Formulating a More Effective Job Search

Formulating a More Effective Job Search For most of the worlds professionals, success hinges greatly on the companies you work for. Regardless of natural talent, if you land successive jobs at average companies, eventually you will fall victim to your environment. If you are like many people, winning positions with successful companies rather than average ones means reimagining your view of the recruitment process. Evaluating and identifying what a truly successful job search process looks like is the skeleton key for unlocking your doors into the most successful companies.  How best to begin? Defining a successful job search: The job seekers who have the most trouble are those who don’t set defined goals. Without specific goals, they are unable to gauge how they are doing during the process and whether alterations need to be made in their strategy. Naturally, the main goal of any job search is an acceptable offer of employment. A successful job search is one that yields anywhere from 2-4 solid employment options. This number fluctuates based on a candidate’s experience level, as well as salary demands and the current market in their industry and/or geographic area. For instance, an entry-level candidate should strive for 3 or 4 employment offers, while an established professional asking for a salary over $100,000 ought to be more than satisfied with 2 viable offers. Analyzing the job search process differently: By: newsusacontent Consider the following tips: 1) Learn to step back and see the big picture: Many job seekers only think about what they want and don’t take into consideration the needs of the hiring manger.  Their vantage point is one dimensional and everything from their application to their interviewing techniques suffers. In reality, you don’t interview with a company, instead you interview with a person (or more often people) within that company.  Take a few minutes to see things from their perspective; envision their needs. For instance, the HR manager of a large company is going to be preoccupied with finding someone who has the skill sets to do the job today.  They are not concerned with your creative ideas for shaping the company’s future. Conversely, the CEO of a small business is preoccupied with finding someone who thinks like an entrepreneur and has a vision for how they can improve the firm going forward. Once you can think like a hiring manager, you can easily connect with and impress a hiring manager. 2) Get into the habit of perceiving stressful situations as enjoyable challenges: Efficient job seekers don’t waste time worrying about how they are going to find the job they want, nor do they beat up on themselves for past interview failures. Rather, they have the ability to shift their focus to the obstacles that need to be overcome for them to achieve their goals.  Once they’ve defined those hurdles, they do everything possible to knock them out one by one. Successful job applicants understand that inner turmoil depletes energy, creativity and interviewing prowess.  They learn the necessary skills to cope with that stress and, thus are able to turn negative events into positive momentum. Avoiding the snowball effect: If you fail to put 110% into your search, you’re going to see significant ramifications. Think of it as a snowball effect. If you don’t end up at a strong company, your co-workers are much less likely to be ambitious, creative and positive thinking individuals. If you’re not around the right people, the chances of you thriving at your position drastically decrease.   If you’re not productive and successful, you will eventually end up leaving and the following will be true: You will lack strong recommendations for your next job. You will have no significant achievements to show on your resume. You will remain at or slightly above your current salary. In addition to setting defined, measurable goals in your job search and learning to analyze the hiring process more meaningfully, you can help yourself avoid the snowball effect by working on the following: Regardless of career level, the entire interview process should not be shorter than 3 weeks, but should be complete before 8.  Any shorter than 3 weeks and you risk making an impulsive decision that lands you at a mediocre company you havent thoroughly vetted.  Any longer than 8 and you lose momentum, thus becoming prone to settle for a position that does not utilize your full range of skills and experiences.  You do not have full control over the interview timeline, so pay attention to companies trying to either rush it or drag out the process, as this often signals a real problem reaching effective internal decisions. Hold yourself accountable to your goals and objectives. In your job search, its just you.  A spouse or friend may provide moral support but at the end of the day, you run on your own steam.  Knowing your goal is to achieve a certain amount of strong job offers, and knowing you need to think critically about your interviewers perspectives and react positively to your own stress, you are the one who has to make up your mind to aim for those goals and those tasks each day of your job search. In the end: It’s not enough to be hard working, determined and passionate about your job if you aim to be meaningfully successful.  You must approach your job search with that same hard work, determination and passion. The way to success in your job search, and thus your career, isnt holding yourself to perfection.  Rather, teach yourself to think about the job search process on more varied levels. Pay attention to both current factors, like the hiring managers perspectives, and long-term indicators such as timing. Above all, hold yourself up to the task of improving every day, in your job search just as in your career.

