The first step in preparing for an interview, whether in person or over the phone is writing out your top 5-7 accomplishments.  Each should cover at least a half page. Anything less and you are not thoroughly considering all of the appropriate details to the accomplishment.  I tell my clients that all companies, regardless of industry, have the same problems.  If you can describe how you have solved those problems at one company, the implication is that you will be able to do the same thing for the company you are interviewing with.  This seemingly small, but significant step of preparation will differentiate you from the other candidates.

The first step in the interview process is typically a phone interview.  The phone interview is now a way for employers to avoid the time and expense of bringing in additional candidates.  The added emphasis on screening requires better preparation in the form of researching the company and the interviewer.  Make sure to ask enough detailed questions so that you have a very good understanding of the issues you would face in the position.  Selling to those needs will significantly set you apart from the rest of your competition.

Most interviewers will develop an opinion of the candidate within the first 5 minutes.  So how do you quickly develop a rapport with someone that you have never met?  Prior to the interview you need to research each of the people that you will be interviewing with on Google and LinkedIn.  This information will give you a feel for the interviewer’s professional accomplishments and consequently what has been important to them in their career.  If the interview occurs in the individuals office, take note of all of the pictures, awards, and other items hanging on the walls.  People will often hire individuals that they like.  By asking sincere questions that show a genuine interest in someone’s accomplishments and activities, you will build great rapport.   Other ways include giving a firm handshake, maintaining good eye contact, and expressing a positive attitude by smiling.

As mentioned earlier, most companies have begun using behavioral interview questions as part of the interview process.   These questions start with “tell me about a time when”.  In order to successfully answer a behavioral interview question you need to keep a few things in mind.  First, formulate your answer using the STAR method, which breaks down as Situation, Task, Action, and Result.  The situation is a high level overview of the issue or project.  The task is the specific piece of that issue or project that you are responsible for carrying out.  Action refers to what you actually did to resolve the problem or complete the project.  Result is the most important part of the answer and refers to the final outcome.  The most successful interviewers are able to tie the positive results they have accomplished during their career with the interviewers current needs to demonstrate how they can have an immediate impact.  Finally when answering a behavioral interview question keep in mind your use of ‘I’ versus ‘we’.  To a behavioral interviewer, the term ‘we’ means that you are part of a group that did everything.  The term ‘I’ shows that you were responsible for a given result.  A company is not hiring the team they are hiring you, so be careful to use the appropriate term in order to convey your intended meaning.

Now that you know how to answer questions, let’s look at how to ask good questions.  Many hiring managers have told me how they can tell just as much about the quality of the candidate from the questions they answer as they can from the questions they ask.  Based on the research you have done on the company and the information you have gathered, ask quality well thought-out questions.    The more information you have about the position and the company, the better you can sell yourself for the role.

You have done everything right up to this point.  Make sure to finish it off by closing the interview appropriately.  At the conclusion of each interview express your interest to the interviewer in a short one to two minute statement.  Upon concluding the conversation with the hiring manager, make sure to also ask for the job and the timeline for next steps.  I have had numerous occasions of excellent candidates interviewing for a role that don’t get the offer simply because they don’t ask for job. Finally, follow up with each of the interviewers with a thank you note.  Although a written note is great, it will rarely be able to get to the interviewers before they make a decision.  As such, email is your best bet.

Follow the steps above when interviewing and you are sure to stand out as a preferred candidate.  Best of luck with the interview!

For more information on Career Search Strategies contact Steve Gray at 704 877 5522 or check us out at www.careersearchstrategies.net

Stay positive and I wish you much success in you search.

Steve Gray

Career Search Strategies

704 877 5522

sgray@careersearchstrategies.net

www.careersearchstrategies.net

Developing a resume that jumps off the page at the reader is critical to your job search success.  A Recruiter or HR person will only spend about 20-30 seconds reading a resume, before they make a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ decision.  During that short window of time, you have to convey that you are the best fit for the role.  So how do you accomplish what seems like such a monumental task?  To start with, keep your target audience in mind and understand what they are looking for when reading your resume.

