In the current job market, you’d better have your act together, or you won’t stand a chance against the competition. Check yourself on these 10 basic points before you go on that all-important interview.

1. Do Your Research

Researching the company before the interview and learning as much as possible about its services, products, customers and competition will give you an edge in understanding and addressing the company’s needs. The more you know about the company and what it stands for, the better chance you have of selling yourself in the interview. You also should find out about the company’s culture to gain insight into your potential happiness on the job. 

2. Look Sharp

Select what to wear to the interview. Depending on the industry and position, get out your best interview clothes and check them over for spots and wrinkles. Even if the company has a casual environment, you don’t want to look like you slept in your outfit. Above all, dress for confidence. If you feel good, others will respond to you accordingly. 

3. Be Prepared

Bring along a folder containing extra copies of your resume, a copy of your references and paper to take notes. You should also have questions prepared to ask at the end of the interview. For extra assurance, print a copy of Monster’s handy interview take-along checklist. 

4. Be on Time

Never arrive late to an interview. Allow extra time to arrive early in the vicinity, allowing for factors like getting lost. Enter the building 10 to 15 minutes before the interview. 

5. Show Enthusiasm

A firm handshake and plenty of eye contact demonstrate confidence. Speak distinctly in a confident voice, even though you may feel shaky. 

6. Listen

One of the most neglected interview skills is listening. Make sure you are not only listening, but also reading between the lines. Sometimes what is not said is just as important as what is said. 

7. Answer the Question Asked

Candidates often don’t think about whether they are actually answering the questions their interviewers ask. Make sure you understand what is being asked, and get further clarification if you are unsure. 

8. Give Specific Examples

One specific example of your background is worth 50 vague stories. Prepare your stories before the interview. Give examples that highlight your successes and uniqueness. Your past behavior can indicate your future performance. 

9. Ask Questions

Many interviewees don’t ask questions and miss the opportunity to find out valuable information. The questions you ask indicate your interest in the company or job. 

10. Follow Up

Whether it’s through email or regular mail, the interview follow-up is one more chance to remind the interviewer of all the valuable traits you bring to the job and company. Don’t miss this last chance to market yourself.

It is important to appear confident and cool for the interview. One way to do that is to be prepared to the best of your ability. There is no way to predict what an interview holds, but by following these important rules you will feel less anxious and will be ready to positively present yourself.

http://career-advice.monster.com/job-interview/interview-preparation/ten-interviewing-rules/article.aspx

In the job search, there’s nothing like performing well at the interview. And after researching the company, practicing your interview presentation and answering the interview questions with confidence, you want to follow up with something impressive. You want to thank the employer with a gesture that makes the company want to hire you — or at least bring you back for another round of interviews.

This is the point when some people come up with what they believe are clever ways to thank people for the interview. Sadly, these attempts at being memorable can leave the wrong impression with the interviewer.

So be sure to avoid these three unconventional post-interview thank-you strategies in your job search: 

• Don’t Say It with Plants or Flowers: A candidate for a communications position thought sending a plant would be a nice way to say thank you after her interview. What it really said was that she did not know that doing so was unnecessary and inappropriate. It is never proper to send a gift after an interview. The interviewer is doing his job by interviewing you, and sending a gift of any kind can be interpreted as a bribe to move your candidacy forward. Rather than helping your cause, this move could hurt your chances of getting the job.
   
• Don’t Friend the Interviewer on Facebook: Trying to connect with an interviewer on Facebook crosses a boundary that should not be broached. It tells the interviewer you don’t know how to draw the line between employer and employee, and you would likely have difficulty with that distinction if you were hired for the job.
   
• Don’t Follow Up with a Call the Day After the Interview: If you follow up by phone too soon after the interview, the interviewer will interpret the action as too aggressive. A follow-up call the next day will signal that you lack good judgment and that you would probably act inappropriately on the job. At this point, the ball is in the prospective employer’s court. Any follow-up by phone on your part should reflect what you and the interviewer discussed.