Job Interview Preparation Makes for Great Conversation

Job Interview Preparation Makes for Great Conversation Come along with me on this recap of the great interview you just had, and how your preparation made it rock. Lets pretend Youve been keeping a list of possible interview questions and the best stories from your past history to illustrate those. The stories are very specific, crafted to leave a positive impression to the listener. You put all these together on a continuous basis, and at times when you werent stressed about an upcoming interview. When new experiences at work occur that make good stories, you add them to this list. Your interview preparation is very proactive! Additionally, you list highlights and results, again being specific as possible. 130% increase in customer satisfaction scores, etc. When you found this job posting, it was easy to pick out the highlights and results to put on your resume. You selected a subset from your master list, customized to the company and role. Not to mention You already had nice report covers ready to go. When they called you for the interview, it was simple to package up the specific resume and cover letters for the position. You asked who would be interviewing you, checking spelling to be sure you had their names right and what their title is. Those cover letters for the portfolios are written specifically to them. Easy. And you included relevant examples of your work, documentation of awards received, certifications, letters of recommendation, etc. in the packet. It only took a few minutes because you already had it ready to go, right? You put together enough portfolios for everyone interviewing you plus 2 extra generic ones just in case. Now its interview time You are relaxed. Calm. Heck, you review these stories from your past on a regular basis. You know them like the back of your hand. You are confident that given any question, you will have a closely related match from your prepared history when it comes up in the interview. No answers of the generic I would do this nature. No way. Those are easily forgotten by a hiring manager. No, you have a gamut of real-life stories at your fingertips. When those managers think about all those candidates they interviewed, you will stand out. Why? Because of the specificity of your answers. The way you told a story. Set up the characters and situation, relayed the challenges and how you tackled them. Because of your awesome interview preparation, now you can sit back and have a conversation. To get ready for the interview, you just need to come up with some good questions about the company. Not questions you could research online. Questions about the culture, about how they do whatever function you specialize in. Ask what challenges they are experiencing. Offer advice based on your expertise. Related: Essential Interview Techniques Every Jobseeker Should Know. Image: Shutterstock

Penelope Trunks Interesting Personal Branding Strategy

Penelope Trunks Interesting Personal Branding Strategy What is  the first thing you think of when I say Penelope Trunk? A very interesting article by Fast Company points out the obvious, yet interesting, personal branding strategy of Gen Y career expert and founder of brazencareerist.com, Penelope Trunk. If youve ever read Penelopes personal blog you can find out just about every detail of her personal life, including her abortions and divorce. I get that shes  branding herself as  BRAZEN, but honestly what is her strategy here? From a business perspective, its hard for me to understand why she would want to talk about her Brazilian wax on Twitter one minute, then turn around and tell people in her About Brazen Careerist comments that everything they do online becomes an important part of their career. Penelope Trunk is a smart and successful entrepreneur.   In fact, I respect her career, I love her entrepreneurial spirit, Im a huge fan of brazencareerist.com and- although occasionally painful to read- I subscribe to her blog as well. Therefore, Im assuming her  choice of contradicting her own advice is intentional but I just cant figure it out.   What do you think?   If it is intentional, what is her goal or purpose? Despite the public  details of her personal life, companies continue to  pay her a lot of money to consult with them on career issues.   Is this the kind of person we want representing Gen Y?   Is this what Gen Y is?  A share-all-and-still-expect-to-be-paid-a-lot-of-money kind of generation? Why do you think Penelope Trunk has chosen this personal branding strategy for her own career?   Should  Gen Y and beyond  listen to someone who contradicts her own advice? Penelope  and  Dan Schawbel I hope you can give us your feedback too!

