Why Childrens Characters are Helping to Recruit

Why Childrens Characters are Helping to Recruit Now it may be a question you might have asked while interviewing potential employees, but how seriously should you consider the answer to which childrens character best describes you? A British shoe repair and key cutting business is doing just that. Timpson are now recruiting staff according to which Mr Men characters their personalities resemble. But which Mr Men or Little Miss character would you want to hire? Here are some of the most well-known ones for you to choose from: 1. Mr Tickle He is the very first Mr Men character that was ever created and as his name suggests, he just cant stop tickling people. Now this could be interpreted in two ways if your potential employee says they are like him. They are either the office prankster, who likes to have a bit of a laugh and a joke or they are the person who can change anyones mood and make them laugh. 2. Little Miss Sunshine Now if you recruit someone who likens themselves to this character then you can pretty much guarantee this is a person  who always has a cheery disposition. They are happy to be at work and sprinkle little rays of sunshine wherever they go and on whoever they meet. 3. Mr Greedy Whilst you might admire someone who shows drive and ambition, you want to be a little bit wary of someone who compared themselves to this character. Greed is not a good trait and certainly not in the workplace. #Timpson are using #MrMen to recruit new people! Which one are you? pic.twitter.com/XaI0cIJvrd GoCustom Clothing (@_GoCustom) April 24, 2017 4. Mr Nosey Everyone has an inquisitive side and sometimes being curious is not always a bad thing especially if the job is for a detective or in investigations. But lets face it nobody likes someone who is so nosey that colleagues immediately stop talking when that person walks in to the room or worse still someone who constantly fishes for information which is no concern of theirs. 5. Little Miss Splendid We all like our staff to take care of their appearance and make an effort but when their appearance is so much of a distraction that its stopping others from doing their work, would they really be the best hire? Before you know it they will be asking for time off to get their hair or nails done or worse still using precious work time to buy that new must-have outfit online. 6. Mr Lazy They do say honesty is the best policy but if any potential employee says they are a lot like Mr Lazy then you may want to pass them up. There is nothing worse than an employee who doesnt pull their weight or finish the task in hand and its even worse if their work colleagues have to pick up the slack. 7. Little Miss Trouble Avoid at all costs. I dont think anything else needs to be said. Nobody wants a troublemaker in the work place. Just the thought of all the times you need to report them to HR is enough to give anyone a headache. So unless youre completely mad or want to set yourself a challenge, then I would give anyone who says theyre like this character a wide berth! Now using childrens book characters might not be the right approach for everyone as sometimes a strong CV and a particular skillset are key to whether someone gets hired. But if you want to hire purely on personality or character then why limit yourself to childrens characters, you could ask them to describe themselves as an animal, favourite movie character or weather!

Five Reasons Networking Is Hurting Your Career - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career

Five Reasons Networking Is Hurting Your Career - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career Studies for the past 40 years have reported that between 45% and 70% of all jobs are found through networking, yet most career seekers spend a minor portion of their job search time networking. If you are a typical seeker, then the first reason networking is hurting your career is because you are not doing enough of it. Do more and you can uncover more opportunities sooner. I enjoy networking and make it a part of my activities on an ongoing basis, mostly meeting one on one with other business people and entrepreneurs. After twelve  years of consistent networking, I  seek to limit the amount of time I spend with job seekers because they tend to be  too self-focused (I am being polite). Just last week, I had a two hour meeting in which the seeker  spoke about himself and his situation  almost the entire time. So, if you are a typical  career seeker,  the second reason networking is hurting your career is because you are too self-centered and turn people off. Be more balanced in your networking discussions and you will develop more interpersonal rapport sooner. Most career seekers lack clear goals for their networking. They meet and talk, then leave with parting comments such as If you hear of an opportunity that you think would fit me, please let me know. So, if you are a typical career seeker, the third reason networking is hurting your career is because you are not making effective requests for action from the people you meet. Ask for introductions to specific,  useful contacts and  you will connect with new quality people who increase your odds of  success. When you request someone to meet with you in person or chat over the phone, they expect you to have an agenda. Most career seekers, however, dont. They have rambling, casual conversations that tend to lead nowhere. So, if you are a typical career seeker, the fourth reason networking is hurting your career is because you fail to have a pre-planned agenda that guides your conversations. In  the networking  chapter of my career book, I recommend a simple and effective four stage agenda for your networking meetings and calls warm them up, seek to identify ways to help the other person, discuss your needs and get useful introductions, and recap who has what action items to be accomplished in what time frames. Follow this recipe and you will better insure your meetings are more effective. Your follow through (or lack thereof) during your networking gives people ideas as to how organized you are. Most career seekers fail to follow up in a timely manner or do so in an unprofessional manner, which makes them wonder if this will be your behavior with others such as contacts to which they introduce you. So, if you are a typical career seeker, the fifth reason networking is hurting your career is because you dont follow through in a timely or professional manner. Improve your behaviors in this important area and you will generate results sooner. While I could give several other reasons your networking may be hurting your career  based upon networking with  hundreds of career seekers, this is a good sampling of some of the more notable things to consider when you next decide to put yourself out there.

