The 3 Stages to a Successful Job Interview

The 3 Stages to a Successful Job Interview Congrats, your resume caught the eye of your target  employer! Now the only thing standing between you and the job is the interview, so its essential that you nail the thing! Its not only the interview itself that will determine your success however; in  order to really put yourself in the running, its important that you are fully prepared ahead of the day and leave a lasting impression after the meeting. This infographic by Doherty  Employment  outlines the steps you should follow before, during and after your job interview in order to land the job! 1) Pre-interview: Familiarise yourself with the company and your interviewer. Make sure you have a copy of your resume and any other materials you may need to hand. Turn your phone OFF. Not just on silent, OFF! Give yourself plenty of time to get there. Being late is an absolute no no! 2) During the interview: Make a good first impression by coming across as confident and friendly. Maintain eye contact, greet your interviewer with a strong handshake and smile! Have a short pitch ready. They are likely to ask you to tell them about yourself, so prepare something that outlines your relevant skills and experience. Try to answer every question with a positive spin, even if they ask about your weaknesses. Focus on skills that are relevant to the role and real examples of how you have used them in the workplace. Employers want to hear what you could do for them. Wait until the end to ask about salary. 3) Post-interview: Always send a thank you note after an interview, thanking your interviewer for their time and recapping on any important points discussed. Dont post about the interview on social media, no matter how well you think it went! Image: Shutterstock

Toolkit.com is Fabulous!

Toolkit.com is Fabulous! I just discovered toolkit.com  thanks to entrepreneur.coms list of 65 Indispensable Sites for Biz Owners and it is totally fabulous!     It is free to sign up and you get lots of perks of being a member.   For those of you who have asked me how to incorporate, get a tax-ID #, get articles of incorporation, a domain name etc, heres a great place to start.   Check out the perks! As a Toolkit member, you receive several membership benefits including the following special discounts and rewards: Save $75 on Business Formation Protect your personal and business assets and gain tax advantages by forming an LLC or corporation. Save $75 on a complete incorporation package from BizFilings. Save $25 on Compliance Management with BizComply As a business owner , it is imperative that you know the steps required to keep your corporation or LLC compliant and in good standing with the state in which it is formed. BizComply is a web-based application that outlines critical compliance events, notifies you before these events need to happen, provides access to important forms, and houses your companys important information in one convenient location. BizFilings: Save 10% on Business Licenses Failure to comply with the necessary licenses and permits for your new business could jeopardize the business, result in expensive penalties or leave the business owner with no legal protection.   Let BizFilings research the state and local licensing requirements for your business type and location. BizFilings: Save $25 on Business Planning Software BizFilings Ultimate Business Planner guides you through each business-planning step quickly and easily.It simplifies the process of writing a business plan and gives you expert advice, tips, and hints based on proven business practices. Save $25 on a Corporate Kit Seal A Corporate Kit is a binder usually containing essential items for the required maintenance and administration of a corporation. Save 10% on DBA filings for your business A DBA (doing business as) filing is an official and public registration of a business name with either the state or local jurisdiction. Save $25 on an LLC Kit Seal An LLC Kit is a binder usually containing essential items for the required maintenance and administration of an LLC. PR NewsWire: Free First Year Membership fee ($198 value) When you become a PR Newswire member through the PR Toolkit you are entitled to a special package of free and discounted services valued at more than $2000*. Register.com: Free Domain Registration Register a domain name free for the first year. VistaPrint: Six Free Custom Printing Offers Get 250 business cards, a rubber stamp, t-shirt, 100 postcards, or a sticky pad. Free Trade Magazine Subscriptions Technical Document Downloads Browse through our extensive list of free Small Medium Business magazines to find the titles that best match your skills and interests.