The new girls guide to workplace success

The new girls guide to workplace success Theres been a lot of media focus on how the workplace has changed since Generation Y came on the scene. But what about Gen Y women? From the moment baby boomers joined the workforce, women made it their mission to create a fair playing field for everyone. But after decades of feminists plowing down the boys club, todays women enter a totally different kind of workplace and need totally different advice for succeeding. What should the new rules be? Here are  five ways to get the conversation going. 1. Date co-workers. I can see how 40 years ago, when it was still legal to ask a woman what her husband thought of her career, it wouldve been bad to date co-workers. Back then, women felt powerless in the workplace. But today, young women feel they have equal power to men. And they arent deluding themselves  women and men receive equal pay in business  until they have children (after which woman are penalized for having kids more than men are). So men and women approach dating at work as equals. The bigger issue here is that if youre working 40 hours a week, youre more likely to meet the people you want to date when youre at the office. If you tell yourself that all men at work are off-limits, you put yourself at a huge disadvantage. And if you want to have children, you need to make getting married a higher priority than your career. This isnt some radical statement its  backed by  a lot  of research, not the least of which is that you cant tell your biological clock to wait while you refuse to date all the men you come in contact with. So the adage to not date men you work with is totally antiquated. It assumes that women arent equal to men, can push back childbearing indefinitely, and should put their career ahead of getting married. All of these are bad assumptions. 2. Show some flesh but just enough. If you had any doubts about the power of looking like a girl at work, check out  Hillary Clintons new look. No ones more studied in the art of the female image than Hillary, and her new  appearance is much more feminine. This isnt surprising, though. Theres a wide body of research that shows that women are received better when they hit that magic point between dressing like a guy and dressing like a harlot. For instance, Yale psychologist  Marianne LaFrance  found that medium-length hair is best for looking smart; too long is too sexy, and too short is too boyish. And Debra A. Benton, author of How to Think Like a CEO, says that dressing too much like the guys is what high-ranking men say holds back high-ranking women. Hitting the midway point applies to makeup as well. If you wear too much, you look like youre trying too hard, but if you wear none, people perceive you as disinterested, according to Sherry Maysonave, author of Casual Power. 3. Expect harassment, and stay cool. A recent segment on New England Cable News reported that 46 percent of summer interns will be harassed. And most professional women will experience some form of sexual harassment in their career some studies even say as many as 80 percent of them. Its clear, then, that most women dont report harassment. But it isnt because theyre scared its because theyre smart. The laws are very clear on what companies should do to respond to harassment claims, but they arent very clear on how to define when a woman has been illegally fired for reporting harassment. The careers of most women who report harassment suffer, even if the company works hard to do the right thing.  The law is too far behind the times, so  dont report harassment. Instead, have a plan. Know that you need to tell the guy youre not interested if youre not. Know that you wont get a lot of protection from human resources even though they tell you theyll protect you. And finally, know that just because you encounter harassment doesnt mean you provoked it. You can wear a shirt that shows a little cleavage and not be accountable for the fact that most 40-year-old guys will take a look when you walk by. Wear the clothes that you feel comfortable in, because people who are true to themselves at work perform best. But take heed from the research above: Youll do best if your clothes fall somewhere between frumpy and revealing. 4. If you have to go to business school, go early. Heres how things used to be: You graduated from college, worked for three to five years, went to business school for two years, then graduated and got the job of your dreams. The problem with this scenario is that youre in your late 20s by the time you start working in your chosen profession,  and  most women want to start having kids by their early 30s. So, if you leave the workforce right after joining it, you really compromise your ability to leverage your hard-earned degree. So business schools are accepting candidates earlier. Of course you still have to have good credentials to get in, but its no longer essential to have the requisite number of years of work experience between college and business school. Business schools will officially say that the change in policy is to attract the best candidates, but unofficially, the change is to attract the smart women specifically, the women who are aware of the great biological clock rip-off that business schools were in the past. 5. Tone down your work ethic. For the last decade, girls have earned better grades and better SAT scores than boys, and theyve had higher graduation rates, too. This persists through college. After that, men catch up in the workplace. This isnt because they start working harder, its because what theyve been working at all along multitasking with their video games and socializing with their friends is what the workplace values most. Getting straight As is, after all, widely understood to be an unreliable indicator of how well youll do in your career. So stop being the overachiever who does each assignment perfectly. Instead, start focusing on the stuff that really matters at work, like productivity skills and  getting along with people. But dont be too much like the guys because we know thats no good, either.

