Being in the right place
at the right time
Pat
O'Donnell here to teach you the nuances and skills to be in the right place
at the right time to
acquire the job of your dreams.
Here are just a few of the strategies I will share with you in my blog articles:
- How to present your assets in a compelling manner that makes you a must-meet candidate, rather than someone lost in a pile of commodity resumes.
- How to uncover the "Hidden Job Market." That is the 70-80% of jobs that are given away before the job becomes visible to the general public in places like monster.com and newspaper ads.
- How to develop work-arounds for career problems like age bias, having been out of work for a while, or wanting to change careers.
- When and how to use networking, job boards, recruiting firms, and more.
(The complete set of topics for the blog are listed at the left.)
In addition to the great resources you'll find on this site, I offer:
- complete packages in career counseling services
- recruiting advice
- workshops and speaking for professional groups
Disclosure: Presently I am a Recruiter for McKinley Group, Inc. in Minneapolis, MN, working with Marketing, Product Management, Training, and Organizational Development executives. This role is concurrent to the Career Counseling I am doing through Placement Genius, which is a sole proprietorship.
The three most recent articles:
Lying on Resumes and in Interviews
By Pat O'Donnell | June 22, 2008
The simple answer? Don’t do it.
- I have seen national studies that claimed about 70% of resumes have “mistruths” in them.
- Other studies state 25-50% of resumes have “embellishments” (an exaggeration but not lie.)
The most common lies:
- Length of employment gaps
- Titles
- Degrees completed
- Salary
- Reason for leaving
- Not mentioning a job from which you were fired
- Taking credit for an idea developed by the team
- When career started (age)
- Size of business or projects managed
- Rank as a sales person or total revenue you represented
- Claiming to be “Consulting” when you were billing zero hours
I could quote more studies, but the point is: Recruiters and Hiring Managers EXPECT there to be many lies in resumes and in the interviews we have with applicants so we look and listen for them.
Topics: Branding + Positioning, Career Strategies, Interviews, Recruiting, Resume, Salary | No Comments »
Don’t be lost in a pile of resumes!
By Pat O'Donnell | June 3, 2008
I see too many resumes that show the minimum skills required by a job ad but don’t show how well the job applicant performed the tasks or why this candidate is a better risk to interview and hire than other applicants with the same skills. If you are guilty of this, you have qualified your resume to be “in the pile” of qualified applicants but have done nothing to make your resume float to the “top of the pile.” You have less chance of winning an interview. Read the rest of this entry »
Topics: Branding + Positioning, Cover Letter, Interviews, Networking, Resume | No Comments »
Counteroffers benefit the employer not you
By Pat O'Donnell | May 15, 2008
Fact: 70% of executives who accept a counteroffer are gone from that employer within 6 months.
Fact: 85% of executives who accept are gone within 18 months.
A counteroffer is an offer made by an employer in order to keep you on after you have given notice.
The most frequent counteroffers strategies include:
- a promise of a promotion and/or a raise (most frequent response)
- telling you are a traitor to the team or to your boss
- confiding to you that the company you are considering is not that well thought of
Topics: Career Strategies, Interviews, Salary | No Comments »
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