Personal Branding Opens Desirable Doors of Opportunity!

Brilliant secret that if others figure out, Helping Friends Career Network will explode with career inspiration and fun! Imagine if everyone were to have defined their value add so clearly that what you do best, shines visibly for all!

Corporate Branding Creates loyalty and trust!

At 3 years old my son Kyle could recognize the patterns- music, and variety of products as the Target Advertisements.. Why? Excellent Branding.. You have done a really great job if you don’t even SHOW your company name until the end of the advertisement and showing a different mix of products, people think– OHHH Target has that.

This is a topic that it is interesting and compelling. My husband works in one of those companies with a well known brand.. “With a name like ___, it’s GOT to be good’. Branding is powerful, it creates a feeling of trust and relationship. Branding matters!

Who do you think of when I say:

• ‘You can do it, we can help‘
• ‘Where do you want to go today?’
• ‘Breakfast of Champions’

If you said Home Depot; Microsoft; Wheaties, then you too are a brand genius.. and it’s important to learn that companies do not make themselves memorable on accident.

Personal Branding Creates distinction and value!

So if corporations spend thousands of dollars per campaign to create a memorable brand, what can an individual do to create a personal brand?

PersonalBrandingBlog.com, an award winning recruiting blogs which shares fantastic content for professional branding, interesting stories, and real life examples of how people are creating personal branding, that distinguishes them and at the same time, providing a concreate example for emulating other personal brand leaders!!

Learn from someone DOING what you aspire to do!

If you want to see how personal branding is done, check out Dan Schawbel’s profile to see what he has done to offer his credibility, his expertise, and his skills uniquely in a web 2.0 community.

In this pitch, he presents the benefits of personal branding for career professionals.

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Negotation Tips and Techniques

So we have covered Interviews, and this seemed to have been a popular topic according to your messages in response. In a similar vein, let’s explore the techniques for favorable negotiation.

1. Three Ingredients of Street Negotiation by Tristan Loo
2. Strategic Negotiations- Better Relationships Better Deals by Miller Herman.
3. Fatal Traps of Negotiating Exposed by Wayne Berry.
4. AskMen.com ran a great article on 11 Negotiation Strategies by Mr. Mafioso.

GOOD RESOURCES:
Harvard’s Negotiation Newsletter
CollegeGrad.com Job Offer Negotation
IT Salary Negotiation Rules
Win-Win Negotiation

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Interviewing Techniques: Turning Lemons into Lemonade.

Here are a collection of great interviewing tips for turning negative interviewing situations into positive experiences.

1. How to Handle a Negative Job Interview.

2. Handling the Tough Technical Testing/Interview Questions.

3. Preparing for the Toughest Interview Questions.

4. What to do when your interviewer is negative or rude.

5. What to do to prepare for next interview after a layoff career experience?

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Telecommuting News and Views from the Pink Furry Slippers

WorldAtWork reports telecommuting jobs are up 40% in just one year! The average American home has grown by 400 square feet to around 2.434 square feet, and the average retirement age has shifted by 4 years– not sure if that is attributed to each 100 square feet of the new home, or the cost of health insurance making it too risky to retire.. Oh my gosh, you gotta work now because its BETTER for your health?? Say it ain’t so, Joe!!

(Is it just me or does the number 4 seem to appear very regularly in the telecommuting trends?)

• How Employers can support telecommuting, reap benefits, and avoid law suits.
• Federal Trade Commissions Work at Home Schemes– don’t pay to work from home.
• Dated Work Practices a cause for excess stress
• Underlooked benefits of ‘HomeShoring’ for contact centers/help desks. While Contact Centers are 11% of the Telecommuting workforce
• Exony reports that the traditional work from home employee could cut the employer overhead by $10/Hour/Employee while giving competitive life benefits AND environmental relief.
• Seven Things CIOs should know about telecommuting.
  
• Filling the Engineering Talent Gap
• How to recruit talented teleworkers from the ‘nontraditional hubs’.
  

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Tips for managing a Pink Slip Sabbatical

From time to time, I am asked to share the hints for facing the challenges of layoff. If there are particular resources we can blog in depth for you, let us know or join us and ask questions on the Helping Friends Career Network — Career Transformation Talk Group!