10 Minute Facelift for Your Resume

10 Minute Facelift for Your Resume You have a resume that you worked hard on. To you, it seems exhaustive, well organized, and the time you put into it has evoked a sense of pride at your finished work. Unfortunately, your perspective of your own resume pales in comparison to what a hiring manager or recruiter might think of your resume.You’ve already invested a lot of time into your resume. Maybe you did, but your content and organization are missing the mark. In that case, you might have to go back to the drawing board. But if you feel confident that you’ve at least done a good job transferring the appropriate information onto the page, then here are some quick revisions you can make to polish your resume.Consistent FontYour .5 font size changes aren’t fooling anyone.Some people are so obsessed with the notion that all their work experience must fit onto onesingle pagethat they go to great lengths to shove all their content together to make it so. The descriptions of your work experience are in 12-point font w hile your skills at the bottom of the page are reduced to 11.5 font. If you make it 12-point, it’ll jump to the second page! The horror!Click through your resume and make sure the font sizes are consistent. Maybe all your headings are in size 16 while sub-headings are in 12 and the descriptions are in 10.5. Going below 10-point font may begin to become unreadable.Aesthetically Appealing LayoutYour “custom margins” of .25s and .75s are not worth it.Similarly, space-saving obsessed job seekers will stretch out their margins as narrow as they can to make their content fit on one page. While this may help accomplish what you’ve set out to do, it compromises the overall aesthetic of the page.If you’ve gotten all your information onto one page, that isn’t necessarily a cause for celebration. If it required so much tactic and strategy, it’s likely that your resume looks flooded with words.Along with the actual margins, you should make sure you’ve laid out the content in a l ogical way. For example, your work experience should be in chronological order with your most recent experience at the top. Another example would be how you separate your education field from your skills and work experience â€" perhaps you incorporate some borders or lines to separate these. Length of ResumeA resume should be concise, clean, minimal, and easy to read. If a hiring manager sees a page full of words, they’re not going to want to take the time to read through it all. You should make it as easy as possible for the recruiter or hiring manager to see what they need to see.If you’re a seasoned professional with years of experience, a 2nd page may be necessary! If you’re a recent college graduate, you might just be using twelve too many words to say what needs to be said. In the college grad’s case, one page should be enough without needing to change fonts and margins to make it happen.If just a half a page worth of content is falling into the second page, this may c ompromise the appealing look of the page and more effort should be made to consolidate the information so it fits onto one page. If the last piece of work experience of the first page falls onto the second page, just click enter a few times to make that entire block of related information go to page 2, rather than having it cut off and splitting between two pages.Valuable ContentYour resume is not a consolidated list of job descriptions.A resume should not be a bullet point list of stuff you did. A resume is what you accomplished. A resume displays the exceptional things you did that prove you’d be an asset to an organization. An easy way to do this is to take out boring lines like, “Led advertising campaign,” and instead inject some metrics, key performance indicators, percentages, and other data that prove your campaigns, in this example, led to the accomplishment of something.GrammarIf it’s not a sentence, why is there a period?One of the simplest revisions to make is che cking for misspellings and sentence structures. If you no longer work at a company, your descriptions should be past tense. Begin each bullet with a verb and don’t end it with a period if it’s not a complete sentence. These are some of the simplest edits to make but also easy mistakes to make. If you’re not great with grammar and syntax, have someone else look it over for you. Or check out the free app Grammarly. A single misspelling can shatter the professionalism you hoped to convey with your resume.Save the File as:“My resume” and “resume revised 2017” aren’t the best resume file names.This is another revision that takes a few seconds to implement. When you send your resume to a hiring manager, you should assume that it will be added to a library of resumes. It’s very difficult to find John Doe if his resume is saved as “my resume.” You can keep this as simple as “Doe, John â€" Resume,” or even try to get a tad more creative with it. Leave words out like , “Revised,” or “FINAL.”Lastly, saving as a .pdf is the surest way to maintain the layout. If you used custom fonts and downloaded templates, these can get skewed when others open it in .doc form.Content Is KingAt the end of the day, the quality of your content is what will land you the interview. There are many things you can do to make your resume stand out and look great. These are just some of the quick fixes you could employ, but what will always matter the most, is the richness of the content.Most of your time should be spent on making sure you’re concisely and clearly articulating what sets you apart and how you’ve proven to be a valuable asset for previous employers. The content is your sales pitch!Once you’ve nailed down your content, craft the rest of it into a well-packaged page that hiring managers and recruiters are relieved to see among a pile of unreadable resumes.

