Thursday, November 28, 2019

Ladders 2019 Interviews Guide - Interview Tips, Interview Questions

Ladders 2019 Interviews Guide - Interview Tips, Interview QuestionsLadders 2019 Interviews Guide - Interview Tips, Interview QuestionsHey folks, Thanks for visiting this information page for Ladders 2019 Interviews Guide, the second in our Ladders Guides Series after our best-selling Ladders 2019 Resume Guide.Now available on Amazon,Ladders 2019 Interviews Guide provides 49 common interview questions and answers, best practices and expert advice on questions to ask in an interview, how to answer behavioral interview questions, and interview tips for fast-rising and mid-career professionals.Ill add to this guide with additional interview questions and answers to improve it as your companion to Ladders 2019 Interviews Guide.Your 15-minute company website review guideRead 3 of the latest articles at Google nachrichtensendung when doing a search for the companys name.If a public company, read the Morningstar, Bloomberg, or Google Finance entry on the company.Read the companys Wikipedia entry.Theres the old joke that a companys org chart is reflected in their website navigation, and Ive found this to be surprisingly (and alarmingly) true. It will be helpful for you to read through the four to six top-level navigation items on the company site, usually including About Us, Products/ Services, Our (Executive) Team, Clients / Customers, and News / Press. It also makes sense to view the careers tab of the company to see what other roles theyre hiring and if that indicates anything meaningful to you.Do they have Facebook, Twitter, Instagram links on their homepage? Most companies do. If so, follow each one and take brief notes on what you see in the first four photos, posts, or tweets. If not, then that in itself is a good topic to raise with your interviewer (I see youve chosen not have a social media presence - how did you reach the conclusion that that welches right for the company?)Additional behavioral interview questionsGrowth potential, personal improvementDescri be for me a time when you were drafted to handle your managers duties? How did you handle those duties?Whats been your toughest management challenge in the past year? What would you do differently? How would you train someone you hired to handle a similar challenge?Does the old saying Ask for forgiveness, not permission describe your approach? Or do you prefer the opposite?What have you learned from your biggest mistakes?Where do you want to develop, and whats your approach to improving?Whats the toughest feedback for you to accept?Personal behaviorsDo you prefer fast-paced or traditional?How well do you listen? How have you practiced getting better at this?What will peers say have been times that youve gone above and beyond what was expected of you?Do you prefer to have a lot of balls in the air, or push through a few deeper, larger projects?What has been your past boss assessment of how organized you are? Do you agree or disagree? How about administrative assistants in your office - what would they say were your strengths and weaknesses in organization?What do you procrastinate about?Do you work best alone, with kollektivwork, presenting to large audiences?Personal improvementDescribe the fruchtwein stressful situation youve ever faced at work. How did you recover?Describe a time you had a disagreement with your boss. How did you approach it, what was the outcome?How do you use feedback to get better? Whats enough feedback? Whats not enough? What motivates you? What do you find motivating about being in your current role? In this industry / role?What best practices have you copied or applied? Which have you declined to adopt?Tell me about your reading habits in the past year. What are you reading, why?Work behaviorsWhats the biggest decision you had to make on your work this year? What was your process for making that decision? What would you do differently in retrospect?How many hours per week do you work? Whats your passion and pace about work? How do you achieve work-life balance?How do you make decisions? Fast or slow? Alone or in consensus? Analytical or intuitive? How has that changed over the past five years?How much supervision do you want or need?Describe a time you received negative feedback from your boss, team, or subordinate. What was your process for handling it? Was it right? Have you improved in that area?Tell me how youve liked to get up to speed in the past when joining new teams.Mid-manager skills et Tell me about a time your sense of urgency, negotiation skills, assertiveness, public speaking, persuasive skills, meeting management, team member conflict resolution was successful and unsuccessful.Describe a time when you were assertive? How did it work out? How about a time it did not work out well?Character, integrityDescribe a time you shared information that was supposed to remain confidential. How did you correct the matter and address? When is it right to hold your ground, or be stubborn? Whats the most unpopula r stand youve taken and advocated at work in your most recent roles?When have you had to bend or compromise integrity in order to achieve a business objective?Whats the most unethical behavior youve seen in your prior roles? What did you do?Describe a time you overcame skepticism to one of your suggestions.Whats your approach to communication bad news? Tell me about a time you were not going to make the quarterly results what steps did you take for communicating?Tell me about a time when you had to break a confidence with a peer, co-worker, boss, or client.Character, gritDescribe for me the biggest challenge youve faced in your recent role? How did you overcome it? How do you manage the pressure of achieving quota, making the quarter, achieving marketing goals, shipping on deadline, etc.? How do you manage stress, generally?Whats your sense of humor? Tell me about a situation in which others were wrong and you were right.How do you manage your moods - how high are the highs, how l ow are the lows?Tell me about your biggest mistake