What Should You Do? Send an Interview Follow-Up Letter

The best advice is to follow up with a short thank-you letter after the interview, thanking the interviewer for his time and reiterating your interest in and qualifications for the job. The more succinct, the better. An articulate post-interview follow-up letter or email can only strengthen your candidacy.

http://career-advice.monster.com/job-interview/following-up/inappropriate-interview-follow-up/article.aspx

You may be the perfect fit for a job — but a hiring manager is never going to find that out if he trashes your resume after a mere glance. Even in this age of online professional networking, a great resume is still the foundation of a successful job search.

It’s common knowledge that spelling errors and grammatical bloopers are trash triggers (and these simple mistakes top many recruiters’ lists of resume pet peeves). But is there anything else that job seekers are unwittingly doing wrong? We asked some recruiting managers and career experts about the resume errors that cause them to crumple and toss a resume at first look — and some of their answers may surprise you.

1. Your Resume Is Badly Formatted

Looks matter. Career expert Abby Kohut lists misaligned indentations and double spaces as a couple of the things that make a resume start to look like it belongs in the garbage. The fix? Use tabs for indents, and search your document for stray double spaces.

Also beware of being too creative. “I don’t like it when I receive resumes with funky fonts,” says Mona Abdel-Halim, co-founder of the Web-based resume tool Resunate, who echoed other experts we spoke to. “It is not professional and it makes the resume harder to read.” When choosing resume fonts, opt ones that are widely used and readable, such as Calibri or Arial, and use no more than two fonts with their associated bold and italic styles.

2. Your Resume Is Immature

Other hiring managers we talked to said they had immediately trashed resumes with pictures on them — for example, of cartoon character Bart Simpson (in the case of one applicant for a technical writing job) or of a kitten (an applicant for a customer service job). Cute resume additions like these are for kids — not professionals.

3. Your Resume Is Too Templated

Longtime recruiter Mike Monroe says that unaltered, familiar resume templates from word-processing programs annoy him. “This won’t automatically put you in the trash, but it tells me that you have put less thought into your resume than your competition,” he says.

Jessica Campbell, an HR manager for talent agency Voices.com, says one of her pet peeves is “when a candidate has used a template resume,” but hasn’t updated it before sending it. (And if you use Word’s Track Changes feature to edit your resume, make sure to accept all changes in the final version before submitting it.)

To prevent your resume from ending up in the trash for this reason, customize your resume for each job you apply for using the language of the job ad and highlighting your most relevant experience.

“When the resume is not tailored to the position, it shows you don’t really understand what the employer is looking for and are just hoping your resume fits some of the criteria,” says career expert Heather Huhman, author of Lies, Damned Lies & Internships: The Truth About Getting from Classroom to Cubicle. “To avoid this mistake, show the employer how you fit those [criteria] through your previous experience, skills and expertise.”

4. Your Resume Is Sneaky

Kohut says she immediately distrusts people whose resumes have no dates on them. “Gaps are not a problem,” she says. “The problem is when you try to be deceptive.”

David S. Williams, founder and CEO of salary consultancy SpringRaise, agrees, saying that if you are or have been unemployed, don’t try to hide it. “You may be doing yourself a disservice because you may be a strong candidate for a position, but you tried to hide your current status,” he says.

A better tactic is to be straightforward on your resume, and then use your cover letter to tell the story of your career’s progress — including information about how you maximized your time away from the 9-to-5 routine. And do remember to write a cover letter — not doing so is another guaranteed way to get your resume thrown into the trash, according to the experts.

http://career-advice.monster.com/resumes-cover-letters/resume-writing-tips/resume-mistakes-pet-peeves/article.aspx?HPS=4_5C3ResumeTrash

Career opportunities rating: 3.4

CEO approval: Dennis M. Nall, 82%

PRO: “Company Reputation and Brand is Number One of the Big Four, The new bonus program for next year looks to be a bit more fair and predictible than in the past.”

