6 Creative Ways to Stand Out in the Job Search! : Medical Sales Recruiter – Tips & Quips

SWOT Analysis: One creative way to stand out in your job search!

Can’t get an interview?

Can’t get past the first interview?

Are you demonstrating the levels of commitment, drive, tenacity, skills and organization employers want?

Here are 6 tried and true ways to separate you from other candidates and be the candidate everyone wants to hire:

1.  Preparation = SWOT Analysis:

SWOT is a strategic planning tool.  It stands for Strengths (attributes helpful to achieving the objective), Weaknesses (attributes harmful to achieving the objective), Opportunities (external conditions that will be helpful to achieving the objective), and Threats (external obstacles or conditions that will harm the process).  Look at the picture–it helps.  Doing a SWOT analysis on the company demonstrates your drive, commitment, and skills, along with helping you create a better 30/60/90-day plan. Click here for advice on how to do one and avoid mistakes.

2.  30/60/90-Day Plan :

A 30-60-90-day plan is a short, 1-3 page outline for what you will do when you start the job.  Essentially, you spell out for your future employer, in as little or as much detail as necessary, how you will spend your time–in training, learning company systems, introducing yourself to customers, and your initial plan to build sales.  It demonstrates exactly how you’ll be an asset.  A 30/60/90-day plan is an almost-guaranteed way to impress any hiring manager or hiring team.

Check out this audio that will tell you exactly how to present your 30/60/90-day plan to the hiring manager.

If you absolutely can’t get an interview, you could try e-mailing your 30/60/90-day plan to the sales manager.  It’s an attention-getter, and it could be the key to get you in the door.

3.  Video or Audio Communication -:

Send the interviewer an audio or video clip of yourself.  Keep it short and sweet, and make sure you’ve checked lighting, background, and sound quality.  One idea:  Structure it like an elevator pitch–what can you do for the company and why can you do it?

4.  Brag Book :

A brag book is a folder/ binder that you can use during your interview process to clarify your skill sets.  It can include letters of recommendation, “attaboy” notes (or any notes commenting on what a good job you’ve done), staff ranking, annual reviews (if you include some, include them all), rewards letters, your resume, types of equipment you’ve used or marketed, certifications or other educational courses, any financial or PowerPoint presentations, copies of articles you’ve written, brochures you’ve helped develop, and a college transcript (though ONLY if you’re just getting out).  Here’s a link to a video that explains more.

5.  References :

It’s critical that you have winning references.  Some people believe that references never get called, but they do.  You should know how to choose a good reference, and know with stake-your-job-on-it certainty what they will say about you.  You can (and should) even coach them beforehand, to help them tailor their answers to the job.

6.  Follow-up/Thank You Notes :

Don’t underestimate how important thank you letters are in the job interview process.  Everybody “knows” they’re critical, but unbelievably, not everyone writes them.  Thank you letters accomplish several things:

• They get your name in front of the hiring manager one more time.
• They are your last chance to package yourself as the best, most qualified person for the job.
• They are polite, and manners count.
• They can be an example of your ability to take in information (the interview) and process and provide feedback or new ideas about whatever the problem was. For example:  “I thought about your concerns about how to handle xyz delivery issues, when I was a product manager at ABC corporation, we used………”
  (See what I mean?)

Handwritten thank-yous are nice, but e-mail thank yous are fast.  Sometimes, hiring decisions are made quickly, so a timely note can be critical.

I know these things will help you become an outstanding candidate!

If you need more personalized help, please see my custom consulting page.  If you’re really having trouble, a fresh pair of expert eyes can point out issues or problems that are keeping you from getting the job you want.

Written by Peggy McKee - the medical sales recruiter
Get top medical sales candidates at PHC Consulting

via phcconsulting.com

Posted via email from AndyWergedal

Career Help: How To Figure Out Which Job You'll Excel At | JobMob

Which of the 12 Executive Skills do you have?

Everyone is born with a set of cognitive functions called “Executive Skills”, because they help people execute tasks.

There are 12 of these skills and certain ones are found more frequently than others in certain jobs or functions.

Each person typically has 2 or 3 of these brain functions that they are strong in and 2 or 3 that are their inherent weaknesses.

These skills are:

1) Response Inhibition

The ability to think before you act.

2) Working Memory

The ability to hold information in memory while performing complex tasks.

3) Emotional Control

Ability to manage emotions to achieve a goal or complete tasks.

4) Sustained Attention

Capacity to maintain attention to a task in spite of distractibility.

5) Task Initiation

Ability to start projects with undue procrastination.

6) Planning/Prioritization

Capacity to develop a roadmap to arrive at a destination or goal.