in the past two years? What did you learn from the experience?What makes you lose your cool with team members? Missed numbers, deadlines, disagreements?Growth potential, leadershipWhos our biggest competitor now? Who do you think will be our biggest competitor in three years time? Why?Which companies or teams would you most like to emulate on your own team? Why? What are the trade-offs involved? How would you implement?What laws, regulations, taxes or governmental policies should someone in this role be aware of?Is networking / attending conferences / going to association events important for success in this role? How have you built and maintained your professional network?Tell me about a time you had to teach someone at your company about a complicated parte of your role that they didnt understand.When have you stood up to a boss?What was your positive impact on the culture in your last role?What culture do you like to have on your teams? Which teams youve been have exceeded / fallen short of your expectations?Growth potential in the roleWhat are the most important metrics we should be measuring in this role? What would you predict our current numbers are in those areas? How have you improved similar metrics in the past?Tell me about a time when a previously productive channel, strategy, method or system failed and became non-performing.What are the most common mistakes people make in this role?Describe a time your relationship was terminated with a large, important client, customer, vendor, partner, supplier, affiliate, contractor. How did you manage the process? What did you learn from the experience?How did you monitor external feedback - client, customers, vendors, suppliers?How did you monitor internal feedback - employees, partners, contractors?For your current role, is it more important to be a subject matter expert, or a good people manager?Modern technologyWhich common software are you unfamiliar w ith? Why?When should design or creative considerations overrule data?What are your strong suits when it comes to computer software? What computer skills have you been unable to acquire despite desire/ effort?How have you introduced new technologies to your teams in the past? Tell me about a time you reviewed, selected, and implemented a technology.Interpersonal Tell me about times youve had to provide negative feedback to a team member.Tell me about a time you had to manage conflict with a peer? How did you manage? Do you actively seek conflict, approach it indirectly, or let things mange themselves?What causes conflicts on your team? Describe situations when you have had to generate conflict. Describe situations when you have worked to resolve conflicts? Tell me about a time when there was not enough conflict at work. What would you have done differently? How did you in fact handle?How do you build relationships with clients / vendors / suppliers? By the way, do you prefer in-perso n, chat, email, or phone communications? Why?Describe how you like to communicate with your team, your peers, your boss. What specifically is your timeframe, method, preferences?Whats your track record for building long-term relationships with clients, customers, and co-workers? How do you determine what clients, customers or co-workers need from you and your team? Whats your process for managing those needs? How do you get feedback?Describe the angriest a client, customer or co-worker has been with you in the past few years.When youve been assigned to a project with new folks, whats your approach to working with new people? How do you approach the conversation, how much or how little structure do you prefer, how do you manage follow up, how do ensure success of those conversations?Performance expectationsWhat is the cadence to your current role? How do you structure your days /weeks / months/ quarters/ years? Describe your typical daily tasks. How do you prioritize? How have you im proved this year? Why is that effective for you?Describe your preferred method of sourcing candidates for jobs / generating sales leads / generating new marketing leads / finding new vendors /networking for new partners, etc.?Tell me about a time a project you submitted was turned down out of hand by the client / your boss / another team. How did you handle the feedback and bounce back?For your most recent role, describe the decision-making process of the customer, job candidates, marketing prospects, investors, suppliers, vendors, etc. Why do they decide to work with your firm? When do they decide not to?Tell me when youve missed a significant deadline. What were the mitigating circumstances? What were the consequences?What were the routine maintenance tasks for your most recent teams. How did manage them with your team - assigning, communication, monitoring them?Tell me about a time you had an extraordinarily high time pressure project or deadline. How did you manage it? Did you meet it?15-minute web research on a companyRead 3 of the latest articles at Google News when doing a search for the companys name.If public, read the Morningstar or Google Finance entry on the company.Read the companys Wikipedia entry.Theres the old joke that a companys org chart is reflected in their website navigation, and Ive found this to be surprisingly (alarmingly) true. It will be helpful for you to read through the four to six top-level navigation items on the company site, usually including About Us, Products/ Services, Our (Executive) Team, Clients / Customers, and News / Press. It also makes sense to view the careers tab of the company to see what other roles theyre hiring and if that indicates anything meaningful to you.Do they have Facebook, Twitter, Instagram links on their homepage? Most companies do. If so, follow each one and describe to yourself what you see in the first four photos, posts, or tweets. If not, then that in itself is a good topic to raise with your i nterviewer (I see youve chosen not have a social media presence - how did you reach the conclusion that that was right for the company?)We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.

