Job interviews can be terrifying.It is one of the few times when you know without a doubt that you are being judged. Without judging you, how can potential employers know if you are a good fit or not? They can’t. They will go over everything in your resume and your work history with a fine tooth comb. They will call your references and they will make sure that you are worth their time and effort. Because of this, you need to be careful. You need to make sure that you don’t have anything in your past that could come back to haunt you and cause you to lose future job opportunities. This means that no matter what stage of life you are in or where you are in your career you need to be thinking ahead. Think about what effect the things you are doing today might have on your future. Here are some things that are obvious to avoid: bad talking your boss or superiors, being late, being unprofessional, etc. Those are things almost everyone knows to avoid, but there are some things people might not know, such as: talking about coworkers or superiors on Facebook or other social networking sites, posting vulgar or obscene things on your profile(s), or lying on your resume. All these things can be found out by future employers and harm your ability to keep your job and get a new job in the future. If you simply think ahead before you do anything, then you should be able to avoid doing something that could harm you later in the road and you won’t have to live up to it in an interview. Remember, you are being judged. Don’t give your potential employers anything they can judge badly.
After spending hours of distributing your resume, here it is.You got an interview. The one and only chance to prove that you are exactly what the company is looking for. Talk about stressful. Here are a few tips that should help you make the most of that first job interview.
The first thing you need to remember is to smile. Not only does it ease the interviewer, but they will take on the attitude you put forth, which will also help to ease your nerves.
Talk confidently. Yes, it is nerve wracking to go to a job interview, but don’t let your interviewer know that you are nervous. When you speak do not use fillers, such as “ummm,” or “hmmm.” Using fillers like those will make it seem like you do not know what you are talking about.
Be yourself. Yes you need to smile and be confident, but do not become someone you are not just for an interview. If you are hired you will be working side by side with these people and they need to know that the person they interview is going to be the same person they get when they hire you.
Practice these things before going into your interview. Think about what are some logical questions they might ask you at the interview and answer them out loud while looking in a mirror so you can make sure that you are smiling. If you think about what you want to say before you say it in the job interview, then you should be able to eliminate those unhelpful fillers.
While there are many other factors that go into securing your job, such as creating a professional and accurate resume before your interview, if you follow these tips they should help you make the most of your interview and, hopefully, help you land the job.
In the vacant job market today just getting as far as a job interview is an accomplishment in itself. To get the best possible chance of securing a job interview for a vacant position you are interested in there are a few things that you need to make sure you have in place first. One of the first things you will need is a current resume of your work history. The potential employers should already have a copy of your resume when you first applied for the job, but do take a copy along to the job interview with you. Make sure that on the day of your interview you have everything planned beforehand. Leave yourself plenty of spare time when making travel arrangements. You need to take into consideration hold ups in the travel network whether you are traveling by road, rail or air. There is nothing worse than being stuck in a traffic jam when you need to be at an interview 10 minutes later and you know you are twenty minutes away from your destination. Bad time management does not reflect well on you by your prospective employer. Try not to be too nervous on the day of your job interview. Remember that you must have qualities that the prospective employer is interested in for you to have been invited to the interview stage. There are usually hundreds of applicants for any vacant job and employers have the luxury of being able to invite for interview only the best of the best applicants.
Due to the job markets lately, there are a lot of older generation employees wondering how to get hired. The key is recognizing and remembering that your work experience can play a supportive role as well as a leadership role with organizations. The two need not be mutually exclusive. If you’re over 50, you’ve probably had the experience of being labeled as overqualified. And in response to this unwanted job-search slur, you’ve probably done what any intelligent, ambitious individual would do: Dumb yourself down on your resume. A good move, but what does this do to your career confidence? If today’s market is telling you repeatedly in rejection emails that they are not concerned with your achievements, it’s no wonder your self esteem is shaky. As an over 50 job candidate, you have a unique challenge to struggle with during the interview. Even though the interviewers are telling you that you are overqualified, you are suddenly feeling very inexperienced. This is because you’re overqualified because of the simple length of your resume, the style of your suit, color of your hair, and lingo in your business repertoire.
You’re under qualified because you may lack some understanding of today’s rapidly evolving technologies, flattened infrastructure, and business culture. Coming to terms with this before the interview is an essential component to building back your career confidence. Be confident that you could do many of the job duties of the interviewer just as easily in the pre-computer generation. That doesn’t make you stupid. Many people couldn’t do a lot of jobs if it weren’t for computer programs helping them along. Figure out your strengths and what you can bring to the table as far as being able take on a leadership role. It will still be a learning experience but we all have to learn something sometime. It’s important to know multiple aspects of your professional self prior to your job search, and it’s important to know how to present them to your next employer on paper and in person.
It has happened to all of us. Everyone has experienced a bad job interview sometime in the past. Anything from being late, botching answers to key questions or not being able to show knowledge about the company. Although the proverb is true, you never get a second chance to make a first impression, you do have an opportunity to make up some of what you lost in your bad job interview.
Often, people are their own worst critics, but this can actually be a good thing. When it comes to a job interview, you might be seeing things that weren’t actually there, or at least, that weren’t nearly as bad as you perceived them to be. Try to put the interview into perspective. Obviously, things like arriving late are negatives that will count against you but maybe other issues could be worse. Did you stumble through some questions? Did you fail to impress your interviewer with your knowledge of the company? Are there several things that were on the tip of your tongue that you were never able to express? Answer these questions and you’ll be able to tell yourself whether the interview was as bad as you first thought.
