Real-world advice for today's job market
Real-world advice for today's job market
Behavioral interview questions are the reason you should invest some time early in your job search to develop a bank of stories you can tell. If you don’t, you risk being caught off guard. Having to mentally scrounge through all your previous work experiences for a good example to use, before you can even start to answer the question. Here’s how to avoid that. Read More
I’ll say this right up front: I have a strong bias for chronological resumes, and I know I’m not alone. Most recruiters and hiring managers I know lean towards chronological resumes because they make it easier and faster to find the information we’re looking for quickly. Let’s talk about functional resumes, though, and the reasons you might – and might not – want to use one.
If I asked you to pick one interview question that twists your stomach in knots, I’d bet good money that it’s exactly that: money. “So, tell me … what are your salary expectations?” It’s the question almost everyone dreads. Most mid-career working people today were raised in homes where our parents didn’t talk openly about what they earned. Generationally and culturally speaking, it’s not in our nature. Read More
When you’re a candidate for a job, you’ll be asked for job references, and you’ve got to provide them. There are good ways and less good ways to do that. Read More
There are few meetings with more inherent pressure than a job interview, and worse, most of that pressure is weighing on only one of the people (how unfair!). When you’re interviewing for a job, two or three short seconds can feel like a lifetime. They’re not, though, and allowing them to pass in silence can make a big difference to the quality of an answer – possibly one that could make or break your interview.
I’ve heard hundreds of stories about people who’ve gone to multiple interviews, met hiring managers and team members, gotten their hopes up about what seemed like a slam dunk … only to be ‘ghosted’. No word back, not a phone call or even an email, despite polite messages requesting an update. What are you supposed to do when you’re ghosted? Read More
As a candidate interviewing for jobs, you can harness the power of storytelling. It can be powerful, too; some of the best interview moments I remember are ones where I was drawn in by a compelling story that illustrated the point a candidate was making. Read More
The focus of most of my blogs is what happens between your last day at your last job, and your first day at your next one. Sometimes when you’re employed, though, you wonder ‘should I change jobs?’ Let’s look at four of the most common reasons people quit, and what (in most cases) I would recommend you do for each one. Read More
As a candidate working with a recruiter, it’s to your benefit to help them be as efficient as possible. There are aspects of this that you can’t control. The suitability of your experience and qualifications for the job I’m hiring for, for example. It’s either a good fit, or it’s not. There’s one thing you can control, though. That factor is: friction. Read More