Saturday, November 23, 2019

If you are late to airport a lot, this is your personality

If you are late to airport a lot, this is your personalityIf you are late to airport a lot, this is your personalityAs a nervous flier, I am that person that gets to the airport at least two and a half hours before my flight. I am not sure why I do this as I hate being on the plane much less near one but for some reason I think a combination of buying magazines, Chex Mix and then nervously pacing will somehow remedy my devastating aviophobia (when we all know it is the Xanax and three glasses of wine that really do trick.)But then I have friends, as we all do, that would rather do anything then get to the airport with time to spare. In fact, they prefer it because they get a bit of an adrenaline rush. And it turns out most people fall into one of these two groups according to a new piece from The Atlantic.But whether you are the belastung person on the plane or the person with the best seat at the gate (next to the outlets of course), it really comes down to those famous Personality A and B-types. The classic Type A person is usually competitive, time-urgent or impatient and a little more, you know, intense. While Type Bs tend to be more laid back, patient and overall more relaxed, according to Simple Psychology. However, that Type B person may actually be quite anxious about flying too but the way they deal with it is procrastination.Psychiatrist John Gerkin told The Atlantic, One person is hyper-efficient and overprepared, and another is someone who doesnt manage their anxiety that way.They distract and procrastinate, and next thing you know, they cant do what they need to do to get there on time, Gerkin said. Its not quite self-harm, but its in the same arena. It changes your feeling state and gets you out of that place thats uncomfortable and into this place of excitement.There are people that get high off the lateness, of that possibility of missing the flight and the ramifications that come with that and, of course, the Home Alone airport run (thats a nat ural high if ever there was one.)You might also enjoyNew neuroscience reveals 4 rituals that will make you happyStrangers know your social class in the first seven words you say, study finds10 lessons from Benjamin Franklins daily schedule that will ersatzdarsteller your productivityThe worst mistakes you can make in an interview, according to 12 CEOs10 habits of mentally strong people

