Category: Workplace

Employee experience can seriously impact your bottom line. The Employer Brand Index gives you insight into what talent really thinks about your company.

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Workplace

Top 20 Career-Enhancing iPhone Apps

These days, if you’re not implementing technology to help you be more productive, organized, and successful, you’re probably behind the curve. Never fear, the career-minded bloggers at Pounding the Pavement have developed a list of apps that will help you get more out of your smart phone than you previously thought possible. Here they are, the absolute finest of the latest career-boosting applications, ready for you to peruse and enjoy!
 

Apps for the Job Search
  
  

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Workplace

What Does Your Online Persona Say About Your Personal Brand?

Social networking sites are often advertised as a place where you can socialize with friends, family, and acquaintances. Nobody ever thought they’d find purpose in background checks! But then more and more recruiters and employers are using these sites as a valuable tool when screening potential employees. So if you’re currently looking for a job,…

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Timebound Workplace

Top Social Media and Job Search Tips by Bill Boorman

What are your favourite social media tools? That is really hard to answer. Channel wise, my preference is always for Twitter and Tweetdeck is the tool that enables me to filter the stream properly. (I have close to 6000 followers.) I also use Hootsuite when I’m out and about because it is entirely web based…

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Workplace

Top 7 Ways to Kickstart Your Twitter Job Search

I love Twitter and not because I’m an exhibitionist with a short attention span. I love Twitter because it’s an amazing social search engine. I follow people in HR, employers, recruitment consultants, my clients, people who follow me, and lots of other people who just keep me amused. People are always tweeting interesting information, with…

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Workplace

Top 5 Psychometric Tests for Your Career Success

To make a successful career change, you have to know what type of career is going to suit your personality. Psychometric tests are a quick, convenient way of “personality typing” — getting an idea of which specific personality group you fall into in terms of skill sets, ambitions, and aspirations. Once you know which group…

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Workplace

Cheat Sheet to Your Best Interview Answers

When preparing for your next job interview, you’ll want to have answers to these common job interview questions. These answers are just a guideline to follow. The most important thing to do is to be honest and be yourself when answering these job interview questions. 1. Tell me about yourself. Perhaps this the most common…

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Workplace

3 Things that Must NOT Be on a Candidate’s Resume

Although it seems that the things you should exclude on resumes can be determined easily enough through common sense, some job seekers still manage to commit gaffes that are quite unthinkable. What is considered common knowledge for resume experts and for recruiters may escape job applicants, especially new ones who may not know that there…

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Workplace

5 Little Known Ways to Boost Your Job Hunt

1. Understand your strengths

 
Get clear about what your strengths, skills and natural passions are. Without knowing what you are good at and what value you can bring to an organization or role, how do you expect others to think you’re the right and best person for a job? Make sure you are clear yourself about what your strengths are. Then communicate and articulate these to others in your job hunt. Learn to harness these strengths and find a role that plays to your strengths.
 

2. Get to grips with your skills

 
As well as your strengths, the skills, experience and expertise that you have built up is really important to understand, acknowledge and get across to potential employers. Sit down and review your career to date. Think about what skills you have gained in your various roles and how these are transferable into other situations and roles. Make sure you are clear about this so that you can communicate it to others in key situations. Work with a Guide if you aren’t clear about how to do this yourself.
 

3. Evaluate your options

 
Before gallivanting straight into the marketplace and spamming your CV out to everyone and anyone – think about what options you have and what is actually right for you. It’s just wasted energy if you aren’t focused about what you want. Competition will be high for generic roles – so try to get specific about what option is the one that really suits you.
 

 

4. Review your job search to date

 
If you have been in the job market for a while and you have been struggling – why not take some time to reflect and review what you’re doing. Many of us spend endless hours pumping out applications, filling in forms, ringing up agencies, going to interview after interview – all to no avail. So hey – what’s going wrong!? Think about what you are doing and make a plan that ensures that you are working smart and using your time wisely. Are you sending out generic applications? Are you being clear about what you want? Are you being targeted in your job hunt? Do the recruitment agencies know what you’re after? Do they care?
 

