Work, success, and meaning at every stage of your career
There are two important reasons to turn the tables on your interviewer before you leave the room. First, asking pointed questions can help you determine if this is or isn’t the right job for you. Of course you’ll need to impress your interviewer if you hope to receive an offer, but you have every right … Continue reading Guest Post: Don’t Leave your Interview without Asking These Questions
Every office has at least one: the worker who spends most of her working hours whining about how bad things are. And not just about work (at least the whining would be relevant.) She whines about her family, her kids, her commute, the cashier at the grocery store last night… the list seems endless. If she just spent as much time doing her work as she does complaining about it, she’d have been promoted to director by now.
In a world where meetings happen in cyberspace and a small business’s new marketing campaign is more likely to involve tweets than billboards, few ‘old school’ ways of conducting business have survived unscathed.
The business card is a humble exception.
Since this terrible recession started, we’ve been hearing about clever gimmicks that desperate jobseekers are trying to get themselves noticed. We’ve heard about people standing at a busy intersection with a “Job Wanted” sign and the guy in Seattle who took out a sign on the side of a city bus.
Any career advice column can give you tips on answering the most-often asked questions in an interview. It takes real confidence to give tips on how to shine when the questions are just plain wacky. This post by Glassdoor.com compiled the 25 strangest interview questions posed by recruiters from name brand companies.
Just like performing in a circus act, your corporate lion taming act can be exhilarating, as long as you follow some basic guidelines.
Introverts tend to gain strength, energy and confidence through spending time alone, unlike extroverts who tend to recharge their batteries in social settings. Introverts can be intelligent, calm, thoughtful, and creative. They just don’t find social contact as energizing as extroverts do.
Steven L. Katz is the author of Lion Taming: Working Successfully with Leaders, Bosses and Other Tough Customers. Katz has worked as a corporate lion tamer for over 20 years; he’s been the executive assistant and right hand to many high-level executives and leaders, including a senior (unnamed in the book) U.S. senator. He intersperses real lion tamer advice from circus performers with advice on how to work with powerful leaders in business.
Since you’re making all those other New Year’s resolutions, why not add a couple to perk up your career prospects? Here are two suggestions that will add value to your resume and that can be accomplished in your spare time.
Heather Huhman wrote a great post about the personal qualities that hiring managers don’t like to see in a candidate. But it’s the Smart Brief link title that caught my eye: Are you too boring to hire?
Huhman writes:
“Hiring managers don’t want to see a candidate who has no additional interests or personality beyond what’s required to get a job in their industry. You need to show you’re a human being, not a robot. Hiring managers love to see candidates with hobbies, or even those who have taken on a second job—it shows you’re able to make good use of your free time to expand your skills and interests, and this is a quality that’s likely to spill over into your professional life.”
