Saturday, May 30, 2020

What Should You Eat Before Your Job Interview

What Should You Eat Before Your Job Interview Eating is important for anyone especially to get you through a day. However, proper nutrition is essential when preparing for a crucial time in life such as a meeting or interview. A poor diet can make you tired or sloppy, whereas a healthy diet will make you more focused, more aware and help to get rid of those interview nerves. In this infographic by StandOut CV, youll find foods you should eat, and steer clear of. The foods you should try to intake when getting ready are: Fatty acids (Omega 3): These build brain cell membranes and promote new brain cell formulation so theyll make you smarter! It will also make you great for answering questions, which is extremely necessary in an interview. You can find fatty acids in salmon, eggs and kale (amongst other places). B vitamins: These vitamins will not only prevent insomnia, anxiety and low self-esteem, theyll also increase energy and motivation levels. Make sure to eat peas, broccoli, spinach or meat. Whole grains: These slowly release glucose into the bloodstream, and can increase your mental alertness, concentration and focus. If you have brown cereals, brown pasta or granary bread for your lunch, youll have lots of them! Coffee: but only in moderation! Its obviously a stimulant that will make you less tired, and more alert, but dont drink too much, or you may crash or become twitchy. During the day, when youre preparing for the interview, there are a few foods to avoid including (alongside too much coffee): Carbohydrates: Eating too many carbs, like potatoes, bread and pasta can reduce alertness and may even make you fall asleep which you dont want in an interview! Smelly foods: Garlic and onions should be banned from your diet for 24 hours before any interview or meeting theyll cause bad breath and can be excreted from sweat glands too. Water: Of course, you need to stay hydrated, but dont be drinking too much water before an interview youll be running to the toilet every 5 minutes! However, do ask for a glass of water to keep your mouth hydrated during the time youre talking. Do you have any tips for meals or food to eat before an interview? Leave them in the comments below!

Tuesday, May 26, 2020

Do you need a career coach or a shrink

Do you need a career coach or a shrink I had a career coach. I got the coach the day after a meeting where I was the only woman and the only person under thirty. My boss said, You need more polish. You need a career coach. I thought, Great, my boss is going to pay to help me to fit in with the 50-year-old men at the top of my corporate ladder. The coach asked me a slew of seemingly innocuous questions about myself, and then she trailed me at the office for a few days. Her conclusion: I needed to act more professionally. I was surprised I had read every book I could find on managing ones image at work. I wore earrings because all the women in Fortune magazines 50-most-powerful-women list wear earrings. I kept my hands folded on the table in the same way that experts on news television do. I was surprised that I had missed something. The coach gave me a list of things to change. When I walked, for example, I walked high, with a bounce, and didnt give off a sense of being grounded. She told me to look at the CEO: He has a deliberate, grounded walk no bounce. It instills confidence. She told me I smiled too much. Its a common problem for women, she told me. Women want to establish rapport by smiling, but men interpret a lot of smiles as either nervous or giddy. Lest she say that I also needed to work on accepting criticism, I thanked her for her help. After weeks of practice and her trailing me the whole way I made the changes. The coach collected her thousands of dollars in fees and left with a feeling of accomplishment. But she left me feeling like a fake. I wanted to go back to regular me, but my boss kept telling me how much more professional I was, and I didnt want to disappoint the guy who was responsible for my next raise. I started losing sleep, falling victim to my overactive imagination where my direct reports go out to lunch and talk about how fake I am, then they stop listening to me, and my office becomes Mutiny on the Bounty with an ending where I walk the plank to unemployment. So I did what most people do when they cant sleep for months: I went to a psychologist. And it took the psychologist about twenty minutes to help me realize that I was uncomfortable with the level of authority I held. I had moved up the ladder very fast. I was managing a team of people much older than I was. My smiles and my bounce belied my discomfort. I worked with the psychologist to feel more comfortable with my own authority, and after a few months, the solid gait and serious face came naturally to me. I didnt have to project a fake image because the image I was supposed to project authority felt right to me. My psychologist helped a lot, but a psychologist is likely to miss the quirks of corporate life (after all, she has built a career by avoiding the corporate ladder). And the career coach is likely to miss the psychology driving you to do what you do. So if you find that your career coach makes recommendations that are hard to handle, hire a psychologist. After all, the more people who are helping you to get what you want in your career, the more likely you are to get it. And your money spent will come back to you later, as you gain more self-knowlege in and out of the workplace.

