So therein begins the guessing game.

Then, the candidate runs into the employer who is out to find out THEIR salary negotiation number.

Well, it’s time to do a little mind play on employers and find out your salary negotiation number using the same tricks they use.

The May 2013 edition of HR Magazine had a great article, “The Art of Setting Pay” (by Joanne Sammer), which provided some great insights of how human resource professionals go about setting pay rates.

Using similar methodology, you can tap into these pointers to discover a “rough guess” of what a job might pay BEFORE you walk into the interview.

Remember, knowledge is power, and you need to be as empowered as possible going into any interview.

Here are some tips to try and uncover what a job might pay, and to help understand your salary negotiation power:

1) Google “compensation surveys.” Some of these are paid services, but put this into perspective… don’t you think $50 or $100 out of your pocket to gain access to information that can determine your future lifetime earnings potential might be worth it?

2) Check out the Bureau of Labor Statistics website. At this website, you can find a lot of information about what jobs pay as reported by employers. This can help you create a mean average of what your target position might pay.

3) Purchase salary information from a trade association. Many industries have a trade association that helps their members by collecting salary information.

4) Do some digging on salary websites. Sites such as Payscale.com or Salary.com can provide some general guidelines for your particular job target within your region.

5) Look at other comparable jobs in your market. Taking an average of the salary of the jobs that are available, you can also see what (at least on the public side), employers are willing to pay. Then find the median in the middle to find a comfortable number.

6) Scale the compensation according to the company size. A marketing manager at a 10-person company is going to get paid a lot less than the same position at a 1,000-person company.

7) Understand local geography and economic factors that can influence pay. Smaller towns generally don’t have a broad of an economic base (or job opportunities) that a larger city offers.

If you can get into the mindset of the employer who has the job opening and understand the methodologies they used in setting the salary levels, then you can have a better idea of what their (and your) number will be.

And you can walk into the interview prepared for salary negotiations as a well-informed candidate.

Dawn Rasmussen, CMP, is a Certified Advanced Résumé Writer and the president of Portland, Ore.-based Pathfinder Writing and Career Services. Clients from across the United States and Canada and from all career levels have benefited from Dawn’s highly-focused and results-oriented résumé, cover letter, and job search coaching services. Many professional groups as well as colleges and universities have appreciated the insights and expertise she shares during presentations on career management topics, and she is a frequently requested national speaker as a result.

The post Salary Negotiations: Hack to Know Your Number appeared first on CPG Jobs.

To get you clear, let’s first look at this from a purely marketing point of view, since that is where this term came from.  Wiki defines branding as: Name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller’s goods or service as distinct from those of other sellers. People engaged in branding seek to develop or align the expectations behind the brand experience, creating the impression that a brand associated with a product or service has certain qualities or characteristics that make it special or unique.  In other words, when you see a McDonalds and eat at a McDonalds, you think of certain visual images, as well as a consistent eating experience and environment.  You’re very clear that this isn’t going to be a fine dining experience; you know what to expect.  That’s what branding does for the buyer.  It helps them know where to go to have a specific product or service and experience.

To translate that to you for personal branding, it’s what identifies you from another person and what other people can expect when “experiencing” or being with you.  In the work context, it’s your work reputation and what people come to value about you.  Your Personal Brand is unique to you.  There is no one else out there with the same constellation of skills and personal behaviors that you have.  Granted, there may be others with greater expertise than you, but we aren’t talking about a comparison when it comes to personal branding; we are talking about only you and how you are viewed by others.

To further understand personal branding, let’s look at Oprah’s personal brand.  Visually, Oprah wears color and smiles.  You see pictures of her touching and making contact with people.  In her work, her focus is on being curious about the world, supporting the best in others and personal development.  You could say many other things about what we expect out of her and how we experience her.  All of that is consistent and clear to those of us watching her.  We’d all be shocked if she suddenly got cranky and negative.

To summarize your Personal Brand:

It is unique to you.

It is your reputation.

It is how others experience you and what they value about you.

It is what others expect and seek you out for.

It is also what YOU want to be known for.

With those things in mind, now the big question is:  Why is awareness of your personal brand important to your career?  Here are 3 very good reasons:

1. If you are aware of your personal brand and it is consistent with your career goals, you want to reinforce it so people very clearly understand what you’re all about.  It helps people remember you when it’s critical.
2. If you are ready to make a change in your career status in the foreseeable future, you want to think through how your brand needs to change so others start “seeing” you at this new level.
3. If you aren’t going where you want in your career, you probably have a mismatch between your personal brand and your aspirations.  That means you have to do something to align those two things.  You will only go as far as your personal brand supports.

