Author: gcapone

What is a Mock Interview?

A Mock Interview is a practice interview designed to simulate a real job interview as closely as possible.  Mock interviews are one of the best ways to improve interview skills and prepare for an interview.  The practice gained in a mock interview is invaluable.

Mock interviews can be completed in person, by phone or by video conference.  All three methods work well.  The key to success in a mock interview is recreating the interview experience as much as possible.

One benefit of a mock interview that is often overlooked is the confidence gained after completing a mock interview.  Most job seekers are at least a little intimidated by the interview experience, and some are absolutely terrified when interviewing.  This fear can dramatically hurt a job seeker’s interview performance.  By completing a mock interview, the job seeker will be more comfortable in the real interview.  Like anything, the more you practice, the more confident you will be.

Mock interviews, like real interviews, can take a wide range of forms.  They can be traditional interviews, behavioral interviews or other types.  The interviewer can be friendly and make it easy for the job seeker, or the interviewer can be tough and challenging.  No matter the type of interview or the style, practice will help, but to get the most out of the mock interview, the session should be tailored to the type and style of the interview the job seeker is likely to encounter.  This requires researching every company and learning as much about how they interview as possible.

The biggest style decision in a mock interview deals with follow up questions.  Some interviewers foster a dialog with a lot of follow up questions, while others take the answer from the job seeker and move on to the next question.  In most cases, candidates struggle more when they are not asked follow up questions, but each job seeker is different.  The mock interview should mimic the style of the upcoming interview if possible.  If the type of interview is not known, then work on types of interviews are more likely to be a problem for the job seeker.

Choosing an interviewer for a mock interview is an important decision.  The interviewer should have experience interviewing.  The interviewer should not be a close friend of the interviewer.  The interviewer should have a background that the job seeker respects as an equal or superior.  The goal is to find an interviewer who will be respected by the job seeker, and possibly intimidate the job seeker.  It is important to simulate the stress, anxiety and fear of an interview situation and the interviewer needs to fill this role.

Book: Resume Objective Statements and Professional Summaries

Resume Objective Statements and Professional SummariesResume Objective Statements and Professional Summaries will show you how to start your resume with an introduction to grab a hiring manager’s attention.  Your resume will become a powerful and impressive sales tool for your job search.  Unlike other books on resumes that provide a chapter or two on objective statements and professional summaries, this book attacks the topic.  Numerous examples are provided, analyzed and improved.  Each step is explained in detail.  You will learn how to create a powerful, impressive and effective introduction that will make an impact and get results.

To have a chance of landing an interview, you must first grab a hiring manager’s attention.  Your resume is a sales document.  It needs to sell your potential from the instant a hiring manager starts reading.  To do this, you need a strong, impressive and effective introduction.  This introduction will create excitement in hiring managers and motivate them to want to learn more.  In other words, you need an introduction that will lead to interviews.

Most job seekers understand how important the start of their resume is, but this is also the part of their resume that they struggle with the most.  The result is typically a weak, uninspiring start that is completely ineffective.

This book offers the solution.  It is entirely focused on Objective Statements and Professional Summaries, the two most common styles of introductions.  Other resume writing books provide a little advice on a wide range of resume writing topics.  They try to answer every question a job seeker might have, but provide limited depth on each topic.  You need to become an expert at creating a powerful and effective introduction.  You need this book, and you need the winning introduction you will learn to write.

Get the book today:

Kindle and Print Editions Now Available


Proofreading Software: Whitesmoke

As I continue to proofread my third book, Whitesmoke has again proved to be an invaluable resource.  I used Whitesmoke extensively for my second book, Resume Writing for Manufacturing Careers, and knew it would help greatly again.  I’m using the 2010 version of Whitesmoke.  The newer version is supposed to be better, but I haven’t updated yet.

Whitesmoke is an excellent tool to catch all the mistakes Word misses.  I always use Word’s built in grammar checker, but it only catches the obvious errors.  Whitesmoke will run circles around it.  This does not mean that Whitesmoke is perfect.  It isn’t.  It will still miss some mistakes, but it is an excellent resource.

