Group interviews are more commonly used for entry level positions and trainee programs. As you move up in seniority level they tend to become less common but still, no one is exempt from having one at any point of his/her career.
The idea behind them is to test out candidates on soft skills, assess how they perform among a group of peers, identify potential leaders and define which role candidates tend to occupy in a work group.
When pitted among other job seekers, people often asume that they are competing with their peers for the job. While this may be true in some way, it’s not the main purpose of a group interview. In reality, the candidate is being pitted against himself.
If you jump into a group interview with this perception, you will probably end up being discarded.
and this may be your first day at this blog, so WELCOME to this professional corner of the blogosphere.
Make yourself comfortable, grab a cup of coffee or your favorite cigar and come down the rabbit hole by going to our start here page. A perfect spot for you to see if what we have to offer helps you make the most of your career.
We want you to stay. We need to hear your thoughts and criticism. We want you to sit on the front seat, raise your hand and shout your mind out.
Without you, this place is an echo chamber of our thoughts, it’s empty space filled with words that go nowhere, inspire no one. WE NEED YOU.
This blog may have my name at the top but I’m not the only voice around here. Get to know my wing-woman, Ioana Lazarov, who also runs her own careers and personal development blog and tens of contributors from around the world which, on a weekly basis, provide you with a constant stream of information.
We hope you enjoy reading these stories and decide to join us and leave your first comment, subscribe to the mailing list or RSS feed, follow us on Twitter or add us to your circles on Google+ to stay in touch and share your ideas and thought provoking links or guest posts.
Once again, thank you for being here.
Thank you for making your voice heard.
We are all ears.
The fernandotarnogol.com Careers Blog Team
Job Seeker Premium Impressions
I’ve been test driving Linkedin Premium for a month. Starting at $19.95, you get these features:
- Job Seeker Badge: a fancy icon on your profile to “make you stand out from the crowd”
- 5 inmails: message any Linkedin member even if they are not in your network
- Featured listings
- Search organizer: advanced filters and the ability to save profiles to your contact book
- Openlink: enables any Linkedin member to message you without having to resort to inmail
- Extended Who’s Viewed Your Profile: unrestrictedly see who’s viewed your profile
Read on to know my experience using the advance features that Linkedin Premium enables and if the bang for your buck is worth it.
Hi there!
I messed up a bit.
Last night I changed the permalink structure of every post in the blog in order to improve my SEO and SERPs -search engine rankings in layman terms ;)- but while doing so, all the social sharing buttons at the bottom of each post lost their share count.
Truth be told, when people see that something has been shared by others, they tend to keep sharing. This is what’s called social proof.
Inversely, if someone sees zeros across al social networks, he or she may instantly deem the post “unworthy”, sometimes not even reading it.
Gotta ask you for a favor now, smart and selfless readers.
After you read a post, please take a second to tweet, like, stumble or +1 it to help me get those posts back to their former glory.
That second of your life will be greatly appreciated by yours truly.
Thank you!
Fernando
Your organizational culture comes from years of interactions between the participants of the organization, where most of them are already gone and what lives is their myth and the interpretation of that mythology that current employees make of it.
Every organization has a foundational myth. The myth that tells the story of how the “founding fathers” devised and created something that endured through the years.
Sometimes their mission still holds true, sometimes its changed to something they wouldn’t even recognize. Big socio-economic changes, mergers and labor disputes all have the potential to take an organization’s culture to hell.
Changing organizational culture is one of the most daunting tasks you’ll ever endure. It takes time, lots of follow up work and cooperation across the board (which is not usually easy to obtain).
When you attempt to change culture, you are attempting to change a paradigm.
The three cultures
Let me debunk your first preconception. Your company doesn’t have an organizational culture: it has 3.
I tweeted this on Nov 29th and look what happened on Dec 3rd.
Coincidence? Mmmm…
Picture this scenario -a not too uncommon one-. It’s year’s end or your anniversary at your job and your boss summons you to his office: it’s performance evaluation time!
You both sit down and you are confident you were a great employee; always on top of your work, responsible, punctual, you never call out but… surprise, surprise!… the feedback you just got is not all bright and shiny.
Whaaaat?! you weren’t supposed to do that thing you did back in May?!
WTF!!! And now you are finding out about it… well, kind of.
Danielle Restivo, Corporate Communications Manager at LinkedIn for Brazil and Canada was interviewed by Eileen Murphy.
She agreed to tell us about the social network so we can better understand how it works and maximize our use of it.
Since its launch in 2003, Linkedin has grown to an astonishing 120 million members worldwide in over 200 countries and territories. Danielle told us that Linkedin continues to look for new ways to add value for our members by adding new products and tools on the site and improving access through mobile devices.