Your personal brand is always there no matter if you understand it or are deliberate about managing it.  You will find that if you pay attention to it and continually align it to your career goals you will be more successful at attaining your career goals.

For more career tips and advice – FREE newsletter and eworkbook: http://CareerMakeoverToolKitShouldIstayorShouldIGo.com/  From Dorothy Tannahill-Moran – Your Career Change Agent from www.nextchapternewlife.com and www.mbahighway.com

The post Clarifying Personal Branding and Why It’s Important to You appeared first on CPG Jobs.

Hi Joshua, I’ve been working at a high-end boutique in SoHo for about a year now while still trying to apply for corporate jobs.  Should I put this retail sales (fashion) position in my profile at all?  I’ve been told my having a retail job on my résumé might jeopardize my career path.

I’m a Communications major (1992) and have worked in sales/marketing in the past.  I’m working on toward a marketing certificate at NYU’s School of Continuing & Professional Studies.

Thanks – Victoria

————————————————————-

Victoria,

You might not like that I will begin my answer to you with, “It depends.”  Don’t kick me!

It depends!

It depends on which company you are applying to. It depends on your personal brand. It depends on how full your résumé is without it.

Let’s tackle each dependency one at a time.

A Customized Résumé Is No Longer Optional

In earlier posts, I mentioned that LinkedIn’s drawback is that it allows you only a single profile. In a way, this is where you might pack in as much as you can.

However, when applying for a specific company, just using a LinkedIn profile, or any other generic résumé, is not really an option.

The days of spray-and-pray are long over.

Hal Thomas, who was a guest in a recent webinar, did extensive research on  his target company. He determined that they value creativity, have a non-conservative/innovative spirit, and require blog writing as a prerequisite skill.

Therefore, he customized his application to include a link to his blog, a Wired magazine cover mock-up, and a résumé filled with creative positions.

If your target company works with fashion companies, or requires you to have frequent customer interaction, then including your retail experience might be good.

On the other hand, if the target company is more conservative, and your role would not include customer interaction, then including your retail experience adds little value.

All Decisions are Branding Decisions

A new flight attendant came up to the CEO of Southwest Airlines and said, “I would like to serve chicken salad on our flight from Chicago to Las Vegas. Will you approve that?”

To which the CEO replied, “Will serving chicken salad make us the ‘Low Cost Airline?’” The flight attendant smiled and walked away.

So now I ask you, will including retail at a high-end boutique make the Victoria you want to be obvious to other people on your résumé? The answer may very well be yes.

But to answer that question, you’ll need to know what your brand is first. Try reading Tom Peter’s original article about personal branding or read Chris Brogan’s ebook. Both are great resources to get started.

The One-Pager

I need to make this clear, I am not a résumé expert, neither in certification nor in practice. However, I have talked with enough hiring managers in my research to know that if you are first entering the workforce, there is absolutely no reason to have a résumé longer than one page.

That doesn’t mean you can’t talk about the other stuff.

However, the lower you are on the rung, the more competition. And that means the more résumés hiring managers have to read just to make one choice.

They will LOVE you for making that job easier.

If you believe you can’t fit it all into one page, then it’s time to make some executive decisions based on your personal brand. Then supplement your cover letter and résumé with links to your online résumés, like Visual CV.

I want to leave you with one thought. If we were to consider our job search as just like running a business, then the idea of strategy begins to make better sense. What I mean is that the core of every business decision is rooted in a single thought process:

Will this decision fit within my strategy?

I recommend all job seekers take a weekend and really write out a business plan with that strategy. It is a lot of work to do this; however, when you come up against decisions, it will be easy to hold it up against your plan and get your answer.

Who knows, you might get multiple offers. Now that would be a good problem to have!

Joshua Waldman, author of Job Searching with Social Media For Dummies, is recognized as one of the nations top authorities in Social Media Career Advancement. To learn Joshua’s secret strategies for shortening the job search and getting the right job right away, watch his exclusive video training here: http://careerenlightenment.com/training

The post Online Resume Help – What Not to Include? appeared first on CPG Jobs.

Ahhh… what a wonderful feeling!