7) Organization

Ability to arrange or place according to a system.

8) Time Management

Capacity to estimate how much time one has and allocate it well.

9) Goal-Directed Persistence

Capacity to have a goal and follow through to completion.

10) Flexibility

Ability to revise plans in face of setbacks.

11) Metacognition

Capacity to stand back and take a bird’s-eye view of yourself to make changes in how you solve problems.

12) Stress Tolerance

Ability to thrive in stressful situations.

It is likely that you can read the descriptions and determine most of your own strengths and weaknesses. Always on time? Strong in Time Management. Speak too soon? Low in Response Inhibition. And so on.

If a certain job matches a person’s strengths, it is what we call a goodness of fit situation. And when this happens, the job is much more natural for the person since the tasks align with how the person’s brain is hardwired from birth.

When certain jobs require what are a person’s inherent weaknesses, those are called effortful tasks since they are unnatural for that person.

The key for career success

Sooner or later in a career, a person will generally come across both situations, those that fit their Executive Skills and those that don’t.

The key for career success is knowing which situation is which and acting accordingly.

For example, when certain jobs require a person’s weaknesses, there are several options:

• Do those tasks first while fresh, since they will require more energy.
• Find someone who is strong in that Executive Skills, and delegate the tasks to that person, since it will be more natural for them.
• Partner with someone with opposite strengths and weakness, and have each party focus on tasks that align with their strengths.

The ultimate solution is to maneuver into positions that play to strengths. This works for interacting with and managing others as well.

Along a career, a person will meet people with some of the same strengths as well as some with the same weaknesses as them. Career success can depend on who gets which tasks and who faces the best ‘goodness of fit’ situations.

Those with a match of Executive Skills strengths and job can end up as the perfect fit.

About the author

Chuck Martin is a New York Times business best-selling author, noted researcher, speaker and business strategist. He is the Director of the Center for Media Research, MediaPost Communications in New York and CEO of NFI Research, where he surveys senior executives and managers around the world on a regular basis. He has written eight business books including Work Your Strengths. He can be reached at chuck@nfiresearch.com, his Web site is www.nfiresearch.com and you can follow him on Twitter at @chuckmartin1.

If you found this article useful, you’ll also enjoy Hard Time Choosing A Career? Try Them All, Like Sean Aiken.

Subscribe to JobMob via RSS or email and follow me on Twitter for more expert career help.

--Jacob Share

via jobmob.co.il

Posted via email from AndyWergedal

Should You Fill in the Cracks as a Freelancer? Handling Down Time

As a freelancer, every once in a while I have a couple of hours where I would have liked to have scheduled work for a client but I wind up with nothing. Over the years, I’ve taken a couple of different approaches to this sort of crack in my time: I’ve been known to take those hours off, to work on my own projects and to even pick up work on bid sites. There no single way that freelancers should handle spaces in our schedules, but there are a few factors that can be key to deciding what approach will be most beneficial in the long run.

Your Goals As a Freelancer

Many freelancers keep a number in mind — an amount that we must wind up with in our pockets at the end of the week or the end of the month. That number may mean the difference between paying all the bills. If not having paying work for every hour you’ve set aside for clients means that you won’t meet the number that you have in mind, it can quickly feel like your options are limited. Such a situation can make something like writing for a content mill or offering a low bid on a bidding site feel like the best choice. It may mean that you could wind up working even more hours than you’ve initially scheduled, at a lower rate than you usually work at, but it means that all the bills get paid.

We do what we have to do to make sure that the bills get paid. If, though, there’s some flexibility in your schedule, taking on more work — especially low-paying work — may not be the most effective use of your time. A little extra marketing done this month can help keep a similar problem from occurring next month. Similarly, investing some time in your own projects can help you meet your long-term goals a little sooner than just trying to fill in the hours with work from clients. It’s important to take a look at your options and decide what will really help you accomplish what you need to during the free hours in your schedule.

The Need for Down Time

The hardest thing for many freelancers to shoehorn into our schedules is down time — time away from our work. But when you are essentially being paid to be creative on demand, taking some time for yourself is important. If a few hours come up empty, using them to recharge can mean that you don’t have to face writer’s block, burn out or other issues that can slow down your work.

The forms that useful down time take differ from freelancer to freelancer. Going to a museum and seeing how other people can be creative can help one freelancer, while another can benefit from just getting out of the office and thinking about anything but work. If you can take advantage of it, a hole in your schedule can be an opportunity to find a little extra down time.