Focus is Everything - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career

Focus is Everything - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career Theres a myth in innovation that creativity means letting go and throwing out the box. Everyone needs to open their mind completely and let possibilities flow in from everywhere. Theres no structure just openness. Thats how you get the good ideas. Its a myth because its not true innovation sessions without structure rarely go anywhere. But people believe that myth because they dont want to limit themselves creatively. What if they pick the wrong area to focus on? What if they dont get the big idea because theyre too focused? If this sounds familiar to you, its because many business owners and job seekers do the same thing.  They dont want to eliminate any possible customers by focusing in on a particular demographic. So they try (and fail) to appeal to everyone. This strategy doesnt work. When you refuse to focus in on who you really want to appeal to, you spread your attention across too many potential customers to do it well. In my field, we handle this in a simple way. At first, we do an Opportunity Exploration to really explore the challenge our clients are facing. This session has the potential to go anywhere our goal is to listen for themes in what the clients customers are saying. Then, we use what we heard to decide on the top Opportunity Areas. After that, we generate ideas in one Opportunity Area at a time. This strategy works because we find the areas with the most potential (and passion from customers) and then spend our creative energy in those areas. The result is  lot of highly-focused ideas that appeal to customers particular unmet needs. Marketers approach limiting their customer in a similar way. Companies that are really invested in their sales and marketing efforts know that they need to focus in on certain customer segments to be really effective. So they develop  buyer personas that describe their main consumers. Those buyer personas really focus on  who a potential customer is.  They include things such as: Age Gender Salary / household income Location: urban / suburban / rural Education Family Values (in regards to your area) Main challenge/concern (in regards to your area) Main goal (in regards to your area) Marketers dive really down deep into defining their ideal persona even giving them a name and a picture. It feels that those marketers are limiting their possible customers by giving them so much definition.  But what marketers are actually doing is making it easier for them to come up with possibilities to appeal to that particular customer. Buyer personas give marketers a deeper understanding of the needs of their customer. Entrepreneur running a small business is a vague concept. But Stacy, 39, who started her business in her garage and is finding that shes spending more time doing paperwork than the creative work she love but who is hesitant to pay someone else to do something she can do. is someone easy to visualize and understand.  That makes it easier to develop ways to appeal specifically to Stacy. Even though focusing on one type of customer seems like it limits the potential of what youre doing, it actually is a powerful tool everyone doing personal branding should use. Just like in innovation and in marketing, focusing in on the areas of opportunity and in on specific customers will actually lead to more powerful personal branding.

LinkedIn- where to start University of Manchester Careers Blog

LinkedIn- where to start University of Manchester Careers Blog You will have heard about LinkedIn and many of you might even have a profile on LinkedIn. However, we often hear that students and recent graduates don’t know what do with their LinkedIn accounts. Over the next weeks we’ll make a series of posts about how to improve your LinkedIn use and make the best of its features. So what is LinkedIn? LinkedIn is a professional networking site where you can search for jobs, research professionals and companies join groups and network. LinkedIn is not Facebook. Photos from your holidays and details about your diet are best left out of LinkedIn. Instead use a professional looking profile photo and it is best not to link to your Facebook profile from your LinkedIn page. Keep LinkedIn for professional interactions only. So how does it work? You sign up for an account and set up a profile. When you’re writing your CV you must be concise and that means that sometimes certain details are very summarized or left out because they don’t fit in. That is not a problem on LinkedIn where you can elaborate on details about that volunteering opportunity you took abroad or a course you have made to improve your IT skills. Take time to write a detailed profile where you outline your education, past and present work experience, skills gained, volunteering, etc. As with your CV, proofread your profile to make sure there are no typos. LinkedIn does not have a spell checker so you must be careful. Ask a friend to proofread it before you post it online. When you’re happy with your profile, then you can start connecting. To start with, you connect with people you know: colleagues and former colleagues, companies you have worked for, volunteering contacts, friends, family, etc. This will be the start of your network. In the coming weeks, we’ll give you a series of tips and advice on how to make the most of your LinkedIn account from how to make it look more effective to how to put it to good use. All Undergraduate LinkedIn

