20 Dos and Donts for Your Company on LinkedIn

20 Dos and Donts for Your Company on LinkedIn LinkedIn you either do it, or you dont. Everyone knows how to build the perfect LinkedIn profile   but do you know how to operate as a business on the site? There are over 500  million users on LinkedIn, covering 200 countries and territories worldwide and 40% of these check the site daily. Thats a wide audience that you may be missing out on.  Additionally, is your CEO on social media? 22% of CEOs of the top 50 fortune companies are on  LinkedIn, which is up from 6% in 2012, with 47% of B2B businesses using LinkedIn themselves. If youre not doing LinkedIn, or doing it right, you could be missing out some important business. This infographic by our friends at Salesforce will give you some dos and donts if you have any other tips or advice, make sure to leave them in the comments or tweet them to us @UndercoverRec! Takeaways: DO:  treat your profile like a professional brochure with an appropriate image and up-to-date information. DONT:  never send spammy messages avoid including sales pitches. DO: be active in groups, by posting relevant discussions and engage with other peoples posts. DONT: try to steer clear of always self promoting other users want to learn something, not just be sold to. DO: nurture relationships by keeping up conversations and always engaging with your network. RELATED: 10 LinkedIn Profile Words Recruiters Must Avoid

Personal Branding Interview Stephen R. Covey - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career

Personal Branding Interview Stephen R. Covey - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career This post originally appeared in my Forbes.com column. Today, I spoke with Stephen R. Covey and we focused on his new book “The 3rd Alternative: Solving Life’s Most Difficult Problems,” which just came out today! Dr. Covey is the author of the worldwide bestseller, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. First written in 1989, it has now sold over twenty million copies in 38 languages! Dr. Covey has been recognized as one of Time Magazine’s 25 Most Influential Americans. He is the co-founder and vice chairman of FranklinCovey, the leading global professional services firm with offices in 123 countries. He is also the author of The 8th Habit. In this interview, Dr. Covey talks about why business negotiations should factor in the 3rd alternative, common conflicts that occur in the workplace that the 3rd alternative can resolve, and much more. When negotiating a business deal, why do people seek the 1st or 2nd alternative instead of the 3rd, as you suggest in your new book? They’re not aware that they can go for a 3rd Alternative, which is a better way than your way or my way. Most negotiators are trying to get their way. Through rounds of haggling, they usually arrive at a compromise, in which both sides concede something to get an agreement. By contrast, a 3rd Alternative requires no concessions at all because it’s truly a better deal for everyone. You get to it not by haggling but by asking, “Would you be willing to go for a 3rd Alternative that is better than what either of us has in mind?” What are some of the most common conflicts that occur in the workplace that the 3rd alternative can resolve? Beyond ever-present personality conflicts, serious conflicts arise over compensation, promotions, resource allocation, who gets credit for what, big strategy questionsâ€"almost all of them can be not only resolved but turned into great opportunities for growing and advancing the organization. A 3rd-Alternative thinker automatically looks beyond the two sides of a conflict in search of a better way. Can you give an example of a situation at work, where someone resolved a conflict using your recommendations? A young man reluctantly asked his boss for a raise. Of course, she could say either yes or no, and he was ready to fight if she said no. But she surprised him by going for a 3rd Alternative. She asked him about the clients he was working with, how the firm could serve them better, and what he would do to build more business with them. By listening to him, she learned how he could add a lot more value and earn a lot more salary. By working with him over time, she built up not only his confidence and compensation, but also her volume of business with his clientsâ€"a true “win-win” for everyone. You believe that synergy short-circuits conflict in the workplace. What are the barriers to achieving synergy? You get to the 3rd Alternative through synergy, which happens when the talents of two or more people add up to more than the sum of the parts. Synergy starts when I go to a person I differ with and say, “You see things differently. I need to listen to you.” It’s exciting when you truly hear out divergent views and you start to see how to bring them together for a solution nobody ever thought of before. Of course, the barriers are defensiveness, territoriality, the “not-invented-here” syndrome. How does someone create a win-win situation in business? What happens when one side benefits more? When one side benefits more than the other, that’s a win-lose situation. To the winner it might look like success for a while, but in the long run it breeds resentment and distrust. You get to win-win simply by asking, “How could we both win in this situation?” What you’re looking for is a 3rd Alternative that’s superior to anything you could create alone.