CON: “Work/Life Balance continues to be a problem”

Source: Glassdoor

Pitfalls to Avoid with Social Media and Job Search;

1. Facebook Pics; Now more then ever its easier to access pictures of people through Google searches and facebook images.  Always make sure to utilize security settings on these sights, because while your friends may think it’s funny to see you with beer in hand, and glassy eyed in Dewey or Georgetown, new employers may not.
2. Email Addresses & Twitter;  If you are actively looking for a job and sending a resume around town, activate a new email address with something as close to your name as possible.  It may seem cute or funny to you to have email names like softkitty@yahoo.com, badbobby@gmail.com or http//:twitter.com/sexyrexy but I can assure you, it does not present well when trying to make first impressions.
3. Blogs; It seems like everyday more and more blogs are popping up around town.  Use common sense when your name is attached to one especially during the job search.  Any comments about politics, religion, race, & gender can be misconstrued and ultimately cost you a job and make the wrong impression.  Once employed those same comments can also come back to bite and could also one day be the source of your termination.

I know the three things listed above seem basic, but I can’t tell you how many people don’t think about any of these things at all when they are trying to find their next job. You have one chance to make a great impression, let’s make sure that people don’t make assumptions based on things that you can control.

Steve Laskin

Nov. 3, 2011

The Old Dominion State returns as America’s Top State for Business in 2011, and we’re starting to detect a pattern here.

Virginia topped our inaugural study in 2007 with Texas at number two. In 2008, they switched positions and Texas took the title. In 2009, it was Virginia/Texas. In 2010, it was Texas/Virginia.

This year, Virginia powers back to the top spot with the best overall score in the history of our study — 1,660 out of 2,500 points. Texas slips back to number two with a respectable 1,578 points.

Trust us. We couldn’t have planned it this way, and if we could have, we might have mixed things up a bit.

Our fifth annual study once again puts all 50 states to the test, measuring them on 43 different metrics in 10 key categories of competitiveness. We weight those categories based on how frequently the states use them as selling points to attract business. That way, we hold the states to their own standards, and tell you how they measure up.

This year’s categories and weightings, for a total of 2,500 points, are:

• Cost of Doing Business (350 points)
• Workforce (350 points)
• Quality of Life (350 points)
• Infrastructure & Transportation (325 points)
• Economy (300 points)
• Education (225 points)
• Technology & Innovation (225 points)
• Business Friendliness (200 points)
• Access to Capital (100 points)
• Cost of Living (50 points)

Virginia is a perennial favorite with its strategic location, friendly business climate and diverse economy. It moved back on top this year thanks to marked improvements in a couple of key areas.

We found Virginia’s tax burden improved considerably, helping the state move up five places to number 21 in our all-important Cost of Doing Business Category.

In Education, Virginia jumps seven points to rank sixth, reflecting an effort begun in 2009 to reduce class sizes.

But not all is rosy in Virginia. The state fell eight spots to number 26 in Quality of Life, which, among other things, measures healthcare. The number of uninsured residents in Virginia has risen steadily in recent years.

Virginia lost some ground in the Workforce category as well, dropping three places to number 12. But that was mainly because an improving unemployment rate is shrinking the pool of available workers.

Still, Virginia did what it does best—and has done in each year of our study: It turned in a solid all-around performance, with top ten finishes in five categories (Infrastructure & Transportation at number 10, Economy at number 8, the aforementioned 6th place in Education, second in Business Friendliness and tenth in Access to Capital).

Texas Two-Step

So what happened to Texas, which was gunning for a repeat as America’s Top State for Business?

While the state improved or stayed the same in seven out of ten categories, it stumbled in three important ones: Cost of Doing Business (33rd this year versus 30th in 2010), Quality of Life (32nd, down from 29th), and most notably Economy, where the top-ranked economy four years in a row plunged to 14th this year on the weight of a nagging budget crisis.