12 Morning Routines To Make Your Day More Productive CareerMetis.com

12 Morning Routines To Make Your Day More Productive Waking up on time is a pre-requisite for a productive day. You cannot skip it. If you are snoozing your alarm clock too often, you need to either get a different type of alarm that works for you or you to need to figure out a sleep pattern that actually works for you. Having said that, I didn’t have issues ever waking up on time.However, it took me a while before I could actually be on time for office. Being late is enough to dislodge productivity from your day as it takes up your mental space as well as your physical time.evalSo what was I doing wrong? I tried to set the alarm half an hour before the usual time but this too wasn’t helping me be on time. All I was actually living were long brooding hours of under-productivity. But eventually, I actually figured out what was curtailing my efforts to be on time.The first thing that I noticed was that I tried to make a lot of decisions just after I woke up. Should I take a shower first? Should I boil the milk? Should I shave later?N ow the morning is not a good time to make good decisions. You cannot skip the natural body clock that you have â€" Remember that these haphazard decisions that you take in the morning without much willpower or inspiration are going to take a toll on your overall productivity of the day.You are surely going to get late however hard you try to be on time. Being cluttered in the morning is exactly what you do not want to be to have a productive day.Now I am always on time and I actually sleep half an hour extra. So what changed? Did I become less cluttered? Yes.But what actually triggered this change was creating a morning routine and sticking by it.It is very important that decisions in your morning do not meander especially in the very first hour of your day and hence a morning routine is what you might just be missing for making your day productive.evalYou need to eventually switch off the anxiety of getting late â€" anxiousness does you no good, it gets you locked up in your own wh ims. So to do that, you need to know what exactly you are going to do in those crucial moments of your morning.1) Your routine starts before you go to sleepevalA morning routine has a pre-requisite: you cannot have pending work you couldn’t finish in the night.So the first thing is to never postpone any work that can be easily finished before hitting your sacks. Also, it is important to include your previous night as an important part of your morning routine by finishing off the possible tasks in the night itself. You will then have lesser things to worry about in the morning.For instance, as a school kid, I used to pack my school bag right before going to bed as instructed by my mother. So this simple tip from my mother has helped me in my job life too.evalYou can easily include shaving as a task for the night. It does eat up a lot of your morning time. You can also take your shower in the night itself.Taking a shower before you go to sleep helps you relax and fall asleep more qu ickly. If you tend to sweat a lot, this, however, might not work for you. But for most of the people, it does because most of us shower only once in 24 hours.Keep a deodorant handy if you are unsure about how you smell in the morning without a shower. Being unsure in itself is a hindrance to your day’s productivity.2) Drink water when you wake upDo not start your morning dehydrated. Water will help you freshen up quickly and will also help your metabolism.3) Put some music to time yourselfTo kick-start your day, you need some music to groove to. Your body will adjust to the beats and you can time yourself accordingly to the music. Recommended morning music is usually something that has a proper beat.You need to feel excited for the day and hence mellow songs might not work for you right in the morning. Buy yourself some good speakers and let the music take control of your anxieties. You can even get a shower head with a speaker built-in.4) Stretch out and exerciseAssign yourself a fixed time for stretching out â€" Do not do it beyond 10 minutes. It is important to feel rejuvenated when you start off your day. This would also help you be regular with your bowels if you have constipation problems.eval5) Brush your teethBrushing and flossing will help you feel hygienic for the rest of the day.6) Empty your bowels before you showerA great start to the morning is accompanied by being able to poop on time. You cannot feel constipated and have a great productive day. It is customary to approach your toilet seat before you hit the shower â€" so do not skip this step in your routine and keep it for the later part of the day.evalIf you cannot come to terms with it, then drink lots of water and hot beverages in the morning. You need to have more fiber in your body. So add fiber in your diet or at least in your dinner.7) Do not skip the showerIf you haven’t ticked off this task on your previous night, you need to be very specific about how much time you spend in the s hower. The first and foremost thing is that you cannot miss a shower on the pretext of being late.To make sure you have a productive day, you need to get freshened up and that is only possible with a cold shower. Nothing can be as bad as a bedhead right in the morning and even if you reach office on time, the bedhead is going to get you late when it comes to doing real work.It is easy to lose track of time when you are in the shower. So put an alarm to time your shower â€" the idea is to shower for not more than 5 minutes.8) Speed up your showerBefore you hit the shower, make a list of the things you need when you shower. You might need shampoo, soap, conditioner. If you happen to be a cluttered person it is better to opt for a combo pack of body wash and shampoo â€" this would help you keep track of the things you need. Otherwise, it is very easy to forget one thing for the other.evalThis only kills your precious shower time. Did you know that you get the most beautiful ideas in th e shower?So the right thing to do is not to waste it on redundant things. You can also cut down on the days you shampoo your hair to save your time â€" Shampooing 4 days a week is decent.9) Make sure the shower is coldIn order that you do not laze around, choose a temperature that’s not comfortable for you. Cold showers have their own benefits and they can give you a kick start right away.10) Know what you will wear for officeDo not waste time juggling with different wardrobe options right in the morning.11) Do not skip the breakfastSkipping breakfast will eventually make you clumsy and will hamper your morning routine. So one important thing to do before you hit your office is to have your breakfast on time.12) Go to Step 1 and repeat the following steps.If you ever create a morning routine to make your day productive, remember to stick to it and be strict about it. A morning routine is indeed what you might be missing out on if you feel you are under-productive. You can surely t ake control of the day if you let the routine take control of you in the morning.

