A few unique job interview tips to make you the one they want. 
This is a guest post by Thomas Taylor. If you’d also like to guest post here on JobMob, follow these guest post guidelines. Job interviewers read and hear so many clich?s these days that they just about walk and talk in their sleep during the recruitment process. No more “I should get the job because I’m honest, hardworking, and reliable” — it’s time to say something different if you want to them hire you. In job interviews, you’ve not just got to talk the talk. You’ve got to walk the walk. Here’s how with these unique job interview tips. 1) Give examples It’s more than likely that you’ll never have met the interviewer. Somehow, though, you have to convince them that you’re the person for the job. How? You prove you’re not just blowing hot air, by supporting your answers with examples: of problems you’ve solved, of (good) results, of how you’ve turned things around in some way (if that’s the case). Show that you understand the job requirements. Demonstrate that you know about the sector by highlighting key ...
|
One of the important insights from the financial fiascos of the last few years is that senior managers and their company can’t always be trusted to act openly or ethically. The consequence of that is writ large: a huge number of people lost their jobs. Indeed, on several occasions, employees who lost their jobs have expressed their frustrations to me about their firm’s practice, telling me that they would never have guessed that of their firm’s leaders.
But then, as the conversation went on, they emphasized that a person at their level couldn’t possibly know what’s going on behind closed doors. Duhhhh. Sometimes we have to be shocked to see what was there all along. The status of a firm and its managers is not nearly as obscure as many employees think. Furthermore, there are a number of clues to various kinds of financial difficulty or hanky panky that employees at any level can pick up. Bankruptcy?
Here’s how I got educated on potential corporate bankruptcy. Back in the early ‘nineties, I had a number of long-term, development projects at Sunbeam in Boca Raton. Since a part of my development program involved 360 interviews, I ...
|
 Recognize This! – Innovation is not just the big, market-transforming end result, but the little ideas along the way.
What’s the most powerful word in business today? Innovation. Read any blog, any news source, any prospectus and you will quickly stumble over “innovation.” How the company pursues innovation, how innovative the products are, how “innovation” is a core value of the company. And this is all well and good – innovation truly is what propels industries and markets ever forward. But the real question smart companies should be encouraging every employee, in every role, to ask is: “What can I do, in what I do every day, to be more innovative? How can I innovate our product, our service approach, to better serve our customers, change the market, or push the company forward?” Unfortunately, too many people think innovation is too big for them or “not in my job description.” I believe that’s because we as leaders have failed to explain what real innovation actually looks like. David Steinberg, chief executive of XL Marketing, gives a much better definition of innovation in a recent New York Times ...
|
(Editor’s Note: Today’s post is brought to you by Allied Van Lines, a leader in the moving and storage industry with more than 75 years of experience. For a second year, they are championing a research project, Allied HRIQ, aimed to provide business professionals with data on current workforce trends. I’m honored to be working with Allied again and hope you find the information interesting.) A few months ago, Yahoo! President and CEO Marissa Mayer banned telecommuting. The response uproar backlash was swift. Experts from everywhere said telecommuting is essential to employee satisfaction and engagement. Some said this was the first sign of the apocalypse. All right – you caught me. No one really said that … but you would have thought the world was coming to an end given all the media attention. 
Let me toss an idea out there. Maybe telecommuting isn’t the utopia we think it is. Or that it’s been hyped up to be. By definition, telecommuting is when employees do not travel to a central place of work. Telecommuting is also referred to as telework or remote work. Typically when a person telecommutes, they’re working from home. So ...
|
Recently we were in San Francisco interviewing a new candidate for our computer engineering and support team. We had the opportunity to extend our trip to visit some of the vineyards in Sonoma and Napa Valley. We visited five different wineries and had the chance to meet the owners and winemakers at each of the vineyards. There was one common theme between all of these individuals. Extreme passion for their work! Even while in the surreal environment of Napa Valley, I found myself wondering; why can’t organizations create engagement in their workforce similar to the passion that a winemaker brings to his or her work? I can tell you not one of these winemakers talked about how much money they were being paid, or how much they were making. While certainly they are all running businesses, they speak first about the love for what they are doing. Not about the financial returns that their work produces. If you think about it, these owners and winemakers get a lot of feedback, attention and recognition when they produce a quality product. I think everyone has a need to be positively noticed. To back up my common sense, I’ll cite a recent survey where 78% of ...