5. Revamp your CV

 
Before going out into the market and targeting a role, you may need to review and revamp your CV. If you haven’t touched it in many years then definitely spend a bit of time getting it up to date. Spend time understanding what your key strengths and skills are so that you can highlight them in your CV well. Make sure your CV is relevant and targeted to the roles you are going for.
 
Most of us believe that our CV is the most important aspect of a job hunt. This isn’t entirely correct. It plays its part for sure and you need to take some time out to make sure that you have it looking in tip top shape but it isn’t necessarily the first step to getting you on the right track. Dedicate sometime to the other key points in this list and you’ll be in a much better position to land that dream job you want!

Related: How You Can Boost Your Job Search and Actually Enjoy the Ride


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Workplace

The ONLY Career Change Guide You Need (feat. the BIGGEST Career Gurus in the World)


I know there’s a lot of career changing advice out there. And I know you’re busy.
 
So I spent weeks reading through all those articles, blogs, tweets and books on career change. All to bring YOU answers to the 7 top career change questions you (dear readers) have asked me via this blog and on Twitter.
 
Seriously, I am EXCITED about sharing this with you. All of the world’s top career change advice, in ONE place? Wow. This should clear everything up. Ok, take a deep breath, here we go!
 
Answers to your top 7 career change questions, courtesy of the world’s leading career gurus.
 

1. What should I do next?

 
• Stick to what you know
• Explore things you don’t know

 
2. I don’t have the contacts I need! How do I meet them?

 
• Network online (face to face is so 2008)
• Network face to face (online’s pointless)

 
3. How should I make contact with people I don’t know?

 
• Cold call, you wimp.
• Don’t cold call, who likes cold callers?

 
4. Where should I look?

 
• Use lots of different avenues in your search
• Stick to one avenue and do it well

 
5. I’m going around in circles!

 
• Calm down: think things through, stop just diving in
• Get out there! Dive into action, stop thinking so much

 
6. How do I get my message across?

 
• Develop a personal brand
• Are you joking? Personal branding is a wanky term.

 
7. Should I focus on my skills when deciding what to do next?

 
• Yes, they are all you have. Analyse your skills
• No, your skills are just a mini-teeny part of you. Forget about them. Just visualise… like, stuff. Nice stuff.
 
All right! That sorted everything out then.
 

 

By the way, I wish the above was a joke. It’s not.

 
If you want to spend weeks reading career change books and blogs, I encourage you to. But at the end you’ll be as confused as I was when I first entered this field.
 
As a shortcut, here’s my take on it: ALL OF THE CAREER CHANGE GURUS ARE RIGHT. Even when they contradict each other.
 
How is that possible? Simple. They are each speaking to different people. And they each come from the perspective of what sort of person THEY are, and what would work for them. As everyone is different, we have contradiction!
 
Every one has their own path to what makes them happy in a career, and everyone has their own path to what works in career change. One single guide, or one single approach for changing careers will never work for everyone.
 
Imagine if Bill Gates tried to host the Oprah Winfrey show, or if Oprah tried to run Microsoft. Wouldn’t work, right? (Funny though). Oprah and Gates are both super-successful. But they get there in different ways. And I’d bet that if they were to change career they’d do things differently to each other.
 

Finally some good news

 
The good news IS, there is one guide, or piece of advice, for changing careers that WILL work for you. It won’t work for the person sitting next to you, but it will work for you. It’s just a question of finding it.
 
Knowing your personal success profile (ie: who you are and what works for you) is the only reliable way to discover the best way of changing careers – for you. It’s the only way of knowing which sort of advice you should listen to, which to ignore, and how to go about things in a way that will work for you.
 
And that’s my advice for the day!

Related reading: 10 Secrets To Getting Yourself Headhunted.
 
Marianne Cantwell is a Free Range Human, and a career change expert. She helps mid-career professionals figure out what they REALLY want to do with the rest of their lives. Marianne gets her clients thinking outside the box, excited and motivated to create remarkable, awesome, simply wonderful careers they truly love. Visit Marianne’s site Free Range Humans and be sure to follow her on Twitter @FreeRangeHumans.