But to borrow a page out of our hardy forebears, this isn’t where one gets to rest on their laurels… time’s a-wastin’!  It’s time to do much-needed deep cleaning.

But I’m not talking about purging the garage, or moving the couch to get at those annoying dust bunnies. Instead, let’s zero in on your career documents.  Why?

Because most people let them gather dust and only clear them off to see the light of day only when they actually need them… say, for a job interview, or in the event of job loss or layoff.

Sound familiar? Have I struck a nerve yet?

Freshening up your career assets ensures that you are ready to respond to opportunities as well as unplanned changes… and is essential to your overall career management.  Don’t treat them as obituaries… you know,  as in: “Susie did this and Susie did that….”

Yikes!   Wouldn’t it be better to instead have an up-to-date document that also helps you strategize what skills you might want to add in the coming year, or what organizations you should join to boost your networking IQ? I think so.

So, every time I speak to a group, I make everyone in the audience raise their hand and take a solemn oath to update their résumé and career documents every 6 months.

Sounds kind of funny, but in reality, this isn’t a frivolous exercise.

This is serious business.

By keeping on top of what you’ve been achieving and setting career goals for yourself, you’ll gain the momentum you need to either find that dream job or nail the promotion you’ve been angling towards over the past few years.

But first, in order to take the pain out of updating your career documents, you’ll need to create a career management file. Not having one is sort of like trying to put the cart before the horse.

This file is going to be your catch-all file that will help be those memory triggers so you don’t spend hours on end scratching your head, trying to remember what in the heck you did 5 years ago.

In this career management file, you’ll put:

1. Kudos letters from co-workers, bosses, colleagues, and clients.
2. An extra copy of registrations for any educational events you’ve attended (including seminars, workshops, conferences, conventions, tradeshows, webinars, trainings, classes, etc.)
3. Certificates of memberships so you can easily recall what organizations you joined and when
4. Staff reports
5. Plan of work
6. Post-event recaps
7. Performance assessments / reviews
8. Any kind of metrics used to measure job success to goal
9. Notations of any kind of volunteer, committee, or board service
10. Any accolades you’ve received (i.e.  awards, speaking engagements, features, quotes, etc.)

So, presto! Now when it’s time to update your career documents, you have all of your updates in one easy-to-locate spot!

Update your work history with concrete, measurable wins.   Under the “Education” section, you’ll add all the things you’ve done to enhance your professional development with jobs-specific knowledge.   Don’t forget including new volunteer service (MPI has a great way of adding this kind of meaty stuff to most members’ résumés) to demonstrate involvement and leadership.

Once you have your résumé up to date, then it’s time to turn your attention to its online companion, LinkedIn, and add in the same information to freshen up your profile.

Once your profile is modified, make sure you occasionally add a status update as well (much like a Tweet on Twitter) so it looks like the lights are on and someone is home.

By always doing a spring cleaning to your career credentials, you can rest assured that you are always “at the ready”  for any opportunities that come your way. Trust me… You’ll thank yourself later for it!

Dawn Rasmussen, CMP, is a Certified Advanced Résumé Writer and the president of Portland, Ore.-based Pathfinder Writing and Career Services. Clients from across the United States and Canada and from all career levels have benefited from Dawn’s highly-focused and results-oriented résumé, cover letter, and job search coaching services. Many professional groups as well as colleges and universities have appreciated the insights and expertise she shares during presentations on career management topics, and she is a frequently requested national speaker as a result.

The post Spring Cleaning: Freshen Up Your Career Documents appeared first on CPG Jobs.

Here we have put together some thoughts on how to conduct yourself in meetings and get the most out of them. We’d also like to invite you to join us in our Being Effective in Meetings webinar on Monday 20th May at 1-2pm GMT, to learn more about this.

To get you started, first think about who’s attending your meeting:

You need to ask yourself questions about who the attendees are going to be and why. As an attendee, you may be there because of your position and your status. The reason that you’re there could be because you’ve always been there. Those are not necessarily good reasons to even be there. However, the most crucial reasons include the purpose of the meeting, the contribution you can offer, what you can take away from it and the ways in which it will help you to do your job.

What makes a good meeting?

The quality of the person chairing the meeting is very important. Are they any good? Professional workers can often be pretty awful chair people. Sometimes people who aren’t good in other arenas are actually very competent at chairing. This raises another question – is the boss always the chairman? Bosses usually have the most information and know most about the team or organization. They usually have the most power too, meaning they are the most authoritative. Bear in mind also that great chair people are usually good because of the quality of their listening, it does not necessarily follow that the boss makes the best chairperson.