Ten tips to make your resume reader friendly;

1. Get the reader from your name to your current role within the top third of the page.  What is of most interest to the reader is your last five years of experience.
2. No bullet or paragraph should be longer than 3-4 lines.  Anything more than that is difficult to read quickly, so it is either skimmed or skipped all together.
3. Make your resume accomplishment oriented.  A resume that reads like a job description does not differentiate you from the hundreds of other applicants.
4. Your accomplishments should be bulleted to make them stand out on the page.
5. Attract the reader’s attention by quantifying your top three accomplishments per position by using numbers, percents, and dollar signs.
6. Start each bullet with action oriented words that convey a strong sense of the role you played in that accomplishment.
7. Standardize your use of font and format throughout the resume.  Use an easy to read traditional font like Arial or Times New Roman.  Make sure to also maintain the same consistency of how you format each section of the resume.
8. Incorporate the key buzz words from the job description into your resume.  This will help capture the readers attention and make you more easy to relate too.
9. Most resumes should utilize a functional format.  The only exceptions to that rule are those individuals making a significant career change (ie engineering to accounting or sales rep to a social worker).
10. Keep the resume to two pages in length, anything longer is unlikely to get read.  This can be accomplished by limiting your experience to the last 10-15 years.

In this ultra competitive job market, you are at times competing against hundreds of other candidates for your next position.  To make yourself stand out from the crowd, you need a resume that concisely captures your experience in an easy to read format.  By making your resume easy for the reader to understand, you have effectively gained a leg up on the competition.  Congratulations, now that you have made your resume jump off the page, you are ready for next weeks article on “The Elevator Speech”.

Career Search Strategies is here to help you with all of your career search needs.  We function as a coach to walk you through each step of the career search process.  We provide one on one coaching and group classes on topics such as resume writing, networking, Effectively Using LinkedIn, and interview preparation.  With over 15 years of experience, we can help you develop a plan to jump start your search and find the career you’ve been looking for!

For more information on Career Search Strategies, contact Steve Gray at 704 877 5522 or by email at SGray@careersearchstrategies.net.  You can also check us out online at www.careersearchstrategies.net or on Twitter at @CareerSrchStrat.

Geosyntec Consultants, an Atlanta-based consulting and engineering firm specializing in environmental issues, natural resources and civil infrastructure, has opened an office in downtown Charlotte at 401 North Tryon Street.

The company works with both private and public sector clients. Clients include regional and national developers, large commercial property owners, law firms and industrial clients such as oil and gas, chemical, aerospace, pharmaceutical, diversified manufacturing, advanced technology, power and utility, and environmental management companies. Public sector clients include local, regional and federal agencies and governments.

“Establishing an office in Charlotte was a logical choice for us in the evolution of our company,” says Geosyntec principal Terry Cheek. “We are performing a number of active, long-term environmental and infrastructure projects for clients based in the Charlotte area and numerous multinational clients with facilities in the region. Having a local presence will help us better serve these clients and will position Geosyntec for significant new opportunities with clients who value the Charlotte market as the economic engine driving sustainable growth in this region.”

The Charlotte division of Geosyntec currently employs 3 principals with plans to expand to 20 employees in the next 3 years. The company has over 600 employees and more than 45 offices with both a national and international presence. 

Source: Charlotte Chamber

The index now stands at 90.8, up 1.8 percent from the revised October figure. The index is down 9.4 percent from a year ago.

“This month’s large increase in the Employment Trends Index suggests that job gains are imminent,” says Gad Levanon, associate director of macroeconomic research at The Conference Board. “However, the pace of hiring is likely to remain subdued because the economic recovery is expected to be weak throughout the first half of 2010.”

The Employment Trends Index aggregates eight labor-market indicators. November’s increase was driven by positive contributions from five of the eight components. The five indicators were initial claims for unemployment insurance, number of temporary employees, job openings, industrial production, and real manufacturing and trade sales.

The new index follows Friday’s report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics that showed the national unemployment rate for November was 10 percent and the economy lost only 11,000 jobs.

Local jurisdictions trail the federal government in reporting monthly unemployment numbers. In its most recent report, the N.C. Employment Security Commission said unemployment in the Charlotte/Gastonia/Concord metro area rose to 12 percent in October from 11.8 percent in September.

The unemployment rate in Mecklenburg County rose to 11.1 percent from 10.9 percent in September.

In the Hickory/Lenoir/Morganton region, unemployment increased to 14.5 percent from 14.1 percent.

The New York City-based Conference Board operates is a nonprofit organization that publishes information and analyses, makes economics-based forecasts and assesses trends.

Source: Bizjournals.com

If nothing changes by the fall of 2013, University of Tennessee researchers say the state can expect a teacher shortage so severe 40 percent of the current positions could be open.

The most critical need will be for math and science teachers, but dire shortages are predicted at every grade level, plus special education and vocational education, said Bill Fox, director of the UT Center for Business and Economic Research in Knoxville.

“We’ve been changing the rules,” he said. “For instance, we’ve increased the number of math classes and science classes that students must take. We’ve lowered pupil-to-teacher ratios,” he said.