5 Valuable Life Lessons Learned From Being A Runner

5 Valuable Life Lessons Learned From Being A Runner Becoming a runner has changed my life. It has become a way to deal with stress, to forget my everyday worries, and to help tone and energize my body. I must say that running has taught me several important life lessons, and here are 5 of them I would like to share with you:1. Patience is a virtueSetting goals for yourself is crucial if you want to succeed in becoming a runner, changing your lifestyle or your career. You should set ultimate long-term goals, but to achieve them, set short-term and more reachable ones too. If your ultimate goal is to run a marathon, begin by setting smaller and reachable goals such as running several miles a day and safely increasing the mileage in time.evalDo not hurry to sign up for that marathon before you have completed your smaller goals, because you can risk overtraining and injuring yourself if you push yourself too hard. This may take some time, so patience is something you need to work on. In time, I found that by gradually increasing my mileag e and pace, I felt ready to sign up for my first half-marathon. It took my more than 2 years to build up the power and confidence to run my first marathon, but the wait was absolutely worth it.So, the same goes for the ultimate goals you make for your new business or for your life achievements too. Be patient, and work towards achieving them by setting and completing smaller goals. Step by step you will feel more confident and able to move towards your ultimate goals.2. Becoming a runner can take time, patience and some extra motivationSeveral years ago, I was what can be best described as a couch potato. I didn’t have the energy to even walk to the store. So, when I decided to change my lifestyle, and add some exercise to it, I realized that I couldn’t just jump into my running shoes and go marathon racing. I knew that I needed to learn to walk before starting to run.So, my training began with walking. I did several laps around my block every day. In time, I felt that my body w as ready and was actually craving for more laps, and a faster pace. So, I began increasing my mileage, and the steps I took every day. This, as I found out is the sort of approach one must take when starting a new business or when changing jobs.Take some time, and patiently study your abilities, your new activities and learn to do what is necessary to get the job done one step at a time. In time, you will gain the confidence and the abilities to perform better and more efficiently.Need motivation to stick to your running plan? Reward yourself every now and then â€" get a new pair of shoes such as these from Runa Bees, get new workout clothes, eat the chocolate you are craving.So, this is one valuable life lesson, I think people should keep in mind when making changes in their lives or careers.3. Pace yourself and do not push yourself over the limits to achieve your goalsevalAs I already mentioned, overtraining can lead to injuries and can be harmful for your body. You need to pace y ourself, so that your body and mind get adjusted properly to the new mileage, paces and other training goals you have set for yourself.The same goes for career goals â€" make a plan in accordance with your time and abilities and work slowly and patiently to achieve the goals. Pushing yourself too hard at work can lead to immense stress and burnout, which can be dangerous for you and will hinder your road to success.4. Being over competitive can harm your performanceIf you are a competitive person like me, you may need to work on re-adjusting this, because it is perfectly alright for others to run faster than you. I used to be fixated on catching up with the other runners, but in time, I realized that it is great to want to improve, but racing is not always the healthiest option, especially for a newbie like me.evalOnce again, setting your own personal goals and pacing yourself in a realistic and healthy manner is crucial for your overall success. The same can be said when.5. You can enjoy winning, but learning to lose is important tooBeing a sore loser will only harm you whether you are running, or whether you are competing for greater success at work. So, even though everybody likes to win, and in time, believe me â€" you will experience the joy of winning, in the meantime while you are getting ready for the ultimate victory, be ready to lose some races on the track or in life as well. This is definitely a healthier approach.

