Our 20 best tips ever…and here are 6-9!

Tip #6: Prepare for interviews before you will even get a call for one, because interviews can pop up at any time, especially when you get your focus defined. Then you’re going to start having more awareness for what opportunities exist in the market, for people that you want to be connected to, etc. You’re just going to be attracting more of a possibility around really connecting into that focus. And because of that, interviews can pop up when you might not even expect them, sitting on the plane with someone, in a class or a professional association gathering.

So prep for interviews early. I’ll give you some tips around that in one of the further suggestions, but just be ready now. Go through the process of being able to answer,”Give me an example of a time when I demonstrated my expertise in whatever your niche area might be.” How would you respond to that? Do you have some success stories put together? If you know that you get hung up on, “Tell me about your strengths,” what have you done to practice that and to get more solid so you can reply in a way that sells you rather than makes it look like you’re not really on your game? We do provide interview prep. Just throwing that out there. If having someone hold your hand would move things forward, we would love to be that partner for you.

Tip #7: Know your worth. This is such an important piece, and I am consistently surprised at how many people are not clear on their worth in the market. It’s almost like they don’t want to know or they haven’t figured out how to get that data. So let me give you a couple resources for that. LinkedIn.com is excellent, excellent resource from many perspectives. If you are logged in and in the upper right hand corner, there’s a little grid that says Work. If you click on that, it will provide the option for doing a little salary survey. You can type in your job title, and it will give you salary data based on what other people in the LinkedIn system have reported as their salary in a particular role. So you’re hearing first-hand information. You’ll get a range. So that’s a good resource.

Another helpful resource is CareerOneStop.org. That’s a government career information site, and they also have a salary function that, based on my experience working with clients, come out to be pretty accurate. There are also resources like Salary.com. My experience is that they come out maybe 20% higher than what I see actually come in terms of negotiated packages.

Tip #8: Document your successes. In Tip #6 (previous blog) I talked about being prepped for interviews early. A good way to do that is to document a handful of achievements that are (and this is an important word!) relevant to your career focus. For example, I spoke recently with a woman who’s aiming toward a position as a project manager in video production. Right now, she’s a video specialist, so she’s doing the hands-on video work. She wants to move into the role of project manager. So thinking about what her successes would be, she wants to consider what are times when she’s demonstrated her expertise managing video projects, not just doing video projects. Writing those down, including what are the metrics. How did she help save money, make money, improve quality, improve image? That’s a nice little filter to run your accomplishments through. It can be any of those or multiple of those factors. Write those down and start practicing talking about them. If you find yourself on an airplane next to someone who is interested in you from a professional standpoint you can say, “Well, as an example, I’ve worked this project, blah, blah, blah,” and then you’re sharing your success story. So that’s number eight. Love this one.

Tip #9: Aim your resume for your target. I’ve looked at ~ 20,000 resumes in my life, and easily 90% of them project a picture of the candidate from the perspective about where they’ve been, not where they’re going. Most people will approach a resume as, “I need to create an inventory of my career closet. I need to look in my career closet and write down everything I’ve done.” Do you like to read an inventory list? I don’t, and I don’t think decision makers and recruiters do either.

What is far more effective is for you to say, “What is my career focus, and what in my closet is relevant for that?” and then to create a picture of your key skills and experiences toward that goal. I think of it as the perfect outfit. If you’re talking about your career closet and all those items in there, you don’t want to put on everything in your closet because then you look like a bag lady. But if you pull out the relevant pieces and you create the perfect outfit, that works like a charm.