Vacation

Folks, I am going to be taking a month off. If you must know, I am getting married! I will be back before you know it but a vacation is long overdue.

What did you do today?

Be a Great Boss!

Have you come so far that you are now managing other employees?  Congratulations!  That is fantastic news!  Now, learn from all of your previous managers and strive to be the best boss to your employees.  If you need some help deciding what qualities are the key to unlocking a great working environment for all parties then you are in luck!

Wouldn’t you know, there was an article written just about that topic.  The thing that always comes to mind for me is that I love it when I am left to do what I do best.  Currently, that is the case 100%.  I know my job, my boss knows hers and we do what we need to do to get things done.  It’s wonderful.  Surround yourself with people who fill in gaps and posses skill that others do not.

So here are five qualities of exceptional bosses:

1. Develop every employee.
2. Deal with problems immediately.
3. Rescue your worst employee.
4. Serve others, not yourself.
5. Always remember where you came from.

All wonderful tips and ones others often forget about.  Now read the full article to make sure that one day you too will be a remarkable boss.

What did you do today?

Leadership…a la The Godfather

My mom loooves The Godfather so I think she’ll appreciate this post.  The Godfather has a lot of great quotes for life, such as “leave the gun take the cannoli.” Upon writing that line, I made a Robert Deniro face and thought “Eh, whattaya gonna do?”

As usual, I digress.  I recently came across a great article that relates a lot of great Godfather quotes to the five keys of leadership.  You have to admit, that there was quite the sense of community in that movie.  Granted, most mafiosos are that way but there msut be SOME qualities that they exemplify that make people want to believe in them…other than fearing that they’ll get whacked.

I cannot say it better myself so I might as well leave this one to the experts.

1. Build a powerful community – “Someday, and that day may never come, I’ll call upon you to do a service for me. ~Vito Corleone“
2. Hold people accountable – “What’s the matter with you? I think your brain is going soft. ~Vito Corleone“
3. Don’t get emotional – “It’s not personal, Sonny. It’s strictly business. ~Michael Corleone“
4. Be decisive.
5. Spend time with your family – “Do you spend time with your family? Because a man who doesn’t spend time with his family can never be a real man. ~Vito Corleone“

What did you do today?

Social Media Plan

This is a MUST share for everyone who is looking for a better way to manage a social media calendar. We all have our own way but if we don’t at least explore other options then we will never learn.

So in my attempt to learn I sampled upon a great article about the 9 social media tips to help small business and I plan on implementing tip number four in my future social media post planning. I truly think that having an idea of what your general plan will be will make creating a post for each day of the week much easier.

Now, are you ready for the best part? At the end of the article you may notice three links, don’t overlook them. It’s true that the best is left for last because the last link leads you to an Excel spreadsheet that will help you with your social media plan!  Now let’s all thank the Inbound Marketing Company.

What did you do today?

Your Resume Through the Recruiter’s Eyes

Not too long ago I came across an amazing article that showed two resumes.  This was a study which was done on 30 professional recruiters.  Eye tracking was used, and the article revealed what the recruiters looked at in the first six seconds of looking at anyone’s resume.  With the number of applicants to every job, these results are crucial and I think will truly help anyone out there to tailor their resume so that it doesn’t get lost in the numerous piles…or worse yet, simply put in the rejection pile.

I’ll link you to the article at the end of this posting but I wanted to highlight what was found first.  If you look through the comments on the article you will also get some great advice from other recruiters who say that they spend more than six seconds on a resume…more like 10-20!

Your resume will get A LOT more viewing time if it is structured in an easy to navigate way.  Tell them who you are in your title & more importantly, create a summary section which tells them in a concise way why you should be hired and what you have already accomplished.  Think LinkedIn summary.  This should be followed by intro’s to each job.  Just a one to two sentence synopsis of what you are doing in your current role or what you’ve done in the past.  Just because you’re a financial analyst in one place doesn’t mean you’ll fit into the shoes of a financial analyst in another.  Yes, the basic tasks might be the same but a financial analyst in the job you are going for is actually covering someone else’s tasks as well.  This is where tailoring your resume to each job becomes increasingly important.  Lastly, close with your education.

Do these simple things and I think you’ll be on your way to getting that next job!  Good luck! What did you do today?

P.S. As promised, read the fascinating article about How Recruiters See Your Resume.

Get Ready for Co-op Students!

I’d like to start today’s post off with a little off topic story that led me to write this post.  Often times I boggle my fiancee’s mind.  He simply cannot understand how a girl who was born and raised in Latvia came to like country music.  To him, country music is sad dogs, trucks and a lot of beer drinking.  To me, it’s songs about the simple pleasures in life.  But, how DID I come to like it?

Well, I was trying to find my very first co-op internship at Northeastern University.  Unwilling to leave all of the deciding to the career center I decided to venture out on my own and look at monster.com.  I came across what seemed like the best job in the world. The job description was written in all caps and it talked about working with TV, Radio, sports casters, etc.  I was blown away.

