This is the sixth installment of “Diary of an Unemployed Finance Mom 2.0.” This story is real, nothing is fabricated. For the sake of her privacy, and her hopes of landing a new job, she’s going under the pseudonym, job mom 2.0. Follow her trials and tribulations on Twitter @jobmom

First the generic career advice …

There seems to be an endless amount of generic career advice  everywhere right now – all over the many jobsearch sites (e.g., TheLadders.com, CareerBuilder.com, Monster.com, etc…), Twitter via the many “career coaches” out there, articles in almost every newspaper (local and national).

There was an interesting blog post in The Wall Street Journal this morning on this subject by Dawn Jordan, one of the writers in the series Laid Off and Looking.

I couldn’t agree more with Ms. Jordan.

She says most of the advice  is extremely broad, attempting to speak to everyone – what she calls the “one size fits all” approach. “Yet, it seems like 95% of the information, advice and tools I have encountered are totally generic. They speak to the unemployed population en masse instead of speaking to me.”

That universe spans recent college grads to people with professional degrees to mid-level managers to C-level execs, and beyond. Tools and tips that one demographic might find useful could be completely useless (if not detrimental) to another.

I wrote about an example of this in my last post where I discussed the generic resume critique offered up by the good people at TheLadders.com.

Then the specific, made to measure career advice

Counterpoint to everything generic: meet Jack Young (@Recruiter on Twitter, where we met) who’s been an Executive Recruiter for over 20 years.

He has a very interesting idea. He hosts webinars called “Allow Me to Introduce Myself.” He has a website of the same name.

Each Webinar features one of his clients, an employer who is conducting an active search. It does cost $15 for a candidate to register, which turned me off at first.

Jack did an amazing job of asking excellent, pointed questions of the employer, questions about his particular preferences regarding resume issues (gaps in the timeline? for older job-seekers – how many years to show? pictures on resumes? does format really matter?), cover letter matters (do you read them? can they help? hurt? both? do they ever trump an inadequate resume?) and interview questions/responses.

Jack’s format gives the candidate a unique look into the mind of the specific employer to whom he or she is submitting an application. That way, the candidate can tailor his or her materials to that employer’s tastes. Talk about targeted advice! (And the $15 fee also guarantees that Jack will pass your resume along to the employer featured on that specific webinar.)

Valuable insight into what the employer wants from a job candidate

In this market where there are so many qualified, experienced candidates, it’s invaluable to have the inside scoop into what the employer is looking for and how to best differentiate yourself.

Once armed with that knowledge, your chances of landing the job increase exponentially. Networking with people at your target company is one way to do this – though sometimes, it’s difficult (even with a huge social and professional network) to get to the right people at the right places. It’s impossible to literally know everyone. Jack Young has identified a fantastic way to help candidates who run up against such a roadblock. And differentiated himself in the process.