Starting The Week With Power & Passion

Landing Your First Job: Tip One


Obviously the best way to put your best foot forward is to physically put your foot (and the rest of you) in front of the person you’re trying to impress. Unfortunately, that’s getting a few steps ahead of yourself. You may not be able to immediately put your fantastic self in front of your fantastic new job yet, but you have a few tools at your disposal to sing your praises for you.

Cover letter

Your cover letter is the warm up show. It’s your opener, introduction and a chance to showcase a little more personality than you can within the more structured confines of a resume.  It’s also your chance to show interest in your prospective employer while getting them interested in you.

Properly introduce yourself in the letter

When you first meet someone, you don’t say, “Hello Sir or Madame. What exactly does your company do? Well I guess I’m generic enough for you to ignore.”

You say, “Hello Mrs. Smith, what a pleasure it is to meet you. I’ve heard so much about your company. I was especially impressed by the inroads you were able to make in the European market last year. During my third year of university I had the opportunity to do a term in Germany. I believe my experiences there…” 



Show your interest in the company

Discuss how you can be an asset. Don’t be afraid to ask for an interview at the end of your cover letter. It shows you’re serious.

Be Personal With Your Potential Employer

If possible, make the cover letter personal. If you can, find out  the name of the person you’re sending it to. Absolutely know what the company does, their goals, awards and achievements and reference those in the letter. The fact that you cared enough to find out what you could about them will make them more inclined to want to find out more about you.

Write a different cover letter for each job

Again, your goal is to pique interest in you while setting yourself apart from the rest. Remember, it’s not always the most qualified person who gets the interview – people can be trained and taught, especially in entry-level positions. It’s about making an impression and warming up the hiring manager so they want to see more.

First impression

Even though you and the hiring manager have never met, putting your best foot forward with your cover letter is the first step to make a good impression.

Revise and edit

Double, triple and quadruple check your resume and cover letter. Once you’ve done that, get someone else to check it again. Typos somehow have the ability to become invisible to the person who made them. But they won’t be invisible to the person deciding whether or not to call someone in for an interview!

 

Landing Your First Job: The Prequel

The easy phase

Walking and talking, you’re barely out of your first year and that’s usually in the bag. We’ll just skip past the part about diapers and the trials and tribulations of primary school.

The adolescent years

Once you hit high school things start getting serious. For some, it’s four years of dedication, while others might take a year or two to really get down to work.

College or university?

By the last couple of years in high school, anyone serious about moving on to college or university and building a strong foundation for a future is working hard to achieve the marks to get into the school of their choice. At that time, it seems like the biggest challenge ahead of you is everything involved in getting into the post secondary school and program you’ve decided on.

The first job after graduation

Post secondary school is one challenge piled onto the next: Essays, exams and fitting in a social life. Then all of a sudden you’re done and all that hard work and those challenges are behind you.

Some people are fortunate to have a job already lined up so they can close the doors of school and open the doors of employment, but most aren’t that lucky.  For those who don’t have a job waiting for them, landing that first job after graduation is the newest, biggest challenge of their lives.

Over the next few days we’ll discuss 4 tips to help you tackle that challenge.  See you tomorrow for tip #1.

 

Everything Starts With A Thought

Thanks to healthcentral.com 

Avoiding Employment What-Ifs

If you could go back in time and start your job search all over again, would you? Are there things you would change or do differently?  Here are a few tips to help you avoid the “what ifs” as you move along in your job search and career.

Network, network, network

Networking is probably the most important factor in searching for or landing the job you want. Make a point of talking to professionals in the industry you are interested in. Also shoot out emails or phone calls to friends, family and professors. Like the saying goes: “it’s a small world” and you never know who they will know. Even if these people can’t connect you to a job or a hiring manager, they probably have insights about your field of choice or general career advice that can help you down the road.

Keep in touch with professionals in your field

After you reach out to people who can help you; keeping and building relationships is key. Check in with them with an email or phone call from time to time. Ask them how they are doing. If you notice that they’ve done something significant like publish an article online, email them and compliment them on their work.  As you get more comfortable, you can initiate a coffee meeting or lunch, a great opportunity to sit down with them one-on-one and talk about things that cannot be properly communicated through email.