Think of it this way. Maybe that job was not the right one for you anyway. Did you feel like you weren’t able to connect with the interviewer? Did you feel out of place in the office? Were the questions exceedingly simple and not a challenge to you? Sometimes our instincts will show us in subtle ways when something is not right.
If you’ve decided that you did do very badly in the interview but still want the job, you can do damage control. The first thing to do is to analyze what went wrong. Write a thank you note or recovery letter. This is a way to follow up your bad job interview with concrete examples to back up your less than stellar answers to the interview questions. This is your chance to set the record straight and take back the initiative. Put together a concise, hard-hitting letter, using verifiable facts to back up your case wherever you can. When your prospective employer receives the letter, they will know, even if you didn’t show it in the interview, that you very much want the job and further, that you’re uniquely qualified for it.
There are any number of reasons why you can have a bad job interview. Often, it’s not as bad as you thought, or the interview will have given you enough of a perspective to convince you that the job wasn’t for you after all. But if you have a bad job interview for a job you really want, writing a timely, fact-filled and enthusiastic recovery letter can show the employer yet again that you are the best person for the job.
If you are not getting calls for interviews, you may need to review the documents and information employers are receiving from you. Those things are what employers are basing their decisions upon regarding which candidates they will hire. Usually, if you are not getting interviews, there are red flags deterring employers from considering you.
These are the resume red flags of death: 1. Gaps in your work history. Really, a few months do not matter, but more than six months is considered significant. If you can show on your resume that you were doing something during this time such as freelance work or furthering your education, you will be better off. 2. Lack of career progression. Career progression is not necessarily expected in all career fields, but in many it is expected that as the years go by, you will attain more important status by job title with increasing responsibilities. If the progression is not there, employers could assume your work is not worthy of promotion to higher levels or that you lack ambition. 3. You were formerly a business owner. One would assume that with all the capabilities required by an owner this would be a plus to your resume, but not necessarily. The reason you are no longer an owner is the issue. An alternative job title for unsuccessful ventures would be Manager or Operations Manager, and if asked why you became unemployed, you can simply state that the business closed. 4. Career changer without experience or education in the new field. Employers may think you are grabbing at straws, desperate for any job you can get or that you lack direction. The reason for the career change is best addressed in your cover letter and should show a genuine interest in the new career field and reasons why the employer should choose you over experienced or educated applicants. Don’t forget to throw in volunteer and hobby experience if appropriate. 5. Lack of clear direction. You are a jack-of-all trades but master of none. You have worked in many industries or many different types of positions that do not relate to one another. Employers look for candidates who have a real interest in their job industry and may question yours. 6. Multiple jobs of short duration. Employers call this “job hopping” and assume you will also leave them quickly, wasting the time they spent searching for, interviewing, and training you. The best type of resume format for this circumstance is a functional resume. However, when employers receive functional resumes, they often wonder what an applicant may be hiding. If you were freelancing or a contractor, list all companies or persons for whom you worked under one section with your freelance or contractor job title as the heading. 7. You never completed a high school diploma or a GED. Employers presume this is evidence of lack of ambition or laziness. If you did not complete high school, leave the education section off your resume completely.
Go through your resume carefully looking for red flags, and decide whether you need to have some re-vamping done. Then continue your job search with renewed energy and hope. Your new job is out there. It’s time to claim it.
With all the new technology available on the Internet today, there is absolutely no reason anyone should simply stop once a resume has been completed and sent. There is a wide world of other venues just waiting for you to use them to market your personal brand. Blogging is only part of it. Some may think blogging and job searches are two different things. They are, but they aren’t. There has never been a better time to be able to talk to people, to get the word out about you and your skills than blogging.
Build a blog site that highlights your job skills and your previous jobs. Talk about something every day. Add links to your resume and use the social networks to retweet or repost your site. There are numerous job boards for you to use to post your resume, whether it’s an executive resume, professional or entry level. And there are people who will retweet your blog post so others can see it. Before long, you have reached thousands of people. Before, you would have sent it to only a few. So, what’s smarter? Twitter has a very easy way to help individuals with their blog posts and to be able to integrate both together. Facebook does as well, and LinkedIn too.
Now, you can increase your visibility and get more options available to you during your job search. Take a chance and see how much fun it is and how much it will help at the same time.
Before you send your next resume out, give blogging and social media sites a try. You just may have more opportunities than you originally thought.
If you have been out of work for a while, then you know just how stressful a job search can be. It seems as if you apply over and over for weeks on end and still not an interview in site.
One thing to remember, it is very stressful, but at the same time make sure you are doing everything you can for it to be different.
If what you are presently doing is simply not working, change it up. Sit down and think about what you could do differently. Perhaps it’s searching for jobs in a different field altogether. Or maybe for some, you are simply not applying to enough jobs in a week’s time. I know that some will not understand this but there are those who only apply to one job a week. At that rate, in these economic times, you will never find a job.
Take a look at your resume. If you are applying for an executive position, does your resume reflect that? If your resume is more generic, then you will want to spice your resume up. In other words, your resume must reflect your jobs skills. If not, hiring managers will not look twice at a generic resume for an executive position. There are a number of ways to transform a regular resume into a professional or executive resume. If necessary, look at a few resume samples for some ideas.
So, sit down and think about what you need to change. There is no telling how long the job market will stay down and you just may not have the time to wait it out.
