So, Why Don't You Tell Me About YourselfWritten by Linda Matias, JCTC, CEIP
"So, why don't you tell me about yourself?" is most frequently asked interview question. It's a question that most interviewees expect and one they have most difficulty answering. Though one could answer this open-ended question in a myriad of ways, key to answering this question or any other interview question is to offer a response that supports your career objective. This means that you shouldn't respond with comments about your hobbies, spouse, or extra curricular activities. Trust me, interviewers aren't interested.Interviewers use interview process as a vehicle to eliminate your candidacy. Every question they ask is used to differentiate your skills, experience, and personality with that of other candidates. They want to determine if what you have to offer will mesh with organization's mission and goals. If answered with care, your response to question, "So, why don't you tell me about yourself?" could compliment interviewers needs as well as support your agenda. This is a question you should be prepared to answer as opposed to attempting to "wing it". Follow four easy steps outlined below to ensure your response will grab interviewers attention. 1. Provide a brief introduction. Introduce attributes that are key to open position. Sample introduction: During my 10 years' of experience as a sales manager, I have mastered ability to coach, train, and motivate sales teams into reaching corporate goals. 2. Provide a career summary of your most recent work history. Your career summary is "meat" of your response, so it must support your job objective and it must be compelling. Keep your response limited to your current experience. Don't go back more than 10 years. Sample career summary: Most recently, at The Widget Corporation, I was challenged with turning around a stagnant territory that ranked last in sales in Northeastern region. Using strategies that have worked in past, I developed an aggressive sales campaign that focused on cultivating new accounts and nurturing existing client base. The results were tremendous. Within six months my sales team and I were able to revitalize territory and boost sales by 65%.
| | How to Take Advantage of Public RelationsWritten by Robert A. Kelly
Please feel free to publish this article and resource box in your ezine, newsletter, offline publication or website. A copy would be appreciated at bobkelly@TNI.net. Net word count is 760 including guidelines and resource box. Robert A. Kelly © 2003. How to Take Advantage of Public Relations Decide once and for all to do something about those outside audiences whose behaviors affect your organization most. When members of those “publics” of yours perceive and understand who and what you are, and like what they see, behaviors that flow from those perceptions will put a smile on your face. Good things happen like converting sales prospects into customers, convincing existing customers to stay with you, or even toning down activist rhetoric. Even internally, productivity often increases when employees conclude that you really do care about them. It’s all possible when you commit your organization to confront head-on those key target audience perceptions and behaviors. Easy to do? Well, it’s not so hard when you have a roadmap to guide you. Right at top, try listing, say, your top three outside audiences whose behaviors can really affect success of your organization. Let’s pick audience at top of list and go to work on it. Can’t take any chances on being wrong about what they think of you, so now’s time to start interacting with audience members. Ask a lot of questions. What do they think of your services or products? Is there a hint of negativity in their answers? Do you detect evil effects of a rumor? Are their facts inaccurate and in need of correction? What information gathering like this does for you is let you form a public relations goal. It could be as simple as correcting an inaccurate perception, clearing up a misconception or spiking that nasty rumor. Your goal might even have to take aim at a widespread belief that’s just plain wrong. With your goal set, how will you actually affect those perceptions? Of course, that takes a successful strategy. But when it comes down to really doing something about opinion, we have only three ways to go: create opinion if there is none, change existing opinion, or reinforce it. Just make sure strategy you choose flows logically from public relations goal you set.
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