Employee experience can seriously impact your bottom line. The Employer Brand Index gives you insight into what talent really thinks about your company.
Sales and marketing are a vital part in any business. Because of this, opportunities in sales and marketing will never run dry. These jobs would always be available no matter how bad the economy gets. But getting into this career is not always easy. For highly specialized technical sales positions, certain qualifications are required for you to get the job. So, if you want to apply for a these kinds of opportunities, revise your resume a bit to help you get the job.
These are the things your resume should focus on:
Business Development Skills
Employers are not only on the lookout for people who can sell. Expanding the business is just as important. Detail in your resume and cover letter what skills you have in networking, lead generation, sourcing and probing/pre-qualifying, as well as any experiences you have had organizing events in your previous jobs.
Numbers
It’s all about the numbers! Employers and recruiters scanning your resume will be keeping an eye out for any figures included in your resume. Highlight increases in sales, relevant industry rankings you have attained, number of years or months it took you to bring a certain amount of profit, percentage of increase in customers or product sales, costs you have reduced (if not eliminated), and other pertinent contributions.
Accounts Managed
Name the products or services you have promoted and sold (especially the complex ones). No matter how big or small the brand is, they count. Big brands are often accompanied by demanding decision makers, so highlight the abilities you used to win them over and deliver on your promise. Previous experience though not lengthy is still experience and is definitive proof that you can do the job.
Advertising Skills
If you have good advertising skills, then that’s considered a bonus to your already stellar resume! Copywriting talents and a knack for creating promotional materials tell employers that you can effectively execute their marketing strategies and reach the target audience for the products or services assigned to you.
Training
Some say that selling is an art. Because of this, a certain degree of education and training can be helpful to get into a job in sales and marketing. If you have taken courses for enhancing abilities in negotiation and closing, probing, presentation, account management, strategic marketing, print and other media advertising, then by all means include them in your resume. This tells employers and recruiters you have the tools to help you perform on the job and contribute to the bottom line.
A proven track record is often the requirement for a job in sales and marketing. However, the ability to manage multiple accounts, to communicate and interact with people are also of great value. So get to work and make sure that resume and cover letter sells the best things about you!
LinkedIn brands itself as a social network for professionals and a lot of people do use it successfully for sharing information and news about their companies or discussing key issues in their industry. But what can LinkedIn do for the jobseeking professional? Many of us are not as clued into all of LinkedIn’s different features…
Before you go on your interview, you should realize there are several common types of job interviews. You will definitely want to inquire what type of job interview you will be going on beforehand so you can best prepare for it. Don’t be afraid to ask your recruiter what type of job interview will be conducted, as it serves both of you and the interviewer to know. In this article, I am going to discuss the six of the most common types of job interviews.
1. Traditional one on one job interview
The traditional one on one interview is where you are interviewed by one representative of the company, most likely the manager of the postion you are applying for. Because you will be working with this person directly if you get the job, he/she will want to get a feel for who you are and if your skills match those of the job requirements.
You may be asked questions about the experience on your resume, what you can offer to the company or position. Many times the interviewer will ask you questions such as “Why would you be good for this job?” or “Tell me about yourself.” The one on one interview is by far, one of the most common types of job interviews.
2. Panel Interview
In a panel interview, you will be interviewed by a panel of interviewers. The panel may consist of different representatives of the company such as human resources, management, and employees. The reason why some companies conduct panel interviews is to save time or to get the collective opinion of panel regarding the candidate. Each member of the panel may be responsible for asking you questions that represent relevancy from their position.
3. Behavioral Interview
In a behavioral interview, the interviewer will ask you questions based on common situations of the job you are applying for. The logic behind the behavioral interview is that your future performance will be based on a past performance of a similar situation. You should expect questions that inquire about what you did when you were in XXX sitation and how did you dealt with it. In a behavioral interview, the interviewer wants to see how you deal with certain problems and what you do to solve them.
4. Group Interview
Many times companies will conduct a group interview to quickly prescreen candidates for the job opening as well as give the candidates the chance to quickly learn about the company to see if they want to work there. Many times, a group interview will begin with a short presentation about the company. After that, they may speak to each candidate individually and ask them a few questions.
