We have all been in this situation. After weeks (months) of applying to various jobs a company finally contacts you back. FINALLY! But your momentary relief is cut short as you begin thinking about the impending interview. Let’s be honest, job interviews are stressful. Some people will spend hours in the mirror practicing their winning smile repeating to themselves their finally tuned answers to the common interview question we’ve all heard by now.

“Tell me a little about yourself?”

“What do you know about the company?”

“What are your greatest strengths?”

You’ve perfected your answers to these questions. And your answer to these questions are important. They give the interviewer a good idea of who you are and how you might fit into the company. But preparing questions yourself to ask the interviewer can help you to stand out even more. Below are a list of the top questions to ask an interviewer and why they are important to ask.

1. “What does success look like in this position?”

In an interview a candidate should ask what would make a candidate successful at the position. Knowing the relevant not only requirements to do the job but also the ways one can go beyond that to really impress your company will help you to succeed in your next position.

2. “What is the most challenging aspect of the job?”

Knowing what you may struggle with at a job is as relevant as knowing what you will be strong at. It will help you and the interviewer to gage your skill level as well as what you are willing to work on in order to succeed.

3. “How does one advance in this company?”

Knowing what is needed to move up in a company will help you to set goals for yourself and give you the motivation to follow through with them.

4. “How Would you describe this company’s values?”

Working for a company who’s mission you believe in is important. An employee who values the company they work for and believe in their values will be more likely to work hard at the company to help them achieve their goals

5. “What is the best part of working for this company?”

Though no one enjoys work enjoys their job all the time, working for a company you like will help motivate you to get up in the morning. Knowing whether the best parts of the company are also things that you know you might enjoy is relevant to both you and the interviewer to know whether you will be a good fit for the position.

2. Billionaire Question

Ask yourself: “If this job paid me a billion dollars and I could buy anything, how would I spend my time? Would I keep the same job in the same industry or would I quit and do something else in a different field?”

If you’d continue in the same job, you’re on the right track. But for most of us, our current position isn’t our ideal situation. Plus, the path we’re on isn’t taking us in the right direction.

3. The Ideal Day

The search for your dream can often be more paralyzing than inspiring. How can you know what you want if you’ve spent your entire life in one industry? Maybe the job you’ve been looking for didn’t exist until recently. For example, thirty years ago, you couldn’t be an E-Marketing Specialist. So let’s table the dream job for a moment (we’ll get there) and just try to define your ideal day:

Example:

• “I’d wake up at 7am full of energy because I’m excited to start a new day.” (Possible conclusion: On-call surgeon is not the ideal job.)

• “I go to the gym for 3 hours and get back home at 11 am.” (Possible conclusion: An office job is not the ideal job.)

• “I sit down and spend one-on-one time with several people until sunset.” (Possible conclusion: My perfect job could be as a therapist.)

• “I finish work at 6 pm.” (Possible conclusion: Owning my own business is not realistic.)

When you know what your ideal day looks like, you’ll have a better sense of what your dream career is. After that, all that’s left is the proper education, training, and experience. That’s where Team Plus, Inc. comes in. We put you on the path to your dream career. When it gets complicated (and it will), we’ll help you overcome every obstacle.

Ready to begin?

Three ways Team Plus helps you get on the path to your dream career. 

Imagine earning a living doing what you love. Imagine, also, that the people you work with are more than employees, but collaborators. Team members who share your vision and believe in what they’re doing. Imagine how great that sense of culture and camaraderie would feel.

TeamPlus can help you make this dream a reality. Unlike other hr matching companies, what we offer is no ordinary leadership class. It’ll take a bit of grit, courage and resolve on your part, and success won’t happen overnight. But it’ll be a lot of fun too.

First, we help you make the right career choice on your life path to happiness and success. This is harder than it sounds. To become a winner, you need to be true to yourself in a way most people aren’t. Mentally, you have to get out of your comfort zone.

Too often, we let other people define what’s possible for us. At Team Plus, we help you break this pattern, shut out external noise, and listen to you. It’ll feel like a eureka moment – a reunion with who you really are deep down.

