Social media is a must for you as a job seeker, and LinkedIn is King of social media for white-collar professionals. If you are in the job search, you need to see this short video and find out why LinkedIn is such a necessary resource for you. Click the video to watch.
Career Confidential is hosting its first ever blogging contest!
I have participated in these before…they’re big fun and introduced me to a fresh new audience—lots of new readers.
Career Confidential gets over 400,000 visitors every month. If you would like reach potentially hundreds of thousands of new readers very quickly, you need to enter this contest!
First Step: Tell Us What You Want To Win!
This contest is for YOU, so YOU should pick your prize! What would motivate you to enter? What would you like to win? We have some great ideas. Let us know what you like in our short survey.
Once we have our prizes nailed down, we will release the Official Contest Rules and Dates. If you give us your name and email in the survey, we will contact you first with all the details.
General Guidelines:
Topic will be “Find a Job”. Both text or video posts will be accepted. Need ideas? How about, "Find a Job Using ______" and just fill in the blank with: Keywords, Google Plus, Facebook, Twitter, Networking, Video, Pay Per Click, LinkedIn, Career Builder, Monster, MedReps, or anything else you can think of. Any tool, strategy, or technique that can help someone find a job will be great.
To Win:
Drive as much traffic as possible to your post during the contest. Social media is crucial to your success. You do not have to have a blog to enter...just the ability to drive a lot of traffic to your article.
The contest will begin within the next few weeks. Details are coming soon...
The impression you make in an interview is critical to your chances of getting the job. But interviews are incredibly stressful, so even the best of us get nervous.
In the video below, I will share with you a few ways to build your confidence before your phone interview.
Read my article about this to get 3 great tips to build your confidence and have a better phone interview: Phone Interview Tips #5
Do you want to stand out in today's job search? If so, then you can't just do what everyone else is doing. Sometimes, you've got to make a big leap out of the box. One way to do that is to use YouTube in your job search.
In the video below, I've got a great story of someone who used video to land a job in 3 weeks. Would that work for you? Click the video to watch.
Now, read my article about this: Fastest Way to Find a Job Tip 11. I'll give you more ideas for using video in your job search, and even give you some technical tips so you look good on camera!
Don't forget to check out my entire blog series, Fastest Way To Find a Job. In the series, there are 24 other great ways to stand out in your job search.
Career Confidential's standout resume and interview tips are now available in Español!
These 3 special reports are available in Amazon's Kindle Store for all Spanish-speakers who need the best advice and coaching for their resumes or job interviews.
Click the title or image below to see more information and make your purchase.
What's one very easy tip that anyone can do to make sure you have a great phone interview? Practice!
In the video below, I'll tell you more about how to practice answering phone interview questions and why it's so important for you. Click the video to watch.
Read my blog post to get some ideas for what to practice for your phone interview: Phone Interview Tips #11
In school, 'cheat sheets' are the notes you sneak in to help you ace the test. In phone interviews, you can use cheat sheets, too--except in a phone interview, it's not cheating. It's just smart. (We can call them 'smart sheets.') They will help you ace your phone interview.
In the video below, I'll tell you what kinds of notes you should keep in front of you so you can refer to them during the interview. Click the video to watch.
These do take some work to research and put together, but the investment you make in time and effort is going to pay off big for you in terms of money and job offers. This plan is going to help you have a wildly successful job interview. So, now what?
How do you write a 30-60-90-Day Plan?
1. The first 30 days of your plan is usually focused on training–learning the company systems, products, services, software, vendors, and/or customers. So, most of the items in your 30-day plan should be along the lines of attending training, mastering product knowledge, learning specific corporate systems, traveling to learn your territory (if you’re in sales), meeting other members of the team, or reviewing accounts.
This part of the plan is all about getting your feet wet. Not every boss has a lot of time to train you. If you can show how you can get up to speed on your own, they love it. No hand-holding necessary for you.
2. The next 30 days (60-day) are focused on more field or independent time, less training, more customer introductions, more vendor introductions, reviews of customer satisfaction....just getting deeper into things. More details, more responsibility.
A big point here in this 60-day section is getting feedback from your manager to see how you're doing. Put this in your plan.
