Top 5 Tips for a Successful Telephone Interview

A common misconception with the job application and recruitment process is that the procedure is (1) advert, (2) application and resume, (3) interview, (4) when can you start. While in the majority of cases this is in fact the process down to a tee, some employers may look to have a telephone conversation or even an interview with the applicant before inviting them in for an interview.

The reason for this is that sometimes there simply isn’t the time to interview every single person who applies, or even is put onto the interview pile, so the employer will narrow down the options by speaking to some, if not all, over the phone to begin with. The jobs market is a busy one, with far more people applying for one individual position than ever before.

For many, the sound of the phone ringing is not a good thing, particularly when you hear “I’m calling about your application” as this usually means a rejection. However, there are a number of ways that you can get through your phone interview stage and land yourself a meeting with the company and maybe even a full-time position:

1) Be happy and confident:

While talking on the phone might not come naturally to you, you can take some comfort by having an interview without the pressures of sitting in front of three or four members of the company all staring at you. If you relax and smile as much as possible while speaking, it will allow you to give positive answers and sound confident which is much more likely to impress your employer as it emphasizes your enthusiasm.

2) Be professional:

While you may feel comfortable at home or outside having your interview, avoid doing what you may normally do on the phone such as eating or sipping a drink or watching television. Turn the TV off, leave the food in the cupboard and focus on what is being said to you and your response, it’s a case of respect – something all senior employers look for.

3) Stand up and take note!

Believe it or not, standing up and walking around can help your voice to come across more effectively. A clear voice is key down the phone as it allows your potential employer to hear you easily and shows that you have good communication skills. If at all possible, attempt to avoid words like “erm” and “umm” as it can imply that nerves affect you.

4) Have your application and resume on hand:

In the majority of interviews, you will be questioned on your application. If you have this to hand, you can answer any questions you may receive on it and avoids the potentially disastrous situation of leaving the employer on the line while you run off to try and find it. First impressions count and this can imply a lack of organizational qualities.

5) Listen!

Whenever your interviewer is speaking, do not interrupt them. Wait for them to ask the whole of the question before jumping in with an answer to show that you have good listening skills, and it also allows you to think of the most suitable answer, something you cannot get away with so easily in a face-to-face interview. Saying words such as “ok” or “right” at intervals will let the interviewer know that you are listening to them.

Of course, following these ideas will only put you into a good position in terms of preparation and theoretical performance. The actual interview is all down to you and how you answer the questions, but if you follow these points as a guide, you should be well on your way to success.

One thing you could try, and this is something many people I know did before their telephone interviews, is to get people to ask them questions that were likely to come up over the phone, (i.e. from landlines to mobile phones), so that they could get into the habit of listening in to the full question and speaking down the phone to the interviewer.

The more you can develop your skills before the interview – whether it is by phone or face-to-face – the more prepared you will be when it comes to actually talking with the interviewer. It’s a bit like training for the Olympics and attending all of the warm up events to hone your skills and make sure you’re in the best possible shape ahead of the main event!

Arguably one of the most vital points that I can give you ahead of any interview, is to remain calm at all times. An interviewer might deliberately attempt to fluster you to see how you cope in a pressure situation which you may experience every day in the position, so if you can show them down the phone or in the sit down interview that you can handle the pressure, you’re already on the right tracks. Good luck!

via Top 5 Tips for a Successful Telephone Interview.

Top 5 Tips for a Successful Telephone Interview

Evaluate Your Emotional Agility

Norman Vincent Peale, the author of The Power of Positive Thinking, was known for pithy, uplifting quotes like “Keep your heart free from hate, your mind from worry,” “Change your thoughts and you change your world,” and “When you get up in the morning, you have two choices — either to be happy or to be unhappy. Just choose to be happy.”

Unfortunately, it’s not that easy to do a “quick-fix” on difficult thoughts and emotions; the human brain doesn’t work that way. Thousands of thoughts and feelings course through our minds each day. And trying to avoid, ignore or “manage” the negative ones only make them more powerful.  My colleague Christina Congleton and I wrote an article about this for HBR in November, encouraging readers to build something we call “emotional agility” – that is, the ability to attend to and use one’s inner experiences (both good and bad) in a more mindful, productive way.

The first step in the process is to understand your patterns:  Do you buy into your negative thoughts and emotions? (Wow. I really blew that presentation. I’m not doing any more public speaking.) Or do you avoid them? (Just forget about the presentation. Focus on something else.)  Or both?

The response to the article has been so strong that we’ve worked with HBR to develop an interactive assessment designed to help you with this first part of the process and then offer advice tailored to your specific profile.

