Blog | HELLMANN CAREER CONSULTING

Choose the Right Leadership Style to Get Results

by Rob Hellmann • On-the-job Success, Org. Effectiveness •

When we need someone’s help or cooperation, most of us will adapt our style to the audience and environment. For example, we might communicate differently with a colleague depending on their level of motivation, or whether there’s a severe time crunch or not. While you want to keep that same flexibility when managing staff, default to an influencing and delegating leadership style unless there’s a good reason not to. Here’s why: More

Write These 6 Things to get a LinkedIn Introduction

by Rob Hellmann • Building a Business, Career Change, Getting Interviews, Recruiting •

One of LinkedIn’s killer applications is its ability to leverage your “first degree network” to get introductions to your second degree contacts– for recruiting, landing interviews or prospect meetings, partnerships, or just to learn from others. To get the meetings you want, make it easy, for both your first degree connection to forward your request and for the recipient to agree.

Let’s take an example based on a client’s situation. Ellen wanted to meet Susan, a second degree connection, and she saw that John was their mutual first degree connection. Ellen’s introduction request to John contained these six elements, in the sequence below:

Don’t Be an Interview “Know-It-All”

by Rob Hellmann • Interviewing, Recruiting •

The best thing you can do in an interview is to keep the focus on how you can help the interviewer with their challenges. Yet even if you are keeping this focus, bringing a “know-it-all” attitude, with accompanying assumptions, can leave a bad impression. In particular, be careful of presuming that you know what the fix should be for a hiring manager’s problem without understanding the whole picture. More

Surprise! Start Your Presentation Off with a Bang

by Rob Hellmann • Interviewing, Presentations •

Bring the element of surprise into your presentation to make it memorable and powerful. Humans evolved to remember the unusual and the shocking; use this knowledge to your benefit!

For example, I coached one client to begin his presentation (to an executive audience at a Fortune 500 company) with a slide that had one single large number on it. Then he said:

Avoid These Six Job-search Time Wasters!

by Rob Hellmann • Getting Interviews, Job-Search Strategy •

The most common time killers in a job search (excluding procrastination) involve interviews that go nowhere, networking meetings that net nothing, and countless job applications that get no response. Here’s how to manage these and other situations so that you can turn waste into haste and jump-start your job search.
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How to Write Compelling Resume & LinkedIn Profile Bullets

by Rob Hellmann • Getting Interviews, Resume, LinkedIn, self-promo, Social Media •

When I first look at a client’s resume, I quite often see a list of bullet points that reflect only responsibilities. One of my clients, for example, an accountant, listed a bullet point that read: “Responsible for managing the monthly close.” After we discussed the impact she made through her management, we modified the text to read: “Managed the monthly close, reducing turnaround time by at least 30% while improving accuracy.” Do you feel the extra power More

Applying for Jobs? There’s a Better Way to Get Interviews

by Rob Hellmann • Getting Interviews, Job-Search Strategy •

A prospective client once came to me for help. “In the past year I’ve applied for about 100 positions, yet have had no interviews!” she told me in frustration. I was pretty confident that I knew the crux of her problem straight away. How? It was the emphasis she placed on the number of jobs she had applied for. Usually, it’s not nearly enough to just apply for jobs. More

Resume Mythbusters: Myth #1 Busted!

by Rob Hellmann • Resume, LinkedIn, self-promo •

A number of resume “professionals” say not to use formatting such as bolding or underlining because it can prevent Applicant Tracking Systems from identifying formatted keywords in your resume. ATS’s are often used by large organizations to do initial automated resume screenings for job postings, before resumes are seen by a human. My take on this claim: TOTALLY FALSE.

How do I know? Simple—you can test it yourself. Get a free Google Drive account, which includes gigabytes of cloud storage, and upload your PDF (or Word) resume there. Google Drive is known for making More

Are You Keeping in Touch with Your Network?

by Rob Hellmann • Building a Business, Getting Interviews, Job-Search Strategy •

If you’re not, you’re not a good networker– you’ll miss opportunities! Getting meetings (and then “acing” these meetings) is 50% of what you need to do. Keeping in touch following these meetings is the other 50%. More

How to Write Emails that Land Interviews & Meetings

by Rob Hellmann • Getting Interviews, Resume, LinkedIn, self-promo •

Many cold emails and cover letters (i.e. those sent to people you don’t know asking for a meeting or an interview) are not even read by the recipient; the email subject line doesn’t resonate, or the content is too dense, boring, irrelevant or seemingly pointless to engage the reader. Clients who have applied the following 10 rules, however, have seen big improvements in their email response rates.

Rule #1: Make your letter easily “scannable”
These days, work is too fast-paced to allow time for reading through a long, dense letter. More