I've read (The Tipping Point and The World is Flat) on the list. Funny. I bought Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point because of the buzz about it (See? It works.) but let it gather dust until the follow-up buzz for his Blink made me read that first and then I went back and picked up Tipping. I got to The World is Flat about two years after the rest of the world, so, I'm probably screwed. Still, I think I'll have something coming up on Poynter.org that grew out of the ideas in there.

It's always good for journalists to have a couple of good books going to keep us plugged in and to recharge our writing batteries.

Obviously, don't claim to read a book that you haven't. An editor once told a job-seeker that he should read a particular book, it was so related to his interest area. She even told us a little about it. Maybe my mean streak was acting up that day, but I asked whether she had actually read the book. She hadn't. You guessed it, she had read a review of it.

Read books, but don't be a phony and choose books that you're interested in, not books you otherwise wouldn't read and that you'll be straining to get into the interview.

How many typos in a resume?

How many typos does it take to get your résumé trashed?

One, right?

Well, that may be the case in journalism, but not everywhere.

OfficeTeam, which provides specialized administrative staff, surveyed employers and found out juist how many typos employers will stand. The tally:

• One typo: 47 percent
• Two typos : 37 percent
• Three typos: seven percent
• Four or more typos: six percent
• The remaining three percent did not answer or said they just don't know how many typos it would take.

Who or whom?

Q: Usually, I am up to the task of "who" or "whom" but sometimes it seems as if it is more of a "sounds right" rather than "is right."

I had a couple of designers working with me who/whom I loved and who/whom I am still very good friends with today.

Lucy

A: I see this pronoun in some of my mail. As in, "To Whom it May Concern."

Before we get to answers, a lecturette: We don't do grammar or punctuation by ear. We follow the rules. Know the rules; write with confidence.

On who and whom, the rule is that "who" is the subject form of this pronoun and "whom" is the object form.

The AP Stylebook's "Ask the Editor" blog says: "Who" is grammatically the subject -- never the object -- of a sentence or phrase: The woman who rented the room left the window open. Who is there? "Whom" is used when someone is the object of a verb or preposition: The woman to whom ...

Even if we know the rule, we can run into some tricky situations, as when it is hard to tell whether the pronoun is the object of a verb or part of a noun clause.

Whom seems to be on its way out, people say. But then, people have been saying that -- praying that -- for decades. It has become such a distraction that journalists seldom use it. We don't simply plug in who everywhere, we write sentences that don't require the objective form of that pronoun.

My guess on your sample sentence was whom in the first case and who in the second. Our chief of copy desks, Alex Cruden, agrees with whom in the first place, but says experts disagree on the second. The disagreement seems to have to do with whether the pronoun is the object of "with" or part of a noun phrase that is the subject. Get me rewrite!

Mad about being fired?

So mad about being fired that you could spit -- or worse?

That can hurt your efforts to land a new job says an article in the Wall Street Journal's CareerJournal.com.

The article helps talk you in off the ledge -- and maybe into that next job.

Stress testing job candidates

CNNMoney.com reports on new frontiers in screening out ill-tempered job-seekers.

One way, they say, is "a company might call you knowing it's a bad time - think dinner time with crying kids in high chairs. You'll raise a red flag if you confess your house is chaotic and you're stuck with double-duty because your spouse is always working. Why? Home life is a top distraction at work."

Another is to ignore you for several days during the interview process to see if you'll flame them in an e-mail.

When newspapers do this -- and we do -- it is not part of a larger plan -- sadly.