Get Hired Stay Hired blog discussing professional resume writing and all things career related.

Even the most confident professional can get nervous during an interview. Sticking to the basics will help you focus on compelling answers instead of the butterflies in your stomach. Make sure your responses meet these three requirements for successful interviewing:

1. Relevancy:  Answer the question you are asked. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Many jobseekers don’t completely understand the question, and start talking hoping “it will come to them.” Warning: the answer won’t come to you. You will only get more anxious as you realize you are off track. Write down questions or ask for them to be repeated if you aren’t 100% clear. Winging it will only get you in trouble.
2. Conciseness:  When you violate rule #1, it leads to problems with rule #2. Interview answers should be approximately 2 minutes, long enough to provide enough information for the interviewer, while still holding their interest. Being concise gives the interviewer time to ask follow-up questions to delve deeper into the points that they are curious about. This back and forth allows for conversational engagement, which puts everyone at ease.
3.  Do No Harm:  Don’t say something you will regret. Violating rule #1 and rule #2 is the surest route to putting your foot in your mouth. While you are obligated to tell the truth in an interview, it’s not true confessions. If you start talking, unsure of the question, begin to ramble, the next thing you know you will be revealing how you haven’t gotten along with your boss since that bad performance evaluation. Ouch.

There are no do-overs for an interview. Take the time to prepare using the position description as your guide. Practice questions out loud and time your answers. Understand what your greatest weakness is, and explain how you overcame it. Most importantly, go back to the basics, and then relax. The interviewer is probably as nervous as you are.

What leaps to mind when someone mentions resume fraud? A high-profile executive that is fired in disgrace after lying about the college degrees they never obtained? While that still happens, the newer resume fraud occurs when a jobseeker steals content, often just copying and pasting information from someone else’s resume. Blogs abound with stories of a shocked poster who comes across their resume online with someone else’s name on it, virtually word for word. It is particularly rampant in the IT industry, where shady offshore recruiting firms copy US resumes for their clients to make them more marketable in America.

It doesn’t end there though. Just as common are cases of unsuspecting jobseekers that send their resume to co-workers, friends, and family for “their opinion.” This makes it very easy for the recipients to use the resume as their own if the occasion arises. Imagine a peer at work who has the same title and worked on the same projects with you over several years, there would probably be a lot of crossover in duties. Even so, would you feel comfortable with them using your resume, especially if you paid for it to be professionally written by a resume writer?  

I recall an HR Director who wanted me to coach him on his interviewing skills. He told me the “secret” to his “great” resume. He just keyword searched resumes in his company’s database, pulled out ones he liked that closely matched his skills, and pasted together the document. When I questioned his ethics, he just shrugged his shoulders and said, “it’s common practice.”

If that isn’t enough of an insult to jobseekers, there has also been an uptick in resume piracy. This is when unscrupulous recruiters pull resumes off job boards or the internet, then send them out to companies without the jobseekers knowledge or permission. This, along with identity theft resulting from information stolen off resumes, leads to a host of problems that could merit a whole other article.

What can you do? Here are some suggestions to reduce the odds of becoming a victim of resume theft:

• Protect your document before submitting it online or sending via email. A pdf is the most difficult to copy, and the first choice for sending via direct email. Not all job boards accept pdf, so use a protected word document in that case. It can still be copied, but at least it adds a layer of difficulty.
• Make sure your resume has many achievements specific to you. If someone is thinking of trying to steal your content, achievements are more difficult to justify in an interview, and they may think twice.
• Don’t put your drivers license or social security numbers, date of birth, or marital status on your resume.
• Create a new email to be used only for your job search, so you don’t corrupt the personal email you want to maintain. You will know anything suspicious that comes to this address is a result of your posting your resume, and will be easier to track.
• Thoroughly read the privacy policy of the sites where you post your resume. Make sure they won’t sell your resume and have adequate privacy controls in place.
• Avoid submitting your resume for a “free resume critique.” Many of these services are unscrupulous and don’t provide useful advice to really improve your resume, and you don’t know how they will use your resume after you submit it.
• Limit your open job board postings. I know it sounds heretical to someone in the midst of a job search, but when you realize the majority of jobs are never posted online, the odds for success are low anyway.
• Spend your time networking and selectively sending out your resume, instead of competing with 100’s of jobseekers for an online position that may already have an internal candidate lined up to fill it.
• If a job posting has a vague or poorly written description, avoid it.

Treat your resume as you would any of your valuable identity papers. Doing so will limit your chances of being a resume theft victim, and protect your hard-earned career history from aiding someone else in getting the position you deserve.

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The only thing an employee fears more than getting laid off is getting fired. Executing a strategic career management plan is the best insurance available to protect you from being involuntarily terminated. Unfortunately, not all employees who are fired deserve it, just as there are workers that are laid off who should have been fired.