Be up-to-date with current job market skills

It used to be that things changed slowly over time. Not anymore. Now things are always changing around the job market and work environment. For example, social media has become such a huge part of marketing today that many companies are looking for candidates who are good at it, even if the position they’re hiring for has nothing to do with social media. Make sure your skill are up to date and that you’re aware of current trends in your field so you’re not left in the dust.

Be honest

Don’t put something in your resume or cover letter that you’ve never done just to impress the hiring manager. At some point it’s going to come back to haunt you. Hold your head up high and make the most of what you’ve actually done and the amazing potential you have.

Keep an open mind

While setting high expectations is a great way to pave the road to success, don’t be too disappointed if you don’t end up in the job field of your choice on your first try. Remember, very few people land their dream job after graduation. You have to work your way up. Even if you find yourself in a completely different industry from the one you were planning on, keep your eye on the prize and continue moving towards it. There will be detours in the road no matter what you do. Just try and always ensure you’re going in the right general direction.

Monday Motivation

Success – So Much More Than It Appears To Be

When you look at a successful person or business, all you see is the happy end result where everything is shiny and shaking hands. Of course you have no idea what created that success or what else is beneath or behind that glimmering-for-the-world-to-see exterior.

You don’t see all the failures or disappointments. You don’t see the early mornings or late nights. You don’t see the persistence, stronger than the desire to stop, or the dedication to keep going through hard work that seems insurmountable.

What people see, the tip of the iceberg called success is beautiful. What’s beneath, the invisible majority, will sink ships that aren’t willing to navigate through treacherous waters in pursuit to their goal.

How Emotional Intelligence Influences Success

Stop Chasing A Good Night’s Sleep And Catch It

Do you sometimes feel like falling right back into bed when you wake up? Need ten cups of coffee just to function? Then you might need a sleep intervention.

Not getting the proper amount of sleep can affect every aspect of your life. It can slow your thinking, hinder your memory, make you more prone to illness and even cause depression. And worst of all, it may prevent you from having the energy and determination to search for jobs!

Obviously you don’t want to face any of those obstacles when you wake up, so here are a few tips to help you get and make the most of your good night’s sleep.

The Four Stages of the Sleep Cycle

You should understand a few things about sleep before you try to improve its quality – namely what sleep cycles are and their stages. So first off, a sleep cycle is a 90 minute cycle within the four stages: two REM (Rapid Eye Movement, which is caused by dreaming) and two non-REM. People generally need five or six cycles to feel well rested. If you can’t fit all of them in, it’s possible to feel adequately rested on just three or four, but you need to wake up at the right time.

Stage 1 – A very light sleep. The body is either easing into a shallow sleep from a deep one (stage 4), or easing into a shallow sleep from wakefulness. People are easily awoken at this stage with very few side effects. It’s about 10-15 minutes long and is the window we want to wake ourselves up in – but we’ll get to that later.

Stage 2 – In stage 2 your body is preparing for deep sleep. You’re less easily awakened here and your heart rate slows, and body temperature drops. Waking up isn’t terrible, but it’s sort of disorienting.

Stage 3 & 4 – These are your stages of deep sleep: 4 being much deeper than 3. They’re when the REM sleep sets in, and quite difficult to wake from. If you are awoken from stage 3 or 4, you’ll feel grumpy, groggy and disoriented. These stages make up the bulk of your cycle, and you do not want to wake up from either.

Get Sleep and Don’t Wake up Grumpy!

Waking up during stage 3 or 4 in the morning because of your alarm clock is probably why you hate mornings so much. So change it up!

Knowing that each cycle takes about 90 minutes to arrive at completion, and that the average person takes about 15 minutes to fall asleep, you can calculate the best time to wake up from whenever you want to go to sleep. Remember, you’re aiming for stage 1, which lasts 10 – 15 minutes, so you want to wake yourself up 5 or 10 minutes after the end of your last cycle.

If all that sounds a little too complicated, don’t worry! Here’s a sleep calculator which will do all the math for you!

You can also try turning your phone off or putting it to airplane mode at night (your phone gives off tiny electrical pulses that keep people sensitive to them awake). And you should definitely try reading a book instead of watching a lit screen – studies have shown that LED screens have the same effect on the brain as caffeine.

Keeping these tips in mind, good night and sweet dreams.

Just Because It’s a Phone Interview Doesn’t Mean You Should Be Any Less Prepared