Managing Your Personal Brand Without Going Insane - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career

Managing Your Personal Brand Without Going Insane - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career Managing your online identity is becoming very challenging because multiple social networks are launched each week and we all suffer from information overload. How do you keep up with everything, without losing your sanity? You don’t want to join every new social network, create a profile and start communicating on it because that’s not a scalable solution for any individual. Instead, you want to understand what you’re objectives are, and classify each network as either a personal network or a mass communication network. A personal network revolves around your inner circle of friends and family; whereas a mass communication network that allows you publish one message to hundreds or thousands of people who are interested in hearing what you have to say. These people could be in your professional network or just followers of your work. Personal network Facebook profile: Most people use their profiles to keep in touch with people who they know directly, instead of accepting random friend requests. Google Buzz: Everyone who uses Gmail now has “Buzz,” which is great for talking amongst numerous friends within a single message. Email / Instant Messaging: These are both mediums to connect one to one, instead of one to many. Mass communication network Facebook fan page: Instead of blocking people, who want to be your friend, forward them to a separate professional fan page on Facebook. Twitter: Each tweet you publish will be distributed publicly to everyone who follows you. Blogs: One of the main objects of a blog is to gain subscribers and to communicate posts consistently to them. LinkedIn: You should accept all requests so that your network expands exponentially, from first to third degree contacts. Why do I need both? Personal network The people that will go out of their way to support you are your inner circle and they should get treated differently than your audience at-large. Its the same as giving your loyal customers a coupon, or a free beverage or a VIP card. Your personal network deserves not only more attention, but a different level of interaction than your entire audience. This also goes back to the 80/20 rule, where 80% of your business comes from 20% of your customers. When it comes to networking, as noted in Me 2.0, 80% of your time should be used to create stronger relationships with 20% of your network (the percent that is crucial to your personal growth and development). Mass communication network Dont rule out all of your followers, most of whom you dont know by name or even by face. By using the above social networks as tools to connect to a large audience, you can be more well known and convert people from readers into acquaintances and then into friends. Of course not everyone of your followers will become a member of your trusted personal network though. A mass communication network allows you to get your message out to more people who want to hear from you and in effect pulls people into your world. Your turn How do you manage your personal network? What tools do you use to communicate to the masses?

Why You Need to Write a Resume Objective

Why You Need to Write a Resume ObjectiveResume objective should not be left out when writing a job description. One of the primary components of a job description is an introduction or goal and the resume objective falls into this category. In this article, we'll explore what the resume objective should actually mean, as well as what employers look for in a resume objective.A resume objective is the first part of the job description. You can't get past the resume objective without using it. It's always there, at the beginning of the job description, to set the tone for the rest of the document. That said, a resume objective doesn't have to be a complicated thing.Basically, you just need to set up a goal or something that needs to be accomplished before the rest of the job description gets started. The objective sets the scene for what the rest of the document is about, so it's really all about setting the stage. So, to help you get started, here are a few examples:There are many diff erent reasons why you might want to include an objective in your resume. For one thing, it helps you to show that you've done your homework. It says, 'This is my personal statement, and I'm pretty serious about this opportunity.' Most people will write an objective when they're applying for jobs they really don't feel prepared for.Of course, creating an objective is not a difficult part of writing a job description. The problem is finding an objective that actually expresses what you want to accomplish with the position. There are so many different types of resumes on the market today, with all sorts of resume objectives. The important thing is to make sure that your resume objective actually means what you think it means.It's also important to understand that the reason why employers ask for the resume objective is to weed out the applicants who don't mean what they say. Your objective may be short, but it should give them a general idea of what kind of applicant you are. Don't go overboard with your resume objective; it's very easy to read it and come away thinking, 'Man, that's not exactly what I was hoping for.' Be realistic with it.Another important thing to remember when crafting your resume objective is that it's just a starting point. Employers will want to know what you do beyond the objective. It's important to talk about what you enjoy doing in your spare time, your interests outside of work, and any other unique things you have going on in your life. When you add this to your resume objective, it makes it seem more like you're really qualified for the job. This makes you stand out from the crowd and puts you ahead of the pack, even if you haven't spent the money on a fancy resume writing service.Don't leave out the goal. Even though the resume objective is usually there to set the stage for the rest of the job description, it's still important to mention the goal as well. Having the goal in there gives you an additional reason to get back to your r esume. The rest of the document works together with the goal to highlight why you're the right person for the job.