How Can You Help Me to Find the Best Candidate for Our Role

How Can You Help Me to Find the Best Candidate for Our Role I’m often asked by my clients, “How can you help me to find the best candidate for our role”? As a recruiter with more than 20 years experience, I will always tell them that there is only one sure way that I can guarantee to find the best available candidate in the market and that is through the application of executive search or headhunting techniques. Let me explain; there are essentially just 3 ways in which any organisation, large or small can recruit; You can access candidates through a database You can advertise your role in the most appropriate media You can Headhunt, proactively approaching candidates and often referred to as “Search” 1. Database Candidate databases of one form or another are typically maintained by a wide spectrum of recruiters as well as, increasingly these days, by more and more employers and of course there are networking sites such as LinkedIn which provide a useful database albeit one based on self reported data. Databases are at their most useful, in my view, when you might be looking out for the “steady Eddie” type of candidate, low risk/limited potential; the very best candidates will rarely show up on databases and on the odd occasion that they do, they rarely stick around on the books of a recruiter for very long. Ask yourself, ‘How did candidate X or Y happen to show up on the recruiter’s database in the first place?’ What role were they pursuing initially and seemingly, unsuccessfully since they are still looking today, that brought them to the attention of the recruiter in the first instance? Not that this necessarily makes them a bad or less relevant candidate, but do you really want to hire someone else’s second best for your key appointment? So, why then do I personally carry around a database of several thousand names on my iPhone or stored in my cloud, all of them accessible from almost anywhere in the world via a broadband connection? Why you might ask would I choose to do this having regard to what I have said about Databases at the outset? The answer is simple, a database in the right hands provides a useful conduit through which the very best candidates might be identified and accessed through the effective networking of the most relevant contacts within that database. 2. Advertising Despite the inexorable recent rise of social media platforms, recruitment advertising is still one of the more effective tools in the recruiters toolkit. Of course, like almost everything else in life, the internet has in recent years made a significant impact upon recruitment advertising as discussed in my blog; “Recruitment advertising: death by social networking”? Today, rather than paying a lot of money for a ¼ page ad’ in a national Broadsheet newspaper, a short, sharp and sometimes rather pithy call to action delivered via a social networking site may well yield as many prospective candidates as the traditional Broadsheet. The trick is knowing how best to write it and also where best to put it! Advertising is of course a passive medium. If your desired candidate is not even looking for a new job or just happens to miss the particular issue that your beautifully written and hand crafted recruitment advert appears in, then it is all for nought. 3. Headhunting And then we come to Method 3, Headhunting. Properly applied there is no substitute for it. You may be the best networker that ever trod a boardroom floor or even the best recruitment advertising copywriter that ever lived. But, unless you have the skill, knowledge and credibility to first of all identify and then to approach the very best talent in your sector of interest, then even your very Sunday best efforts, delivered with the benefit of a following wind and a very long run-up, could still never guarantee that you will bring your opportunity to the attention of the very best candidate “in the market” rather than those who just happen to be “on the market”. Simply put, that is what the Headhunter will do for you and in an intensively competitive market where points of differentiation between companies are slight, why would you not strive to ensure that you hired the very best? Wasn’t it Napoleon who when not composing the worlds longest palindrome suggested that the only difference between one army and another lay in the calibre of their people? Substitute the word companies for armies and the same still holds true today. So are you going to adopt the passive approach and just wait to see what tasty morsel (candidate) swims by your bait or are you going to strive to recruit the best? The incremental additional cost of hiring a competent headhunter to proactively go out and find your candidate pale into insignificance when put alongside the business advantage to be gained by hiring the very best. Robert Hyde writes the Headhunter2001 blog which  carries advice based upon the experience of an active head-hunter with more than 20 years experience in the UK Executive search market principally serving industrial and technology sectors. Follow Robert on Twitter at  @headhunter2001.