Think about your role & other key people’s roles

So, answering the question of how to conduct yourself in a meeting, let’s think about where we’re conducting the meeting. Really determine what you’re going to give to the others at the meeting and what it is you want from them. When you identify those people who are at the core, there are probably a very small number of individuals who are central to the meeting. Other people should they come in for a very short period to present or listen.

A good chairperson should be clear about what the planned outcomes are. The meeting must have an agenda. That agenda is not just something that’s thrown together but must subtly dictate the flow and development of the meeting by ordering items for discussion in a logical fashion.

Anybody who comes to the meeting must be well prepared. This includes being clear about their contribution to it. In order to give everyone time to prepare, it’s important to give them enough time to gather data and get an idea of what’s going to happen so that they don’t just sleepwalk through the meeting. They must be prepared to take decisions. Sometimes people aren’t in a position to take decisions because they’re part of the process, but that’s rare. Often meetings are called together in order to decide an outcome. Discipline depends very much on context. So in the public domain (i.e. the Houses of Parliament and in other environments like local government), the meeting notes are comprehensive or even verbatim. Otherwise, they can just be about actions that were agreed.

Inefficient Meetings

Inefficient meetings have the following characteristics. They never start on time, they’re unproductive, they waste people’s time and are badly chaired. People attend and never say anything, nobody’s prepared and nobody makes a decision.

Here are 8 tips for best practice at a meeting:

• There’s a pre-agreed agenda
• The participants earnt their right to be at the meeting
• The meeting starts on time
• There are no distractions, there is one meeting and there’s one conversation at a time
• The meeting is tightly chaired
• Everybody is welcome to contribute to the meeting
• There are actions taken on every agenda item.

How do you conduct yourself in a meeting like this?

• Adhere to the guidelines of the meeting
• You need to check out whether you’re required to attend
• Be well prepared
• Listen hard
• Make points appropriately
• Share your thoughts without over-committing

At many meetings, at least one person will be required to make a presentation and in some cases, all or most participants will be called upon to make a presentation, even if each one is just a few minutes long. Here are some tips on how to present at a meeting:

• You need to know where the meeting is being held in advance, to plan how you’re going to set up the projector, flip board or anything else you’re using for your presentation
• Check how much time you have for your presentation
• Make sure you’ve been properly briefed on what’s required of you during your presentation
• Deliver appropriate information to your audience during the presentation
• Leave time for your fellow meeting attendees to ask questionsbout what you’ve spoken about and what you’ve shown them.

By Simon North, Founder of Position Ignition (www.positionignition.com) and the Career Ignition Club (www.careerignitionclub.com), the UK’s leading career change and career development company and platform. He is also the author of 125 LinkedIn Job Search Tips (http://www.positionignition.com/100-linkedin-job-search-tips). Follow him @PosIgnition for more help with your career challenges.

The post How to Conduct Yourself in Meetings appeared first on CPG Jobs.

I know I’m not alone in this email overload reality so how do you stay efficient, weed out the email spam, and correspond in a timely manner to your constituents without becoming completely stressed out?

Christine Stoddard is a writer and television producer in Washington, DC and she shared some incredible tips in Little Pink Book about how to manage an inundated inbox with some measure of sanity:

Learn your email system inside and out. Whether you’re using Gmail, Outlook or First Class, tutor yourself on the shortcuts.

Create and save automated messages. Different clients may regularly submit similar queries. If you find your email redundant, create a standard reply and save it. The next time a client asks you a question you’ve answered before, send a prewritten response.

Set up an account with automated responses. When saving canned responses and sending them off one-by-one isn’t enough, it may be more time-efficient and cost-effective to set up another email account, info@yourcompany.com for example, which only sends out automatic responses.

Direct and organize emails from different recipients. Want emails from a specific vendor all in one folder? Many mail systems allow you to direct and store your emails as they hit your inbox.

Update your address book. Add loyal clients, long-time vendors and other important contacts to your email address book. Doing so means their messages are less likely to end up in your spam folder, which also means less sifting on your end.

Schedule two times of the day to answer email. If you feel like Pavlov’s dog when the ringer on your computer announces a new email, shut off the audio and get on with your work day. Organizational experts recommend scheduling 2 times a day to deal with email so you have this uninterrupted time to efficiently get through your messages. Resist the temptation to respond whenever a new message comes in unless you are on-call for an urgent reason.

Teach people how to treat you. It all boils down to teaching people how to treat you. If you answer an email on your smart phone at 3:00 am – the person who sent you the message will assume you are available and open for business. Set your boundaries and know that responding in a 24 hour period is perfectly acceptable.

Bottom line, email can take over your life if you let it. Set your boundaries, put efficiency models in place and schedule time each day to tackle email so it doesn’t get the better of you!

With over a decade of career and professional development coaching experience, Caroline Dowd-Higgins has a desire to empower and energize people to achieve their personal goals.  Her training style is engaging, high energy, and positive with a focus on unlocking the self-advocate within each of us.  Read more from Caroline at carolinedowdhiggins.com.

The post Digging Out of the Daily Email Palooza appeared first on CPG Jobs.

Then, after three months, our dryer stopped working well. It was taking us two or three cycles to get the clothes dry. It got so bad that I remember hanging clothes on my office door, the back of the couch and dinner chairs. After all, it was raining outside (Portland!).

So, one day I got fed up and made the “call-o-shame” that a lot of guys find hard to make—the call to the repairman.

When the repairman arrived, he walked over to the dryer and, to my horror, went straight for the lint drawer and peeled out a lint brick the size of a boot. Instead of the typically fluffy lint, this felt like a solid mass.

I’m sure that I was blushing. I’ve used a dryer my whole life.

Yet, I still missed something so completely obvious because I was living it.

The same thing happens when people try to write about themselves, fill out profiles or otherwise think objectively about something they are living in.

And missing something small can sometimes lead to big repair bills. For job seekers, it could mean missed opportunities or, worse, like getting blacklisted.

So, to help you determine if you are missing that LinkedIn lint brick—the obvious thing you can’t see—here are three objective tests you can run.

1. Has Your Network Grown?

LinkedIn doesn’t offer an easy way to track and report on network growth. It’s something you’ll have to do manually.

Look back at your emails from LinkedIn. You should be getting emails announcing every time you make a new connection.  Filtering those emails by date, count how many new connections each month for the past six months.

If you’re network hasn’t grown month over month, the reason might be that the way you are talking about yourself isn’t compelling enough for people to want to connect with you. Often, minor improvements in profile language can result in exponential network growth. You’ll get more requests, and you’ll get a better acceptance rate when you send requests.

2. Is Your Profile Visible?

Many small businesses use LinkedIn’s built-in search feature to source candidates. The better you describe yourself in your profile, the more you will appear in search results.

Luckily, LinkedIn provides this report right inside your profile. To access it, click on Who’s Viewed Your Profile on the Home page. Then toggle over to the graph on the top right called Appearances in Search. If you don’t see an upward trend, then something is missing from your profile.

My guess is that you aren’t describing yourself in an accurate enough or objective enough way. Perhaps there are keywords and trends missing from your profile. Perhaps there simply isn’t enough copy on the page to capture the outlier opportunities. This is a classic symptom of being so “in it” that you can’t see how others see you.

An easy fix might be to write more and hope that something you say sticks—like tossing spaghetti on a wall to see if it’s done—but that’s not a precise way to improve your click rate. Read on…

3. Are You Clickable and Cuddly?

Click rate can be a measurement of the quality of your profile. The better your profile copy, the more likely someone will be to click on you when you show up in search results. That’s what the Views report tells you.

Again, if you don’t see an upward trend in views, then the quality of your Headline needs improvement. Improving that pesky 120-character area will have the largest impact on your job search success.

What You Can Do to Improve Your LinkedIn Profile

I respect people who want to do it themselves. My yard is full of DIY projects (and they look that way!). But, sometimes, you have to hire a repairman to tell you where your lint bricks are.

When it comes to your career, you may want to consider having a professional writer handle your profile.

My LinkedIn Profile Writer service offers a 48-hour turnaround on your new LinkedIn profile, guaranteed for quality. After uploading your new profile, expect upward trends in your network growth, visibility and clickability within weeks.

Your career isn’t something you want to take risks on. Every day that your profile isn’t working for you is another lost opportunity to find your dream job.

The post 3 Warning Signals Your LinkedIn Profile Needs Help! appeared first on CPG Jobs.

Personally, I find these fascinating, simply because as humans, we are visual creatures and anything that is attention-getting helps candidates stand out from the crowd. And that is one of the main purposes of having a resume – to market oneself.

Unconventional designs, info graphics  charts, and illustrations are all great. Heck, there was even one person who put their resume on a candy bar recently, which attracted a lot of viral attention online. Another guy created an online career portfolio website that looked like an Amazon.com page which got a lot of “oohs” and “aahs” from appreciative audiences.

While all these flashy and trendy tactics definitely serve a purpose (in what is otherwise a boring document that is likely to make any human resource person’s eyes roll up into the top of their head), the format also doesn’t matter.

What really grabs ‘em where it matters is the content, not the pictures.

Given a choice, human resource managers, hiring heads, recruiters, and headhunters would opt, hands down, to pick a resume that actually has meaningful, meaty content versus pretty pictures.

While the format can be the attention-getting ploy, your resume ultimately needs to boil down to substance.

The last thing you want to do is become link bait: Attract the fish with enticing bait, and once they bite, they realize that what was being offered was a deception of what they ended up biting down upon.

No one likes surprises. Especially when they are disappointing ones where what they thought they were getting was something totally different than what was advertised.

In some ways, the more cynical side of the human resource equation might have a different take altogether: What are you hiding? Why all the fireworks – is it sort of like the “Wizard of Oz” where the audience entering the presence of the Great and Powerful Oz are warned to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain?

The last thing you want to come across as being is all smoke and mirrors.

So while having an amazing, attention-getting format to a resume can help get you in front of people, what makes you get offered an interview is how you deliver on results. What things have you achieved with present and previous employers that are meaningful and relevant towards the position for which you are applying?

Smart career managers know that being a “flash in the pan” with an interesting-looking resume can snag some interviews, but they also know that ultimately, their career success depends on how they communicate what they can deliver.

Dawn Rasmussen, CMP, is a Certified Advanced Résumé Writer and the president of Portland, Ore.-based Pathfinder Writing and Career Services. Clients from across the United States and Canada and from all career levels have benefited from Dawn’s highly-focused and results-oriented résumé, cover letter, and job search coaching services. Many professional groups as well as colleges and universities have appreciated the insights and expertise she shares during presentations on career management topics, and she is a frequently requested national speaker as a result.

The post Your Resume Format Matters… and Doesn’t appeared first on CPG Jobs.

It would be nice to think that, like some people out there, that you knew what you wanted to be and stayed the course for the next 40 years.  That doesn’t happen to too many people, so consider it an unrealistic expectation for you.  Even when you have clarity about your direction, you don’t have to stay the course at all costs.  Most careers weave in a variety of directions for all sorts of reasons and if resetting your goals looks like the right thing to you, don’t waste your time worrying.  It’s clearly think time.

Let’s look at a couple reasons for this reevaluation:

Now that you’re close, it’s not that cool.   When we develop our ideas of our career direction, we think of all the great things about that position.  Usually there are several steps and a few positions to pursue before you arrive.  At each step you get better visibility, as well as more personal insight.  It might not be that great now that you can see it better; or you simply might not want to do what it takes to make that next step.

Priorities change.  As we go through life, it has an interesting way of changing our minds about what’s important.  You may have changed your priorities without outwardly realizing, and now that you have, your previously chosen career goal doesn’t fit well.

You have other interests.  You may now be at a point where you have discovered new directions for your career that now hold more interest to you.  That’s fine because that’s how life works, the longer you live the more new things you get exposed to.

Whatever the reason for the change of heart you need to move forward to rethink your career goals.  Once you’ve arrived at this point you have many different directions you could take and steps to go with them.  You have work to do to help you identify both your direction and the steps you have to take to get there.

Complete career change.  This one can be tricky because most of us really don’t know how to start from the beginning at figuring out a new career path.  If you’re at a point of completely changing, it’s best to pull out all the tricks and settle in for a while to get this figured out.  There are books to help you and career coaches that can help guide you through a self discovery process.  No, there is not an assessment that will tell you.  I might help point you but you’ve got work to do to arrive at a good decision.

Course correction.  You may have thought you wanted to be CFO but now that you’re a group controller you may be thinking Operations Management might be better for you.  While it is a new career goal, the order of magnitude is more like a course correction.  You can capitalize on your background to get to this new career goal but you may need to figure out what assignments you need that will better qualify you.  Speak to your management to get their viewpoint on things you can do to better qualify you.

One step back.  You may have gotten promoted but now that you’re there, you like your previous job better.  No problem unless you work for a company that can only see one direction for you which means you will most likely need to leave for another company.  If that isn’t the case, then speak to your management and HR about your career direction to see if they can help support it.

You career is a constantly moving thing just like you.  No longer do we have a “life work” that goes on for decades which means that rethinking and reevaluating your career goals will happen a few times.  When the time comes it may take some time to get used to the fact that you want to change direction but once you’re there do the work to make that next step really worth taking.

For more career tips and advice – FREE newsletter and eworkbook: http://CareerMakeoverToolKitShouldIstayorShouldIGo.com/  From Dorothy Tannahill-Moran – Your Career Change Agent from www.nextchapternewlife.com and www.mbahighway.com

The post Re-evaluating Your Career Goals appeared first on CPG Jobs.

These two techniques are based on a single human characteristic, ego.

Almost everyone googles themselves. Even Lady Gaga googles herself, as if there were any risk of her not showing up! Most busy executives take the time to google themselves too. And if they don’t, then their admins or customers do.

Oh, and guess what the cheapest ads are to buy on Google and Facebook? That’s right, someone’s name. Are you catching on yet? Let me break this down step by step.

Prerequisite 1: Know Your Dream Company

For this ninja technique to work, you should first know who your top 10 dream companies are, and the names of the executives (or managers) who might have some say in hiring you.

This is the easy part because LinkedIn will most likely have that information for you. Start by browsing the various industries on LinkedIn. Follow this link to a page that has been hidden by LinkedIn: LinkedIn Browse Industries, and select your prefered industry.

Next filter you list of companies down by the characteristics you prefer such as company size or location.

Finally, search within these companies for contacts with roles you suspect would be in a position to hire you. For example, if you want a marketing job, find the VP of marketing. If you want a developers job, find the director of product development.

Prerequisite 2: Show Your Body of Work

The way click ads work is this: someone Googles a search term, like their name. Since you’ve put a bid on that term, your ad shows up. If the ad get’s their attention, someone will click. You pay when they click. And that person is taken to a website.

If you don’t have a website, then you need to get one NOW. All you need to do is buy a domain name ($10/yr). Then either set up a blog, or redirect it to your online portfolio, like Vizify. The idea is that when your target person clicks, they see information that is relevant to them and they perceive that you can provide value to their organization. This next story will illustrate why your web presence is so important.

Google Ad Words and Human Vanity

This technique came from Alec Brownstein, who is now sitting in a corner office at the top floor of his dream job (metaphorically of course). His story starts with a Google Ad Word campaign. Alec knew we wanted to work at Young & Rubicam (Y&R) New York. So he researched the names five creative directors, whom he admired the most.

Next, he took out a Google Ad Word campaign for each of their names which only cost him less than 15 cents per click and no more than $6 in two months. The ad read: Hey, [creative director's name]: Goooogling [sic] yourself is a lot of fun. Hiring me is fun, too” with a link to Brownstein’s website, alecbrownstein.com

After two months, Alex received calls from four of his five target people. A few months after that, he had job offers from two of his target creative directors.

Summary:

1. Find five or ten names of people you want to talk to in a company

2. Take out an ad for each of their names

3. Link the ad to your website to demonstrate your body of work with an easy way for them to contact you

Facebook Ads and the Power of the Second Degree

This next technique comes from Ian Greenleigh who found that most managers and leaders are so proud of their success, that they usually fill in their entire Facebook profile, including their role at their company. This revelation helped him get hired at his dream company, Bazaar Voice, in a few short weeks.

Ian took out an ad in Facebooks Ad Manager platform and directed it just to people in a specific geography, who had a specific role in their bio. This is what his ad looked like:

And it directed people to a page on his website called, “5 Reasons You Should Hire Me”.

Ian was surprised how many people offered to help him. And he found that although Bazaar Voice didn’t respond directly, someone with a connection to his dream company did respond, and offered to make an intro for him. The power of his second degree. In his own words, “This was a great conversation starter.”

1. Identify the job titles of the people you want to work for

2. Take out a Facebook ad focused on just them

3. Experiment with different ads, and different targets

4. Direct them to your website where you can start a conversation

Joshua Waldman, author of Job Searching with Social Media For Dummies, is recognized as one of the nations top authorities in Social Media Career Advancement. To learn Joshua’s secret strategies for shortening the job search and getting the right job right away, watch his exclusive video training here: http://careerenlightenment.com/training

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