To get you to this milestone, we begin with three exercises:

1. Life Legacy-Funeral Speeches(From S. Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People)

Imagine your long, happy and successful life has come to an end. Your body is about to be buried, but your soul attends and participates in your funeral. You’re sitting in the front row, listening to people you admire and love eulogizing you. Who are they? Who were they to you in life? What are they saying about you? Does it match with your sense of who you were and what you tried to be in life?

To be continued…

Conversational Recruiting – Good or Bad? Good!

Conversational recruiting approaches the processes of recruitment and hiring through a human lens. Unlike conventional recruiting, which mostly involves a recruiter solely reaching out to a candidate, conversational recruiting encourages a two-way conversation between recruiter and candidate.

In 2018, most companies have switched from a written application to an online application. Online applications are useful because they help to streamline the application process for recruiters and saves paper. But they have their limitations. The online application will let the recruiter know if a potential candidate has the basic skillset to do the job, but such an application is impersonal, and a recruiter cannot get a feel for who the candidate is and how they would fit into the company through just the application. Conversational recruiting can be beneficial for both recruiters and candidates by keeping potential candidates engaged and give recruiters more understanding through an open line of communication between the recruiter and the candidate.

Benefits for Recruiters

Having an actual conversation with potential candidates through calls, texts, email, etc. will help a recruiter to get a better feel of who the candidate is. Recruiters who reach out to candidates through referrals are more likely to hire said candidates. References are another form of communication that gives a recruiter more insight into a candidate. References can be depended on to give trustworthy insight into a candidate and ensure that the candidate picked will be right for the job.

Benefits for Candidates

Applying online to many different jobs can be a draining process and many jobseekers feel disconnected from the companies they are applying for. Having a dialogue with a recruiter will help to engage a jobseeker with the company they might want to apply for. Connecting with a candidate through text, email, calls, and social media will let a candidate know whether or not a company is actually interested in them and in turn increase the likelihood that a candidate will apply and interview for a potential job.

Online Interviews

It seems like online interviews are a hate-love-story. Recruiters either hate them or love them. For positions that have a high number of applicants with similar qualifications, we feel that a recording of the candidate can give a very good impression of whether the candidate might fit with the team or not.

If a person likes their team and the team likes them, they are likely to remain longer in their job. So why not go by first impression? If there are any indicators that automatically disqualify the candidate, then why invite them to an interview? Why not avoid the hassle for the candidate and hire managers? For instance, when recruiting for a sales associate for high-end sport clothes and the candidate obviously does not have the appropriate style, then why invite them for an interview? When hiring for a dentist front office and the candidate has crooked teeth, then why not ask before the in-person interview whether they would consider fixing their teeth as a benefit of taking the job? Online interview recordings can be used to assess the candidate’s ability to adjust if asked to redo their recording changing XYZ.

It is clear that, above all, equal employment opportunities need to be upheld.

When you set up a profile on a job search site, you are usually asked serval sets of questions about your experience and skill set. Many websites have pre-recorded sets of words in their database that one can search through to determine which one is most relevant to their skills. For example, when you log into LinkedIn and create a profile and add to the list of skills the website gives you a large list of skills from which you can choose from that most fits with your current array of skills. The list is designed to include the most common skills for the jobs of today.

Having a database of skills to pick from makes creating a profile easier because it is less time consuming than writing out every skill you have one after the other. But there are drawbacks. Job sites that only allow you to pick from a prearrange skill labels from a database do not account for the nuances that exist in people’s skill sets. Some skills intersect (social media, social media marketing) and many job site databases do no account for this, leading to users creating long lists of skillsets, many of which overlap and overcomplicating the list.

Being able to create your own labels for skills will help you to more accurately define your skills. With Team Plus, candidates can create a specially curated list of skills that will precisely define their abilities because it allows users to make their own labels for their skills. Being able to create your own skill labels will also help you in the new emerging job-market, where new kinds of skills and jobs are being created every day, allowing you to keep up with the advancement.