Last-Minute Interview Preparation

Even if you have less than a day before your job interview, you can outshine the competition with a little interview preparation. The following four tasks will take you about four hours (plus five minutes) to complete, and you'll walk into the interview confident you'll be successful.

Conduct Basic Interview Research

To prepare for an interview, find out as much as you can beforehand. Call the person who scheduled your interview and ask:

• Who will you be talking to? Will you meet the manager you'd work for, or will you just talk to HR? What are the interviewer's expectations?
• What's the dress code? Dress better than suggested. Most times, it's best to wear a professional suit. You'd be amazed how many candidates show up looking like they're going to class, not presenting a professional demeanor.
• Get directions to the office. Plan to leave early. Keep a phone number to call if you get stuck on the bus or in traffic. If you arrive late and stressed, the interview will not go well.
• If you don't have a detailed job description, ask for one.

That's a five-minute phone call.

Learn About the Company Online

Do some fast Web research, which will give you something to talk about in addition to the job description. Go to the employer's Web site, or search the Web for information such as:

• How big is the company in terms of annual sales or employees?
• What does the company say about its products or services?
• What recent news (such as a new product, a press release, an interview with the CEO) can you discuss?
• If the company is public, the boilerplate at the bottom of its press releases will tell you a lot.

Basic research should take you about an hour.

Think of Some Stories

Be ready to answer typical interview questions with a story about yourself. To prepare, write down and memorize three achievement stories. Tell about times you've really felt proud of an achievement at work or school. These stories demonstrate all those hard-to-measure qualities like judgment, initiative, teamwork or leadership. Wherever possible, quantify what you've done, e.g., "increased sales by 20 percent," "cut customer call waiting time in half," "streamlined delivery so that most customers had their job done in two days."

By the way, nonwork achievement stories are good too; if you volunteer for the local food pantry, write down a time you overcame a big challenge or a crisis there.

Achievement stories make you memorable, which is what you want. There's an exercise in Monster Careers: Interviewing called "Mastering the Freestyle Interview," which helps you develop these stories into compelling sales points.

Take the time you need -- at least three hours on this task.

Pick Your Outfit, and Go to Bed Early

Lay out your interview outfit the night before, get a good night's rest, and always get an early start. The last thing you want is to waste all of your interview preparation by arriving flustered and panicked because you couldn't find a parking space.

By Doug Hardy, Monster Staff Writer

Adapted from Monster Careers: Interviewing



Are you a manager or a leader?

Developing a leadership mindset, whatever your level, will get your career heading in the right direction. By Lisa Orrell, speaker and leadership coach.

The confusion between the roles of a manager and a leader has tripped up more than one business professional. Is ‘the person in charge’ automatically a leader? If you’re managing other people, are you also leading them? What is the difference between the two?

According to current wisdom, managers are principally administrators - they write business plans, set budgets, monitor progress and manage people - but sometimes without an effective leadership mindset. Leaders, on the other hand, get organisations and people to change.

Most business executives and owners have a mix of management and leadership skills. And quite often both are necessary to run a successful team.

Be a leader at any level

Here is a key point that can settle confusion for you. Even if you manage just one person, regardless of what your role or title is, you are also a leader. Even if you currently manage no one, you can still take on leadership roles such as heading up a project or volunteering to plan the company’s annual picnic. So whether you are actually in a true management role with employees, or assuming a short term leadership role, cultivating a leadership mindset is critical.

Don’t think leadership is something that only occurs once you’re in an executive role. Your leadership mindset needs to start on day one of your very first job.

Not every person in a company wants to be a senior executive or ‘lead’ the whole business. But you should embrace some fundamental, effective leadership qualities within your management style.

Have you ever heard this saying: ‘People don’t leave companies; they leave managers’? You don’t want to be the leader people choose to leave.

10 differences between a manager mindset and leadership mindset

Leadership skills are flexible, responsive to change, and future-oriented.

• leaders set a standard of excellence – managers set a standard for performance
  
  
• leaders seek employee commitment – managers seek employee compliance
  
  
• leaders are proactive – managers are reactive
  
  
• leaders create change – managers maintain the status quo
  
  
• leaders take risk – managers are risk averse
  
  
• leaders are passionate – managers are controlling
  
  
• leaders create followers – managers have subordinates
  
  
• leaders use personal charisma – managers rely on bestowed authority
  
  
• leaders give credit – managers assign blame
  
  
• leaders care about what’s right – managers care about being right.