If you’ve been considering getting Commentluv Premium -link to my review- but the price tag is above your budget, Black Friday is here to aid you. What’s best, the deal doesn’t go with Black Friday. It will be valid until November 30th.
If you purchase Commentluv Premium using Paypal -following the previous link ...
So just how impossible are the odds of you coming into being? According to the infographic below -which is based on the calculations made by Dr. Ali Binazir, from Harvard University- they are kind of like zero, nil, nada. You are either a miracle or a huge cosmological oddity. You should not be here.
Realizing you had a good or bad job interview is one of the trickiest things during the interview process, specially if you don’t have a lot of experience at interviewing for jobs.
These are some signs and strategies you can take into account to realize if you just blew it and get yourself ready for the next one. Then, you can add your creative ideas in the comments section to expand this post for all those lost souls who are despaired because they just had a bad job interview.
“You are overqualified”… that phrase -quoting Freddy Mercury now- sends shivers down my spine.
Companies thrive to get the best candidate for the job and the best job for the candidate, as one of HR’s maxims say. If you go by this perspective, yes, it could be an acceptable thing to say to those applicants who have “too much experience or too many qualifications” when matched against job requirements. But, is it that straightforward?
I don’t think so.
Two months ago, while still at the US, I received a call from a Fortune 100 company -Argentina’s branch-. They had a job proposal for me in HR -talent management, keep this in the back of your head for later-. They liked my profile and wanted to set up a phone interview, and so we did.
My gf -who also received a proposal- and I had been already weighing the option of heading back home so based on that phone screening we decided to pack our stuff and come back home.
Once arrived, we set up our first round of interviews. 3 days after we landed we were contacted in order to schedule a face to face interview and an English test -yeah, I know-.
The interview was the exact same screening we had over the phone, the English test was a waste of time but I understand it’s a formal requirement.
This is where things started to go awry.
If you tend to get stressed out during a job interview, paying attention to all these signs will keep your mind busy and away from anxiety while at the same time giving you a sense of control over the interview.
Remember, it’s not about taking control of the interview -interviewers don’t like to feel they are the ones being interviewed-, it’s about controlling your interactions (actions and reactions) to make the interview flow smoothly.
Here you go, 5 things you should take into account to avoid having a bad job interview:
My top 5 free resources and articles on the internet to improve your resume
My resume skills could be a lot better so that’s why I always resort to the internet for ideas to improve them. Here’s a collection of the best (IMHO) resume writing and editing resources on the Web.
- Quintessential Careers: Resume and CV Resources. Quint Careers is one of the go-to places on the internet for all things careers.
- Proven Resumes: templates and tips trimmed to your specific career. An exhaustive list of resume templates for every imaginable profession and strategies to take your resume to a new level (lots of on topic content).
- Live Clever: Give Your Resume a Facelift: step by step instructions on how to improve your resume’s design. A great resource to start with.
- ResumeBear: ResumeBear allows you to activate text and email alerts so you will know in real time when your resume has been opened and is being read. This allows you to act quickly to secure that initial interview. If the recipient forwards your resume to someone, you will have that information as well and here’s the address to their blog.
Check the video out after the jump.
These conclusions stem from research done by Bayton, an HR consulting firm. Bayton surveyed 40 companies in Argentina and the results were blunt: 37 organizations agreed that during the past 3 years, Monday has been the day of the week when most employees skip work.
Bayton also polled social networks, where 72% of respondents confirmed Monday as the day they skipped work the most.
On Mondays, absenteeism increases by 20%, specially during winter. The main causes are stomach issues (34%), flu (27%), sick relatives (15%), muscular pain (14%) and other muscular nuisances (9%) -I wonder how many of those are actually hangovers-.
Through the years, I’ve always fancied image sliders within blogs. They -usually- look good so they are a nice way of improving your site/blog’s look.
I’ve tried a variety of them and the most common problem I’ve found is that jQuery sliders are hard to install or that they usually need some coding experience to get them running.
The latest one I’ve tried is Smooth Slider. I used it for a few months until the latest version completely messed up my blog, so I had to roll back to a previous version. Truth be told, Smooth Slider is not at the top of the charts looks-wise and I ended up uninstalling it.
I just ran across SlideDeck, a Wordpress jQuery slider which not only looks good but also adds functionality to your site and is highly customizable. On top of that, it’s SEO friendly, you can tweak it through a graphical user interface and there are 10 skins to choose from in the free version, which should spare you from dealing with CSS coding.
![Post image for You Shouldn’t Exist, Statistically Speaking [Infographic]](http://fernandotarnogol.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/abstract_lights.jpg)
![Post image for Build Up Your Resume Skills [with video]](http://fernandotarnogol.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/resume.jpg)
