The Voice of Job Seekers

Mark Anthony Dyson ★ Career Writer ★ Speaker ★ Thinker ★ Award-winning Blog & Podcast! ★ "The Job Scam Report" on Substack! ★ I hack and reimagine the modern job search!

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Job Search News – November 4, 2017

Job Search News – November 4, 2017

This is your job search news  with articles and resources so enjoy! I’ve read them, and you can feel free to comment on them in any form you’d like. Leave a message on the “send voicemail” button on your right. I’ll try to keep it short, fresh, and informative. If you have some news I need to know about, tweet me @MarkADyson!

#Resilience

Struggles are a part of life and makes us better to endure them. This Fast Company article shows up how we can endure and then thrive. Every job search episode has a struggle. Sometimes, it comes from our having to let resolve set in. We know we need to get it done, but there are times we haven’t found resolution and success eludes us. It’s good we learn from the process difficulties take us through. If any thing, we learn how to thrive so we can help others persist.

I like the way you move…people

via GIPHY

If you give people the security to feel their contributions matter whether manager or mail person. It’s your soft skills, baby!

 94% of recruiting professionals believe an employee with stronger soft skills has a better chance of being promoted to a leadership position than an employee with more years of experience but weaker soft skills.

~Forbes, 8/18/17

They set you apart from the crowds if you can demonstrate them either through recommendations, references, or a recording of how you use them training others. The power of seeing them in action or someone speaking on your behalf makes you memorable. If you want to compete, understand how you can demonstrate the soft skill functionality in your profession.

🔥🔥🔥What’s 🔥 in soft skills?

This article is from 2016 but I don’t think the desired soft skills have changed. I find this list of soft skills useful and the same list seen on most surveys.

😒😒😒when soft skills go wrong 😒😒😒

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Job Interviewing Best Practices (PODCAST)

Job Interviewing Best Practices (PODCAST)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS

 

Melissa Cooley

Melissa Cooley, of MelissaCooley.com, is a Certified Resume Writer, Interview Coach, Career Consultant, Blogger, and a contributor to the career book, Nourish Your Career. Her blog, The Job Quest, equips job seekers with tools needed for a successful job search and job interview. Melissa is also a friend and this recorded conversation is the first time we have talked person-to-person since connecting online for the last four years. Her insight into coaching job seekers is worth modeling because she goes beyond the surface practices. That is what made it easy to ask her to share her knowledge in this area. If you want to read a post from her blog that demonstrates her insight, read “3 REASONS WHY YOU STILL NEED TO DO INTERVIEW PREP. (YES, EVEN IF YOU ARE A “SHOO-IN.”).”

Job interviewing is a skill requiring more practice than 95% of job seekers are willing to do. If it is hard to spotlight your best attributes, then your interviewing skills have equal to or less value than your resume.

One of the questions I ask Melissa is what are a few of the techniques she uses to prepare job seekers for the job interview. She cited a technique from Dr. Lynn Joseph, creator of the Job Loss Recovery Program. Melissa says that by visualizing interview success as part of the preparation really has helped a few of the clients she coached.

We also tackled some of the areas job seekers are challenged with such as, communication, networking, and deciding if it is appropriate to go to an interview sick.

I am slightly embarrassed that I flubbed her introduction. My attempt was to roll out the red carpet, but instead, the carpet was spotty in one place. Otherwise, I think this serves the job seeker community well and has advice that is worth putting into practice.

 

Here is a partial transcript:

Mark Anthony Dyson: And we appreciate you joining us back here at The Voice of Job Seekers, we thank everybody who is downloading the podcast. Hopefully, you are getting great value out of what we are sharing. Amongst all of the guest we have, today I have a very special guest. A few years ago I stumbled upon Melissa Cooley of MelissaCooley.com and she has a blog called JobQuest and I was really intrigued that her blog was a whole lot better than what I was writing at the time. Nevertheless, she reached out to me in conversation and then from that point on I think for 3 or 4 years we always had the conversation.  We have shared each other’s content and we have shared a few to follow lists. Most of all, what’s important about Melissa is that she is a resume writer also co-author of  “Nourishing Your Career.” Welcome, Melissa and thank you for joining in.    

 

Interview

Melissa Cooley: Thank you for having me, Mark.
 
Mark Anthony Dyson: This is really great because Melissa is actually a friend that I talk to her all of the time so we are going to be pretty comfortable in talking to each other and it won’t be the standard interrogation that I may perform at times. We are going to try to make this engaging and involving if you guys want to comment feel free to comment on the blog or you can send me a voicemail on my site. I have a “send a voicemail” or “use your microphone” on your computer and leave a comment or a question as well. Melissa, please tell us a little bit about yourself.
 
Melissa Cooley: I started up the JobQuest about 4 years now. It’s something that just came about because I had a loved one that was laid off during the recession and I was helping him with getting his resume together, helping him with networking, giving him tips on interviewing, and everything that goes into that. During that time, I got on to twitter and started to talk to some more career professionals that really liked what I was saying and the question that kept coming up, What do you do? They liked some of the ideas I had and my writing in some of the blogs that I had written early on. The fact that the question kept coming up with the career professionals and they were really interested in what I had to say got me thinking that I should try to do something with this. So that’s where all of this came about just because of helping that one person in my Life with his issues and it kind of blossomed from there now I have my practice. Working with people in whatever aspect of their career management that they need. Whether it be personal branding, interview prep, or being able to clearly articulate their value and resume or cover letter and all of that type of stuff. Now it has been almost 2 years that I have been certified as a resume writer through Career Directors International and that is something that gives a bit of assurance to people who are interested in working with me that I really do know what I am talking about.  
 
