I’ve recently attended a few events where I’ve met a number of folks who are “in transition”. Several of them have been looking for work for while and some of them have recently begun their search. It’s a tough market out there so in order to be successful, you need every tool and every advantage you can get. I’ve posted a number of tips on these topics but I felt this would be a good time to organize them in a way to help job seekers through out the process.

Make sure your experience and qualifications are strong:

Talk about a loaded question. Imagine you’re sitting in your interview all dressed up and everything is going smoothly. Then you get tossed this humdinger of question. How do you answer? Do you describe the person sitting across the table from you? Do you tell the truth and say that you’re ideal boss is one that’s never around? Is there such a thing as a good answer to this question?

In today’s competitive job market, hundreds (sometimes thousands) of people are applying for the same job. To add make things even more challenging, many of the people submitting resumes meet only a fraction of the qualifications (if any) which makes the job of the person scanning the resumes even more challenging. But that doesn’t matter to you, the job seeker. What does matter is how you can stand out from the crowd so that your resume is actually read. Here’s how.

Resumes are not one-size-fits-all:

Unemployment is sky high and the talking heads on TV can barely conceal their pleasure when they share the latest bad economic news. So it’s no wonder people are panicked which means they spend less money which means businesses take in less money. This then means that businesses need to let people go and those folks will certainly spend less money…. The bottom line is that anyone with a job has a chance of losing it.

As if going on the first round of professional interviews in your lifetime weren’t stressful enough, the news media is constantly preaching that they sky is falling. So how do recent (and soon-to-be recent) graduates compete for jobs in this tough environment? Here are some tips to help you stand out in a positive way:

Be Presentable:

It may have been fun to get your tongue pierced, your favorite band’s logo tattooed on your arms and dress for class like you just rolled out of bed (okay, so you did roll right out of bed right before class). But now it’s time to buckle down and get the world to take you seriously.

When dressing for an interview, you want to put forth a professional image and show the potential employer that you’re serious about becoming a member of their team. You can’t accomplish either of these goals when dressed inappropriately. So it’s important to put some thought into what you wear when dressing for an interview.

For a typical white collar office job, you want to wear formal business attire to an interview unless the person setting up the interview tells you otherwise. In the latter case, feel free to ask for clarification if you’re told something vague like “you don’t have to wear a suit” or if they say you can dress business casual. There’s nothing wrong with you confirming that you both share the same meaning of business casual.

One of the things I’ve been working on is pronouncing words correctly. I recently listened to an audio program to learn Italian (I hope to visit Italy in the near future) and was reminded of some of the common mispronunciations that people make. I was surprised at the way the narrator mispronounced numbers in English. Here are some of the ways she mispronounced numbers:

• Twenty was mispronounced “Twen-y.” - Missing “T.”
• Seventy was mispronounced “Seven-dy” - “T” to “D.”
• Ninety was mispronounced “Nine-dy” - “T” to “D.”