Unless you’ve been under a rock, you know that good jobs are hard to find and the competition is stiffer than ever. However, to say that the methods used by companies and potential employees to find one another have changed a tad in the last ten years or so would be a gross understatement. The birth and evolution of social media have shattered the antiquated process of carefully crafting a résumé on a typewriter (with a bottle of Liquid Paper in hand, of course) and then pounding the pavement to hand-deliver it to as many companies as possible. With all facets of the job/employee hunt shifting to the interwebs, does the old-school, paper résumé still hold any relevance in today’s world?

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Pavlov was definitely onto something. That guy knew exactly how to build excitement and keep his audience waiting at the edge of their seats—or the end of a leash, as the case may be—for his next performance. Granted, his performance was delivering dog treats, so not nearly as entertaining as a well-written blog post but the same rules apply: consistency of any action builds anticipation, for readers of your blog as well as man’s best friend. This is why it’s so important to establish a consistent posting schedule.

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This past Friday, I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to attend the first TEDx event held at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. One of my favorite speakers at the event was Adam Braun, founder of Pencils of Promise, an award-winning organization that has built more than 150 schools across Africa, Asia and Latin America.

While Braun has many great things to say (“You change your words to change your worth” being one of them), my favorite part of his talk was about being purpose-driven. Instead of calling Pencils of Promise a nonprofit organization, he instead calls it a “for-purpose” organization. After explaining this term he’s coined (he doesn’t do charity work; he solves problems), he applied it to nonprofits and businesses alike.

“If you’re not building a business based on purpose … your business will erode,” he said.

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Sometimes it’s easy to get so caught up in the day-to-day tasks of running a business that you forget to take a step back and view it all with a critical eye. Do my customers see what I think they see? What do complete strangers think when they come across my website? Are my employees in line with my vision for the company? Do they even know what my vision is? Depending on the answers to these questions, you may have some work in store for you to improve your company’s image. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

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While editing a stack of documents a few months back, I ran across the phrase “top of mind.”

“Ugh, awkward,” I thought, and changed it. But then it popped up again a few docs later from a different writer, and then again while researching. Amid my growing suspicions, I managed to Google it with slightly shaky hands.

To my horror, I found that “top of mind” was a thing — an actual accepted phrase used in business every day by who knows how many people, and this despite its ungainly cadence and oh-so-wrongness. And top of mind is far from the only culprit. We also have nuggets like “vertical market” and leverage used as a verb in the wrong way. Also, nuggets.

Companies now have robust offerings instead of choices and they leverage solutions instead of selling stuff. And business jargon itself is

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