Competing Successfully at Career Fairs

Standing out at a Job Fair can make a difference in your job hunt. Job Fairs are starting to pick up, and a major job search company is running some nice ones, called Targeted Job Fairs. At a SF Bay Area Job Faire in early 2010, 10 companies as showing up, and Dice has 82 job faires scheduled for this year across the States.

How do you rise above the crowd at a Job Faire? The contention can be significant, but you can help yourself leap out from the gang with early planning. At AA-Careers, we have a straight-forward six-step process to prepare. Planning to go? Here’s how to prepare:

First, investigate the companies that are going and pick your targets. Use the World Wide Web to check out the companies that are there ahead of time. Go to their websites and see if they have their jobs posted. Pick a moderate number to target, and get ready to spend up to an hour researching each one. It’s hard to do more than nine in a day, and four or five is a much more reasonable target. For each company, you want to know: recent news, key product lines, and contacts you know. Try to see if you know anyone at the target companies. You will end up with with a page or two of research for each company/job.

Second, if there are job openings on the web, read them to see what the hiring manager is looking for. Create a mapping of your accomplishments and skills to the prerequisites of the job. Make the language match. If the hiring company calls customers "clients", your resume should do the same thing. The accomplishments should be written in the style of the hiring organization.

Third, create a ‘brief sales pitch’ for each potential organization/position combination. Write down a 90 second ‘thumbnail’ that you can repeat verbally describing why you are a fantastic prospect for that position. You’ll use this in your resume and when you meet the company at the job kiosk.

Fourth, modify your resume for each position. The objective on your resume should exactly match the job you’re going after. The executive summary should be a written form of your “mini sales pitch” for the job. Then choose the accomplishments and skills that most clearly match the job prerequisites. Especially at a Career Faire, the purpose of your resume is a sales tool for you – to get you on-site job interviews. It should be very easy to see that you’re a fit based on your resume.

Fifth, dress and prepare as if you’re doing on-site interviews. Dress nicely and be fittingly groomed. Don’t overdress (this isn’t a date!) and don’t underdress (no jeans or t-shirts, no matter how much you paid for them). Avoid strong cologne or perfume.

Finally, practice your ‘mini-sales-pitch’. Collect your research and the resume for each spot - bring a couple of copies for each – and put each in a intelligibly labeled folder. Keep them in a light briefcase or folio.

Remember to smile, and good hunting!

The Harvesters Part 2

The Harvesters - Part 2 by Laurie Rogers Copyright 2001

Remember from part one, we are not talking about those folks who pick veggies out of the garden in the fall. This is definitely NOT an episode from Martha Stewart, although I’m curious to know how get my tomatoes to stop bruising, ooops, sorry got a little side tracked for a moment! It happens to the best of us, espicially when you’re weeding (pardon the pun) through all that spam trying to find your “real” email messages.

You know the important stuff, that really does need your FULL attention. And half the time you can’t find it because it’s buried under all that JUNK MAIL, I know how you feel, somedays I’d like to run to the highest mountain and SCREAM my head off. Maybe they’d listen, cause I sure as heck don’t get a response when I’m screaming at them through the computer. (You’re not the only one huh?)

Hopefully, someone will invent a system where you can talk to the email that comes in, the person sending can hear you right at that moment. That’d be awesome eh? Someone sends you some spam and you CAN tell them what is on your mind! You know, HOW you “really” appreciate their message. Although, I do NOT think we’d get much work done, cause we’d be too busy cussing them all out.

You have really got to wonder WHY they keep spamming cause *NOBODY* buys their stuff. And let’s be realistic for a moment, what in the world is the point in sending 1 person 500 copies of the SAME darn ad? I’m not the one who’s the MORON here! I can read, I simply choose NOT to read spam. And NO matter HOW many times you send it, it’s STILL not going to change my mind. (You’d really think they’d CLUE in after the first 250 copies.)

Is there some kind of contest out there that we’ve been missing? Do they offer awards for this kind of junk? I’m curious because, nobody buys their stuff, so what EXACTLY is the incentive? If it is a contest what qualifies you?

*The Most Creative Spammer

*The Spammer - who actually got “A” sale!

*The Spammer - who’s ISP never got shut down for a month!

*The Spammer - with most FAKE addresses

*The Most ANNOYING Spammer

What do you win if you qualify? 5 million FAKE email addresses? Cause you know they’re not going to give out a REAL prize! (Once a con always a con) And do they all compete for Spammer of the Year? It sure seems like it! The fact is life goes on, and no matter where you go and what you do, there will always some “STUPID” moron that just HAS to break the rules!

P.S. Try not wear out that good old delete key!

Did you miss part 1? Send a blank email to mailto:harvesterspart1@optinfrenzy.com

Mobile Broadband is going to be the Secret to the Future of Internet Connections

Mobile broadband is the new development in the technological world which will be the turning point to the development of high speed broadband. Up until recently, high speed connection has been delivered through a simple phone landline, ADSL cable, that connects to a terminal through an ADSL modem. Wireless high speed internet is going to be more and more famous, whereby the ADSL modem is linked to the PC via a wireless network, and as a consequence people are now clearing their homes of ADSL cables. However mobile broad band is pushing internet connections further and offering another idea in the evolution of internet; a broadband line nearly in any room without using a landline cable.

The prospect of going online with a fast high speed internet line anywhere is surely appealing to potential internet users, like those people that more and more use their PCs away from home. People who regularly travel for business meetings are the obvious target for mobile broad-band because they will surely welcome the fact of not having to search for a working WI-FI hotspot for a quite reliable connection. Mobile broad-band is going further than that, and when fees soon begin to come down and connection speeds improve we will soon witness a great number of high speed connection potential users applying for mobile fast speed connection.

Mobile broad band works by using a modem to any modern laptop, which is referred to as a ‘dongle’, from which your personal computer is able to go online using whichever mobile high speed connection connection the users have acquired. Internet providers are now supplying mobile high speed internet offers and coverage of the networks, also called third generation networks, which is reported to be as much as 90% of the United Kingdom.

Broad band speed is a key issue for any high speed internet connection and mobile high speed connection providers a few years ago struggled to market potential clients that a mobile high speed connection could perform as good as traditional, landline internet. Connections are better, recently Vodafone has reported mobile high speed internet speeds up to 7.3 mb, which is not that far from most of the fastest landline broadband. Some countries, including England, are ready to finance with huge resources in fibre optic cable networks, in an attempt to increase broad band line to up to 100 mb.

In New Zealand, however, a famous telecommunications provider has announced that mobile broad band networks will soon develop rapidly over the coming years and they have forecasted that mobile broadband will deliver speeds of up to 100mb by end of 2011, the year the GB’s fibre optic network will be completed. This will create a major shift in industry thinking, with the discovery of a reliable super fast mobile high speed connection network having serious advantages over the laying of thousands of Kms of fibre optic cables, not least from a practical point of view.