With all the negative publicity piling on lately, the sentiment from American car manufacturers might be seeing the powerhouse Japanese automaker in their rear view mirror.

Truck Stop by Noel Kerns / © All rights reserved

State padlocked 6 sites in January, says move could save $900K a year

Indiana hopes to save nearly $1 million by closing aging highway rest areas this year, but truckers who depend on the facilities for much-needed breaks are concerned about drivers' safety.

The Indiana Department of Transportation (INDOT) shut down six of the state's 36 rest stops in mid-January. State officials would not say if additional sites would close in the future.

"There is a plan for going forward," said Bruce Childs, deputy commissioner of communications for INDOT. "It is still a work in progress."

Budgeting issues have forced highway departments across the country to close rest stops. In Virginia, 18 of 42 rest areas, plus a welcome center, are slated to close by Tuesday, according to the Virginia Department of Transportation Web site. Welcome centers are near state lines.

INDOT said it considered maintenance costs, customer demand and proximity to other rest areas before padlocking the Indiana rest stops.

Truckers say the closures in Indiana eliminate more than 100 potential truck parking places.

"The biggest thing is the safety issue," said Bob Hudson, chairman of the Safety Management Council for the Indiana Motor Truck Association. Federal laws prohibit truckers from driving more than 11 hours during a 24-hour period.

Hudson wrote to U.S. Rep. Baron Hill, D-Seymour, stressing the problems that closures can cause. When parking isn't available, truckers who have reached the 11-hour limit have two options: Park illegally or risk a citation for exceeding the driving limit.

The consequences can be deadly.

In April 2006, four Taylor University students and one employee were killed when a Michigan trucker crashed his rig into their van on I-69. The truck driver exceeded the federal driving rule by nine hours, police said. Witnesses said the trucker appeared to have fallen asleep at the wheel.

The state hopes to build newer rest facilities to replace the older ones, but there isn't a finalized plan. "There is hope that many of the facilities will be rebuilt into bigger and better facilities," said Brian Shattuck, facilities engineer for INDOT.

He said closing the aging ones could save taxpayers $900,000 a year.

The 2009 job market is very different from job markets of the past. If you haven't job-hunted in a while, the changes in the landscape can throw you for a loop.

One of the biggest changes is the shift in what constitutes a strong resume. Years ago, we could dig into the Resume Boilerplate grab-bag and pull out a phrase to fill out a sentence or bullet point on our resume. Everybody used the same boilerplate phrases, so we knew we couldn't go wrong choosing one of them -- or many -- to throw into your resume.

Things have changed. Stodgy boilerplate phrases in your resume today mark you as uncreative and "vocabulary challenged." You can make your resume more compelling and human-sounding by rooting out and replacing the boring corporate-speak phrases that litter it, and replacing them with human language -- things that people like you or I would actually say.

Here are the worst 10 boilerplate phrases -- the ones to seek out and destroy in your resume as soon as possible:

• Results-oriented professional
• Cross-functional teams
• More than [x] years of progressively responsible experience
• Superior (or excellent) communication skills
• Strong work ethic
• Met or exceeded expectations
• Proven track record of success
• Works well with all levels of staff
• Team player
• Bottom-line orientation

You can do better. What about adding a human voice to your resume? Here's an example:

"I'm a Marketing Researcher who's driven by curiosity about why people buy what they do. At XYZ Industries, I used consumer surveys and online-forum analysis to uncover the reasons why consumers chose our competitors over us; our sales grew twenty percent over the next six months as a result. I'm equally at home on sales calls or analyzing data in seclusion, and up to speed on traditional and new-millennium research tools and approaches. I'm fanatical about understanding our marketplace better every day, week and month -- and have helped my employers' brands grow dramatically as a result."

You don't have to write resumes that sound like robots wrote them. A human-voiced resume is the new black -- try it!

This is a Guest Blog by Paul Hemp of the Harvard Business Review

Hiring people? Who has time to think about that these days, when most organizations are trying to figure out who to lay off and how to do it humanely?

The Harvard Business Review says you're making a mistake if you don't carve out time to plot your hiring strategy, according to Claudio Fernández-Aráoz, a senior executive at the search firm Egon Zehnder International and the co-author--with Harvard Business School professors Boris Groysberg and Nitin Nohria--of an article in the May issue of Harvard Business Review, "The Definitive Guide to Recruiting in Good Times and Bad."

Although few companies are adding--or even replacing--people now, hiring will become a key source of competitive advantage as soon as the first signs of recovery appear on the horizon, says Fernández-Aráoz, who also is the author of the recently published book Great People Decisions.

In the current HarvardBusiness Ideacast, Fernández-Aráoz catalogs some of the mistakes people make when hiring and offers advice on avoiding them. One of the biggest errors is assuming that the worst thing that can happen is hiring someone who turns out to be a disaster. A potentially greater mistake: not hiring someone who would have been a star performer.

After you listen to the IdeaCast, you can also take Recruiting Practices Self-Assessment, a "painless, 21-question" quiz, developed by the authors, to see how your hiring practices stack up overall and in seven distinct sub-categories.