6 Easy Steps to Identifying Your Blogging Niche - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career

6 Easy Steps to Identifying Your Blogging Niche - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career Last week, I wrote about leveraging a blog for your personal brand. In the article, I said that one of the most important aspects of creating a blog is deciding on a specific topic â€" or niche â€" to write about. Whats your niche? But how do you decide on a niche to focus on? This can be hard for some people who have expertise and education in multiple different fields or industries. To find your niche, follow these seven easy steps: Write down your expertise, education, experience, and interests. Much like searching for a job, you’ll need “qualifications” and “skills” to write your own blog. Why should people listen to you? Choose a topic that you have interesting viewpoints or advice on in order to get people reading. Above all else â€" you need to choose a topic that you have a passion for! Being phony is not something you should do when blogging. Your audience will be able to tell if you don’t truly believe in your topic. Check out other blogs in your subject area. What are these blogs focused on? How can you make yours different than theirs? What advice are they lacking? For example, if you wanted to write about social media, there’s a lot of competition out there in terms of blogs. Do you have specific expertise in a certain part of social media? Are you a Twitter guru, or great at designing Facebook pages? Segmenting your expertise is key depending on your subject area. Write down all of your ideas for content. If your niche is too narrow, it will be difficult to come up with new posts every day or every week. If it’s too broad, it will be difficult to target a specific audience of readers. See how many topics for posts you can come up with and determine whether to tweak your niche from there. Research your audience. Will enough people be interested in your niche to read your blog? And what types of advice and expertise are they looking for? Search for keywords on Google and Twitter to see what people are saying. Understanding your audience is an important part of creating a niche blog. You may even want to monitor your audience for a few weeks before deciding on a topic that will be successful. Get started. Sometimes, it’s hard to determine what needs fixing until you start. Once you’ve begun churning out content, your readers will start commenting and leaving their opinion. You can also poll them on what types of advice they need. Listen to your audience. Read all of the comments on your posts. Search Twitter for what people are saying about your blog and posts. Truly listen and incorporate their feedback into your blogging strategy and topics. Blogging can be a great asset to your personal brand. However, it’s important to first identify a niche for your expertise so you don’t get lost in the noise of other more established and popular blogs. If you have a blog, what steps did you take when identifying your niche? What worked and what didn’t? Author: Heather R. Huhman is a career expert and founder president of Come Recommended, a career and workplace education and consulting firm specializing in young professionals. She is also the author of #ENTRYLEVELtweet: Taking Your Career from Classroom to Cubicle (2010), national entry-level careers columnist for Examiner.com and blogs about career advice at HeatherHuhman.com. Follow her on Twitter at @heatherhuhman.

The Essentials of an Athletic Trainer Resume

The Essentials of an Athletic Trainer ResumeIn the competitive job market, having a robust athletic trainer resume to make an impact is essential. The resumes are the first thing that employers look at and they want to see a resume that makes a statement about a candidate's potential.There are three basic things to include in the resume. In addition to the standard duties and responsibilities listed in the position, you also need to be able to tell what the applicant has accomplished. Examples of accomplishments are the number of patients treated, the length of time the position was filled, or the number of times the position was filled for any specific period of time. These should be listed under the skills, experience, and education section.While some treatments have already been established as a successful way to establish how athletics work, others will need to establish a completely new way to treat patients. To do this, include a detailed description of what has been done so fa r, and then suggest further research should the need arise. Use these examples in order to explain what you have learned as an athletic trainer.In addition to the skills and experiences that are listed in the job description, you also need to include the training and certifications that the applicant has had. How long the certifications have been in effect are vital pieces of information. If the certification was recently passed or if it has been in place for over five years, this is a strong piece of information. It can indicate a commitment to excellence.One other important part of the athletic trainer resume is your education. Whether you received a bachelor's degree or earned your associate's degree, this information should be listed in the resume. It is helpful to write this in the format of a curriculum vitae. An educational background is going to be a helpful indicator of your ability to provide top-notch care for the patient.If you have held a position for more than five yea rs, then you can start to write the athletic trainer resume as if you were applying for a position in the same location. Be sure to include information about previous positions in that location. Give a brief synopsis of the abilities that you would bring to the position. With this information, employers will know what to expect from you.When writing the resume, don't forget to write in a professional manner. As the past year has shown, you can be penalized when you submit sloppy and disorganized work. As an example, an athletic trainer resume should not be distributed via email. This is especially true if the recipient is seeking out positions in areas outside the area where the person worked before. Make sure to use proper spelling and grammar, and cite specific supervisors who can offer you references.Whether it is your first time writing a resume or you have worked with this document many times before, the job of writing an athletic trainer resume is much the same as any other. A little help can go a long way and will give you an edge over your competition.