One of the most important things the employer is observing during a group interview, is how you interact with the other candidates. Are you emerging as a leader or are you more likely to complete tasks that are asked of you? Neither is necessarily better than the other, it just depends on what type of personality works best for the position that needs to be filled.
5. Phone Interview
A phone interview may be for a position where the candiate is not local or for an initial prescreening call to see if they want to invite you in for an in-person interview. You may be asked typical questions or behavioral questions.
Most of the time you will schedule an appointment for a phone interview. If the interviewer calls unexpectedly, it’s ok to ask them politely to schedule an appointment. On a phone interview, make sure your call waiting is turned off, you are in a quiet room, and you are not eating, drinking or chewing gum.
6. Lunch Interview
Many times lunch interviews are conducted as a second interview. The company will invite you to lunch with additional members of the team to further get to know you and see how you fit in. This is a great time to ask any questions you may have about the company or postition as well, so make sure you prepare your questions in advance.
Although you are being treated to a meal, the interview is not about the food. Don’t order anything that is too expensive or messy to eat. Never take your leftovers home in a doggy bag either. You want to have your best table manners and be as neat as possible. You don’t need to offer to pay, it is never expected for a candidate to pay at a lunch interview.
Chew quietly and in small bites so you don’t get caught with a mouthful of food when the recruiter asks you a question.
So, now you have an idea of these six common types of job interviews. However, no matter what type of job interview you go on, always do your best to prepare for it the best you can ahead of time so you can do your best and show them the best of who you are.
Everyone has a personal brand. Do you know what yours conveys to potential employers? When your name is Googled, what comes up? If you haven’t given much thought to your personal brand, here are a few ways to start building it: 1. Sign up for professional networking sites. You may have been one of the…
There’s a sea of online resume postings out there, and with the huge number of resumes submitted via e-mail or online forms that the employers have to scrutinize, they may all start to look the same. When you’re competing with hundreds of other equally qualified applicants, you have to establish yourself as the front-runner from…
While a career contributes to your time on the planet in many ways, most people agree that it shouldn’t be the sum total of your life. If you work a regular full-time job, you get 128 hours per week to sleep, eat, be a romantic partner and parent, or participate in sports and entertainment. There…
The evolution of social networks is the major change in the landscape in the last few years, and they’re continuing to evolve every moment. They can dramatically improve your sources of information and your career management results. If you’re not using them and your competition is (and, I promise you, they are), you’re at a disadvantage.
Using them is fun, too. You can find people that you haven’t seen in years, from high school friends to former employers and neighbors, as well as meet new people with similar interests. You will discover ways that you can help each other that you never would have known about before. Don’t worry. They don’t have to be a huge time sink unless you allow them to be. This book isn’t a primer on how to use them; those already exist, and the tutorials on their own sites make using them fairly easy and safe.
Here, however, I will give an overview of the pros and cons of the three dominant ones, and provide ideas about how to use them to build your reputation, your knowledge, and your entrees into companies.
The Pros and Cons of Social Networks
Tidy classifications of “pros and cons” or “do’s and don’ts” don’t really work well for social networks. The answer is always, “it depends.” Considering the implications of the four areas below and how you want to be known before you plunge in can lead to improved choices, visibility, and reputation over the long term.
Companies can find you.
According to Jennifer Scott, Principal at HireEffect, 80 percent of recruiters (agency, independent, and corporate) use LinkedIn to source candidates. It’s free (let that word and its
implications sink in), and they’re tracking both passive candidates, ones that aren’t looking for jobs that they find with keyword and interest group searches, and active candidates who may be tracking them down.
Remember how you did the research in Strategy #1: Send Clear Signals, about the key words in job postings of interest to your markets or from interviews with your colleagues on “the four most important skills” they’d be looking for? You built them into your résumé so it’s skimmable and scannable, and embedded them in your Elevator Story, right?
Now it’s time to embed them in your profile on the social networking sites, your professional headline on LinkedIn, and in your choice of interest groups. Make yourself easy to find! If you make your profile settings as public as is reasonable, including putting your phone number or email on your profile so an employer can contact you by Googling you rather than needing to join LinkedIn, you’ve just helped both sides.