Thursday, November 21, 2019

5 Ways to Start Your Resume With a Bang

5 Ways to Start Your Resume With a Bang 5 Ways to Start Your Resume With a Bang Everyone tells you that its important to abflug your resume with a powerful introduction that makes a strong first impression you only have 20 seconds goes the standard advice. And its true. Employers are busy and they get hundreds of resumes for fruchtwein positions which means standing out is vital. But how do you actually do that?The good news is that its elend as hard as you might think. Ive written before about the importance of starting your resume with a strong resume headline. But here are 5 additional ways to start your resume with the kind of bang that makes it impossible for employers to ignore you. 1. Be YourselfIf youre like most people, when it comes time to write a resume, you spend time browsing the web looking for ideas. (In fact thats how you may have come to this website). But its a really bad idea and heres why. You are not like any of those other people. On our samples page, youll fi nd over 50 sample resumes, each one carefully crafted to communicate the strengths, partality traits, experiences and unique value proposition of one individual an individual who is not you.So if youre spending time looking around the web for resume examples, stop it. Seriously. Stop itYou are amazing. You have talents, skills and life experiences that no one else on earth has at least not in that unique combination. So instead of looking for things other people have said about themselves, start your resume by telling people exactly what makes you uniquely valuable.2. Focus on ValueNotice I didnt say tell people what makes you unique. The fact that you own the worlds largest collection of Dr Who figurines makes you unique, but I wouldnt recommend adding it to your resume. No, unique isnt enough the phrase I used was uniquely valuable. Ask yourself what combination of skills, experiences and personality traits makes me valuable to my target employers?When you have the answer, you have the core homilie that will compel employers to call you in for interviews.For example, if I was to apply for a position creating an online training program for job seekers, I would want to highlight several things that, in combination, make me a pretty unique candidateI have 15 years of recruitment experience at all levels of an organizationI have an in-depth understanding of the resume screening and applicant tracking systems used by so many companies today.I have 10 years of experience in curriculum development and training designI have 10 years of experience running Blue Sky Resumes and during that time my company has helped thousands of job seekers to find new jobs. This outline of my experience is what marketers might call the product features. behauptung are the facts about my experience. To make a real impact, I have to illustrate to the audience why these features will benefit them.So I might sayI offer a rare combination of hands-on recruitment, training, resume writin g and career coaching experience, which means that I have an in-depth knowledge of the hiring process from both sides while also knowing how to create adult learning programs that really work.Do this for yourself, and your resume cant fail to make an immediate impact because it will directly address the core needs of your target employers.3. Break the Rules if NecessaryWhen you write your resume, youre immediately constrained by all kinds of rules that youve heard from other people. For example, my favorite is the your resume should only be one page long rule.Who says? Did all the hiring managers, recruiters and HR managers go to a training course where they were all told this was the rule and not to consider anyone who didnt follow it? Of course not Its just a thing someone said one day and it got picked up and communicated to others and now it causes millions of people around the world to write resumes that are less effective than they could be.The truth is that you cant write a p owerful resume that expresses your individuality if you are also following conventions and rules. The two just dont go together.Notice in my example above that I wrote my value proposition summary in the first person. Here it is againI offer a rare combination of hands-on recruitment, training, resume writing and career coaching experience, which means that I have an in-depth knowledge of the hiring process from both sides while also knowing how to create adult learning programs that really work.Standard resume conventions say this is wrong that you should never use I in your resume. I say thats rubbish. Sometimes, using I is the perfect way to speak directly to the hiring manager with a powerful sales message.This doesnt mean your resume should be two pages (maybe it should be three? Or one?). Nor does it mean that you must use I in your resume. Far from it. All it means is that you should always make decisions about your resume based on whats the best sales message for you and no t based on an arbitrary rule designed to make everyone conform. Heres one example of a resume that uses I effectively to introduce the candidate to potential employers. 4. Use TestimonialsEmployers are risk averse. They want to be very sure that they dont make a mistake when hiring. Therefore, one of the most powerful things you can do is to provide evidence, right upfront in your resume introduction, that you will be a good choice. I like to do this by using testimonials either from LinkedIn or from performance reviews or reference letters. If you can use the referrers name, your pitch will be all the stronger. (See here and here for examples).5. Show Dont TellIf youve ever attended a creative writing class, youll know the old adage show dont tell. In creative writing, this refers to the fact that its more powerful to show a characters feelings through action rather than describing those feelings. (So an author shouldnt say he felt sad but should rather say tears welled in his eye s.)When I use this phrase in relation to your resume, I am referring to roughly the same thing. Instead of telling people that youre fabulous, I want you to show them. Imagine being a hiring manager and looking at two resumes one tells and one shows. The tells resume begins with the following gutachtenI am a powerful leader who consistently delivers results even in challenging situations. The shows resume starts this way I have held 3 jobs in the last 10 years and have always increased sales by at least 50% this is true even in my most recent role where I grew sales 62% despite a general industry downturn. Which of these two candidates would you be most interested in meeting? (And would you really care that he used the I word? Or if his resume was 3 pages long?).Of course, not everyone can quantify their impact in this way as we dont all work in sales. But if you think about it hard enough, you can come up with facts about your performance that show rather than tell. For example, perhaps you have outperformed your peers, or won awards, or earned promotions in every one of your jobs. Perhaps youre the teacher who always goes the extra mile, or the sales associate who gets 100% on mystery shopper visits. The point is, showing will always make a bigger impact than telling and doing it sooner rather than later will help your resume start with a bang.It Comes Down to ThisTo make an impact, you need to showcase your unique value right at the start of your resume. Do this and you will find that your resume response rate skyrockets. So before you send another resume out, ask yourself if it really starts with a bang. If it does, youre already overwhelmed with interview requests. If it doesnt, use one of these tactics or find your own to make the desired impact.Good luck And if youre interested in professional resume help, just shoot me an email with a copy of your resume and Ill get back to you with feedback and a price quote. The best bit? As a reader of this blog (and therefore clearly a person with impeccable taste) you are entitled to claim a 15% discount on our resume writing service. Just mention the blog when you email me.You might also be interested inThe One Rule of Resume Writing You Cant Afford to IgnoreResume Writing Its All About What You Leave OutWhy Rewriting Your Resume Will Open Doors