 Typically, there are two types of involuntary terminations, one covering personal misconduct or ethical violations, and another for poor job performance or absenteeism. The antidote for protecting yourself against being fired for personal misconduct or ethical violations is simple – don’t engage in that kind of behavior in the first place. The same goes for absenteeism. It can get a little stickier for an employee accused of being a poor performer, and we can hope there were clear measures in place to gauge quality of performance. 

Terminated for cause is another expression used when a company fires an employee. After my experience in corporate America, I think there is a third type – although not openly admitted – termination without cause. Often a company will veil the firing under the guise of the above reasons. When in reality, the root cause is politics, jealousy, revenge, or nepotism. Fortunately, there are tactics you can deploy to prevent becoming a target. 

Here are some career management guidelines: 

• Make yourself indispensable to your company. Have a hard to find talent or hold expertise necessary to the company’s growth. Cross-train in other departments.
• Request periodic reviews. Don’t just rely on an annual review for feedback on your performance. There is no excuse for being surprised with a bad appraisal.
• Stay ahead of the knowledge curve. Sign up for classes, learn new industry processes, and keep up with technology. Obtain a degree if you don’t have one.
• Don’t gossip or complain about your boss or co-workers. Even if your co-workers encourage it, don’t engage them.
• Volunteer and perform well on high-profile projects. This can attract the attention of managers outside your department, which can increase the odds of an inter-departmental transfer if problems arise.
• Document all your successes. The more evidence you gather the better, not only as proof you are excelling in your job, but as ammunition if neccessary.
• Become your boss’s ally, not a threat. If you are showing your manager up, even if it’s legitimate or easy to do, you may have to back off if it causes tension.
• Establish a relationship with at least two mentors. One inside the company, the other outside. Offer to be a mentor also. Your next boss may be someone you influenced on their way up who will remember.
• Be cognizant of warning signs. If there is a sudden coolness from your boss, Board Members aren’t returning your calls, and you are excluded from key meetings, it’s not an oversight.

You can reduce the odds of being fired, whether for cause or not, if you manage your career in a proactive way. If you are engaged in monitoring your performance and vigilant in reading the warning signs, you will be positioned to take corrective action, or do your best to move out of the firing line.

The allure of online job boards is undeniable. From the comfort and privacy of your home, you can search thousands of positions without ever leaving your chair. However, are they the most effective way for jobseekers to find new, full-time positions? The short answer is no. 

According to CareerXroads 8^th Annual Source of Hire Study: What Happened in 2008 and What it Means for 2009, CareerBuilder is accountable for 3.95% of external hires, Monster 3.14%, and HotJobs a paltry 1.35%. Numerous other surveys report even lower numbers, especially for 2009. Additional evidence of the decline is the rapidly decreasing ad and “pay to post” sales of all major job boards, and their aggressive search for new revenue streams and additional services to replace lost income.

 While the ineffectiveness of job boards is common knowledge in the career industry, many jobseekers aren’t aware of the low hit ratio. The major boards still heavily advertise on the TV, radio, and Internet, often supported with glowing success stories. Many job boards partner with media organizations by offering articles and services, and are often featured prominently in newspaper career sections. As this is a source of income for media outlets, some are reluctant to write revealing articles about this trend for fear of offending their partners, and risk jeopardizing much needed advertising dollars.

 Should jobseekers avoid job boards all together? No. Even if the success rate is low, it is still meaningful for the individual who obtains a new position through this medium. Just balance your online search activity with a much higher percentage of time on networking, which continues to be the number one source for securing new positions by a large margin.

 Here are several suggestions to improve your online search efforts:

•  Make sure your resume is uploaded in the exact format requested, e.g., .doc or .txt. Note that .docx is not widely accepted.
• Refresh your resume every week or two so it looks like a new submission and doesn’t get stale. Just as you search by date of position posted, sourcers search by date of resume posted.
• Use job board aggregators like Indeed.com or SimplyHired.com. These sites are great time savers as they provide an easily searchable database for thousands of boards in one location.
• Take advantage of industry association and niche job sites. And, don’t forget LinkedIn’s exclusive job postings.
• Apply directly to the company career board if possible. LinkUp.com is a nice website that features jobs aggregated exclusively from more than 22,000 company job boards.
• Create a resume that is rich with keywords that are reflected in the position description. This means you have to modify your resume for each specific position, every time.
• Label your resume document as “lastnamefirstname,” or “lastnamefirstname_position” to make it easier for the recipient to identify and remember you.
• Don’t put a date on your resume file (“resume_05-08”), as you don’t want to accentuate how long you may have been looking.

 Now that you are armed with tips to make your online search more productive, push away from the computer and get out there and network. That’s where you’ll get the biggest return on investment.