Why Telling the Truth is a Powerful Career (and Life) Strategy - Kathy Caprino

Why Telling the Truth is a Powerful Career (and Life) Strategy I’ve been stunned lately with the power of telling the truth â€" the raw, uncensored truth.   It’s such a release, relief, and a joy to let the truth rip, rather than wasting so much psychic energy “spinning” the truth so that you project an image of doing better than you feel you are.   (Those of you who’ve seen My 52 Mistakes know I’m committed to telling the truth about my mistakes, as hard as that is.) I once knew a guy in my corporate life who, when asked, “How you doing, Fred? would answer, “Fantastic!”   Every single day, Fred responded that he was “Fantastic.”   God, I hated that.   How can you be fantastic every single day? I tried to figure out what was up with this man.   I asked my mom what she thought about it, and she said, “Anyone who’s happy every day is an idiot!”   Ha! In trying to understand Fred, here’s what I came up with all those years ago: Fred was perhaps: 1) a terrible liar, or 2) so distrustful of others and insecure he had to project a fake “fantastic” image, or 3) living life so superficially that every day was, in fact, fantastic or 4) living life so deeply that every day was, in fact, fantastic Whatever the case, I didn’t resonate with this man at all, or with his same fantastic daily response. Yesterday, I was talking to my awesome marketing advisor Krista Carnes of Booking Authors about my website, and I shared that over the past few months, I’ve heard people say this of my website: 1) It’s too professional â€" it intimidates me 2) You’ve accomplished so much, I don’t think I’m right for you (as a client) 3) How I experience you as a person (warm, compassion, approachable, caring, etc.) isn’t what comes across on your site I’ve always been confused about those impressions because clearly I’m sending out a vibe that isn’t me. I finally listened! Krista helped me see what I needed was to tell a bit more of the truth â€" about who I am, what I care about, what I’ve been through.   And in that telling of truth, those who are meant to connect with me as clients, friends and colleagues, will resonate with my words and find me.   So I revised the site again with more of my personal voice â€" which is an interesting mix of the highly professional but also the very human, flawed and honest.   I also shared my personal story of breakdown and breakthrough â€" which I realize many folks don’t know. (And wouldn’t you know I heard from three awesome women this very morning hoping to connect!).   And please let me know your thoughts about the homepage copy hows it ring for you? I work with women every day in all stages of their careers and businesses who want to tell the truth but struggle with how to do it, for fear of being rejected or judged negatively.   From corporate execs needing a powerful resume, to entrepreneurial women crafting marketing copy for their new programs, to creative folks deciding if they want to embrace Twitter and get their messages out there â€" we all want to tell the truth about who we are and what we love.   We’re just afraid. So let’s start communicating more of the real truth, but do it from a lens of positivity.   Tell the truth in a way that fits that facts  well but allows room for as much hope, energy, and compassion as possible.   Make sure you tell the truth of who you really are â€" inside and out whether you’re networking, speaking, writing, interviewing, or building clients and businesses.   And make sure that your lens focus isn’t set to “negative” to the exclusion of all of the amazing positivity your truth can reveal. When you do, your words and stories will attract what you long for most: the heart-aligned jobs, opportunities, clients, business, friends, colleagues who you really want â€" not a circle of people and experiences that leave you feeling alone and cold. I’d LOVE to hear from you.   PLEASE SHARE your comments below where are you not telling the full truth, and can you access the courage today to tell more of your truth, share more of the real story? Indeed, my friends, the truth will set you free!   Love ya

