To find out more about RelationshipSecure, visit www.RelationshipSecure.com.

Expanding your Network

While RelationshipSecure is a powerful tool for maintaining your existing relationships, other companies have developed technology to help you expand your network of contacts. These concepts aren't mutually exclusive: in fact, it makes sense that you'd want to keep in touch with people so that relationship won't have gone cold by time you need to ask them for an introduction, a job, a meeting, etc.

LinkedIn.com is one of most popular services for expanding your network by getting introduced to other people who can help you move ahead in your career. How it works is this: you enter your contacts' email addresses or import them from Outlook. LinkedIn then gives you a window into people your contacts know and depending on their privacy settings, ability to contact people who may be able to help you. LinkedIn.com is most popular among executives and other high-level professionals because of exclusive nature of their service and its powerful privacy features.

Ryze.com is another service similar to LinkedIn.com, but with fewer privacy controls. It is not as popular among executives but it's worth checking out, especially if you want to network with people who aren't in LinkedIn's demographic.

Reaching Recruiting Contacts

While these tools provide a powerful way for you to tap your existing networking resources, it may be case that you have to reach out of your network to find someone who can help you. I recommend using a service like ResumeArrow.com to get your resume in front of recruiters and employers you wouldn't be able to reach otherwise.

Another area where employers can run into trouble is with credit checks. If an employer requests a credit check of an employee who will not have any fiduciary responsibilities, it could be difficult for them to show that it was truly warranted. As an example, if ABC Company institues a policy to require credit checks on all their job candidates before hiring and a year later it turns out that a disproprotionate number of people they rejected were minorities, one of minority candidates would probably be successful in suing company for damages if they could show that credit worthiness is not a good predictor of job performance for type of position they applied for.

To address question about your specific situation: company you applied for would probably be on solid ground to reject you on basis of a positive drug test provided that drug test is administered to all job applicants (and not just job applicants that would likely be in a protected class).

For information about reference checks on your prior employers, check out this article: http://www.jobsearchinfo.com/refs.htm