Tag Archives: Job Interview Preparation

How to Succeed in a Phone Interview

Last week I gave the best advice I had for an in-person interview. If you missed it or need a refresher you can read it here. While I know that not everyone will have to experience a phone interview, they are becoming more popular and I want to make sure that if you have one, you’re as prepared as possible.

Preparation

Just because you aren’t going into an office doesn’t mean that you can just go into it without any preparation. Like any interview, you should be researching the company and starting to get familiar with what the company does, who works for the company, and who is going to be interviewing you. Knowing some of these key elements and mentioning them in your interview could really set you apart from other candidates. You can even use being in a remote location to your advantage and keep a page of …

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Top 5 Interview Horrors

It’s that time of year again. Leaves are starting to fall and there’s a cold bite in the morning air. The sunny days are dwindling as our nights get longer and darker. While your friends are looking for a costume of Harley Quinn and that girl from Stranger Things (where’s my Eggo?), you are spending Halloween alone at home preparing for a job interview. What a terrifying sight! But don’t you fear, we’ve mapped out the top five interview horrors to avoid and come out of the interview alive (and employed)!

1. Surely you thought making a pit stop at McDonalds before your interview was a great idea, but now your pressed shirt is covered in ketchup. Or is that blood?

2. You got lost in the company building and can’t find where you’re supposed to go. The email said room 666 in Building B, but you’re only seeing rooms …

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Soft Skills vs. Hard Skills: What Matters the Most?

Throughout our young adult life, we’ve experienced many victories — from years in formal schooling to tribulations that come along with navigating between different jobs, friends and personal strategies of success.

These countless learning experiences began at a young age with critical decision making and problem solving in the classroom. We grasped these understandings over time and their effects rippled throughout our adolescence and beyond, shaping our perceptions and personality. When the time comes to enter into the real world and search for a job after graduation (and it will come sooner than you think), you will be called upon by future employers to explain what skills and assets you possess naturally or those you’ve picked up along the way.

As students, many of us tend to focus on the hard skills we possess that correlate with our natural capacity for intelligence, our chosen degree or academic accolades. We willingly …

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Interview Preparedness Guide

An interview can cause stress and panic. You may spend hours on Google searching for what to wear, what to ask during the interview or what to do after the interview. Here’s a guide to help you prepare for an interview and reduce your stress level.

By preparing your interview outfit in advance, you can help ease the morning stress of worrying about what you’re going to wear. Also, this gives you the opportunity to iron, hem, sew on buttons or lint roll your outfit. What you’re wearing to the interview should correlate with the organization you’re interviewing at. A corporate law firm is going to have a very professional dress code and you should wear a neat suit. However, for a more relaxed organization you may consider losing the tie. If you’re unsure about what the company dress code is, do some research on its web site …

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Want to Perform Your Best at Your Next Internship Interview?

Entry by Pat Patterson

Aside from the usual interview preparation – researching the organization and opportunity, preparing answers to questions, dressing in appropriate professional attire, etc. – the key to performing your best at your next internship interview is to get enough sleep the night before, so be prepared to catch some zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzs




 

According to studies discussed in Brain Rules, a book by molecular biologist Dr. John Medina, sleep helps our brains function at peak performance:

To highlight this, Medina refers to a study in which math graduate students were given a problem and told the way to solve it. 

“It was a bonehead solution,” Medina says. “Unbeknownst to students, there was a much more elegant way to solve the math problem.”

The researchers, who wanted to study the effect of sleep on cognition, broke the students into two groups, Group A and Group B. With 12 …

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