Do You Have A Laser-Precise Job Search Plan - Pathfinder Careers

Do You Have A Laser-Precise Job Search Plan - Pathfinder Careers Do You Have A Laser-Precise Job Search Plan? Well-known fact: Job searching and being unemployed can be one of the most discouraging and ego-smashing things a person could ever experience. Rejection is common, and there is a tendency to end up in a very unhappy place. Then, there’s the chaos. If you’ve previously been working for most of your career in a full-time position, you’re used to have the structure and routine to each day. Being out of work, you find yourself in a drifting miasma of What do I do today? Someone once told me: Looking for a job IS a full-time job. You need to adopt that mentality. Here are some suggestions on how to chart your course, add some structure to your day, and give yourself definable goals to give you that sense of order that you had within the workplace: 1) Appoint a Job Search ‘Buddy’ This person will be someone you report to on a weekly basis. This person will hold you accountable and be your ‘cheerleader’ at the same time. NOTE: Make sure that this person is someone who is a friend, mentor or colleague. Don’t rely on someone in your household… this could be a potential sticky wicket with family relationships if you somehow fall off the bandwagon and could lead to arguments! 2) Number of Articles to Be Read Weekly When you are unemployed or out of work, it is easy to feel that you are getting left behind on industry trends and issues. It’s amazing when you have a clear command of what’s going on in the world how easy it is to find opportunities to talk about what you’ve read or learned. 3) Number of Networking Events to Be Attended Weekly Shy? Get over it. The ocean is full of sharks right now, and you need to be one of them. That means getting out of the house, and getting out to networking events. Take a completely different approach: my friend Cleon Cox, who is the founder of the Portland Job Finders Support Group has this mantra which is perfect: Meet people, learn something, and have fun. 4) Number of Educational Events to Go to Monthly When you are not working, again, there is the fear that you are getting ‘off the merry-go-round’ and losing ground to competitors. But smart job searchers realize that there is a huge opportunity to be gained during this time: go take classes. This could be a great way to help catapult you into a new career, enhance your professional credentials, or hone your skills. 5) Number of Volunteer Hours Per Month Volunteering can provide exceptional opportunities to network, learn new skills, become a known quantity within an organization and even find out about industry or company job openings before they are even posted. Plus, you’ll feel good while doing it! 6) Number of Member Organizations To Belong To If you have a target industry, chances are that there is some kind of related trade association or membership organization that you could join. The benefit of these organizations is that your involvement can add gravitas to your credentials. 7) Number of Informational Interviews Per Week Part of the ‘getting out of the house’ aspect of this job search plan is to meet people… one-on-one in informational interviews. Many people mistakenly believe and take the approach that informational interviews are all about finding jobs. WRONG! Informational interviews are precisely about finding INFORMATION. The best part about informational interviews is that if you treat the person right who took the time to meet with you, they can become a great internal advocate for you. ALWAYS thank interviewees for their time by mailing a hand-written note. 8) Number of Friends To Talk To Per Week Who do friends know? People. Employed people. Don’t be afraid to reach out to your entire network. The key is to tap into your social circle and ‘refresh’ your connections. You never know what might happen. 9) Follow Up On Sent Applications One of the biggest failures of job seekers is that they are constantly looking forward for the next job opening to apply for that they don’t go back and follow up on the positions for which they’ve already applied. Sometimes, the position opening didn’t turn out to be the right fit for your skills. But if you treat the hiring manager or the human resource representative right, you could impress them in a very good way. That could put you on the “A” list for other jobs that come open. 10) Focus Your Resume on Key Themes You probably have several different theme areas that you could develop separate resumes for based on your background. Explore how you might have different incarnations of your resume, and take the time to develop these fully. You might be pleasantly surprised at how you can reinvent yourself and create new flexibility in your employment search. This blog seems like, wow, a whole lot of homework, but the goal is to provide structure, stability and goals to you in a time where there is a lot of chaos, unclear objectives and confusion. By structuring yourself and your time while unemployed, this will give you the sense of purpose you need and also a boost to feeling productive.