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Proactive:

1. Network and job search from your email, don’t depend on your employer’s email.
2. Cultivate career resilience chart your development, while you love your job but don’t confuse it with marriage. Employees should have a business plan.
3. Define your brand and value, but keep a ‘what’s next’ dream in the hopper.
4. Dream big and plan to get there. What is your big dream in career or do you dream of exploring the freedom business?
5. Prepare an online toolkit and business cards to your career resources– representing you and your brand.
6. Take Social Networking & resume optimization to new heights with TalentSpring or Jobster.com.
7. Too busy to network? Change that! Make now the right time to build a network – slowly, naturally, and proactively.. You would be surprised what a great network can do for morale, and community good…

Positive Reactive:

1. I’ve always dreamed of having my own business– here is my window of opportunity!
2. I know what I like to do. I know what I am good at.. here is my career launching point! Popular Free Resume Tools, Interview Tips and Job Search eBooks are here.. OR ideas for turning the shock into productive Freelancing.
3. Losing my job as a winning business strategy.
4. I’ve worked for many more years than not.. First I will take care of financial business, health insurance, and deliberately choose what’s next.
5. Controlling the emotional reaction to a layoff might help you to land your next opportunity faster. Find a career coach, support group, or join the Helping Friends Career Network Resources – we offer Strategic Community, Jobs Board, and career resilience best practices– because our network was founded out of supporting people facing layoff.

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Request for the inside scoop on Interviewing Techniques..

YES WE TAKE CAREER REQUESTS!

We have had requests to share some of the hot tips Interviewing Techniques.. Here are some of them that I have found useful for my candidates. Please share comments and links to share your experience (or offer more information on areas of interest).

Helping Friends Members shared the secrets of their success, and the results are shared in this Interview Checklist: Employment Success Checklist Assessment/Improvement

TIPS and TRAPS:
$ Relax. Remember you need the right job, and your mission is to be your best self.
! Forgetting that employers are looking for evidence that you are right person for the job.
$ Prepare and visualize the interview outcomes in advance. Why might they want to hire you?
! Using the ‘Tell me a little more about yourself’ to give them concerns you can’t do the job.
$ Prepare examples prior to a ‘Behavior Based Interview’ (tell us about a time when…)
! Overselling your needs for a good job — one without the mistakes you just came from.
$ Its practical, not pollyanna, to be prepared to express the good things you learn and offer.

Interest Information:

• JDResources has a nice article with Interviewee tips and Questions to ask when interviewing.
• About.Com’s Bruce Dwyer ‘Interview Tips- Behavior Based Interviewing’.
• WSJ.Com’s Eugene Raudsepp ‘ Don’t let tough questions ruin your interview‘
• Robin Ryan’s Interactive Readiness Quiz
• JobInterview.com offers Job Interview Etiquette Article with practical tips.
• Marvin Walberg’s ‘Make the first moments of a job interview count.’
• John Hadley’s ‘Hit a home run with every interview‘. Check out his teleclasses too!
• Himjobs.com offers a nice Telephone Interview Prep article.
• WSJ.Com’s Perri Cappel has a ‘Research Jobs Long Distance‘ opportunities (brush up on your telephone interview and email follow up skills!

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Reading and Service Resources:

Social Networking creates a world of opportunity. As a professional, how do we make the most of that opportunity? With the availability of your global network, the resources are virtually at your disposal for informational interviews of people that work in your dream career, location, and industry.

Relocating? for Affordability of Opportunity? I blogged on the best locations in the U.S. to live recently.. for both affordability and opportunity.

Want to learn more about your community and Social Networking? Volunteer to be a part of the LinkedIn 2 Helping Friends Meetups that are being organized online and across the world! We would love to list a “helpful” networking friend in every key area– good for your networking, good for business, good to extend your knowledge!

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Evaluating Career Opportunity: Technique and tools..

The world is your oyster when you have tools that help you negotiate your best opportunity without geographic boundaries. Here are some questions to answer to target your best opportunity:

What is my ideal geographic location?
What is my ideal work environment?
What type of work would I find most rewarding?
What must the perfect career opportunity deliver for you to be happy?

Then look into the tips and tools that help you to evaluate a careers fit for your needs.

TIPS:

1. Consider extending your “informational interview‘ strategy by using Social Networking. Wall Street Journal CareerJournal shares how to use LinkedIn or social networking to connect to others who live and work where you might like to be.
2. BC Work Futures contains tips for evaluating career fit, while written in Canada, it’s value is globally applicable!
3. Helping Friends Career Network or your national recruiter can widen your search, if you keep an open profile. HOW to keep an open profile: Make sure to do more than just submit a resume and wait, fill out a profile of the geographic areas of interest. If you fail to do so, you may only be considered for positions in your geographic area. The profile will help your recruiter to target the right range, fit and geographic area…
4. Eleven Commandments for Smart Negotiating — great article by Lee Miller for Wall Street Journal CareerJournal.