When using Whitesmoke, you will quickly learn that the software makes a large number of style choices.  For example, it recommends changes when the same word appears more than once in close proximity.  This is an easy mistake to make, but it is not something Word is going to address.  Whitesmoke is also pretty good at finding missing words.  When I type fast, it is not uncommon for me to skip an occasional preposition.  For any reader, this will jump off the page as a mistake, but for grammar checkers, this can be a difficult mistake to identify.  Whitesmoke does a good job with this.

I also like the ability to check for synonyms.  All you have to do is click a word in a document and a box pops up with suggested alternatives.  This is great when you need to come up with a high-impact word and don’t want to pull out a thesaurus.

Whitesmoke isn’t perfect.  It is supposed to integrate with Word well.  I’ve found this integration does not always work.  As a result, I copy from a Word document into the Whitesmoke editor rather than having Whitesmoke edit the text directly in Word.  This is more cumbersome, but it works.  Hopefully, Whitesmoke has addressed this in the latest version, but I haven’t tested it.

In addition to Whitesmoke, I’ve also been tested, and found it to be a very effective grammar checker too.  Grammarly is web-based, while Whitesmoke is an application installed on my computer.  I prefer having it installed on my computer, although with a web-based solution, Grammarly is always up to date with the latest version.

I’m going to put together some articles on the effectiveness of the grammar checkers on resumes.  Check back, those will hopefully be complete in a week or two.

Proofreading Software: Grammarly

I have been working on my third book.  I’m at the stage where I need to proofread over and over again.  As I did with my last book, I’m turning to automated grammar checkers to help with the process.  They can’t replace a proofreader, but they can help improve the process.  For this book, I’m trying a program I haven’t used before – Grammarly.

Grammarly is a web-based grammar checker.  You just copy and paste text into an online form, and it runs the check.  It is extremely rigorous, and almost overwhelming with how many suggestions it makes.  It took time to get used to this.  Many of the suggestions are style related, suggesting synonyms or simplifying complex sentences.  Although these are valuable suggestions, they aren’t mistakes.

For the major grammatical errors, Grammarly does a great job.  It identifies very subtle mistakes in sentence structure.  This makes it a program you have to spend time using to get the real value out of it.  I found a number of cases where the program identified an error that I thought about writing off as ok.  Then, after reading the sentence very closely, I confirmed the software was right.  This was most likely to occur with long, complex sentences.  The software was able to analyze these sentences and figure out that something was wrong.

Grammarly also identified a number of false positives.  These were sentences that had a structure that didn’t fit exactly how the software recommended.  The suggestions were not wrong.  I’ve seen this with other grammar checkers.  There are always a number of false positives.

The synonym suggestions were helpful.  On every page, the program offers dozens of suggestions for alternative words.  Any writer looking to expand their vocabulary and write with more varied wording choices will find this valuable.

I have also been using the grammar checker in Word and the program on the book.  Whitesmoke and Grammarly are similar in what they accomplish, but they are very different programs.  Both are much more effective than the Word built in grammar checker.  For my book, I ran everything through Word, then Whitesmoke and finally through Grammarly.  This meant that every error Grammarly found was an error Whitesmoke missed.  Whitesmoke does a great job, but there were numerous corrections Grammarly found that Whitesmoke missed.  I expect that if I had reversed this order, Whitesmoke would have found errors Grammarly missed.  Neither will catch 100% of the mistakes.

Overall, I like Grammarly.  It is very effective at identifying grammatical errors, and will help any writer proofread their work.  I’m still deciding if I’ll keep my online subscription.  I already have Whitesmoke and it is effective.  I like both of them, but am not sure I don’t think I need two complete grammar checking packages.  If you are considering a grammar checker (if you don’t have one, you should), it’s really a toss up between the two – they are both very effective.

I’ve been testing both programs on resumes and will follow up with a series of articles with the results.

Resume Keyword Lists

The webinar I presented on Wednesday went great. I reviewed the results of the resume benchmarking study I did for APICS, and then took questions. This was the first time I did a live resume assessment.  During the Q&A, I asked attendees to send their resumes so I could review them during the session.  Two people submitted resumes, and we walked through a few quick changes that they can make to improve their resumes.

One of the changes I identified was removing or relocating a keyword list.  Resume keyword lists are a common element of resumes.  They provide a list of technical terms that a hiring manager may use to find candidates.  This type of list is great for ensuring that a resume shows up in different searches.  Unfortunately, that’s the only benefit of a keyword list.

