Career Tips, Insights and Career Advice by Paul Freiberger
The job interview is not the place to confess your mistakes. It is not the time to demonstrate your weaknesses or let the interviewer know many of your faults. You will be asked about weaknesses, faults and mistakes for sure. These are traps, aimed at excluding you, and if you ...
It's hard to imagine how and why the job interview became the normal way to get a job. Exactly when did the job interview become standard practice?Once humans advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage of cultural development and began to assign professions to certain individuals, the passing on of these ...
Sell me this pen. If you’re in sales, that’s the task you’re likely to be given in a job interview. Sooner or later, an interviewer will reach into his pocket, pull out a pen and ask you to hit him with your very best pitch - "sell me ...
Imagine you've been asked to read a book to your child's first grade class. You're a little bit nervous when you get to the school, but you take a deep breath and open the door to the classroom. That's when you notice the cameras and are ...
It's highly unlikely that you'll ever walk into a job interview and be given the position after only 30 seconds. However, while this lightning-in-a-bottle scenario is incredibly unlikely, the truth is that you can very easily eliminate any chance of getting a job within that same short amount ...
Imagine you've been asked to read a book to your child's first grade class. You're a little bit nervous when you get to the school, but you take a deep breath and open the door to the classroom. That's when you notice the cameras and are ...
It's highly unlikely that you'll ever walk into a job interview and be given the position after only 30 seconds. While this lightning-in-a-bottle scenario is incredibly unlikely, the truth is that you can easily eliminate any chance of getting a job within that same short amount of time ...
In any job interview, you’re bound to be hit with one or more “behavioral” questions, the ones that ask you to describe your response to real or hypothetical work situations, and one of the more popular questions concerns your reaction to stressful situations in the workplace. It’s a ...
Mistakes in the Executive InterviewIn many ways, mistakes made in the executive interview continue the theme established by mistakes in the resume. The common denominator is the sense among many executives that, to put it bluntly, they’re above all this. Their accomplishments should speak for themselves. Given their successful ...
Who wrote your resume? At first glance, that may seem like an odd question for a job interviewer or recruiter to ask an executive job candidate. Even if it’s not the first item on the interview agenda, however, reports from the interviewing front indicate that it comes up often ...
We’re all only human. A great many job applicants may feel otherwise, but that distinction applies even to those members of the human race who conduct interviews. The interaction feels painfully artificial, but human emotion inevitably plays a part in each hiring decision. If feeling plays such a part ...
Not every interview in your job search is a job interview. Consider the informational interview. An informational interview is a chance to meet briefly with someone in your field and talk about that person’s company, her career, and the industry as a whole. It’s as simple as that ...
My conclusions about job search strategies come from years of experience with hiring managers, HR professionals, recruiters and from my own career changes: journalist to project manager to researcher to author to communications professional. They are conclusions drawn from years of helping applicants—at every level and in many different ...
As you might expect, not all interviewers have taken the time to parse the regulations that govern their behavior. Most of them have the obvious missteps under control, so you are unlikely to find interviewers asking direct questions about your racial identity or religious affiliation.That leaves plenty of room ...
Make Informational Interviews Help Your Job SearchResearch and networking complement each other in your job search. One under-used strategy takes advantage of that overlap and should be part of every applicant’s arsenal: the informational interview.Despite its value, the informational interview has become the poor relation in the family ...
Many of my clients ask what to do about age discrimination during the job search. The plain truth is if you’re waiting for ageism to disappear from the job market, one thing is certain: However old you are, you’ll grow much older waiting.Age-based discrimination may be illegal ...
Your resume worked. Your interview preparation put you in contention for the job. What next? What are the rules for following up after a job interview?If you halt your efforts to reach an employer after interviewing, you may undo much of what you have accomplished so far.There’s ...
"What's Your Management Style?"If you’re applying for a job in management, you’re bound to be asked one fundamental question: “What’s your management style?” It’s not necessarily a good question, but it’s an almost inevitable question when the job entails managing.If the question is ...
How to prepare for the phone interview“Remember to breathe. It is after all, the secret of life.”- Gregory MaguireCompanies are making the video job interview commonplace. This trend was predictable even before the recent pandemic since technology and design was becoming more suitable for video conferencing. Today, with Zoom ...
The Duke and Duchess Offer Job Search Strategy to We CommonersYou may feel that you don’t have much in common with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex – those crazy kids, Harry and Meghan, who’ve decided to “step back” from their roles as “senior members” of Britain’s royal ...