My client, George, had a nonsolicit, an agreement with his former employer that he couldn’t ask any of his former clients to follow him to his next firm. George put his new contact info on his LinkedIn profile that popped up on Google and, voilà, people could track him down at his new location, easily and legally.
Reputation . . . make it or break it.
Any potential employer is checking you out now on Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook, at a minimum. They can’t afford not to since they’re the easiest tools for performing due diligence. According to ExecuNet research, 44 percent of recruiters have eliminated candidates as a result of information found online. Even your current company is probably checking you out, too.
The groups you’ve selected to join on LinkedIn, the crazy pictures you’ve posted on Facebook, rants against your company or boss—this information is never private. Never. It’s fairly simple for others to work around your privacy settings and, after all, you’re posting information,
pictures, and opinions on the Internet. Did you think it was really going to be private?
“Digital dirt” is a great expression coined by Kirsten Dixson in Career Distinction: Stand Out by Building your Brand. Google yourself and see what comes up. Is there “dirt,” or entries that do not build the brand that you would like, especially on the first page of Google? What about your credit rating or information about legal or marital disputes? It’s all out there. Y
ou can set up a Google alert if you want to track when your name pops up on the Internet. Stacey Rudnick, director of MBA career services at the University of Texas at Austin, teaches a required course to first-year MBA students that includes managing your online presence. She suggests Googling yourself on a regular basis (including using Google Images for pictures), thinking of who you’re connecting with, considering how your privacy settings are structured, and, most importantly, making sure your information is consistent.
Remember Debra Cohen’s research at the Society for Human Resource Management in Strategy #3: Stop Looking for Jobs? More than 93 percent of their HR members said that they are “less likely to hire” if “information on the applicant’s profile contradicts that provided on the résumé, cover letter, or CV.” If the stories differ, is that person trustworthy?
Should you be the victim of digital dirt that isn’t accurate, either bury it, delete it, or differ. “Bury” is pushing a highly ranked Google link further back onto later pages, where it won’t get noticed as much. Burying a link can be done by your publishing material about your research, your blog, or your insights on professional trends. “
The more information you post about yourself,” says Kate Brooks from Career Services at the University of Texas at Austin, “the less likely any negative information is to show up when your name is Googled by an employer.” Unsolicited testimonials, that is, friends or clients who volunteer third-party testimonials about you that are frequently viewed so they appear on the first page or two when your name is Googled, are even better.
“Delete” you can often do with comments on your wall on Facebook, and “differ” is contacting the source of the “dirt” and enlisting help to have the tone of the comments changed or reversed. A phone call saying, “I’m really trying to set a professional tone on my wall because I’m starting a job search. Could I get your help?” is much more likely to elicit the response you need over retaliation or defensiveness.
Taking the fight outside, so to speak, out of the social network to a direct connection, shows your maturity and wisdom . . . and it gets results.
Promiscuous networking.
It’s easy to connect randomly and casually on all three sites. If you’re in any way a public figure, people who have heard you speak at a meeting or read about you may ask to link to you. Someone you meet at a party may want to friend you. You may extend the same casual invitations to others. Who wouldn’t want George Clooney as a friend? Do you really know these people though? Are they safe (will they protect your boundaries and identity), and are their connections safe as well? Do you really want all of these people to have access to the inner workings of your network or your life? If the answer is “yes,” link away, but I’m going slowly.
I personally use two filters when deciding whether to connect with someone: I need to know the person fairly well and to feel comfortable with writing a reference for the person (not that I will for everyone, but I want to be able to should they want one). Given the amount of time I’m going to spend on each site (finite), the awkwardness of “un-friending” someone if necessary, and the importance of maintaining the brand that my clients value, I want to build something that’s sustainable from the start.
After all, this should be a long-term network for each of us. A cleantech investment banker, Bic Stevens, told me that if he isn’t sure about accepting an invitation, he asks the person to call him so they can get to know each other better first, a practice that is both polite and a good idea.