Putting a list of keywords on your resume will not get a hiring manager excited.  Anyone can pick out important terms and create a list.  It does not convey proficiency in any of the areas.  You have to describe your experience and accomplishments with a skill to make a strong impression.

A good place for a resume keyword list is at the end of the resume.  The section should have a title like “Skills” or “Areas of Expertise” and be the last item of the resume.  This placement ensures that it does not get in the way of more important information.  The keyword list might help a database match your resume to a search, but it is not going to make much of an impression with a human reader.

Keyword lists are most effective when they focus on in-demand technical skills.  Soft skills don’t offer as much value.  For example, leadership, communications skills, organizational skills and administrative skills may be important to a hiring manager, but they make terrible search terms.  They appear on too many resumes, and are important to almost any career.  Technical skills that are specific to a single career field tend to be much better search terms.  Ensuring these terms are in your resume by putting them in a keyword list is a great way to match as many relevant searches as possible.

Some job seekers put the keyword list at the top of their resume.  This can provide an attractive presentation, but it isn’t particularly effective.  Hiring managers will skip a list like this.  Even if they read it, the list isn’t going to do much to sell the candidate’s potential.  The result is the keyword list isn’t much better than just leaving a large blank space.  The top of the resume is valuable real estate and putting low value content such as a keyword list in it is a waste.

Resume Benchmarking Webinar – APICS

I am presenting a webinar on July 13th (2PM EDT) with the results of the Resume Benchmarking Survey I conducted for APICS.  The survey looked at nearly 400 resumes of operations management professionals.  These mainly came from supply chain managers, production managers, production planners/schedulers and logistics managers, but also covered other operations management careers.

The survey looked at the resume structure and how job seekers start their resumes.  Resume titles, the first line and the content of the first section were examined in great detail.  Best practices and common mistakes were identified and reported in the APICS whitepaper. Later this year, I’m going to work on the next phase of the benchmarking survey and assess other sections of the resume.

I’m looking forward to the webinar.  The last webinar I did for APICS was on Resume Formatting and had around 400 attendees.  APICS members can download the whitepaper and register for the webinar at the APICS Career Center.

 

Not an APICS Member?  Join APICS Today!

APICS Conference

I had a great trip to Las Vegas for the APICS Conference last week.  I had two sessions – one on interviewing and one on resume writing.  Both were based on sections of my books.

The interview section covered a number of topics but the core was the STAR(L).  This is technique for answering interview questions that is one of the most powerful and effective interview tools you can learn.

The resume session focused on the resume assessment from my new book, Resume Writing for Manufacturing Careers.  I took the checklist from Chapter 13: Resume Assessment and delivered it as a presentation.  This checklist is an invaluable tool for assessing your resume.  Not only will it identify problem areas that you need to improve, but it gives specific best practice recommendations.

You can learn the STAR(L) technique and get the Resume Assessment with my books:

Resume Writing for Manufacturing Careers

Power Up Your Job Search: A Modern Approach to Interview Preparation

Resume Book on Amazon

My book, Resume Writing for Manufacturing Careers, is on Amazon.  We had a few problems with the initial setup of the book, but the publisher did a great job getting everything fixed.  You can now buy the book on Amazon:

Resume Writing for Manufacturing Careers

This book is perfect for anyone in an operations careers, whether production, quality, logistics, transportation, maintenance, scheduling or engineering.  There are tons of examples, often showing both the typical resume content/formatting and then an improved version.  In addition, I show the resume writing process from start to finish.  I used a hypothetical Production Manager for my example.  It took six chapters to show how to write this example resume, with detailed instructions showing each improvement along the way.  There’s also a resume assessment checklist that you can use to review your resume.  It gives specific criteria and best practices for the assessment so you can look at your resume like a resume writing pro.

Amazon also has the Look Inside feature active, allowing you to check out the Table of Contents, first chapter and index.

Buy the Book:  Resume Writing for Manufacturing Careers

Resume Writing for Manufacturing Careers

My new book is now available!

The book can be purchased directly from the publisher, and in the next few days, it will be available on Amazon.  I am also working on getting the book into other retail channels.

The website for the book is up and running… www.resume-writing-for-manufacturing-careers.com

Resume Writing for Manufacturing Careers - Front Cover
Resume Writing for Manufacturing Careers - Back Cover