TOOLS:

• 20 Great Employers for New Graduates (Fortune)
• Best Companies for Telecommuting
• Best Places to Live (Money)
• Cost of Living Calculator
• Fortune Best Companies to Work For
• Fortune Global 500
• Forbes Lists of Largest Companies, Private Companies, Compensation, etc.
• Hoovers- Company Research Information
• PayScale.com compares salary by geographic location to your experience– neat!
• PowerTools for Relocation
• Relocate-America.com
• Salary Calculator by location

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Harmonic Career Balance (Relax… WAKE UP!!! )

We have visited some crazy topics before, but never one so seemingly contradictive as seeking harmonic balance in “relax” and “wake up”. Surely you can do one or the other, but not both…

RELAX: Most of my experience with yoga was learned in “Still Mountain” Boulder, Colorado with Dr. Jia Gottlieb, an astounding medical doctor who has a gift for traditional east/west medicine and life balance. I took his Refresh, Renew, Revitalize programs and appreciated the wisdom of science and life arts! We learned breath-works, yoga, and balance rituals.

It would take me about 4 more years to appreciate what Dr Gottlieb was telling me about ‘Resting“.. It wasn’t what he was telling me that was so difficult to grasp.. Quite the opposite, it was too easy! One might say I ‘woke up’ from a very very long period of insomnia, to a more relaxed, vital, healthy, and creative state.

Dr. Carrie Angus blogged on the benefits of Yoga for relaxing the mind.. Surely the gentle affects of posture, relax, and letting go are appealing to many of us who live as if all we do is one big obligation, who has time for anything but what is right in front of them!? Yoga has proven and profound affects on calming the mind and body.

Tracy Laswell- Williams of Career Magic blogs about using Yoga and other techniques to stay ‘up’ in a drawn out job search.

WAKE UP: Isn’t falling asleep a natural part of relaxation? Yes, but the sleep part is optional. Most of us have grown so busy with the day to day demands that we have fallen into an autopilot mode– we go to sleep when we can or must, we wake when we must go to work, we run out the door at work when we must run to make another obligation. Granted that is alot of activity, but how much of it are we really AWAKE for? Sometimes we have grown too busy because we have not taken the time to focus on the quieter moments where inspiration, appreciation, and satisfaction are cultivated, for a beautiful sense of well being.

If too much of our decision making is based upon ‘obligation’ and ‘assumption’ then we might fall victim to ‘toobusy-itis’.. where we lose the passion for what we do and the joy for which we are doing it.

Harmony? You, yes I am talking about you, deserve the joy and harmony from inspired livinng. You can relax and rest your mind from time to time, and prepare yourself for your next big burst of energy. This does not mean sleeping through life, or dreaming beyond practicality, but it does mean re-introducing some of the magic and wonder into life, and allowing the creativity and productivity to flourish with less constraints.

Tips towards basking in harmonic career balance.

• What career brings you the greatest career satisfaction? If I had this perfect state, what would I be doing, feeling, and being? What tiny steps can I take each week to move closer to that dream?
• “Pay it forward” attention– feeling lonely, help someone else feel better. Feeling unappreciated? Who have you appreciated? Feeling and doing are different things.. Doing can be managed.
• Be the change you want to see in your environment– as you model it, as you appreciate it, you will find it.
• We can relax when feeling constraint, into empowered choice, where new options and ideas are presented.
• Guilt, Fear, and Sorrow are highly over-rated as a predominant feeling.. but they do serve to remind us more clearly of what we do want.
• We are always free to make a new choice, unless that choice is to feel stuck
• The more “good things” in life we can appreciate, the better connected we feel to other opportunity.. What have you done for you lately to get out of the rut?

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CIO: Great Piece on Reading Body Language

Meredith Levinson wrote a great article for CIO about how to be a Mind Reader: The Art of Deciphering BodyLanguage. What was really practical about the story was that it offered real life examples of how to read and identify opportunity for clarity identified by knowing those you work with enough to have those meaningful discussions that help you to help them.

Being able to read and interpret more than just words extends your professional potential by:

• improving your business relationships and attractive possibilities.
• communicate with a clarity that helps you recognize win win opportunities.
• project a profile of someone really able to create meaningful solutions.
• respond more productively, and naturally, in business negotiations.

One of the best examples was that of Eric Goldfarb discussing how he identified opportunity to check his read on a budgetary/financial discussion. Good thing he is great at this skill, as CIO for Bearing Point IT Strategy, this ability to read staff, customers, and clients is a key talent to managing effective relationships and results.

So the secret, in my opinion goes beyond “reading” people, it requires a willingness to listen with intent to understand the dynamics of a business relationship– it means checking what you are reading for accuracy. Developing relationships based upon well earned trust and transparency can help in many areas of life.

Related Resource Links:
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• Are you a good listener?
• 3 Tools for reading others.
• Body Language Tactics that Sway Interviews (Wall Street Journal Article)
• Quiz
• Detroit Chamber: 10 ways to be a great people manager

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