If you’re out there on the job market, it’s important to be able to laugh — at yourself and the process — from time to time. Here’s a humorous video from Comedy.com offering tips for “screwing with the interviewer’s head.” A few of our favorites:
Smell your fingers periodically.
Wink frequently.
Casually straddle a chair.
Put “inspirational lyrics” on the top of your resume.
Conduct the interview in the persona of Shannon Sharpe.
Bring an “attorney;” consult him before answering.
Let your cell phone ring. With a ringtone of “Cherry Pie” by Warrant. Answer it.
Hug goodbye.
Warning: some of the language is a little off-color.
Here’s a summary of our tips for workers aged 55 and up:
1. Don’t wait to be laid off to look for a new job.
2. If you have been laid off, do a little soul-searching before deciding your next move.
3. “Dumb down” your resume.
4. Put personal networking first.
5. Target companies where the leadership skews older.
6. Be patient.
Read the full tips here (scroll down to the sidebar.)
RiseSmart was fortunate to be mentioned in USA Today again today, this time as part of Del Jones’ highly entertaining article talking with CEOs about their jobs as teenagers. Here’s the relevant excerpt:
USA TODAY reached out to dozens of executives who now run or once ran major corporations. Thirty-two responded, and although their ages range and they grew up diversely in big cities and rural towns, all worked as teens, eight of them before age 11. At USA TODAY’s request, RiseSmart, an Internet site for jobs that pay $100,000 and up, surveyed CEOs and former CEOs of smaller companies.
Among the 37 who responded, 32 said their summer jobs were good experience. Only four said their first jobs were awful, and one said it was just a job, neither beneficial nor traumatic. Almost all earned $3 an hour or less.
We got a lot of great anecdotes from RiseSmart members for Del’s piece. We’ll plan to do a future blog post featuring quotes from some of our members that were not included in the USA Today story.
I’ve always wanted to commission a survey that USA Today deemed worthy of one of its famous Snapshots — those stats-based graphics on the corner of the newspaper’s section fronts. And guess what? It’s happened!
We recently conducted a survey asking jobseekers how much time they spend searching online for work. As the USA Today chart headlined “Searching for jobs online” reported, 47 percent said they spent between one and three hours daily online, and 10 percent said they spent even more time than that.
This poll data validates the reason we started RiseSmart in the first place — to free jobseekers from being chained to their PCs when they could be polishing up their resumes, networking within their profession, and focusing on other, more time-efficient aspects of their search.
The Snapshot can be found online here, in the Money section. (It may not be posted till late Thursday night.)
We haven’t released the full results of our survey yet — although Time Magazine’s Work in Progress blog has reported on it as well.
I was honored to be included in Joann Lublin’s “Managing Your Career” column in the Wall Street Journal this morning. The column, headined “For Job Hunters, The Big Interview Is Getting Bigger,” offers advice on acing a committee interview. Here’s an excerpt:
A man vying for a vice presidency at a financial-services concern last year did a thorough Internet search about its four-member screening committee. He learned one member wrote a newspaper column about martial arts.
He broke the ice at his interview by declaring that he was going to “break a stack of boards over his head in the executive’s honor,” recalls Sanjay Sathe, a friend and head of RiseSmart, an online job-search service for senior professionals and managers. “It showed the committee that this candidate had done his homework.”…
You should intersperse colorful anecdotes about your experience with perceptive queries about the vacancy. The tactic “puts you on conversational terms with your interviewers, and also gives you a much-needed breather between the questions thrown your way,” Mr. Sathe suggests.
We like Susan Ireland. We’re a fan of her book, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Perfect Resume, and of her blog, The Job Lounge.
Unfortunately, a YouTube video Susan posted last week is an example of what can happen when the business world and goofy Internet culture come together. Susan’s video praises (at length) actor Michael Cera’s YouTube “video resume” called “Impossible is the Opposite of Possible.” Check out Susan’s critique:
The problem is, Cera’s video is a spoof — a parody of “Impossible is Nothing,” the hysterically arrogant video resume by Aleksey Vayner that became a worldwide Internet phenomenon. In the Web world, Susan praising Cera’s video is akin to your mom telling you that the polka-dot bow tie you’re wearing as a gag actually looks good on you.
One YouTube viewer bashed Susan with the following comment:
I’m guessing no one told Susan Ireland that Michael Cera’s video “Impossible” was a priceless comedic spoof of another YouTube video. Makes you wonder about the quality of her business venture, doesn’t it?
This is a lesson that all business people should consider carefully before venturing into the hip-deep hipness of the Interwebs.
By the way, if you haven’t seen the Cera video, here it is:
Time’s Work in Progress blog offered a peek today at a survey we recently commissioned on Internet job searches. Time staff writer Lisa Takeuchi Cullen reports:
[A] survey … from RiseSmart—a job search site that “caters to jobseekers earning $100K or more and that’s backed by former CareerBuilder and HotJobs execs”—finds one in three people already employed spends an hour a day looking for a new job.
Lisa then poses this question to her readers: “Are you one of them? Why?”
That’s a topic for another post (or several), but for those who saw Lisa’s post, we wanted to let you know that the full results of our survey will be released soon. Stay tuned.
1. You’re a brand. Act that way.
2. Know the company.
3. Know your interviewers.
4. Go ahead, wear a pantsuit.
5. Make eye contact.
6. Handle sensitive questions with finesse.
7. Ask the right questions.
8. Be assertive — ask for the job.
9. Get contact information and send individual thank you notes.
Many people say “Tell me about yourself” is the most difficult interview question. That’s wrong on two counts.
First, it’s not actually a question; it’s a request.
Second, it gives you complete freedom to say whatever you want. If you’re prepared, it’s the best single question you can be asked.
In the three videos below, Denham Resources offers an example of a GOOD response to “Tell me about yourself,” a BAD one, and an UGLY one.
Here’s the good response:
Here’s the bad one:
And here’s the ugly one:
My thoughts on the videos above is that the points made in all three are well-said. I would argue, however, that the GOOD answer could be much better. I’m a firm believer that interviewers tune out of long answers during interviews, and this is a long answer. It goes in too many directions. I think it’s better to stop after making a couple of points, and to do so in a way that an interviewer will naturally want to ask you a follow-up question.
Brian Krueger of CollegeGrad.com has some good general advice on “Tell me about yourself” here:
Here’s a chuckle: A reader asks Marie Claire’s “Cubicle Coach” what she should do at her next company outing — since at the last one her bikini top came down and she accidentally flashed everyone. CC’s advice: Go to the gathering, but “to avoid any easy memory association, stay away from the water. This time, stick to macaroni salad and Wiffle ball.”