The Flexibility of Freelancers

One of the benefits of having a freelance career is that we have flexible schedules. That includes not only time when we want to do something other than work, as well as hours when we’re willing to work but just don’t have anything on the schedule. It’s the trade-off of that flexibility and it’s important to find ways to turn it to our advantage. That can mean doing something to land more clients in the future, working on a side project that will bring us passive income in the future or just taking the opportunity to make sure that we don’t burn out.

via freelanceswitch.com

Posted via email from AndyWergedal

Is Spokeo Defining Your Online Personal Brand?

Monitoring your online reputation is important to your job search. Spokeo is yet another place to watch your actual online “personal brand”. Spokeo.com is a site that pulls information from all over the web about you and everyone else.

The information is all already public, but some of it is out of date. The website compiles data from real-estate listings, tax records, insurance data banks, credit data, neighborhood data, Facebook, LinkedIn, the White Pages, and much more. All this is summarized very neatly into a profile about you. Your profile will list your family members, and which ones live with you. How much your house costs and statistics about your neighborhood is included. Personal information about age, education, phone numbers, and the like is displayed. Credit information is behind a tab that requires a paid membership.

Why should job candidates be wary? Things you left off your resume are all assembled neatly in one place for the interviewer to peruse. The interviewer can find this information in multiple locations on the web, but that’s time consuming. Having information about the kind of neighborhood you live in easily accessible, may effect salary negotiations, or may turn off a company all together. You just don’t know. It might work in your favor. The Spokeo service let’s the interviewer get answers to all those illegal questions without you knowing it.

I found no way to correct any of the information; but there is a way to delete your listing. At the bottom of the page you can select privacy settings. It’s a very simple process.

While you are at it, check out your children’s listings and your senior citizen loved ones. Seems this could be a nice easy place for predators to identify their targets. The world of privacy is changing and the battle to be private will be lost. I just finished reading the third book in a trilogy about the vast machine. The Traveler by John Twelve Hawks discusses how the world can become a prison without freedom. Then again, society has had multiple revolutions and adapted quite well. There have been multiple developments that changed the world and society built in safeguards. The Bomb, the pill, video games, and democracy, just to name a few.

Knowing what is being said about you on the internet is an important part of your job search. Be certain to have a Google Alert set to track your online reputation. Most of all, do positive things online to squash out any mis-information.

via employmentdigest.net

Posted via email from AndyWergedal

The Beauty of Keeping Information Shareable

via chrisbrogan.com

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A One-Size Resume Does Not Fit All | Career Rocketeer - Career Search and Personal Branding Blog

I recently went car shopping this week and man, what an experience that can be. I looked at so many different cars, they all started to blur together. I set out with specific criteria in my head of the features and options I wanted included with my next vehicle—some of which came from experience with my current vehicle—which happens to produce some really loud road noise. It’s one of my pet peeves about the SUV I drive, so one of my main goals for my next vehicle (among others) is to find one that is quieter. I have a list of other things that I need in the car—and a few things that I just want—things that would be nice to have. After what has felt like two weeks or more of car shopping, test driving, and more, I ended up feeling really great about one particular vehicle—it really stood out. The reason why I loved it so much and remembered it from out of all the others (others that seemingly all blurred together and were quite unremarkable to remember) was because it met all my needs and wants. It stood out from all the other SUVs because it met every one of the criteria on my list. How different is our job search, really?

How many of us use the exact same resume to apply for 10, 20, or even 100 different positions? Each position is different, right? Sure, some of the responsibilities may be the same, but every company’s needs are different. If you want to make a better impression with the hiring manager you have to show him you can meet the employer’s needs—and maybe even a few of their wants. Needs tend to fall under the “required experience/skills” section of the job ad. Wants fall under the “preferred qualifications” part. If you can show the hiring manager in your resume and cover letter that you not only meet their needs but also their wants—you have just become a very memorable prospect in a sea of others who just blur together.

So the next time you’re submitting the same resume and cover letter that you haven’t altered since 50 applications ago, stop for a second; take a moment to customize the resume and cover letter to the job ad or position opening. I know it may take an extra 10-20 minutes now, but if it means standing out in a blurred sea of other applicants it will be well worth your time.

For a free resume analysis submit your resume via e-mail to info@greatresumesfast.com. To view professionally-designed resumes visit http://www.greatresumesfast.com.
Author:

Jessica Holbrook is an expert resume writer, career and personal branding strategist, author, speaker and President/CEO of Great Resumes Fast. She creates high-impact, best-in-class, resumes and cover letters that win interviews. For a free resume analysis visit http://www.greatresumesfast.com/ or for a free phone consultation call 1.800.991.5187.

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LinkedIn Keyword Research: a great new tool

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