Managers who don’t choose to embody important leadership qualities suffer. And their employees and companies suffer.

Be a manager who blends management skills with a leadership mindset, and you will succeed in any role at any level your career takes you to.

---

Lisa Orrell is a speaker and a leadership coach. This article is contributed by CIMA (Chartered Institute of Management Accountants) and it first appeared in Velocity, CIMA's online bi-monthly magazine for its students. Visit www.cimaglobal.com

HR and the Learning Organisation

With the job scenario now moving towards knowledge for the competitive edge, HR will now be required to develop positive values, ethics and passion for the job. These will be the key elements to cultivate the talents, skills and creativity of the workforce.

HR will now have to re-look at its function, the broader HR system and the resulting employee behaviours, and determine how these 'architectures' can help the organisation excel.

The 21st century brings with it a new economic paradigm. The focus now is on brand recognition, knowledge, innovation and most importantly, human capital.

HR now becomes a Strategic Business Partner. It must develop systems for business performance, and it must evolve from its administrative role to driving the organisation to become a learning organisation.

In order for organisational learning to occur, individuals in the organisation must be willing and prepared to reveal their individual mental models, contrast them to one another, discuss the differences, and come to a unified perception of what that system really is.

This alignment of mental models can be referred to as developing a shared vision.

At the heart of a learning organisation is a shift of mind - from seeing ourselves as separate from the world to connected to the world, from seeing problems as caused by someone or something 'out there' to seeing how our own actions create the problems we experience. A learning organisation is a place where people are continually discovering how they create their reality and how they can change it.

(References: Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline, Brian E. Becker, Mark A. Huselid, David Ulrich, the HR Scorecard - Linking People, Strategy, and Performance)

by Marcia Nicholas

How to Seek Jobs in Malaysia?

It is never an easy task to find jobs. It is a competitive world and you just have to outclass the rest. Having being a job seeker myself, I find that it's important to compile a to-do list when you are on a mission to find a job. Although it's written based on Malaysia, the same concept applies to any part of the world.

Here are a few simple items you should take note when seeking for jobs:

Search in Jobs directory. It is the place where career and human resources links are provided to you for your convenience. You could either apply directly via the sites or you could contact the HR departments of the hiring companies. There are a few famous Malaysia job directories which you could count on such as JobsMalaysia.info, Jobstreet, JobsDB Malaysia, Jen Jobs and Malaysia Central. You can search more in Google for terms such as Malaysia jobs directories, Job websites in Malaysia.

On the other hand, if you are interested to work with the Malaysian Government, they too have a portal specially for vacancies in the government sector. It is actually very simple to search for a job in the Government sector. Just google for "vacancies in Malaysia government".

Next on the list will be recruitment agencies. Some job seekers do not really favour recruitment agencies because they need to pay a fee to the agents. Sometimes it is a one-time flat fee and there are times where it is based on a sliding scale on the length of time the employee is attached to the hiring company. However, out out desperation, job seekers still end up opting to this choice. Some of the well-known recruitment agencies in Malaysia are Adecco Asia, ManPower Staffing, Kelly Services, JAC recruitment and PM Resources.

If you are an independent person and you believe that you would want to try all this yourself, then the best solution is to manually find the job yourself. How? Well, you could physically go to the companies and submit your applications to the Human Resources Department (but it is not very practical nowadays as you are rarely allowed to simply enter a company without any appointments).

Hence, electronic mail (e-mail) is your best chance. Just visit the company websites and go to "contact us" section. Usually they have career or hr emails listed on their websites. Remember to produce a presentable resume and email it to them. Wait for the good news! The rule of thumb is send A LOT of applications daily. Send at least 50-70 applications daily.

Last but not least, a conventional way of searching for jobs is still worth the try. A lot of companies STILL advertise job vacancies on the newspaper. If you are actively in need of jobs, purchase newspapers every day and dive into the jobs or classified sections.

Using the above methods helped me to find an online marketing vacancy for SEO Singapore so I hope the tips mentioned above on jobs searching are useful to everyone particularly Malaysian. Online, using the web, is the main resource for searching but traditional print and magazines can also be of help.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Ken_Mcewan