The happy at work book - Introduction - The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

The happy at work book - Introduction - The Chief Happiness Officer Blog Happy at work. Happy? At work? Happy at work? Is it possible to be happy at work? Can we go to work and be energized, have fun, do great work, enjoy the people we work with, have fun with our customers, be proud of what we do and look forward to our monday mornings? Can we create workplaces where happiness is the norm? Or must we simply accept that work is unpleasant and tough and that is why we get paid to do it? This book is here to tell you that not only can we be happy at work, but when we are, its great for us and great for business. When we are happy at work, we have: More drive and motivation Better relations with co-workers and employees More success More creativity and good ideas More energy Less stress Much more fun Even our lives outside of work get better, leaving us with more energy and raising our entire quality of life. Likewise, more and more businesses are finding that things go better with happiness. That when employees are happy at work, a company gets: Higher productivity ? happy people achieve better results Higher quality ? because happy employees care about quality Lower absenteeism ? people actually want to go to work Less stress and burnout ? happy people are less prone to stress The best people ? people want to work for you Higher sales ? happy people are the best sales people Higher customer satisfaction ? happy employees are the best basis for good service More creativity and innovation ? happy people are more creative More adaptibility ? happy people are much more adaptive and open to change Better stock performance ? for all of the above reasons Higher profits ? for all of the above reasons Simply put: Happy companies are more efficient and make more money. And they make people happy, which is of course a goal in itself. This book aims to leave you with: Knowledge The basic theory of happiness at work based on real-life experiences Tools Simple, practical tools and methods thatll get you results quickly Energy This book will try to make you excited about the concept of happiness at work and all fired up to do something about it I short, everything you need to make yourself and others happy at work. Being unhappy at work Most of us have probably also tried the flip side, and have been unhappy at work. I certainly have, and I hated every second of it. After graduating with a masters in computer science in 1994, I worked as a developer and consultant and then co-founded a software company called Enterprise Systems together with some fellow geeks in 1997. When we started the company we had one huge advantage: We didn?t know how. The three founders (myself, Patrik Helenius and Martin Broch Pedersen) were all happy geeks with absolutely no idea of how to run a business. We did have some pretty good notions of how NOT to do it from previous jobs, but mostly we had a passion for doing things RIGHT. This mostly kept us from doing ?business as usual???, and freed us to try untraditional approaches. And we succeeded. In our company: People did excellent work All employees took responsibility and action when needed We made good money (not obscene, just good :o) We had fun People didn?t work too much 40 hrs a week or less But nice as it was, after about three years I began to feel constrained and locked in. I wanted to do something new, and there was no room to do this inside our company. I thought long about leaving the company, but didnt get around to actually quitting. That was a mistake. During my last year at the company, I was desperately unhappy. Most mornings when I woke up, I looked for some reason to stay home. I did feel a little tired today, didnt I? Wasnt my throat a little sore? At work I got very little done, and mostly counted the hours untill I could leave. And heres the worst part: I could barely recognize myself. I used to be energetic, positive and fun. Now I became tired, negative and abrasive. This affected me not