Exposing Cover Letter Myths
Your cover letter is a first impression to potential employers. If you expect to be a successful job seeker, you'll want to know how to attract positive attention with your cover letter, while avoiding [more…]
Five Tips for Better Resume Writing
First the good news. You do not have to be William Shakespeare to compose a solid, well-organized, professional-looking resume. All you need are the ability to express your ideas in proper English and [more…]
Grabbing Attention with Your Cover Letter's Opening Line
Learn to write openings that fire up the reader and move the reader along without wasting tons of time. Interviewers are overloaded — whole days are a blur for them, and they have no spare minutes to decipher [more…]
Rookie Teaching Technique: Choosing a Seating Arrangement
Deciding how to arrange your seats isn't as difficult as you may anticipate; the shape and size of your classroom usually dictate how your classroom must be arranged. Before you get to the business of [more…]
Understanding Nonprofit Ownership
No one person or group of people can own a nonprofit organization. You don't see nonprofit shares traded on stock exchanges, and any equity in a nonprofit organization belongs to the organization itself [more…]
Zooming In on Cover Letter Anatomy
In case you've forgotten or never learned the parts of a job letter, review these building blocks. [more…]
Sending a Thank-You Letter after a Job Interview
How much do post-interview thank-you letters really impact hiring decisions? When they're canned, flat, and boring, interviewers may see them as a snore. But when you're in a classy field of candidates [more…]
Avoiding the Cardinal Sins of Resume Writing
Take some time to ponder the following pitfalls of resume writing, and do your best to avoid them in your own resume. [more…]
Understanding What Employers Want in a Cover Letter
In late 1999, the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) conducted the SHRM Survey on Cover Letters and Resumes. The survey was faxed to randomly selected members of the Employment Management Association [more…]
Adding Humor to Training
Thomas Edison once said that he had never worked a day in his life. It was all fun! Wouldn't it be great if you could always say that? Adding humor to your training is one way in which you can add fun [more…]
Considering Why People Volunteer
Volunteers are the lifeblood of the nonprofit sector. Just about every nonprofit charitable organization uses volunteers in some capacity. In most cases, board members serve without compensation. For many [more…]
Uncovering the Many Components of Public Relations
Public relations is more than just pitching stories to the media or mailing out press releases. The PR umbrella covers a number of related activities, all of which are concerned with communicating specific [more…]
Resume Send-Out Strategies
If you are not generating solid leads, despite networking, visiting career sites on the Internet, and reading the classifieds, and you're willing to take a more aggressive approach to your job search, [more…]
Having What It Takes to Be a Trainer
Although training may seem like a glamorous profession to an observer, like any other profession, it has its hidden challenges. Having the skills to be a trainer is only one prerequisite. A much more difficult [more…]
Using Cover Letter Language That Snaps, Crackles, and Pops
Visualize your reader and write specifically for that reader. Speaking directly to your reader may seem obvious, but this tenet is one of the most overlooked aspects of effective writing. Writing to a [more…]
Winning Over a Difficult Customer
Service providers who don't learn how to work well with difficult people lose their hair, their marbles, and their customers. The nature of your job requires that you sometimes work with customers who [more…]
Getting Paid What You're Worth: Salary Negotiations
Oh happy day. Your interviewer looks you straight in the eye and says, "We'd like you to join our team; I'm offering you a job, but before we go any further, we should talk about how you'd like to be paid [more…]
Obtaining an ISBN for Your Self-Published Book
If you look at any commercially available book, the back cover lists the book's International Standard Book Number (ISBN) and barcode, along with the book's price. Any book that's sold anywhere in the [more…]
Building a Better Job Interview
With a job interview comes a great amount of hope. If you don't hear back after an interview, an inevitable let-down follows as you begin the job search again. Don't let that unhappy ending happen to you [more…]
Knowing When to Follow Up a Sale
In today's market, more and more professional salespeople are practicing aggressive, thorough follow-up methods that even a few years ago would have been considered unnecessary on some of their marginal [more…]
Knowing What to Take to a Real Estate License Exam
The big day is almost here. You've passed whatever prelicensing course you had to take with flying colors, and you've filled out and sent in your application for the exam and gotten something back in the [more…]
Preparing Your Training Environment
Establishing an environment conducive to learning is a critical aspect of starting a training session off on the right foot. You can ensure that participants walk in to a relaxed atmosphere and an environment [more…]
Designing Your Marketing Program
A marketing program is a coordinated, thoughtfully designed set of activities that help you achieve your marketing objectives. Your marketing objectives [more…]
Illegal and Inappropriate Interview Questions
Every human resources specialist in America knows that interview questions about sex, religion, and race are against the rules. But other interviewers who don't deal with employment issues on a regular [more…]
Avoiding Self-Publishing Mistakes
If you're about to self-publish your first book, you can make a handful of mistakes that can mean the difference between a successful publishing venture and a total bomb. Careful planning and implementing [more…]
