Categories
Workplace

3 Great Job Interview Tricks That Work!

Today it’s more challenging than ever to land a great job. It’s possible you’ll have to go through several interviews before you find the position you’re looking for. You might feel a knot in your stomach, your pulse rate jump, and your hands suddenly perspire as you anticipate the interview. In fact, if you’re prone to sweaty palms,
 

Job Interview Tip #1: Freshen up First.

 
Sprinkle some talcum powder in your pocket ahead of time and massage a little onto your palms before shaking hands with those you meet.
 

Job Interview Tip #2: Break the Barrier with a Sincere Smile

 
Jonathan, a professional sales and marketing consultant shared with a friend recently that in this job-search climate he’s always on the lookout for such useful tips. Besides a warm, dry hand he claims a sincere and optimistic attitude, a smile, and looking the person in the eye, go a long way to break down initial barriers. Being friendly and forthright helps one relax and puts the hiring managers on your side.
 
You may even want to go a step further. Find out at least one unique detail about the person who will be interviewing you. For example, one job seeker learned that a woman hiring manager was crazy about cats. He mentioned his own cat in the discussion about the job. Her eyes lit up. They had something in common besides the opening in the company.

Another job seeker discovered the man who contacted him for an interview was an opera buff. During a question and answer session, the job seeker mentioned how he liked to relax on a Friday night after work by attending the opera and even suggested the company purchase a block of tickets and sell to employees at a discount. This idea sparked an interesting discussion of how to provide cultural experiences for employees.
 
 

Job Interview Tip #3: You Can Be Personal AND Professional

 
Looking to add some sort of personal touch to each interview is bound to engage at least one or two hiring managers and could make the difference between being overlooked and being hired. Here’s an example of how to move the conversation in this direction. Take the lead. “I noticed in your company brochure that you take good care of your employees and as a result they have a high level of loyalty to your organization.

In my last job I was in charge of the annual sales meeting one summer at a resort with an Olympic-sized swimming pool. I suggested we hold our session poolside. We then invited attendees to stay afterward for a swim and drinks on the company. We even provided bathing suits in assorted sizes for those who didn’t bring theirs. Employees talked about this event for months afterward.”
 
A conversation-starter such as this will provide so much more information and insight about you, your creativity, personality, and client relations than stock answers to typical interview questions. So make a plan now to be friendly, be confident, be creative, and spark the discussion with personal details that draw in the hiring manager.
 
Related reading: 8 Tips To Prepare for Your Big Interview.

Categories
Talent Acquisition

How Professional is Your Recruiter? LinkedIn Will Tell You!

A LinkedIn profile is powerful, but LinkedIn itself can tell you a whole lot more than you think…. I loved a recent piece I read from Punk Rock HR’s Laurie Ruettimann on questions to ask a recruitment consultant. She includes things such as asking for a bio, asking the consultant to talk about their networking…

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Workplace

How to Start Your Cover Letter with a BANG!

Want to grab an employer’s undivided attention? Use this little-known cover letter secret to land more quality job interviews immediately. A fantastic, ‘must-read’ headline practically ‘forces’ a hiring manager to keep reading right through to the end of your cover letter. BUT, headline placement is all-important so listen up… Put your show-stopping headline right above…

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Workplace

How to Craft Your Personal Brand Statement

Before you write blog posts for the masses, before you apply for those positions, before you even set up your LinkedIn profile there is one thing you should do – craft your very own personal brand statement. Your bio, elevator pitch, and any other descriptive text about you will invariably start out with your personal…

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Workplace

5 Weird Things Nerves Make You Do in Job Interviews

Many people come to me for help when they freeze up in interviews, which they attribute to panic and nerves. That’s true. Your nerves can make you freeze up under the spotlight of an interview. What you may not know, however, is that your nerves will make you do other strange things. So if you’ve…

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Workplace

7 Brilliant Ways to Use Your Contacts to Get a Job

Do you ever feel like you have lots of contact names from networking, your current job, and life in general, but you don’t know how to leverage them? It can be difficult to think of ways to approach them, or even what you want to approach them for. The chief thing for us to remember…

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Workplace

5 Great Tips to Using Social Networks in Your Job Search

Getting a job through Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook sounds like a great idea. Job searching from the comfort of your own home instead of pounding the streets! In reality, it’s not as simple as it seems and there are a few things to think about if you’re going to make social networking sites part of…

Categories
Timebound

LinkedIn Profile: Have You Done the Shuffle Yet?

LinkedIn started allowing their users to to rearrange the sections of their profile a few months back. I haven’t seen any statistics on this but I don’t think this has taken on at all. The reason for that could be that nobody knows why you should be rearranging the profile in the first place. As LinkedIn has shown the feature, I will try to give you the benefit.

Before we throw ourselves in the deep end of the rearranging pool, it’s important to be clear about why. Your LinkedIn profile is a billboard that markets you, or your personal brand if you will. I can think of three distinct reasons to do it, basically to highlight different parts of your personal brand to attract a new employer or more business. Here goes:

This reason presupposes that you have a good few glowing recommendations that will work their magic on any potential customer or employer. Let’s say you have five strong recommendations, instead of having them languishing down below the center of your profile you might want to bring them to the top. Perhaps not all the way but certainly before your work experience section which in most cases tends to be rather lengthy.

If you are a consultant, freelancer or in any other way trading in your own name, you’ll know how important recommendations are. If you have worked in this capacity for a number of years, your work history will not be made up of jobs but assignments. A list of short/medium term assignments doesn’t look great and that’s another reason you will want to put recommendations before work experience.

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Nobody works for a big name because they get a great salary, more influence or are being managed more humanely. It’s all about brand recognition so make the most of your work and let your personal brand benefit from your sweat equity on your LinkedIn profile.

Just be careful, some big corporates are not exactly the flavor of the month, if you are working for Goldman Sachs, BP or Monsanto you’re probably better off with the recommendation focus instead.

Just like any good resume of a fresh graduate should feature their education first, so should their LinkedIn profile. Nobody wants to see your summer jobs or recommendations from your pals at the student union. Demote both the work experience and the recommendations sections, so that employers get to see your sterling academic record and perhaps even be enticed by the title of your master’s thesis.

 came out? Everyone had the same basic profile. Two years later, you could barely see that it was a MySpace profile anymore due to all the customizing they allowed on the profiles. By heavily altering a profile like that, you kind of lose the point of being on a social media network and you would be better off with a personal site/blog.

Don’t tinker too much with your profile, you want the reader to be able to size you up in a minute. LinkedIn is the most professional platform out there, so keep your profile neat and tidy so that professionals can find the information they need.

Categories
Employer Branding Workplace

How to Zip It in Job Interviews

I had a client see me last week because she was concerned she would go off on a tangent in her job interview. She said she talked so much she was afraid she would lose the interviewer or shoot herself in the foot with something she said. She’d done it before and blown her chances.…