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Pay It Forward! Benefits to you and others for helping out.
Last Monday, I overheard my husband Pete as he had a conversation with a recruiter. Pete works as a firmware engineer, a specialty that lately has been in strong demand. Because he maintains a complete profile on LinkedIn and has strong experience, he frequently gets calls from headhunters. Yet he’s happy in his current position, so I was curious about how he’d handle the call. Would he say, “Thanks for reaching out, but I’m all set for now”, or something different? What he did raised my already-high opinion of him. First, he listened patiently to what the recruiter was seeking, including...
read moreLinkedIn: Focus on Your Strengths
Having worked with hundreds of clients to improve their profiles, expand their networks, and leverage their connections, I have noticed that many people are nervous talking about their strengths. When we reach the summary section, skills section, or experience descriptions, many clients immediately cringe from my suggestion of expanding the verbiage to include more strengths. Generally speaking, individuals fall into two camps: they either say they “don’t want to brag” or they “don’t have any strengths.” For those who don’t want to brag, my response is fairly simple: it isn’t bragging, it’s...
read moreKick Your Job Search into High Gear
If you are like many people, then performing a job search can start to wear on you very quickly. In my own job searches, I became fatigued after about 3 weeks—I would apply to job ads online incessantly, and then become disheartened when I didn’t hear anything. Struggling to land even an interview can be very discouraging, and can lead to you ceasing to apply altogether. Rather than letting your job search get bogged down, try the steps I’ve included below. Sometimes, to land that interview and find your next opportunity, you just have to change the way you do things to get more leverage out...
read moreThe Importance of Communicating Well
Communication. It’s a word that everyone agrees is important, yet many people have difficulty accomplishing it well. There are a lot of measures to define communication effectiveness. The one that I use is to ask myself 6 questions about my communication to ensure that I am communicating well individually and organizationally to build trust, and also ensure that I am accomplishing what I say I will accomplish. Why? When I think through the purpose of a message/conversation, I ask myself what I am trying to accomplish. I think we’ve all seen the e-mail chains in which everyone makes a...
read moreCreating a Killer LinkedIn Headline
Is your LinkedIn headline less than it could be? The LinkedIn headline is a surprisingly important part of the networking site. It’s one of the key pieces of information used in the search algorithm, and it is the first information someone will get upon doing a search. Yet many people leave the LinkedIn headline as-is with the basic LinkedIn formatting: your current position AT your current company. This is a perfectly fine starting point, but to have a really good LinkedIn headline, you must change it up. Your headline is a snapshot of who you are and what skills you have to offer. It...
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