Take the Assessment:  http://hbr.org/web/2013/11/assessment/evaluate-your-emotional-agility

via Evaluate Your Emotional Agility – Susan David – Harvard Business Review.

Evaluate Your Emotional Agility

How To Address A Layoff On Your Resume

Getting laid off or fired can be hard enough. Figuring out how to explain the gap on your résumé so that you can get a new job may be even more stressful.

Although the gap may raise some questions, fight the urge to explain why you were laid off or fired on your résumé.

“Don’t use the résumé to explain job gaps,” Paul McDonald, a senior executive director at staffing firm Robert Half, tells Business Insider. “That’s precious real estate that should be used to highlight your strongest accomplishments and show what you can do for your next employer.”

McDonald says jobseekers should be prepared to eventually explain terminations, but plan to do so in the cover letter and job interview where you will have a better chance of explaining yourself. As for your résumé, there are a few tips those with job gaps should consider to up their chances of getting the interview.

Eliminate the months.

If you don’t want to call attention to your employment gap, use only years instead of months when detailing dates of employment at specific companies, advises Amanda Augustine, career expert at TheLadders.

This will make it more difficult for hiring managers to detect gaps in your work history. If you decide to use this format, make sure to keep it consistent throughout your resume, meaning you also wouldn’t list months for the previous positions you held.

However, if the potential employer requires that you fill out an online application that asks for complete start and end dates, you should never lie about them, says McDonald.

Highlight your accomplishments.

If the gap does end up catching the hiring manager’s attention, you need to counteract their worries by focusing on your contributions and accomplishments at the company, says Augustine.

“Think about how you’ve increased efficiencies, cut costs, grown revenue, and so forth,” she advises. “Discuss the number of projects you’ve worked on, the size of the team you worked with, and if you were able to meet or beat deadlines and come in on or under budget.”

Use your resume to show how you streamlined processes, saved the company money, or grew revenue, says McDonald.

Include your experiences during the work gap.

“If you have a gap on your resume between full-time jobs, but have taken on consulting projects or temporary assignments, list them on your résumé,” advises McDonald. “Do the same for any coursework you’ve completed. Show potential employers that you’ve used your time to build your knowledge and keep your skills and network active.”

Augustine tells us that you should also include volunteer experiences, especially if you’re volunteering your professional expertise to a nonprofit organization.

“Write it as you would any other position in your résumé by describing your role and achievements, highlighting the skills that are most relevant to your current career goals,” she says. “This will help you fill the employment gap on your résumé and prove to prospective employers that you are keeping your skill sets sharp.”

Resist the urge to list your last position as “present.”

You should always be honest if you are no longer working at a company. If you have to explain yourself later, it may seem to hiring managers that you misled them.

Instead, Steven A. Gold and Matthew Carbon, recruiters at executive recruitment firm Green Key Resources, say you should include the reason for the gap in brackets next to the date of employment on your résumé. For example, you can put “Position was automated,” “Department eliminated,” or “Position downsized” in brackets if you’ve been laid off.

But you should only do this for the most recent position you’ve held, they say. You don’t want to have a bracket next to every job position on your resume.

If you’ve been terminated, remember that employers understand that the employment market and business environment is challenging for employees. Having a layoff or a job with a short tenure won’t completely eliminate you, but having a series of short tenures may raise red flags, says McDonald.

via How To Address A Layoff On Your Resume – Business Insider.

How To Address A Layoff On Your Resume

Top 10 IT Resume Tips of 2013 from CIO.com

It’s been another productive year for CIO’s Resume Makeover series. You learned how to target your resume to better highlight your skills, cut out unnecessary descriptions, and list your work history and technical prowess in fewer than three pages.

If you weren’t selected to participate this year, don’t worry. We’ve compiled a list of the top 10 best pieces of advice from our 2013 series here.

1. Take a Cue From Advertising

Take a cue from advertising — make your resume read like a fast, catchy, hard-hitting advertisement of your skills and experience.

Resume writer Donald Burns says that it’s important to make your resume function like an ad, because in a world full of noise, competition and distraction, you need to say a lot quickly.

Burns says a resume needs to read fast with key items highlighted. All items should be short — one to three sentences at the most. The goal is to make it easy to read or scan in five or 10 seconds. Once it gets beyond three to five lines, it’ll be much more difficult for readers to digest, according to Burns.

2. Don’t Forget LinkedIn

Use LinkedIn to your advantage. The social network is a crucial tool in any job search. Don’t neglect it, because recruiters, hiring manager and other job-seekers certainly aren’t.

Sure, you want to keep up with friends and family on Facebook, and have pins of holiday crafts for your kids on Pinterest. But don’t ignore LinkedIn when it comes to your career.

Keep your profile updated as you finish projects, add new skills or take new classes. Recommend your colleagues and peers for their talents and skills, and ask that they do the same for you. And check out security solutions provider Rapid7s senior director of talent acquisition Ed Nathanson’s take on how organizations are using LinkedIn to search for talent; you might pick up a few more tips on how to use keywords and Boolean searches to your advantage.

3. Highlight What Makes You Different

Highlight what makes you different, but resume writer Jennifer Hay says to also simplify your messaging and remove excessive buzzwords.

Hay, working on tech pro Brad Kirk’s extensive resume, says she identified repetitive messaging and categorized those to streamline Kirk’s resume.

“I had to break them down into categories to make it easier to organize the information and collect it under a simple message,” says Hay.

She says he noticed throughout the resume that Kirk had described some of the same skills more than once. “He had multiple bullet items that were sending the same message. You have such little space in a resume, so why repeat the message?” says Hay.

Finally, though Kirk refers to himself as a cloud industry thought-leader, no mention of these skills appeared on the first page of his resume, Hay says.

“He called himself a cloud industry thought-leader and a cloud strategist and there was no connection between that statement and his old resume,” says Hay. The information was in there, but it was almost impossible to pull it out, she says.

“There are plenty of cloud consultants who work on the front-end and deployment. There are much fewer who are involved in the full product lifecycle. This is what distinguishes him from all the other people,” says Hay. Bearing that in mind, she created a more focused and targeted resume opening that highlighted what separates Kirk from the pack.

4. Always Be Prepared

Always be prepared — keep your resume up-to-date and in constant circulation.

Though Doug Koch has a job he’s happy with and a solid relationship with the management team at his current company, he’s been around the proverbial block enough times to understand that he can’t become complacent. Though he’s not looking for a job, he says his experience working with CIO.com’s resume makeover team is still valuable.

Caitlin Sampson, co-founder of Regal Resumes, who worked with Koch on his resume, says, in general, you should update your resume every six months.

It may seem like extra work, but in today’s world you have to be prepared. If the day comes when you need it, you will be happy that you don’t have to dig through old notes or spend hours detailing the previous year’s projects, accomplishments and successes. Sampson suggests updating your resume right after your yearly performance review so everything’s fresh in your mind.

5. Make Your Messaging Clear

Keep your message clear and on target; you should know exactly the type and scope of the role you want and communicate that through your resume.

Ken Montgomery knew that he needed to change the focus of his resume from technical to management, but he says he struggled to do so. Enter Stephen Van Vreede of ITTechExec.com. Van Vreede immediately pinpointed the problem with Montgomery’s resume, a flaw that’s very common, he says.

“There doesn’t need to be a formal objective statement — that is kind of passé in today’s resume world — but there still needs to be something to communicate to the reader the type of role that you want to be considered for. At first, we had no idea whether [Montgomery] was looking for an IT manager position or something with voice and data network design,” says Van Vreede. It really wasn’t putting off a ‘senior management’ or ‘C-level’ vibe,” he says.

To resolve this, Van Vreede created a header at the top of the summary section. This piece makes it clear to potential employers the level of work that Montgomery is looking for. “It frames the whole document so they understand what it is he is going for and how they should be considering him,” says Van Vreede.

6. Don’t Try to ‘Teach Them All’

Career specialist Roy J. West was impressed with the breadth and depth of Bobby Saxon’s experience, but condensing a 25-year military and IT career into a reasonable format was tough, West says.

“We reduced it from ‘the course of his life’ to a summary. I personally have never been a big proponent of cutting a resume short unnecessarily,” West says, but in this case it was necessary.

“[Saxon"s] first response was dismay because I had taken so many of his extraordinary credentials off the page,” West says. “I had reduced the details that, in his mind, demonstrated the sheer complexity of what he had to navigate in order to create the amazing results he had delivered,” but sometimes that’s crucial, West says.

West felt that many in the civilian world would respect Saxon’s military service but wouldn’t necessarily understand the magnitude of his accomplishments. “Trying to provide a resume in such detail that you teach them all, that is not the solution. Your best chance, your only chance, is in the job interview not on your resume,” says West.

7. Ace the 20 Second Test

Can your resume pass the “20 second test”? Most recruiters scanning your resume give it approximately 20 seconds. If you don’t grab them within that time frame, you’re history.

Pamela Rucker, president of The Rucker Group, a C-Suite advisory organization, and co-chair of the CIO Council’s Executive Women in IT, was tasked with helping Michele Franchi determine why her resume wasn’t getting the attention it deserved.

First impressions are usually all you get and Rucker could tell there was room for improvement with Franchi’s resume. “For me, it didn’t pass the 20-second test. Michele has 20 years of experience, and probably only 20 seconds to get past a recruiter’s review. Moreover, even if the recruiter was sitting right beside me, I’d have a stack of resumes to review in our meeting. I probably wouldn’t give her resume more than two minutes and that’s if I was interested in it,” says Rucker.

8. Don’t Be Wordy

Make sure you’re using clear, succinct language and highlighting the skills relevant to the positions to which you’re applying.

Resume writer and career coach Laura Smith-Proulx found Michael Smith’s wordy resume too dense. She first made a few changes, adding what she likes to refer to as the “technology career milestones,” or summary section. This, Smith-Proulx says, really gives the hiring manager a quick snapshot of what the candidate is all about.

“If there is something critical in your background it needs to land on your first page and preferably in the top half or it just won’t be obvious,” says Smith-Proulx.

Smith-Proulx next took Smith’s career highlights and worded them in a more easy-to-digest way and moved them to the first page of his resume. This ensured hiring managers could quickly get a feeling for the major impact Smith had with his previous employer.

The most important skills to highlight are the ones employers are looking for, so Smith-Proulx brought to the forefront what was notable about each previous position Smith held.

“This was a way to pull out some strong career highlights” that had been buried in the word-heavy original resume, says Smith-Proulx.

9. Keep It Short

This is no time for five- or six-page expositions. You want to keep hiring managers hungry for more information, which they can get in the interview.

Sampson and her team at Regal Resumes could see immediately that Rob Sorenson had a depth and breadth of both corporate and client consulting experience. However, the major sticking point was the length of Sorenson’s resume, Sampson says. Though he had a lot of value-added content, the length was distracting, and could be problematic for anyone reviewing it, she says.

“Because hiring managers and recruiters are inundated with resumes, they tend to lose focus after one to two pages for entry-level candidates or management applicants and three pages for senior or executive-level applicants,” she says. Sampson’s first task was to edit Sorenson’s resume down to a manageable length.

A significant portion of Sorenson’s resume outlined his extensive consulting experience, but it wasn’t necessary to outline every client engagement, Sampson says. By eliminating much of the unnecessary details of each consulting assignment, Sampson and Sorenson were able to clarify and accentuate Sorenson’s successes and focus his resume on the next step in his career, she says.

“We redirected the focus of his resume from technical consulting to that of an IT manager or director role,” Sampson says. “He has a wealth of relevant managerial experience, but it was difficult for potential employers to find, because it was buried beneath the technical consulting language.”

10. Consider Getting Professional Help

Working with a resume specialist or career coach can give you a huge advantage. If you’re not getting the response you want, or are being offered positions that aren’t suitable, get professional career help.

A professional resume writer can often see problems or issues that you can’t, and can be an objective voice when you’re trying to land that dream job

via Top 10 IT Resume Tips of 2013 – CIO.com.

Top 10 IT Resume Tips of 2013 from CIO.com

How to Make Recruiters Love You and Your Resume [INFOGRAPHIC]

You’re applying for a job – what do you want to happen? You want recruiters to love you AND your resume. Our friends at AvidCareerist have created this handy infographic to give you 5 ways to make that happen.

Takeaways:

1.  Include experience which is relevant to the position.

2.  Tell the truth.

3.  Show what you can do, don’t tell.

4.  Use the right file format – default to .doc if not specified.

5.  Address the cover letter and resume to the correct person.

via How to Make Recruiters Love You and Your Resume [INFOGRAPHIC].

How to Make Recruiters Love You and Your Resume [INFOGRAPHIC]

Too Pretty for the Job? by Shala Marks

I read an interesting article about a woman, Nan Boland, who decided to open her own recruiting firm. Another woman-owned business in the recruitment field? Nice.

But what really interested me was what Boland said about the makeup of her staff:

You know, it’s great. And interestingly, right now we have all females in our office, although that is not by design. Women in general are very strong individuals, but anyone can be successful in owning his or her own business, it’s just a matter of how hard you work and the good people you surround yourself with. I have a fantastic team. I’m not doing this alone, but I have a wonderful team and a business manager that has been with me since day one. I cannot take all the credit for my company’s success, because it’s been a great team effort. I’ve been blessed to have great relationships with our clients and candidates, too.

A woman-owned, 100 percent women-operated recruitment firm? Very nice…and very unique.

This unique setup particularly interested me because I remember reading a Forbes.com article about how women HR professionals often discriminate against attractive female job seekers.