3. The last 30 days (90-day) are the "taking off on your own" part. By now, you should be up to speed, rolling with some independence, and contributing significantly. You should know your way around by now and be initiating things on your own: thinking of ways to increase customers or revenue, generating ideas to save time or money, implementing plans or schedules, fine-tuning your schedule, and continuing to get performance feedback. Read the rest of this article...
Do you know what your phone interview goals are? It's not just to answer their questions and hope they like you. You do have a goal, and you do have to know the best way to hit it.
In the video below, I will tell you what your phone interview goal is, and tell you what has to happen in order for you to hit it.
Then, I will tell you the absolute, most important thing you can do in your phone interview (or any interview) to get you one step closer to the job offer. Click the video to watch.
Interviewers like to ask behavioral-style interview questions like, "Describe a time when your workload was heavy and how you handled it." They know that past behavior predicts future behavior, and they want to see how you reacted to a difficult situation.
In the video below, I will tell you a great way to respond to this question. Click the video to watch.
Don't Let This Happen To Your Resume! Come To My Free Resume Writing Webinar and Save Your Resume!
Everyone knows you can't afford any resume mistakes...just one typo and the entire thing hits the trash. So you spell-check it to within an inch of its life and you ask your friends to proofread it for you just to make sure. You can do everything you know to do....and STILL have a big mistake that will keep you from getting the interview.
I've seen thousands of resumes in my career (career coach, recruiter)...most of the time, resumes need improvement. But it really hit me last week when I looked at 250 resumes at once. A full 248 of them had a major mistake right on the front page.
Did you know it's just as important to do your research before the phone interview as it is before the face-to-face interview? If you gather information before the interview gets started, you can have a much better conversation and increase your chances of getting to the next step.
In the video below, I will tell you how to research the interviewer before your interview in 3 different ways:
What to ask when they arrange the call
Where to research the things you need to know before the call
What to ask at the very beginning of your call that will help you tremendously
A top-quality resume MUST be more than just a job history...it has to be a marketing document that represents you in the strongest, most powerful way possible and sells you for the job.
Most job seekers don't have a resume that does this well. If you aren't getting interviews, chances are your resume isn't doing you justice.
The good news is that most of the time, all it takes are a few simple changes.
Let me show you how to improve your resume in my free, LIVE training webinar.
In this FREE webinar, I will spend an entire hour and a half going through actual resumes from job seekers and talk about what's good, what's not good, and how it could be better.
You will learn so much just from watching that process...you will feel like a resume expert by the time we're done and most importantly, you will have the tools to make YOUR resume rock!
You can even send in your own resume to be one of the ones we talk about! (We can't guarantee we'll choose yours, but we'll get to as many as we can.)
Here are the details:
Live Resume Training Webinar
April 2, 2013
1:00 - 2:00 pm, EST
Register by entering your name and email address on the form below:
I hope you take advantage of this amazing opportunity. A better resume will open doors for you.
CVs are the long, detailed cousin of the resume. It delivers much more information than a resume and takes many more pages to do it. But whatever differences they might have, CVs and resumes both have the same function: to get you interviews. If you have a curriculum vitae and aren’t getting the job interviews you would like, you can borrow good resume writing principles to make your CV more effective.
Employers should WANT to talk to you after reading your CV. Very often, all it takes is a few adjustments in how you write it. Read the rest of this article...
In a job interview, an interview might very well ask you "What will you contribute to this job?" It's another version of "Why should we hire you?"
This can be a make-or-break moment in your interview. A strong answer will sell you for the job, and a weak answer will get you crossed off the short list of candidates.
In the video below, I will tell you what a strong, positive answer to this question will sound like, and talk about what kinds of things you should include. Click the video to watch.
HOW TO WRITE A 306090 DAY PLAN - These do take some work to research and put together, but the investment you make in time and effort is going to pay off big for you in terms of money and job offers
read more...
CVs are the long, detailed cousin of the resume. It delivers much more information than a resume and takes many more pages to do it. But whatever differences they might have, CVs and resumes both have the same function: to get you interviews. If you have a curriculum vitae and aren’t getting the job interviews you would like, you can borrow 
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