Choosing Your Career Happiness - Sterling Career Concepts

Choosing Your Career Happiness Choosing Your Career Happiness Are you happy in your career? No, really, I’m serious. Can you say with 100% certainty that you’re truly happy?  Or are you like most other people, just getting by? Are you waiting for the end of your day so you can slump home, veg in front of the t.v., and forget about work?  Are you working toward some fuzzy, future goal in the hopes of one day finding fulfillment? We’ve all been there. At some point or another, we’ve all hit a rhythm of trudging along at work, head down, getting through it. But some of us stay in that trench for far too long. However, that’s just one story. You can choose to write a new one in which you’re bright-eyed, enthused about work and fulfilled by your career. Here are 3 easy ways you can leave the grey days behind and seek career happiness: 1.     Define Your Happiness What brings you joy? Is it helping people? Is it ranking as the top salesperson? Is it helping a company launch a new product? Take the time to reflect upon and determine what qualities in a career or employer make a happy you. 2.           Move Towards Your Chosen Life Start creating the happiness you just defined. Take steps toward your bliss activities. Sign up for a networking event, take a class to learn something new, or start looking for a new position. You’ve got to keep moving. 3.           Let Go Once you’re moving toward the things and exchanges that make you feel happy, it will be easier to see what’s dragging you down. Let go of those things. It might be challenging, as people want to hold on to what they’ve known…but it’s okay. Let go, and create space for even more joy to show up. Happiness is not a trait reserved only for lottery winners. It’s available for everyone…but you must choose it. Step out of the shadows, and choose to live in the light. You deserve it. What will YOU do to choose happiness TODAY?

Resume Proposal Writing Tips

Resume Proposal Writing TipsResume proposal writing is probably the most important part of your job search. It is vital that you create a unique and effective resume proposal that attracts attention from recruiters. Make sure to follow the below tips to make your resume proposal stand out among other resumes in your section.Include Your Work History: Do not leave this point out. Even if it is not specifically about you, including your work history in your resume proposal makes your position stand out. After all, a recruiter is not going to read a resume proposal that has nothing about your skills or experiences.Include Your Portfolio: Does your resume proposal showcase only your name and title? The truth is, there is no sense in presenting a resume if it is not accompanied by a portfolio. It will look awkward to put a resume up in front of a hiring manager with nothing on it.Consistency In Quality Content: In order to create a successful resume proposal, you have to be consistent in your content. You can ask for proposals from companies you are interested in working with. This can be done by e-mailing the company and asking for their idea of how to write a proposal. You should also ask them for examples of the proposal, they will use for you in the interview process.Pay Attention To Dates: One mistake made by a lot of aspirants is to forget to add the dates. In the world of resume proposal writing, dates are very important. If you forget to include the dates, it will look very amateurish. To avoid this, make sure you are aware of the date of the project so you can at least know what project the company was doing at the time you were invited for an interview.Provide References: Do not include only your names and the date of the last project, include any past projects you were involved in. Recruiters are looking for people who have built up portfolios of previous projects. If you have only one previous project, your resume proposal would be weak and would probabl y be rejected.Include a Project Description: Do not write everything about yourself. You need to put some thought into your proposal so you can find a balanced mix of your accomplishments and achievements. It is also important to include a project description. A project description will serve as an overview of your past projects, so it will be easier for the hiring manager to analyze your skills and experience.In a formal part of a resume, a recruiter will consider your project descriptions and previous projects to determine your resume writing skills. They are only going to take note of those that you put in your resume proposal and that included relevant information and details. Some recruiters are going to look for project references in your resume proposal, if you include those in your resume proposal then the hiring manager will see that you put much thought into your proposal.