I took the orange line out to god knows where and wore a suite but comfortable shoes, as the interviewer specified on the phone.  I arrived at some open concept office and waited for my turn to interview for the job of the century.  After about an hour and a half about 6 of us were going to be taken on a little field trip to see if we like the job and the sales people would pay for lunch!  Oh boy!  So we piled in, I was in a red jeep with one other recruit and two sales people.  We drove to…the middle of nowhere in NH.  What proceeded was 5 hours of going door to door and trying to sell Domino’s coupons.  At one home we were told that the previous home owners we spoke to had had a quarrel pretty recently and the husband pulled a gun on his wife.

No, this was not the job I ever wanted or would wish upon anyone.  We were asked at the end of the day, at 6pm with an hour and a half drive back to Boston ahead of us, if we wanted to head back to the office and fill out paperwork for a full time co-op position.  I politely declined.  HOWEVER, during our drive back the guy driving the Jeep turned on a country music station.  Keith Urban was singing one of his little ditties and I was so happy that the day had come to an end that THAT is when I began liking country music.

But now, to the task at hand.  It is time for a lot of Co-Op students to find…a co-op for the summer.  First and foremost, think about what you have learned so far in school and figure out what you liked.  Then, look at your major or minor and see how those interested might fit into them.  This is your time to figure out what you like and don’t like.  Don’t take a menial job just to pass time, try and do something that might really make you bust your hump but at the end of those six months you’ll know whether the work was rewarding or simply awful.

Go in to your interviews with confidence, but keep your over confidence in check.  No on wants to work with a know it all.  Lastly, make sure to leave a lasting impression.
* prepare!
* shower
* show up on time, this might mean that you need to go to the place a day ahead to make sure you know where you are going
* be nice to everyone in the building, you have no idea who the boss, interviewer or secretary might be
* give a firm hand shake
* send a thank you note to everyone you interviewed with

If you really want to blow them away then go on vistaprint.com and create some business cards that give your name, address, phone number, e-mail and what your major and minor are.  It’s these little things that are so simple, yet so memorable that may just get you the job you want.

Good luck students!  What did you do today?

My Two Cents: Facebook Has Come A Long Way

There has been so much talk about Facebook buying up Instagram lately, people saying that Facebook is the big bad wolf, everyone wondering what’s next and contemplating shutting down their page.  So today I thought I’d write a theme about my experience with Facebook and share my two cents on this acquisition.

Picture it, a la the Golden Girls, it’s 2004 and a young Linda finds herself in Madrid, Spain on what her undergrad International Business guidance counselor likes to call “an expatriate year abroad.”  My brother was going to be attending his freshman year at Northeastern University and I was bummed that I was so far away from family, granted Madrid is much closer to Latvia, and that I wouldn’t get to show my little broski around campus.

Then he told me, there’s this cool new website where he was able to figure out which of his high school buddies would be at Northeastern as well.  The site was called, “the facebook.”  The premise was that only college students could log in. This was great, I could interact with my friends back home and I could share photos with my parents without sending zillions of big files through email!  This was the new age and we all loved this new website.  As we know, Mark Zuckerberg later dropped the “the” from the name to make a bigger statement with simply calling the site “Facebook.”

Through the years, more of my friends have joined Facebook, some have also closed their accounts, but through it all, it still remains the biggest networking platform out there.  But what else remains the same is Facebook’s ability to keep changing, evolving, and as much as we all hate to admit it, improving.

We all hate change, but when Facebook first came on the radar, everyone was so thrilled to interact and quite honestly spy on those they used to know or might not know but wish they did.  Then came the stronger privacy policies and people were given the ability to hide some updates, or hide their profiles altogether.  Through out all of it, Facebook kept increasing the amount of sharing you could do amongst your closest networks and friends.  You could also play online games, share photos, share videos, link to articles, the list goes on.

But why were all of these things becoming more and more available on this one site?  Well, here are my two cents.  We, the people, are the ones guiding where Facebook goes.  We first just linked to pages, so Facebook took that and upon linking to a page an image showed up…an image that was linked to that page via meta descriptions and alt tags and all other kinds of html mumbo jumbo.  We then wanted to (and began to) share some of our videos, so Facebook made it possible to put links within your profile which were actually housed within Facebook in an app.  Whoa!  Apps, what are those things?  Let’s get a bunch of apps and tell people about all of our activities.  What’s better?  I’m going to let people know exactly where I am in case they want to meet me…or rob me.  Well, welcome to 4square and Facebook check ins.

My point is that this Instagram acquisition, as insanely huge and costly as it is, did not come out of the blue.  We have all been linking Instagram photos with our Facebook profiles and sharing those photos with all of our friends for months, if not for at least a year.  It was pretty much time for Facebook to truly get on board and not get just a slice of the pie but the whole darn baked good!  So thank you users of Facebook for making this an easy decision for the minds behind the social networking platform.  We, the people, guide what happens next.  So watch what app becomes popular on Facebook next and I’ll bet you that Facebook will either acquire that site (Pinterest?) or make its own knock off app.

And those, are my two cents.

What did you do today?
P.S. as you can see, I have moved to blogging once a week. With everything that I have going on in life currently I want to keep blogging but the only way I’ll be able to pull it off is if I scale back.  I hope you’ll keep reading!