Each time you interview for a job, you should learn something new that will help you improve your interviewing skills. As Thomas Edison said, “The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.”Perhaps Edison was thinking about job interviewing. The great American inventor and ...
Searching for job openings on the internet is nothing new for most people, but interviewing with the hiring person via a web-based video app is likely to be a new experience for many people. It’s essential that every job seeker acquire some video savvy in order to better ace ...
Research is one of the most important things to do when you conduct a job search and prepare yourself for a job interview. Even if you have been in the industry for decades, you need to embark on a journey of discovery to find out what’s going on within ...
When is a Job Interview Question Not Legal?At first glance, it may seem that there should be a clear way to identify illegal interview questions, but the real world is never so accommodating. For one thing, employment law comes from more than one source. There are federal laws, state ...
Most job seekers go into a job interview with answers in mind to such standard questions as: Tell me about your greatest strengths? Why do you want to work for us? Where do you see your career in 5 years? But how would you answer interview questions like these?If ...
At this very moment, we’re still dealing with the pandemic issues that have affected – profoundly affected – each and every business and organization in the country for more than half a year. No company has been immune. No employee has been exempt. Everyone has had to find a way to ...
It would certainly be useful, to say the least, if we knew. What questions were coming? What were the best answers to those questions? And what did they think were the best questions for the interviewee to be asking? If only we knew all that.But we can’t read ...
As you get ready for your interview, research into the company and industry can give you a powerful way to set yourself apart from the competition. But there’s one more thing to do that can be the icing on the cake. When the job opening was posted, there was ...
What is the best time to say thank you for a job interview? You may be surprised.Of course, you conclude a job interview by thanking the interviewer for their time and interest. And you also know the importance of following up quickly with a thank you email or snail ...
I recently shared a bevy of tips about making your resume remote-friendly by adapting it to a new world of fully remote or hybrid workplaces. Those workplace arrangements were once the exception; now they’re more or less the rule.Of course, your resume is not the end of the ...
There’s a skills gap in today’s mid-pandemic job market. Companies are struggling to attract applicants who have the skills they need. If you keep that situation in mind, there are ways to use the skills gap to your benefit in a job interview. You can also gain some ...
In the first part of my job interview course, The Expert Guide to Job Interviews, part of my focus is on figuring out your overarching career goals as a fundamental first step in interview preparation. The basic idea is simple, though it’s often neglected: It really helps to have ...
Your resume is the best supporting actor in your interview presentation for several reasons. But here I have a chance to emphasize the single thing that’s most important in eliciting the performance of a lifetime from that supporting actor. It’s a resume tip that bears repeating, especially because ...
In my job interview course, I’ve talked a lot about networking as a key part of any job search, and about its equal importance to the process of finding interviews. Whether you’re seeking formal job interviews or the informational interviews, networking is a time-honored and effective way to ...
In my job interview course, I talk a lot about investigating the company in question. What are their values? And that includes their actual values, not just the ones they ostensibly adhere to. What’s the latest news from them? And what’s happening with their competitors and with the ...
“Tell me about yourself” may be a fundamental part of a job interview, whether asked explicitly or not, but the answer you give is delivered with more than words alone. You’re also answering by how you look and act, and, human nature being what it is, first impressions – even ...
Prepare for All Types of Job InterviewsPreviously, I’ve covered all sorts of interview scenarios, from video to phone to executive and more, but there are two scenarios that come up from time to time that deserve a few words to round out your job interview preparation.First, there’s ...
Quitting is in the news this year. All kinds of quitting. First there was quiet quitting. This refers to people who don’t actually quit per se, but who are working strictly to the terms of whatever deal they agreed to. They do their jobs, but they don’t go ...
I often get requests for career help issues that are a bit unrelated to the common needs of resume writing and job hunting. One that I hear consistently is: “How should I handle stress and anxiety?”That’s a pretty broad area to delve into, but we’re not looking ...
While preparing people for job interviews, I emphasize that it's not just how you answer and using your professional resume to prepare answers but also how you listen that can get you the job.“When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.” — Ernest HemingwayIn the workplace, active listening lets ...
Growing up in a household where my mother, an accomplished scientist, often emphasized the value of curiosity, I remember her sage advice: "Curiosity is a sign of intelligence," she would say. She emphasized that by asking good questions, you not only demonstrate your intelligence but also convey your genuine ...
Ah, the ever-evolving English language! Just when you thought your resume was polished to perfection with action verbs and quantifiable achievements, along comes "rizz" – the Oxford Word of the Year for 2023, originally coined by a Twitch streamer.For those of you who've been too busy tailoring your cover letters ...
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