Saturday, May 23, 2020

34 Jokes About Careers Job Search

34 Jokes About Careers Job Search Heres a little list of workplace jokes that made us laugh. Well, at least smile. If you can think of more, please let us know in the comments and we can add to the list! I just lost my job as a psychic. I did not see that coming. Hard work pays off in the future, laziness pays off now. Im looking for a job where I am politely ignored and left to my own devices. With unlimited Internet access, doughnuts, and coffee. If a jobs worth doing, its too hard. I quit my job working for Nike.  Just couldnt do it anymore. I love being a maze designer. I get completely lost in my work. I worked very hard to get to where I am in life.  An unemployed university graduate. Inspecting mirrors is a job I could really see myself doing. Sure Im willing to work longer hours at work. As long as theyre lunch hours. I think my job interview to be a bug sorter went well. I boxed all the right ticks. Interviewer: Whats your biggest weakness? Me: I dont know when to quit. Interviewer: Youre hired.  Me: I quit. Then I worked in the woods as a lumberjack, but I just couldn’t hack it, so they gave me the ax. After that, I tried to be a tailor, but I just wasn’t suited for it. Mainly because it was a so-so job. Next, I tried working in a muffler factory but that was exhausting. I wanted to be a barber, but I just couldn’t cut it. Then I tried to be a chefâ€"figured it would add a little spice to my life but I just didn’t have the thyme. Finally, I attempted to be a deli worker, but any way I sliced it, I couldn’t cut the mustard. My best job was being a musician, but eventually I found I wasn’t noteworthy. I studied a long time to become a doctor, but I didn’t have any patients. I became a professional fisherman but discovered that I couldn’t live on my net income. Thought about becoming a witch, so I tried that for a spell. Im aspirin to be a chemist. I wanted to be a tree doctor but I faint at the sight of sap. I managed to get a good job working for a pool maintenance company, but the work was just too draining. I got a job at a zoo feeding giraffes but I was fired because I wasn’t up to it. Next, I found being an electrician interesting, but the work was shocking. After many years of trying to find steady work, I finally got a job as a historian until I realized there was no future in it. I applied for a job in Australia but seems I dont have the right koalifications. Being friends with co-workers is like having pet tigers. fun in theory but you still wonder when they will turn on you. I had a job at MinuteMaid orange juice. I got fired because I couldn’t concentrate. I used to be a postman until I got the sack. I worked at the bank as a teller for a while…until I starting losing interest. I wanted to be a baker, really  kneaded the dough. I focused on being a photographer, but nothing ever developed. RELATED: Top Interview Blunders on Twitter.

Tuesday, May 19, 2020

How to Get Your Resume Read by Using Keyword Research

How to Get Your Resume Read by Using Keyword Research Conducting adequate keyword research during your job hunt is key to ensuring your resume is read by employers. According to ERE, each job opening receives an average of 250 resumes with recruiters spending on average only 6 seconds reviewing each  application. The majority of applications are screened by a digital  Applicant Tracking System (ATS) that scan resumes for keywords to indicate a match for  a particular job. At this stage, if you haven’t used the appropriate keywords, the chances of your resume making it in front of a hiring manager dramatically decrease. Even if an organisation doesnt use automated screening software, a recruiter or a hiring manager will use a database or professional networking sites to look for potential hires. It is only by understanding their search behaviour and the language they use to look for candidates can you make your resume more visible and increase your chances of getting found on the system. Identifying the right keywords employers are looking for is the most crucial step in creating your resume. You can find keywords by looking not just at the job posting you are applying for but also at similar jobs in your area of expertise. Keyword research methods: As an example, take a marketer who is deciding whether to optimise his resume for online marketing or digital marketing. Indeed indexes a huge number of jobs online, aggregating job postings from employers and job boards alike. This means  we can use their  Job Trends tool to compare the popularity of both terms across job advertisements in the US. We can see from the results that the percentage of job postings that contain online marketing is currently on par with those that have digital marketing. However there has been a  steady  increase in the usage of digital marketing over the last few years. To get a better gauge of what the job market looks like, run a search on Indeed using the ‘With the exact phrase’ field under advanced search. Exact text matches on Indeed.com (USA) 25th April 2014: Keyword Jobs returned online marketing 6’099 digital marketing 9’072 From this we can see that there is a larger number of employers advertising for digital marketing roles compared to online marketing. Taking the growing popularity of the keyword over the last few years and the number of jobs advertised, it would be reasonable to conclude that employers will use the keyword digital marketing as they search for potential employees. If you’re a developer with HTML5 skills, what job title are employers using to find people like you? It’s not enough to rely on your skills as your primary keywords. In most cases, recruiters will use a combination of skills and job titles to narrow down their candidate pool while searching for people on databases. Since recruiters spend such a short amount of time looking at resumes, you need to make sure that you catch their attention by using job titles with the closest match to their requirements. We can use Indeed’s resume search to find out what professionals in your space are calling themselves. Using the search term HTML5 we can see that the most popular job titles among your peers are web developer, software engineer, software developer, senior software engineer and web designer. Going back to the advanced job search, enter HTML5 in the ‘With all of these words’ field and one of the job titles above in the ‘With the exact phrase’ field. Matches on Indeed.com (USA) 25th April 2014 Keyword Jobs returned HTML5 with web developer 2’131 HTML5 with software engineer 1’977 HTML5 with software developer 817 HTML5 with senior software engineer 434 HTML5 with web designer 336 It’s clear from the results that as an HTML5 developer, you should try and use web developer  at least once or twice  within your resume or online profiles to maximise your visibility to recruiters, hiring managers and search engines. Using software engineer and software developer would make sense too. A word of caution though, finding the right keywords is only half the battle. Make sure that you are using the most appropriate keywords to describe and give context to your skills. At the end of the day, stuffing your resume with keywords might get you past the ATS but it will still end up in the NO-pile if the contents do not make sense to a hiring manager.