What hasn’t happened, “is someone sitting down and saying, ‘What are the implications of the policies we’re legislating?’ We have to begin to assess our capacity to provide the quality of education that we’re mandating, based on the traditional routes of finding teachers.”

The study, done in conjunction with the Tennessee Department of Education and the state’s Higher Education Commission and released Tuesday, was funded by the governor’s office.

It says Tennessee will need 69,168 teachers next year, but will have only 57,665 on the payroll.

In each year of the five-year study, the scenario becomes bleaker. By fall of 2013, researchers project 31,431 teacher openings, as both the supply of teachers decreases and demand increases.

Fox and his team analyzed 10 years of teacher employment data, and factored in the percentage likely to leave each year, those who will move between districts and the number of former teachers expected to return.

The biggest subject gaps are in English as a second language, elementary school music, art and physical education, eighth grade and vocational education.

The Tennessee findings are based on an average 2 percent population increase and no change in the roughly 2,200 education graduates produced each year by Tennessee colleges.

The smallest gap is estimated for kindergarten. Memphis next year is expected to need 138 new kindergarten teachers; Shelby County Schools will need 33.

The findings do not reflect shifts created by the recession, making it possible that teachers will not quit as readily this year and that many more people are likely to seek jobs in schools.

According to the annual report for American Association for Employment in Education, released last month, nationwide demand for teachers in 60 of 61 subjects declined in the last year. Only math was listed as having an extreme shortage of teachers.

It also found that the best-educated tend to leave fastest. They often are high school math and science teachers.

In Memphis City Schools, 20 percent of first-year teachers quit and more than 40 percent leave after three years.

The district does not know why because it does not conduct exit interviews, said Supt. Kriner Cash.

Through its partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the district plans to pay $6,000 incentives to highly qualified new teachers who stay at least four years.

Source: Commercialappeal.com

The job market is slim, so searching for anything to bring in a pay-check may be tempting. But, how do you know the offer is legitimate?

The local job experts give you advice on how to avoid the scams.

Hope and maybe even desperation can cloud your judgment, when it comes to the job hunt, but you’re not alone, and with a high unemployment rate, you can quickly become a target for employment scams.

A quick internet search, online job postings, advertisements for employment; It can be a dizzying process, when the jobs are limited.

“You have to be careful there, because we want to believe, we want to believe there’s something out there we can do,” says Terry Callahan, manager of the Blount County Career Center. 

Callahan has heard the horror stories from the hunt for a job, so he decided to see for himself what the so-called offers were like online.

Callahan says, “Some of the websites have literally thousands of jobs in a local area, that we all know don’t exist.” “And, sure enough I was bombarded with all kinds of, what we call spam, because it all goes to my junk email folder.”

Callahan says avoid requests for anything up-front, “We’re all aware of the up-front money, you buy a kit, or you have to buy this.” Or even asking for email addresses and other personal information for you, and even your references.

Craigslist.com has a “scam alert” page when you enter the job section of the website, because of the number of bogus ads.

Callahan says, “Never, again, apply with anybody that represents an employer, they won’t tell you who they are.”

But, a business, like Skyco Staffing Services, will investigate that potential employer for you.

Dena Flatt, Skyco Operations Manager, says, “We have better sources to check out all of these companies.”

Flatt works to find temporary, and some permanent jobs daily, and she says, “Trying to place them, even if it’s just a few hours a day, just something. People are just desperate.”

“I think the most common thing is ‘I’ll take any job, I’ll do anything right now,’” says Callahan.

Callahan says the best thing you can do to find a job, is be open. That may mean taking a job outside of your field, extending your commute, or even moving.

But there are legitimate sources available to help you find a job, including checking out a business on the Better Business Bureau’s WEBSITE.

Source: WVLT

Asheville’s un-employment rate was at 8.6 per cent in October; Brevard was at 9.1; and Forest City had an unemployment rate of 16.6 per cent this October…one of the highest in the state.

Meanwhile, NC Governor Beverly Perdue says the soaring cost of paying unemployment compensation is placing a strain on state finances…and North Carolina is borrowing millions to pay unemployment claims.

Source: WHKP radio

The new Hotel Indigo, a 13-story tower on the northwest edge of downtown, joins a lineup of Asheville high-rises that hasn’t changed much in the past 80 years. Nearly all the city’s tall buildings — City Hall, Buncombe County Courthouse, Jackson Building, Battery Park Hotel — rose during the 1920s boom years.

The one modernist exception — the much-unloved BB&T Building, completed in 1965 — tends to be regarded as the looming death star of Asheville architecture.

Whether the Indigo is a new Jackson Building or a new BB&T is a matter of some dispute.