4 Underrated Soft Skills To Add To Your CV - CareerEnlightenment.com

4 Underrated Soft Skills To Add To Your CV We’ve all heard of the specific skills that all CVS should boast: communicating well, working great in a term and being a good problem solver.  These are pretty run-of-the-mill, you just know that your potential employer is bombarded with these terms every time they sift through the piles of applications!If you want to stand out then think about using some less common ones to really add that extra  oomph  to your CV.FocusingThis is an attribute that should be more relevant than ever nowadays.   With social media and shortened attention spans, having the ability to focus can really benefit you in the workplace and in your hobbies.In his book, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, author Cal Newport highlights the benefits of focusing on more productive tasks! (Hint: not Facebook or Twitter.)Newport highlights three golden reasons as to why focusing is such a valuable skill.     Firstly, those periods of concentrated effort allow you to produce more than usual.   Second, you’ll stand out because most people opt to do the easier work options (eg. checking e-mails) as opposed to big projects.   Lastly, it maximizes your skills and talents in a way that gives your work more meaning and gives you more satisfaction.   It’s a win/win!Emotional IntelligenceOften overlooked, emotional intelligence is all about your ability to recognize and understand your emotions which is  increasingly regarded as a major key to success.   Having emotional intelligence benefits you in a number of ways. One of the most obvious is how it helps you create better professional relationships.By understanding what makes others tick and developing positive working relationships, you will also learn how to work better as a team.   Additionally, being able to understand your emotions and skills will help you problem solve with or without emotion at meetings. Want to Read More Articles Like This One?Sign up here to receive weekly updates from Career Enlightenment, and never miss another powerful job searching tip! SUBSCRIBE! You have Successfully Subscribed!We hate spam too. Unsubscribe any time. Attention to detailWhy is this important?   Well, according to a 2016 CareerBuilder survey, 40% of hiring managers spent less than 60 seconds looking at a resume.   That means if they spot one error in your resume then it’s more than likely that your application may get overlooked!Attention to Detail is a great quality to add to your CV for a number of reasons.  It shows that you’re efficient â€" you don’t need to re-visit tasks in order to correct them.   It also means that you aren’t known to waste valuable time and resources which is vital for a company.Another major advantage is clear and effective communication. (We all know how messy Chinese Whispers gets).   If the time isn’t put in to check over the initial message that by the time it reaches the destination, it could read as something entirely different.  Openness to FeedbackLets face it, nobody enjoys criticism!   However, having the ability to learn from others and take on constructive feedback can really benefit you.    Being able to do this is critical if you want to develop professionally and personally.   It is an investment in yourself.In Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well, authors Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen highlight some challenges when receiving feedback.   If someone is critical towards your work then it’s important to make sure that you’re not instantly defensive.Instead, ask for specifics.   By doing so, you can get to the observations leading to their judgment and impress your co-workers when you both hear and incorporate their feedback!

5 Tips to creating a curriculum with learning outcomes - Margaret Buj - Interview Coach

5 Tips to creating a curriculum with learning outcomes A curriculum serves as a guide for educators in teaching no matter what course they are teaching. They serve as the totality of the instructions, the lessons taught, the learners experience, amongst other things. When creating a curriculum for a course, whether its a science course for one semester in college or a writing course that will be taken over the summer, it is important to factor in the importance of having good learning outcomes. Learning outcomes are a description of the learning that the learners are supposed to achieve at the end of the learning period. These are not just knowledge but must include the action that the student or learner must be able to demonstrate. Aside from that, there should also be a condition and a performance standard that must be met when the evaluation is done. If you are planning to make a curriculum in the near future, take a look at the tips below to help you in creating one. Determine the purpose of the curriculum and the essentials that need to be learned when writing a curriculum, it might be tempting to cram as many subjects and learning experiences in the course, but you need be careful because you might be putting too much and the learners will just be stressed and pressured. Determine the most important things that need to be learned and build your curriculum around those skills. Remember that it is about the learner and not the instructor there is a tendency that teachers would want to show off all their skills and knowledge to their group of learners. But remember that it is not about you or what you want. The goal is for the learners to acquire new skills, so you need to create learning experiences with that goal in mind. Be clear about the learning outcomes that must be achieved dont state your objective by stating that at the end of the course, the learners will learn how to write. Make it more specific. If you are familiar with the SMART outcomes, then you know that your objectives should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound. Make use of Blooms taxonomy of objectives to help you when creating learning outcomes, do what most educators do and that is to get their verbs from Blooms Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. There are already levels to Blooms taxonomy, starting from knowledge, then comprehension. application. analysis, synthesis and lastly, evaluation. Be realistic about the timeline if your course only runs for a month or less, do not try to cram a semesters worth of facts and instruction into your curriculum. Be realistic about the time, and only put what can realistically be acquired by the learners. The important thing is for your learners to get new knowledge and learn new skills. Your learning outcomes do not have to be a lot. Some curriculum developers only write a couple of learning outcomes because more than that and might be hard to achieve.