Kaleidoscope wants to know...

What are your plans for the future?

photos by Harry Kemp

Antqone L. Brazil: "I’m getting married in April to my beautiful fiance Chikeyia Longley. We’ll be purchasing a house soon and will continue to enjoy a successful, prosperous life together ... Kids? Maybe!!! lol"

Chikeyia L. Longley: "(I will be) getting married soon. I want to start a beautiful, successful life with my fiance Antqone. I plan on continuing to grow my business, Educators Early Childhood Center. Soon I hope to purchase our first home and start a family."

Gwendolyn M. Hooks: "My plans for the future are to continue in the ministry for winning souls to Christ, to promote my upcoming CD so that I can be a blessing to others as God has blessed me. To encourage young America that no matter what you’re going through, you can make it. My future project is to design a suitable living subsidy for the elder. I most definitely plan to continue to raise my seven children and get them to college."

Samatra Collins: "I’m a recruiting marketing specialist for the PMG Educational Services, which is a tutoring service for children in the 6th to 12th grade. My goal is to help children become productive. This is something that I want to do for the rest of my life."

$7 million for the homeless

Governor Jim Doyle recently announced $7,270,027 to 136 organizations across Wisconsin for emergency shelter and transitional housing programs administered by the Division of Housing and community development in the Department of Commerce.

Nearly $5.2 million is for emergency and transitional housing, with about $1.1 million for rental assistance and nearly $405,000 for the statewide Critical Assistance Program. Funds are widely dispersed across the state’s 72 counties, with more than $1 million slated for Milwaukee County.

MATC Graphic Design Program

The Graphic Design associate degree program will be offered for the first time at Milwaukee Area Technical College’s Mequon Campus, 5555 West Highland Road, beginning in late August 2007. Previously the 66-credit, two-year program has been offered only at MATC’s Downtown Milwaukee Campus. For more information, call 414-297-6433 or 262-238-2236.

Unemployment rate

The Milwaukee area added jobs last month, even while the unemployment rate rose, according to preliminary estimates released this afternoon by the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development.

Employment in the four-county Milwaukee area stood at 869,000 in June, up 11,000 from June 2006, based on payroll data.

It’s time to network!

Visitors to Manpower’s New Neighborhood Fair met the operators of many area businesses, including Carla Allison of The Reader’s Choice (left) and Stacy Hasan and Doris Vinson (right) of The Ja’ Stacy Restaurant. The July 12 event helped Manpower and Jefferson Wells learn what the King Drive neighborhood has to offer. Manpower’s new world headquarters opens in September at King Drive and Cherry Street.

What does your resume say?

Busy hiring managers may review dozens, or even hundreds, of applications for a single vacancy, and your resume has the best chance of being flagged for follow-up if it’s well organized and to the point.

In fact, more than half (52 percent) of executives polled by Robert Half International said a single page is the preferable length for a staff-level resume. Forty-four percent of respondents said two pages, while only 3 percent said three pages or more is ideal.

So, avoid pedantic sentences, personal anecdotes and other irrelevant information that doesn’t speak to your ability to do the job. The following long-winded applicant, who submitted a six-page resume, offered a lot of big words but no clarity:

"Skills: Able to remedy posterity and proficiency to the desired cumulus within the work arena. Once expounding upon these various constitutional elements, affinity is achieved, and I sequester the cultivation essential for yielded efficiencies."

Does this resume come with a secret decoder ring?

In addition, steer clear of personal musings. The following candidate, who was applying for a position as a copywriter, should have trimmed her cover letter by deleting this odd anecdote about her financial woes:

Cover Letter: "The other day, I was at the gas station, washing bird droppings off my car with a squeegee. It occurred to me that I was doing so because car washes are, like, 11 bucks. So here I am, ready to write just about anything for money."

Why don’t you start with a new cover letter?

Some applicants include an "Other" section in their resumes as a catchall area for random details that don’t fit elsewhere. Often, these entire sections can be deleted. This candidate, an executive assistant for a financial firm, included a trivial tidbit with no explanation about how it relates to her job:

"Other: I took a class to recognize smells of plastics that burn at different temperatures."

You’ve left us with some burning questions.

Finally, don’t waste valuable space trying to be cute.

"Interests: Listening to music, reading, kayaking, running and writing descriptions of things I like."

What a wise guy.