|
Tucked away in Monday’s NYTimes business section is a highly significant—no, immensely practical—recommendation. The article by Nick Bilton initially describes the work practices of Robin Sloan, a former media manager at Twitter. As you can imagine, Sloan once taught news outlets how to use the hottest social media tools. But does Mr. Sloan follow his own recommendations? NOPE! He owns an old Nokia phone with just one application: making phone calls. He also takes notes with pen, paper and notepad. And—he reads books printed on paper—not the Kindle or the IPad. It may be technical heresy, but it’s a very smart way of living your work life. Sloan found that his IPhone and other technologies were getting in the way of his book writing, so he simply got rid of them. I found it was more important and more productive for me to be daydreaming and jotting down notes. I needed my idle minutes to contribute to the story I was doing, not checking my e-mail , or checking tweets. So I asked my Millennial protégé, a highly responsible project manager, about his use of gadgets. “I use my phone for talking and ...
|
My colleague, Bill Brandon, brought Brian Hall’s post 10 Technology Skills That Will No Longer Help You Get A Job to my attention when I was looking for feedback on what the most relevant and valuable professional development needs are of today’s training and learning technologies practitioners. Hall’s post ends with this: “To justify any salary, it’s not only about what you know – now – but what you can learn going forward. The key to a long career in Silicon Valley, or anywhere in the tech world, is showing that you can learn and adapt – and master - constant change.” OK, I’m nodding. It’s easy to agree. But how do you show that you can learn and adapt (and master) constant change? Do you just keep crossing out and adding on like this to show you can adapt to to change? Adobe Flash Developer/Designer HTML 5 Developer/Designer Mastering constant change is not illustrated this way. I’m reminded of a JFK quote: “And our liberty, too, is endangered if we pause for the passing moment, if we rest on our achievements, if we resist the pace of ...
|
 For years, workplace psychology was all about correcting things that were wrong. How can we fix people? How can we improve human capital metrics? How can we just do better? It was a reactive approach, where we focused on things that we thought needed solving, like turnover or poor morale.
Then Professor Martin Seligman was elected president of the American Psychological Association. Seligman is the founder of ‘positive psychology’, a field of academic study that examines healthy states, such as happiness, strength of character and optimism. He looked at psychology through a different lens; rather than concentrating on pathology, he urged that we proactively identify and build on things that are going right. In other words, what if we stop focusing so much on unhappy people and what isn’t working, asked Seligman, and instead we amplify happy people and what is working? By figuring out how to replicate that success, we can move the needle on human metrics like happiness, satisfaction, productivity and engagement. According to Seligman, positive psychology “is about identifying and nurturing [people’s] strongest qualities, what they own and are best ...
|
Think about your organization and think about your organization’s purpose and brand promise. Then, think about the employees in your organization and if their behaviors and actions are aligned with your brand and brand promise. As I have been writing and talking about continuously, I feel engaged employees who successfully represent the brand provides a significant and unique competitive advantage. I believe that creating brand ambassadors versus disengaged employees is the most important element of creating customer loyalty and net promoter scores. Companies that foster brand ambassadors versus companies that mismanage disengaged employees create radically different results: It is imminently logical that your external brand and the stories about it can never be better or stronger than your internal employee brand and stories. After thinking about your brand and your organization’s employee actions and alignment, what do you have? Ambassadors or mismanaged disengaged employees? If you don’t know the answer or are unsure I will give you a hint; try shopping your organization. That will give you a clear answer.  ...
|
 There are plenty of ways to get an employee appraisal meeting “right,” all of which leave the employee walking out the door feeling driven and excited to get back to work. Good employee appraisal meetings end with each party feeling a renewed sense of respect and appreciation for the other, and great ones end with the employee racing back to her station, determined to make the upcoming year twice as successful as the last.
On the other hand, terrible employee appraisal meetings have the opposite impact. They leave employees feeling drained, belittled, and disconnected. And in the worst case scenario, the employee races back to her desk…so she can get to work polishing her resume. To avoid this scene, watch out for these damaging moves and do whatever you can to remove them from your appraisal process. - Focusing only on recent accomplishments, or worse, recent failures and mistakes. It’s natural to do this, since our memories are wired to focus on the short term. But lambasting a strong employee for a minor mistake simply because the mistake happened a week ago won’t do much to keep turnover down.
- Giving feedback that would have really ...
|