Q. What, if anything, can parents of high-school-age children do to guide them toward their true professional calling?

A. Some parents are apt to put pressure on their children about choosing a first career, thinking that it will determine the course of their lives. Yet as adults, we often reinvent ourselves more than once, moving among professions. So whatever your children choose now won’t necessarily define their future.

“I see many teens who jump on the first career track that someone recommends just to avoid being directionless, only to find themselves miserable a few years later,” said Tamar E. Chansky, a child-and-adolescent psychologist in Plymouth Meeting, Pa., and author of “Freeing Your Child From Anxiety.”

Ms. Chansky says it’s best to have conversations with teenagers about their strengths and interests, rather than a specific career, and then to listen to what they have to say. “If the parent is putting out all the ideas, you wind up with the parent’s dream, not the kid’s,” she said.

If you’ve got job interview rejection letters piling up in a corner of your lounge room and you’re continually left feeling frustrated, jobless and penniless, wondering ‘what did I do wrong!?’ – it’s about time you did something about it. By reaching the interview stage, you have most likely beaten hundreds of other people that also applied for the job, so your resume must be pretty good. It’s the interview part that’s letting you down – you just can’t seem to close the deal and get the job.

Job interviews can be tough – you’ve got several highly qualified people all competing and marketing their talents to an interviewer, but only one candidate can get the job. The interviewer has to be ruthless and pick one person – but what if this person is never you? It could be because you’re nervous, you’re not well prepared or you go to the interview wearing shorts and flip flops – whatever the reason, you need to find out what it is and work on it.

The best way to improve is to get some feedback from the interviewer. This way you can pinpoint exactly what areas you need to work on, which may even be things you didn’t realise were jeopardising your chances of getting the job. The key is not to see a rejection letter as a setback. While it is disappointing, turn it into something positive by interpreting it as a learning experience. The interviewer has most probably interviewed many people before so could offer you some insightful tips or advice. Anyway, you’ve got nothing to lose.

If you’ve got job interview rejection letters piling up in a corner of your lounge room and you’re continually left feeling frustrated, jobless and penniless, wondering ‘what did I do wrong!?’ – it’s about time you did something about it. By reaching the interview stage, you have most likely beaten hundreds of other people that also applied for the job, so your resume must be pretty good. It’s the interview part that’s letting you down – you just can’t seem to close the deal and get the job.

Job interviews can be tough – you’ve got several highly qualified people all competing and marketing their talents to an interviewer, but only one candidate can get the job. The interviewer has to be ruthless and pick one person – but what if this person is never you? It could be because you’re nervous, you’re not well prepared or you go to the interview wearing shorts and flip flops – whatever the reason, you need to find out what it is and work on it.

The best way to improve is to get some feedback from the interviewer. This way you can pinpoint exactly what areas you need to work on, which may even be things you didn’t realise were jeopardising your chances of getting the job. The key is not to see a rejection letter as a setback. While it is disappointing, turn it into something positive by interpreting it as a learning experience. The interviewer has most probably interviewed many people before so could offer you some insightful tips or advice. Anyway, you’ve got nothing to lose.

If you're looking for a job now, you don't need to be reminded about how bad the economy and employment markets are.

But you may need to be reminded of a simple fact: You will never get hired for any job, in any economy, by an employer.

Instead, you will be hired by a person.

A person with feelings, hopes, and fears, just like you.

The more persons you can meet, talk to, and help, the faster you will get hired. In any city. In any economy.

With that in mind, I went through my past columns from this year and collected three proven ways to get hired faster by "getting personal" ...

More companies are turning to interviewers with Ph.D.'s to find a candidate who's the right fit...

It is, no doubt, some job seekers' worst interview nightmare: an hour on the phone answering questions posed not by a hiring manager but by a psychologist. Or, even more frightening, several hours in an office with a psychologist, quietly filling out multiple-choice tests, or even performing workplace simulations with paid actors. Marketing executive So Young Park started scouting for a new job in November, the middle of the worst recession in two-and-a-half decades. Park's search took about four months, and she was asked—by three different companies—to have a talk with a psychologist. "I had never had to do one before," Park says. Indeed, experts suggest that this economy may have created a perfect storm of reasons for companies to embrace psychologists in the hiring process: Employers are struggling to filter the right hire from truckloads of candidates, and the ugly marketplace means good hires are even more critical to a company's success.

Did you know that you could take a cocktail shaker to a group interview and walk away with a job offer? That's right – it's all about standing out from the crowd when it comes to group interviews. But when everyone else has the same goal, that's not such an easy task.

So who uses group interviews?

Companies that recruit large numbers of staff (like retail and supermarket chains) love group interviews. They are also used to recruit graduates into highly prized cadetships at organisations such as accounting firms, banks and other corporates.

A personal account

But back to the cocktail shaker and my experience in a group interview. At the end of a gruelling seven-hour group interview that started with 50 people, I was one of five candidates offered a job. We each had to give a three-minute speech so I decided to 'drink to my success' using my personal attributes as ingredients for the job success cocktail; hence the cocktail shaker!

Why did it work? Because, I think, the speech was memorable (more for the cocktail shaker perhaps but memorable nevertheless). If you don't stand out during a group interview, you'll get lost in the crowd. While you don't have to bring a cocktail shaker with you, you should think about how you can impress the interviewers. No matter how qualified or experienced you are, it's easy to get spooked at a group interview. I was completely unprepared for a make-or-break question in a group interview with an iconic Australian department store: 'What is your favourite colour and why?'

Whenever I want to watch my students' jaws drop down to their desks, all I have to do is tell them that the "safest" attire for women to wear on a job interview is a skirted suit and that pantsuits -- while almost universally acceptable in the workplace -- are still somewhat risky attire for interviewing.

My students can't believe it. They are stunned that such a sexist double-standard could still exist in the business world. They are incredulous that they should be expected to wear attire that is so clearly gender-specific.

I can't blame them. I can't disagree with any of their protests. All I can do is prepare them for reality: That they might be perceived as less than professional and even lose a job offer if they wear a pantsuit to an interview instead of a skirtsuit. And that they can rarely go wrong by reaching for the highest standard of traditional dress -- especially in such conservative fields as banking, investments, and law.

Some of my female students adopt the position that they wouldn't want to work for an employer who would fail to hire them just for wearing a pantsuit. And that's a perfectly valid stance. If you’re trying to find an employer that’s a good fit with your style, the acceptability of pantsuits can be a good litmus test. If your goal is to get a job offer, however, you may want to take the more cautious skirtsuit route.

Debbie has been working for Whatever Inc. for quite a few years already. She has been doing good job so far – her boss is happy with the results and cannot point out just nothing that Debbie could have done any better. Debbie is also quite happy with what she is doing, but… But she feels she should move further, grow, develop, meet new challenges and win new battles. Currently Whatever Inc. cannot offer Debbie any career development – they need her in her present job role. So, Debbie goes job-hunting in order to check what the market can offer. Good move! But what if her boss gets to know about it?.. Whoops!

You have never promised to your employer that you will work for them forever; it is natural to look for new possibilities. However, if got caught, make sure you act quickly, because you do not want to loose your job before you find a new one. Talk to your boss. Here are the variants your conversation can be based on:

You are looking for career growth. Just like Debbie.

Explain to your boss that you have short and long-term career development goals, which you need to review on regular basis. Thus, the purpose of you going for job interviews within this particular period of time is updating your current market value and competitiveness information. In this way you are also getting to know in what way you can improve your marketability, which is absolutely true.