Mark Anthony Dyson: It’s interesting you should mention that and for that to stand out and we just had a show a couple of weeks ago with Bridget Wiede Brooks. We talked a lot about how valuable having someone who is a certified resume writer is to the actual person and how they can get into depth and get the value out of the person because of the training and the information they may have. Whoever gets serviced by you will definitely get some of the best information out there including different trends and different ways and not being a one trick pony in writing resumes and that’s pretty important. It’s very interesting when I have different practitioners on we always tend to talk about what people are doing and what we are seeing in our practices. Today since we are talking about interviewing and resume writing we will probably weave in and out of our discussion. What are you experiencing as far as people seeking your expertise for interview coaching?
Melissa Cooley: I’m finding a lot of people who sometimes come to me because they feel like they have gotten themselves to the door of they are at the interview and then something happens it all seems to fall apart but they aren’t able to seal the deal and they come to me saying I don’t know what’s happening what the disconnect is and just being able to do mock interviews its part of what I do and I’m able to hear how they are answering questions. Of course, there are questions that are pretty unexpected such as tell me about yourself, the greatest strengths and weaknesses, and more of getting into the behavior questions which people have a hard time responding to because they haven’t actually thought about how their experiences relate to the future and how they can fully articulate the value in what they can bring by what they have done and that’s a lot of times where they have been having problems and things kind of fall apart.
 
Mark Anthony Dyson: You are discerning where people are disconnecting is there a particular pattern that people where they are coming apart at other than the regular questions? You mentioned the behavioral aspect of it. What are some of the behavioral questions you find people are stumbling across and failing to connect with the hire manager?
 
Melissa Cooley: Sometimes it’s a matter of being clear about their role in something. This is particular for women but I’ve seen it go for both genders, of not taking enough ownership in a project especially a role in a leadership. More often in women, just because women are building a community where it’s all about us and not necessarily the I and that can be a hard thing because it doesn’t necessarily give a full picture to the people making the decision about the role they may have played in let’s say developing the project or managing the outcomes. Sometimes people don’t give themselves enough full credit for the value that they bring or enough credit for what they do.
 
Mark Anthony Dyson: Women are having a hard time bragging about themselves?
 
Melissa Cooley: Yes, we were always taught not to brag and that is an impolite thing to do. However, you have to be comfortable with talking about the things you have done. If you pull back and try to deflect with the group then the person won’t be giving themselves enough credit for what they have done and the people who are interviewing you and may not have that knowledge about you won’t fully understand the value you brought to the project. 

What you say or do in an interview matters 

The power in your words can affect your chances to impress and perhaps disqualify you from job candidacy. Melissa and I created this video to emphasize the words and terms (and the context) are more important than showing up. These are absolutely the wrong kinds of things to say in a job interview. Can you get away with any of these things? Rarely. In most cases, NO! It’s all about professionalism and the value you bring to a company.

Be sure you sign up for our newsletter found near the top right in the blue box. Join more than 1,100 subscribers about what goes on behing the scenes and other job search tips not mentioned in the show!

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Job Search News October 27, 2017 – The Halloween Edition

This is your job search news – THE HALLOWEEN EDITION- with articles and resources so enjoy! I’ve read them, and you can feel free to comment on them in any form you’d like. Leave a message on the “send voicemail” button on your right. I’ll try to keep it short, fresh, and informative. If you have some news I need to know about, tweet me @MarkADyson!

via GIPHY

You are your own compensation agent…

The passive – aggressive approach to negotiation is tempting but ill advised in the article on salary negotiation. The basics are covered here but mostly, these are questions frequently asked and most people need to be reminded to implement. Negotiating compensation will be ongoing. No one will prompt you to negotiate or ask for a salary enhancement if you don’t. Keep this article close by as the way we will need to engage the discussion will be different than the past. YOU will need to be your own agent  if you don’t have one currently.

The perfect supplement to the above article is this one written by my friend Cassidy Rush (@cassidyhrush) from Payscale. She cites a study stating 57% of job candidates don’t even try to negotiate any part of their package.  I have done several shows on negotiating your compensation. I will add not only my show with Kwame Christian, but also the collaborative article featured on Fox Business. Perhaps we need to concentrate more on the fear of negotiating more than techniques? I would love to hear your thoughts.

What’s hot and what’s not in job search?

Grammar is like vegetables, everyone knows it’s good for them, few love it, rest of us will endure them to get to dessert. Shoutout to Susan Rooks (@Grammar_Goddess) who brought up a great point while we were working on one of my projects. She pointed out in my document where I had quotations and apostrophes were the straight kind, and some were curly. She also mentioned she sees it all of the time.

Why is that important to mention? It is worth the time to get grammar help for our documents, particularly the ones needed for our careers. Not everyone can  or should proofread our products especially pertaining to our career communication. It is one of the few places where we add value directly to who we work for or serve. The details matter and I’m glad to have Susan on my team. To find out more about her proofreading services, go here!

Here are some fun grammar reminders. Consider this like a vegetable fry or baby pea pudding: