29Jun

What Makes a Great Place to Work?

ShakaibEntrepreneurs

Love Where You Work

Are you feeling secure in your job? Do you love the people you work with? Do you work well with those people in a collaborative environment that fosters the development of ideas and creativity? Do you sleep well at night and wake up feeling ready to start the day off right?

Or do you fight insomnia, worried about what the following day will bring? Do you dread starting your day? Are you apprehensive about speaking with coworkers during meetings and events? Do you feel unappreciated by the people you work with? Do you impatiently wait for the end of your workday so that you can be free?

More and more, people understand the value of their mental health as it pertains to the workplace. Many employees are leaving their current positions searching for something more fulfilling and better suited to their principles and values. Compensation doesn’t always come in the form of the all-mighty dollar. It comes in the form of time, flexibility, appreciation, and “joie de vivre.”

People aren’t just leaving the workforce; they are reconfiguring their careers. Some are going for better positions, while others have opted to work for themselves.

If you are looking to switch career gears, do your research and pay close attention to some of the broader aspects of an organization.

Work Environment

Does the opportunity foster an environment of flexibility and balance? No two people are alike. Today’s professionals are enthusiastic about being able to work wherever they know they can be the most productive.

Professional Growth

Are you currently burned-out, or are you “bored-out” in your current job? Professional growth is a top motivator for people looking to switch careers. Look for a place that inspires and motivates employees, promotes professional development, and encourages people to expand their expertise.

Respect

It’s such a self-esteem boost when you’re appreciated and valued by those you work with. The best leaders ensure that everyone is treated with dignity and respect. Make sure you examine how company leaders care for their employees.

Teamwork

You want to feel safe working in a place that inspires a collaborative culture. It’s not practical to have a Pollyanna view that you will like everyone you work with, but it helps if colleagues adopt an environment of mutual respect and ensure a secure exchange of ideas. Your team should be willing to move forward, accomplish goals, and work together as a winning team. When conflicts arise, those issues should be addressed equitably and without favoritism.

Bottom Line

Your career takes up a large part of your waking life. Balance is key. There are good days and not-so-great ones. But you shouldn’t be miserable in your job every single day.

If you’re thinking of making an employment change, seek out companies that will fill you with confidence and a sense of accomplishment. If you decide to conduct a job search, do thorough research on the companies you are applying for. Read about their missions and values, hear what current and former employees have to say about the work environment, and don’t be afraid to ask questions during interviews about culture, vision, and values.

18Jun

Be Prepared for these Types of Interview Questions

ShakaibConsultation

Getting Ready for your Next Interview?

You’re feeling confident. You’ve reviewed your resume, practiced your introduction, searched for common interview questions, and prepared your answers.

The interview starts and when the interviewer says, “Tell me about a time you disagreed with a colleague,” you are ready to go and launch straight into an epic story, certain to awe and inspire all who are in earshot.

Or… maybe not. Don’t panic. The most important thing to remember is to be honest, conversational, and be YOU. Be ready for three of the most popular types of interview questions:

  1. Behavioral
  2. Situational
  3. Technical

Behavioral Interview Questions

Interviewers often ask behavioral questions to evaluate and predict the potential performance of a candidate by learning how they conduct themselves in previous employment situations. They issue prompts that ask you to provide a real-life example of how you handled a certain kind of situation at work in the past.

In answering these questions, you want to remember to use personal pronouns: “I, me, and my” because you want to highlight your responsibilities. Hiring managers don’t want to know how your current team handles things, they want to know how you can accomplish tasks.

Common questions include:

“Tell me a time you dealt with …”

“Tell me about a time when you leveraged …”

“Talk to me about how you dealt with an uncomfortable situation with a work colleague.”

You can answer these using the STAR Method. STAR stands for:

  • Situation
  • Task
  • Action
  • Result

This will set the scene, explain the situation, identify your task and responsibility, and describe the action you took and the results. It’s helpful because it provides a simple framework for helping you tell a meaningful story about a previous work experience. So, let’s break it down.

Situation: Set the scene and give the necessary details of your example.

“In my previous sales role, I was put in charge of the transfer to an entirely new  CRM system—on top of handling my daily sales calls and responsibilities.”

Task: Describe what your responsibility was in that situation.

“The goal was to have the migration to the new CRM database completed by the third quarter, without letting any of my own sales numbers slip below my targets.”

Action: Explain the steps you took to address it.

“To do that, I had to be wary of time management. So, I blocked off an hour each to dedicate solely to the CRM migration. Doing this gave me enough time to chip away at that project while still handling my normal tasks.”

Result: Share what outcomes your actions achieved.

“As a result, the transfer was completed two weeks ahead of the deadline, and I finished the quarter 10% ahead of my sales goal.”

Too many candidates skip over this crucial, final part of their response. They don’t  clarify how their action made an impact—the result (and most vital element of the story.)

Remember, interviewers not only care about what you did, but they also want to know why it mattered. Make sure you emphasize the results you achieved and quantify them when you can. Numbers make a significant impact.

Your Response (Result): “As a result of those additions to our email strategy, I was able to increase our subscriber list from 25,000 subscribers to 40,000 subscribers in 3 months—which exceeded our goal by 20%.”

Situational Interview Questions

You may be asked situational-type questions that examine and evaluate your critical thinking and decision-making skills during an interview.

These are in-depth, hypothetical questions that can help assess your critical thinking skills, creativity, and how you may respond to potential challenges at work. These questions usually begin with, “How would you handle XYZ if you…?” or “What would you do if…?”

To answer these, you can again implement the STAR method and talk about how you’ve experienced a similar scenario and how it relates to the hypothetical situation. Explain what happened, describe the challenge, outline the action you took to remedy the problem, and finally talk about the results.

Technical Interview Questions

In today’s world, it’s crucial for an interviewer to assess your technical proficiency. During your interview, the potential employer may assess your comprehension, aptitude, and skills as they relate to the job at hand. You can best answer these questions in one of three ways:

  1. You have used the technology in question before. Explain how, when, and where you’ve used it in your job.
  2. You have not used the technology but used similar technologies. Explain how they are comparable and how you use or have used them in your career.
  3. You have not used the technology before but you are familiar with it. Explain your willingness to learn and highlight how you’ve learned a new technology in the past rather quickly and how you accomplished it.

Ultimately, when it comes to answering interview questions, practice makes permanent. So, when it comes to all interviews, have some stories prepared and rehearse. You’ll sound natural and conversational in no time.

10Jun

Leadership and Culture in the Workplace

ShakaibLeadership

Leadership and Culture in the Workplace

How do you feel about your workplace culture and is it the right match for you? Are you comfortable and happy where you work? Does the company cultivate dignity, loyalty, and respect?

Knowing what’s essential for you when it comes to corporate culture is vital when seeking out new career opportunities. Perhaps you’re a perfectionist that can’t bear incompetence. Maybe you are the type of person who needs an environment that lends itself to creativity. Or perchance your dream career involves working for a company with a mission you’re truly passionate about in a collaborative environment. It’s important to assess these things as you consider employment opportunities. A great way to measure workplace culture in advance is by examining a company’s leadership.

Look at a potential employer’s beliefs on things like work-life balance. Examine if management allows for schedule flexibility, personal time off, or other perks such as onsite daycare or fitness centers. Evaluate their views on collaboration and productivity —see if teammates understand how to work well together and if priorities are clear, transparent, and honest.

Ultimately, leaders should lead by example. A company needs to be unified by core values, beliefs, and goals that support productivity and innovation, with management that lives by those values. Look for signs that the leadership adheres to its own corporate ideals. Culture and leadership are two sides of the same coin. The leaders’ values and preferences have a trickledown effect that eventually becomes the culture of the greater group. Leaders shape culture.

One of the best ways to see if leadership is positively contributing to an organization’s culture is to do your research. See if those in charge establish a culture where people can prosper and have fun. Find out if employees feel like part of a family and if their workplace exhibits a sense of value and connection. People should be thriving and taking pride in projects and accomplishments in an environment that encourages interpersonal relationship building.

Effective leaders know their companies’ successes depend on not just a service or product, but the people who carry out the vision day in and day out – their employees.

‘You can design, create, and build the most wonderful place in the world. But it takes people to make the dream a reality.’

08May

Working With Recruiters During Your Job Search

ShakaibFranchising

How to Work With a Recruiter – and How to Get Them to Notice You on LinkedIn

There are some serious misconceptions about recruiters. We hear this one a lot: recruiters only work for their clients, not their candidates. But we do work for candidates in the sense that when we have a position available, we do our very best to present them in the best possible light. We coach our candidates, we help them with their resumes, we assist with painful salary discussions, and we advise them what to wear for their interview in order to fit in with the company culture. It’s not all about the client – and we really wish the world would ghost that misconception.

The truth is, working with a recruiter can be the best thing to happen to your job search. With our access to jobs that aren’t otherwise posted and our vast experience in our industries of choice, we will give you that extra push into success. So, how do you find the right recruiter to work with?

How to start a relationship with a recruiter

A relationship with a recruiter usually begins one of two ways. Either you apply to a job posted by a recruiter, or a recruiter finds you from a resume database (like Dice, CareerBuilder, Monster, Indeed, etc) or on LinkedIn.

When you get contacted by a recruiter, it usually starts off with a message describing the opportunity at a very surface level to gauge your interest. From there, phone calls describing the job in more detail will happen, and so will discussions about salary expectations and interview availability. Your recruiter will then work with you and your resume. They’ll rework sentences in order to include action verbs and highlights that reflect hard numbers. They’ll edit sections of your work history to include specifics that are desirable to the client. They’ll rearrange your skills in order of importance. Think of a recruiter as someone who has an ‘in’ with the client, who knows exactly what the client wants, and knows how to present you in the best possible light. Working with recruiters is a win all around.

Now, remember a couple of paragraphs above where I said a relationship usually begins one of two ways? That’s because there is a third, lesser-traveled road: networking. It’s totally ok to find some recruiters you want to work with and send them a connection request on LinkedIn, even if they don’t have a job you’re suited for at the time. Start liking and commenting on their posts. Build a natural relationship with them, so that when the time does come that they have a good opportunity, you’re first of mind.

The inverse also sometimes happens. A recruiter may connect with you, even if they don’t have a position available, because they love your profile and know that one day, they will have something for you.

How to get noticed by recruiters on LinkedIn

Make sure you turn on the “Open to new opportunities” feature.

I’ve run some tests on this myself: when I have this feature turned off, I barely get contacted by recruiters – in a test that lasted a few months, I only received three requests from recruiters / hiring managers. With the feature turned on, I get a lot more recruiters reaching out. This shouldn’t be shocking to anyone – obviously, when someone knows for a fact you’re open to opportunities, they’ll be more likely to reach out. It’s a bit of a waste of time to reach out to people who aren’t actively looking.

Complete your profile

Location, skills, relevant positions, education – it all matters. Ideally, your profile should be as complete as your resume and a recruiter would only need to take a quick glance to see if they’re interested in learning more about you and your needs.

You also should have a good headline. If you think about it, your headline is one of the first things anyone will see on LinkedIn – it’s what you use to hook someone into clicking on your profile. The default for LinkedIn is [current job title] at [company], so make sure you customize it. You do still want a couple of keywords, of course, but the headline is meant to let a bit of you shine through: what value do you bring to a company? What makes you good at what you do?

I’m not an expert at writing headlines for other people, so I’ll leave you with a good article from The Muse on writing the perfect headline.

Use a good headshot

Down with grainy low quality photos! Down with selfies! Down with photos of people vaping! You might think I’m kidding on the third one, but nope – I’ve seen way too many profile pictures of people with huge vape clouds… which, unless you’re in the vaping industry, you shouldn’t do.

It takes only a few minutes to go outside and have a friend, relative, or self-timer take a good picture of you with nice nature background. And you don’t need a DSLR to take a good picture – smartphones can produce great photos that are certainly professional enough for LinkedIn. So, invest in your profile and get a new, high-quality photo up.

A warning about putting your resume in a database

Harnessing the power of a resume aggregator like Indeed can be helpful in your job search, but it can also have unintended consequences, should you make your resume public – which, if you’re trying to get people to find you, you have to do.

Think about it: if your current employer finds your resume, it might result in a very hard conversation about why you’re looking for new employment – and could potentially end with you losing your job. So, just be aware that these things can unfortunately happen. You just have to weigh the pros and cons. Personally, I wouldn’t risk it. I think it’s much more worthwhile to leverage LinkedIn since the platform is saturated with good recruiters that want to match you with the right job and company.

We’re here to help

Sometimes, recruiters might not be able to help you – for example, if you’re in an industry they’re less experienced with – but if you’ve built a good relationship with them, they might know recruiters in your industry that you can connect with or even a hiring manager they can introduce you to. Be kind, be genuine, and be interested – those are certainly keys to building a good relationship with a recruiter.