The article explained how two Isreali researchers—Bradley Ruffle at Ben-Gurion University and Ze’ev Shtudiner at Ariel University Centre—sent out fake applications to 2,500 job openings. The researchers sent two applications to each job; one application included a photo and the other did not. The two believed that resumes including photos of attractive candidates would receive the greatest response.

This was partially true. Although attractive males received more callbacks for interviews than unattractive males, attractive women were less likely to get a callback for an interview if they attached a photo. Why the discrepancy?

The researchers concluded:

Human resources departments tend to be staffed mostly by women. Indeed, in the Israeli study, 93% of those tasked with selecting whom to invite for an interview were female. The researchers’ unavoidable—and unpalatable—conclusion is that old-fashioned jealousy led the women to discriminate against pretty candidates.

Ladies, is this true?

Now, when first reading about the experiment, one might assume attractive women were ruled out because of the unfair “dumb blonde” or “dumb model” generalizations. Yet, each photo in the study was also rated on how intelligent people thought the person looked and the results showed that there was no correlation between one’s beauty and one’s intelligence level(s).

Are women HR professionals really discriminating against female job seekers? If so, this is really disconcerting. Why you ask? Well, look at the stats about women in the workforce (and, ladies let me tell you, they’re not pretty):

Only 4.2 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are women

Women make up 4.5 percent of Fortune 1000 CEO positions

In 2012—just like in 2002—among full-time, year-round workers, women were paid 77 percent of what men were paid.

Women only held 16.6 percent of Fortune 500 board seats

In 2011, at 31.9 percent, women didn’t even account for half of all lawyers

From elementary and middle school teachers to computer programmers, women are paid less than men in female-dominated, gender-balanced, and male-dominated occupations (AAUW)

What am I saying? Ladies, it’s clear that we need one another. Although more and more women (and mothers) are entering the workforce, we still face many inequalities compared to our male counterparts. Instead of being jealous and discriminating against each other, we need to unite and continue to advocate for change and equality.

It may sound cliché, but the phrase, “United we stand, divided we fall,” is very true. Being jealous and unfair toward attractive women only harms women in the workforce overall. Instead of preventing women from entering a company, why not be fair in your selection process? View the female job seekers not as “threats,” but positively as more potential women who can add to those lists of CEOs and board members and ultimately help turn our male-dominated, senior-level workforce into an equal and level playing field.

via Too Pretty for the Job?.

Too Pretty for the Job? by Shala Marks

How To Convert Your LinkedIn Profile into a Fine Looking Resume

One of LinkedIn’s true hidden gems is the free resume building service launched last year, which I have just been testing out. At first I thought it would be very basic and not all that useful. I was wrong.

The resume builder was developed by LinkedIn labs, meaning it’s an experimental tool but still developed in-house by the LinkedIn team. We can safely say that there is a need for a resume builder function on LinkedIn and I assume this is the Beta testing of it before they integrate it fully on LinkedIn proper.

How does the resume creator work?

Very simple. First off make sure you are logged in to LinkedIn. Then click on to the LinkedIn resume tool and sign in with your LinkedIn passport. The next thing you know you’ll have an auto-generated resume which mirrors all the information on your LinkedIn profile. This obviously means that the better that’s been filled in, the better the resume.

How do you edit your resume?

There are eleven different templates that you can play around with to suit your industry, seniority and purpose of the resume. Just like with your LinkedIn profile, you can shuffle the sections of your resume around and even hide the ones you think are irrelevant to your new resume.

The one thing you cannot do in the resume builder tool is to change specific details like job titles, dates and so on – this is done on your regular LinkedIn profile and updated automagically to your resume.

Benefits of using the resume builder

As we all know it’s a bit tricky to keep your LinkedIn profile and resume completely synched. On top of that, it’s a slog to have to update stuff in two places. You can easily change the template, style and decide exactly what goes up on the resume as opposed to the LinkedIn profile.

You can choose to share the resume straight from the application or you can set it to private. Finally, you can download your new resume as a PDF and email or print.

Is this the kiss of death for resume writers?

I don’t think so, whilst the LinkedIn resume creator does churn out pretty good looking resumes it doesn’t customize them at all. A resume writer’s main role in my opinion is to write excellent copy and lay things out in a compelling fashion for your target audience. LinkedIn’s new tool does provide the average job seeker with a nice template resume but this has never been the be all and end all when there is any competition for a particular vacancy.

Final thought

LinkedIn know that their platform is the place to be for all things career and professional networking. By giving the world this free resume feature, they ensure that everyone that uses the resume builder will keep their LinkedIn profile up-to-date and perfectly crafted for success.

via How To Convert Your LinkedIn Profile into a Fine Looking Resume.

How To Convert Your LinkedIn Profile into a Fine Looking Resume