Acing the Interview: What’s Your Greatest Weakness?

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weakness canstockphoto10210474Every so often you will get an interview question like this from HR or a senior level executive. “Greatest weakness” types of interview questions also include “tell me about a criticism your boss once gave you,” or “give me an example of a situation where you didn’t get the outcome you wanted.” They use these questions to a) find people who are genuinely self-reflective and open to improvement, and b) screen out people who say something problematic. When forming your answer, keep these three guidelines in mind:More

Cold Calling Giving You Cold Feet? Try These 9 Tips

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cold feet warm socks shutterstock_248949232Many clients tell me that they really dislike the process of calling people they don’t know to get meetings, interviews, or new business opportunities. By following these tips on how to present yourself on the call and adopt the right mindset, you’ll get better results, and feel better too!

Presenting Yourself – Rehearse your “20-second pitch.”
How do you get them to stay on the phone, or want to speak with you? The key is your  20-second pitch. When someone takes your call, theyMore

LinkedIn “Recommendations” vs. “Endorsements”

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Getting a recommendation on LinkedIn can help your career. LinkedIn recommendations are valued by hiring managers. Why? 1. The first-degree connection giving the recommendation is visible, hence “researchable” on LinkedIn, 2. significant effort is involved in writing a recommendation, adding to the authenticity, and 3. the content’s often descriptive nature helps the hiring manager to understand your value. I would suggest getting at least three LinkedIn recommendations. LinkedIn considers three-plus recommendations to be a factor in “profile completeness,” which figures in it’s search rankings. More

Want to Fast-forward Your Job Search? Target More Positions

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Even if your resume, pitch, skill set, and emails are all stellar, at the end of the day your job search is still a numbers game. To improve your odds of landing a position quickly, you’ve got to actively go for a large number of potential positions.  That is, don’t just passively wait for the search firm to call or the ad to show up (and then compete with potentially thousands of other applicants). Instead, take the active approach: 1) create a plan that casts a wide enough net to include enough suitable positions (open or currently filled), andMore

The Single Best Presentation Tip: Tell a Great Story

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Whether your goal is to sell, inform, or land a job offer, telling engaging, relevant stories can turn even a so-so presentation into a great one. Illustrating your points with the right stories will have a far stronger impact than many other things you can do, including slide design, body language, eye contact, and so forth.More

Resumes vs. LinkedIn Profiles: What You Need to Know

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You can create an effective LinkedIn profile by following many of the same principles that I would recommend for your resume. For example, focus on accomplishments, have a summary section, use keywords that resonate with your audience, etc. etc. (see this blog post and this one for other guidelines).  Key differences in the way that resumes and profiles are shared, however, could have a big impact on how you choose to modify your resume for your profile. Below I’ve shared an excerpt from my book Advanced LinkedIn to highlight four of these differences.More

Top Resume Mistakes to Avoid (Part 2)

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Oops!In Part 1, I covered the top two mistakes that I see clients make on their resumes.  In this post you’ll learn how to avoid six more resume pitfalls.  Topping off this list:

Your resume places too much focus on responsibilities, not enough on accomplishments

Which phrase do you think is more powerful?

  1. Responsible for running monthly financial reports.
  2. Redesigned monthly financial reporting process, cutting production time from one month to five days.More

Top Resume Mistakes to Avoid (Part 1- the top two)

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Oops!(Update: Part 2 is here) When a potential employer reviews your resume, s/he thinks: a) Can this person help me to do my job? and b) I have about10-30 seconds to scan this resume. Hence, the Golden Rule of resume writing: Your “how I can help you” message needs to jump off the page in the 10-30 seconds it’s being reviewed. You’ll hear many rules (like this one) tossed around by experts. My suggestion from experience and training is to forget all those other rules, and just follow this one rule.  Anything that serves this Golden Rule is good, anything that doesn’t is bad– which brings us to the top two resume mistakes:More

LinkedIn Just Got More Useful for Business Marketing

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If you market your (or your employer’s) business or organization using social media, and you are open to using Hootsuite as your social media organizer, you need to know about this useful new LinkedIn-related feature.More

Get better LinkedIn people-search results with “Boolean Logic”

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LinkedIn’s “Advanced People Search” feature is a fantastic tool for finding people in your extended network or shared groups who can help you to reach your career goals.  As I discuss in my book Your Social Media Job Search, including boolean logic in your search terms such as AND, OR, NOT, parenthesis and quotes around phrases can greatly expand its power.  To demonstrate, here’s an example of a client who was interested in obtaining a marketing manager or director position at Pfizer.  More

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