Lauryn Franzoni, ExecuNet vice president and executive editor, concludes in the 2009 Executive Job Market Intelligence Report that “There’s a big difference between purposeful networking and ‘friending.’ Do you want to meet the people who can bring you closer to your career goals, or do you want to collect names? It’s about cultivating your community, nurturing your network and maintaining meaningful—and reciprocal—connections.” Quantity does not equal quality. Check back with the next edition of this book, since the effect of promiscuous networking that online social networking encourages is still being discovered. In the meantime, use your judgment before clicking “accept.”
Value share.
In social networks, as in life, it’s not just about you. Even given the 140-character constraints of Twitter, the etiquette is to help each other instead of shamelessly promoting your own goals. “Retweeting” someone’s message is a perfect example of a three-fer. Jennifer Scott of HireEffect defines “retweet” as forwarding to your followers any information you find useful that other people have tweeted you. “Not only will the person who authored the tweet be thankful, but so will those who see the message as a result of your generosity.” The original sender, the forwarding person, and all his followers benefit. If you find yourself as the originator of a tweet that is fortunate enough to be retweeted, remember to thank the forwarding person for retweeting your message.
Doing good deeds pays off at many levels on all of the social networking sites as well as in your personal network and job creation. Surprised?
Pam Lassiter is the principal of Lassiter Consulting and a popular speaker on career management with the media, corporations, and associations. She currently lives in Boston, Massachusetts, and is available for interviews.
I know that LinkedIn is immensely popular. 150 million users worldwide, says so. But how many Aussies really truly embrace it? Last week as I was updating my own LinkedIn profile, I did a search of my previous work colleagues, friends and old clients and could find hardly find any of them there.
The ones who did have a profile had the barest of details, and definitely no superlatives or adjectives. Just yesterday, even, I spoke to a client, who, despite looking for a permanent role for the past two months had only just put his profile on. He received an email and a call from a recruiter, a couple of days after. He was surprised.
I find this bizarre.
LinkedIn has been a head-hunter’s best friend for the past five years or so. So why don’t we, as Australians, instinctively embrace it?
Is it that we’re not great writers when it comes to writing about ourselves?
Is the Aussie Tall Poppy syndrome going on here? Unlike a resume where we can control who we send it to, a LinkedIn profile broadcasts our claims to the world. Are we afraid that if we publicly announce what we’re good at, that someone will contact us and tell us we’re not? I wonder whether we associate it with what we see as US style self promotion – all a bit too, “salesy,” where absolutely everyone’s a winner and out there.
Do we not know what LinkedIn is about, or just don’t see the value in networking? Do we put it in the bucket that says “a bit desperate”? Or is it because we have to ask people to link up with us and endorse us? Will we feel slightly foolish if they say no? Or is it simply just another online thingie we need to master. I guess effectively we’re updating our resumes in our leisure time. Who really wants to do that?
For anyone who has any doubts about LinkedIn, here are a few facts that might inspire you.
Recruiters will Google you. LinkedIn gives you one Google reference you can control. Social networks aside, unless you’re a blogger, publisher or write web content for a living, you don’t have much control about what ends up there.
Recruiters love LinkedIn. They scan it all the time. They see candidates on LinkedIn as “passive job seekers,” mainly working and therefore more attractive. This is a weird psychology to me, but it’s true.
LinkedIn is a bucket of virtual business cards. If you want to network you can contact people directly. You don’t even have to be brazen about it. You can join groups who share similar interests. Often groups hold free events. There are hundreds of them. It’s a great way to hook up with people in your industry.
Don’t make me preach any more. I know what I’ve just written won’t be new news for any seasoned networkers. And for any North Americans reading this, I don’t think you’re all show offs! I actually do think you do LinkedIn pretty well.
For anyone else, just get over your fears and get on it.
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Karalyn Brown is a resume, interview and job search consultant based in Australia. She’s also an online careers agony aunty, writes frequently on career issues for a major Australian newspaper and talks job search tactics on the national broadcaster. She gets a real buzz out of helping people find jobs. You can visit her blog InterviewIQ or follow her on Twitter @InterviewIQ
What is the key to a successful job search? It is the three As. In prior blog posts I spoke about using a brag book, the need to stay in front of your network, the importance of networking, how to stand out and how to use a bio, but the focus here is more broad.…