Saturday, May 16, 2020

Writing an Effective Email For Resume

Writing an Effective Email For ResumeWhen it comes to writing an effective email for resume, you may be wondering if your chances are any better than they were a year ago. Of course, the odds are slightly more than even, but how do you know if you are having any luck? After all, you may be having a great career in a specific field right now, but that doesn't mean you will keep it in that same job forever.There are many reasons why you could be on the cusp of landing a great career in the future. You could have no choice but to move. You could be taking a new career path. Or perhaps you just want to use your skills to create a career change.If you are planning to change your career or start a new one, then you need to set a goal for yourself and your own career. You need to know what kind of job you want to do and exactly what it is that you are hoping to get out of the job. Is your goal to be your own boss or to have more control over a company? The answers to these questions will he lp you set goals and track progress.When you are writing your resume, you need to do the same thing. Write a resume that is optimized to attract the best jobs available. Put yourself in the best possible light. If you aren't satisfied with your current position, then make some changes and let people know that you are worth something. The key is to write a resume that says 'I am worth your time and attention.'Perhaps you will be given more responsibility than you think you are deserving of. Make sure that you have detailed all of your responsibilities so that you are clear about who you are and what you do. This is a great way to show that you can be trusted.Having a solid career is very important, especially if you are married or have children. You don't want to be the reason someone leaves their home to find a better paying job. If you aren't happy where you are, then you may want to make a career change in order to find the right job for you.It takes more than just an honest resum e to get a job. You need to have a well written one. This means using good grammar and spelling and making sure to include all of the important information. This information should be things like: education, experience, skills, and interests.The goal is to make your resume stand out from the rest of the competition. With this in mind, you need to know what to include in your resume and what not to include. If you follow these tips, you can ensure that your resume is noticed and that the job offers you get will be the best of the best.

Wednesday, May 13, 2020

New feature Subscribe by email - The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

New feature Subscribe by email - The Chief Happiness Officer Blog Ive just added a subscribe by email feature to the blog, meaning you can get an email every time I write a new blogpost. The advantage is that you can read the post right in the email, and you can be among the first to read it. The disadvantage is that I usually post twice a day, so you will be getting quite a few emails from me just though Id warn ya :o) Anyway: If you want to subscribe by email, click this link and fill out the form. And of course, theres always the rss feed if youre into that kind of thing. Thanks for visiting my blog. If you're new here, you should check out this list of my 10 most popular articles. And if you want more great tips and ideas you should check out our newsletter about happiness at work. It's great and it's free :-)Share this:LinkedInFacebookTwitterRedditPinterest Related

Friday, May 8, 2020

Tracking Your Job Search Networking - Hire Imaging

Tracking Your Job Search Networking - Hire Imaging Once you become comfortable with networking, you will be amazed at the number of people you are speaking with on a regular basis. Its crucial to keep an organized list of all your job search networking. Whether youre more comfortable with electronic tracking or a simple small spiral notebook, the important thing is to faithfully record and follow-up. Ive borrowed from the 5 big Ws of Journalism and reporting (and added an extra H) to simplify. WHO Job Search Networking You spoke to Else they referred you to WHAT Tracking You talked about They need from you résumé, business card, references, work samples, tips, etc. Their companys business hiring needs are; or those of someone they know WHERE Tracking You will meet them You should send any requested information (and thank-you notes) WHY- Tracking You should keep in contact with them They are a valuable contact WHEN- Job Search Networking You will meet with them You should call (or email, contact via Internet etc.) them again for follow-up HOW- Job Search Networking You can make sure they remember you You can use the information they provided you with It takes effort to cultivate your job search network. People really are usually willing to help. Most importantly though, it starts with you being willing to help yourself. Due diligence in tracking may be the difference in landing that dream job.