The online message boards for the Montford neighborhood, just across Interstate 240 from the Indigo, have not been kind. “I could not have imagined an uglier building,” a typical comment said.

Michael McDonough, an architect and Montford resident, said the hotel is “a couple of stories too tall for that site,” and he’s also not crazy about the colors: “It conjures up images in my head not of Asheville but of Miami and the coast.”

Other architects, however, embrace the design.

“You get used to a certain look, and when it changes, you can get offended,” said Cynthia Turner of Asheville’s Architectural Design Studio. “But to me it’s an exciting addition because it’s contemporary and fresh instead of trying to be historic.”

Does it fit?

The Indigo is 13 stories of masonry and glass planted at the highest elevation in downtown Asheville.

With nine stories of hotel rooms capped by four stories of condominiums — along with 100 parking spots in a two-level garage — it sits on a slender ribbon of land bordered by Haywood Street, I-240, Montford Avenue and an interstate exit ramp.

Across Haywood Street is the three-story Carolina Apartments building; a block away are the historic Grove Arcade and Battery Park.

Yet for those who feel the style of the Indigo is out of place, architect Peter Alberice advises a trip to the historical dioramas of downtown Asheville on display at Pack Place. Those models illustrate the city’s growth skyward and its stylistic transformation.

Source: Asheville Citizen Times

But that optimism is accompanied by a deep conservatism toward expansion, and an expectation that it will take time for the economy to recover, a new Network of City Business Journals survey of 776 small business leaders in January shows.

Small business bosses are more optimistic than they were just after the election. In November, only 37 percent expected their business prospects to get a lot or a little better. In January, 63 percent expected conditions to get a lot or a little better.

“We’ve got some good news,” says Godfrey Phillips, vice president of the City Business Journals Network, which is owned by bizjournals’ parent company, American City Business Journals. Phillips is in charge of the company’s small-business research efforts. “I think that optimism’s up and that’s surprising but it is up.”

Still, just 27 percent expect to hire new employees when the economy recovers, while 39 percent expect to pay down credit lines and 34 percent intend to increase their capital reserves.

“They’re just going to be more cautious,” Phillips says, “sort of get themselves back on track.”

And the optimism is tempered by worry.

Forty seven percent said they were very concerned about the long-term survival of their companies, up from 41 percent in November.

“I think by nature they’re optimistic but there’s always the realism that things aren’t that good,” Phillips says.

They’re deeply concerned about the U.S. economy. Seventy percent say they’re very concerned about the economy. That topped all other concerns, with the cost of health care coming in second at 66 percent.

And they don’t expect a quick turnaround. On average, small business executives expect it will take 2.4 years for the economy to turn around.

But most do expect the economy to recover. Sixty-three percent expect the economy to regain its former strength.

“They still believe that things will come back,” Phillips says. “They still believe that the U.S. economy will be strong.”

To download the survey results, click here .

Source: Charlotte BizJournals.com

Jon Talton in the Seattle Times echoes Jack Shafer in Slate (or is it Salon?) to remind us that out of all our sturm and drang about journos’ jobs it’s not often that empathy emerges about many other jobs and workers suffering now. Said Shafer:

The misery of a laid-off or bought-out journalist isn’t greater than that of a sacked bond trader, a RIF-ed clerk, or a fired autoworker. The only reason we’re so well-informed about journalists’ suffering is they have easy access to a megaphone. The underlying cause of their grief can be traced to the same force that has destroyed other professions and industries: digital technology….

Before we get too weepy about lost journalistic jobs and folded publications, let’s ask how often reporters lamented the decline of other industries, products, and services swamped by Rossetto’s digital typhoon.

Talton recalls cavalierly writing about the fate of steelworkers overtaken by technology and globalization:

Twenty years ago, no doubt with the hubris of youth, I wrote an analysis of the U.S. steel industry’s troubles. The next day, I got a call from one of some 600,000 steelworkers who were about to lose their jobs in that wrenching restructuring. The jobs were largely replaced with those that paid less, offering fewer benefits and no security.

“You people in the press would write differently if it was happening to you,” he said. “Someday you’ll get yours.”

If he’s still around, this reader and countless others sharing the same sentiments can take comfort. We’ve gotten ours….

Like the 1970s steel industry, much of the newspaper world is a victim of self-inflicted wounds. Monopolies and cartels tend to commit suicide, partly because they become complacent, partly because they grow an inward-looking groupthink. Like Big Steel, newspapers in the 1990s failed to aggressively address the rise of low-cost competitors and much of the industry failed to invest for the future.

 

Read Jeff Jarvis’ full article on www.seekingalpha.com