Ace Your Interview: Tell a Great Story

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campfire story shutterstock_211091626Telling a great story in the interview, is the single best thing you can do to improve your odds of landing another interview or offer. Powerfully share a relevant example from your experience that illustrates how you can help them. Go beyond just saying that you are good at what you do. Go beyond telling them “I did this which resulted in that.” Help them to picture your value by painting that picture with words; share the full, interesting story in detail.

Hiring managers who know how to interview will ask you for these examples and have lots of followup questions. Those who are

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Your 20 Second Pitch: Don’t Cold-Call Without It!

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Whether you’re in sales, business development or a job search, effectively cold-calling “strangers” to get the meetings you seek is a crucial skill. For jobseekers, this is called accessing the “hidden” job market, where you’re developing new long-term relationships that can lead to opportunities.

When you cold-call, you have only roughly 20 seconds to gain their interest. At that point you need to give them an out or you risk making a bad impression; they may be about to run off to a meeting and keeping them on the phone would be a no-no. So if you haven’t interested them enough by then, you’re done. That’s why you need a 20 second pitch.

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Choose the Right Leadership Style to Get Results

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animal,cute,ducks,d_b,cuteness,animals-b832101ed6b4383c27bd1f7d64f115bd_hWhen 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:

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Write These 6 Things to get a LinkedIn Introduction

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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:

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Don’t Be an Interview “Know-It-All”

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know-it-all shutterstock_104220077The 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.

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Surprise! Start Your Presentation Off with a Bang

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GossipBring 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:

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Avoid These Six Job-search Time Wasters!

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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

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resumeWhen 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, a Chief Accounting Officer, listed a bullet point that read: “Led team in managing the monthly close.” After we discussed the impact she made through her management, we modified the text to read: “Led team in reducing monthly close turnaround time by at least 30% while improving accuracy.” Do you feel the extra power

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

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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. It was the emphasis she placed on the number of jobs she had applied for. Usually, just applying for jobs is not nearly enough, especially at more senior levels.

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Resume Mythbusters: Myth #1 Busted!

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2056398799_5849080c71_oA 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

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