only at work but also outside of it. Finally in june 2002 I quit. I also decided not to look for a new job straight away and to just take some time to decompress. The relief was enormous and those summer months with uncharacteristically (for Denmark) great weather slowly brought me back to my old self. I still spent zero time thinking about my next job, reading job postings or starting a new company. Then one day at the beach, an idea came to me: Arbejdsgl?de. Happiness at work. Thats it. Thats what Im passionate about. Thats what I wanted to work with. This idea became the Happy At Work Project, and we have been making people happy at work since early 2003. Leaders and employees at companies like IBM, Lego, DaimlerChrysler, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Pfizer and many others are happier at work after trying our methods. Happiness at work is inevitable The great news is this: Happiness at work is coming to our workplaces. It is inevitable. There is a massive tendency in the business world to focus more and more on making work a good experience, and while it is not yet felt in every country or in every workplace it soon will be. We dont need to lift a finger, happiness at work is coming no matter what we do, and no matter how hard we resist it. However, if we choose to do something constructive about it, we can become happy at work sooner rather than later. Our workplaces can reap the benefits, human and financial, this fiscal year rather than the next. That thought certainly gets me excited! Thanks for visiting my blog. If you're new here, you should check out this list of my 10 most popular articles. And if you want more great tips and ideas you should check out our newsletter about happiness at work. It's great and it's free :-)Share this:LinkedInFacebookTwitterRedditPinterest Related

Why You Should Write Your Resume Yourself

Why You Should Write Your Resume YourselfBefore sending out your resume to get an interview, it is important to write a resume that will stand out among all the others. Writing a good resume will help you stand out in the job market. Even though your resume may look great, if it is devoid of contents and content then it would be useless. It is true that the resume has a very important role in getting the job that you want.You have to write a resume that will make your future employer wonder about your capabilities and skills to perform the job that you are applying for. Before you begin the job search, it is important to analyze the information that you have learned about the job you want to apply for. So, how can you do that? Read on to find out.Keep in mind that you do not have to spend more money when you need to get a job. For example, if you have landed a job as a sales assistant, instead of buying a new car, you can use your savings to buy another car. When it comes to resumes, you don't have to sacrifice yourself when it comes to the money.If you want to get a job that pays high wages and big bonus then you should not choose a job where your job is easy to perform. It is better to have a challenging job and get a job where you will be expected to perform well in your performance.You should also look into the job because it will tell you how well you are going to perform. It is true that some people have tried their best to land a job but they were not able to get the desired job.Your future employer can view your performance as well as your efforts through the kind of information that you deliver. This will help you get a job as well as enhance your job search. You should be able to focus on what is important and avoid unnecessary distractions.There are different ways of writing resumes. For example, you can hire a resume writer who can help you create a persuasive resume. Or you can even use resume writing software programs to create the best resume.You should consider hiring a resume writer or a resume writing software program to help you create a successful resume. Resume writing is an important task because you want to land a great job for you and for your future.