The state has been struggling to close a $13.4 billion budget gap for the 2012 fiscal year—one of the worst in the nation as measured by the non-partisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Texas adopts its budgets two years at a time, and the 2011 legislative session has been a gut-wrenching affair. While Gov. Rick Perry and the state legislature have so far managed to avoid raising taxes or dipping into the state’s rainy day fund for 2012-13, the crisis is forcing severe cuts in state services, including education. But that’s not the only area where the Texas economy has suffered.

Texas no longer leads the nation in Fortune 500 companies headquartered there. In fact, the state comes in third, with 51 major companies headquartered in Texas compared with 57 last year. Some of that is the result of mergers, like Fort Worth-based Burlington Northern Santa Fe being acquired by Nebraska-based Berkshire Hathaway spacer, and Houston-based Continental Airlines spacer merging with Illinois-based United.

But other Texas companies simply saw their fortunes decline, like Dallas-based Blockbuster and Irving-based industrial equipment-maker Flowserve.

Nonetheless, Texas remains a business powerhouse. It remains tops in Infrastructure & Transportation, and ranks 4th in Technology & Innovation. And a surge in investment helped Texas jump to 4th place in Access to Capital from 7th place in 2010.

If Virginia and Texas seem to have the top two spots locked up year after year, the rest of our rankings are a lot less predictable.

Top Five And Honorable Mention

Take Georgia, which joins our Top Five for the first time in four years. Adding to its typically strong finishes in Workforce (4th place), Infrastructure & Transportation (second place) and Cost of Living (9th place), Georgia moved into the top half of the states in Education (22nd place, versus 28th last year).

Massachusetts drops out of the Top Five this year, finishing at number six overall. The Bay State lost ground in our Workforce category because of a shrinking pool of available workers. And the state’s vaunted Education system slipped a bit — to 4th place from first — because school class sizes increased relative to other states.

Ohio is this year’s most improved state, jumping eleven places to 23rd overall thanks to a huge improvement in Cost of Doing Business. Ohio improved to 5th place in our most important category, from 29th place last year. A multi-year effort to reform the tax code in the Buckeye State is paying off with a tax structure that welcomes new investment. At the same time, wages have fallen in Ohio relative to other states. That helps businesses on the cost side, but workers suffer.

The biggest overall decline came in New Jersey, which fell eight spots this year to 30th place overall largely because of the state’s budget situation—one of the worst in the nation, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. New Jersey is no garden spot when it comes to the Economy, which ranked 42nd in our study this year.

Our decision to consider each state’s fiscal situation in our rankings this year also led to a change at the bottom for 2011.

For the first time, Alaska — which ends fiscal 2011 with nearly $12 billion to spare in the state’s coffers — does not come in last. Instead, Alaska finishes 49th this year, and Rhode Island drops to number 50.

Top 10 States for Business
1. Virginia
2. Texas
3. North Carolina
4. Georgia
5. Colorado
6. Massachusetts
7. Minnesota
8. Utah
9. Iowa
10. Nebraska

Click here to see the full Top States for Business

Jobs in Washington DC can be quite the challenge because of the commute. Do you drive in or take public transit? Most jobs in Washington DC are usually metro accessible, AtlasAdvancement recommends you give yourself enough time! If you do plan to drive, allocate enough time for parking, ask HR if there is a garage near the office. Leave early and plan your trip accordingly, know where to go! Be on time or arrive 15 minutes early, arriving too early displays you’re eager and arriving late will irritate the person you’re interviewing with.

Before the interview, do your research on the company and know what position, as well as the responsibilities you’re interviewing for. By inserting company facts during the interview, shows high interest and leaves a better impression.  Let them know you’ve read the description and that you can fulfill their requirements. Bring a few copies of your resume; you might meet with more than one person during the interview. Come prepared! Relax, take a breath, and answer questions directly, don’t digress and start rambling.  Mannerisms such as leg shaking, hair twirling, looking around the room when talking, can cost you the job.

Be prepared with questions they might ask. “Why do you want to work for CompanyXYZ” saying “because it’s centered in Washington DC” can toss you out of the running. That only talks about the location and has nothing to do with the company. A better response would be “Company XYZ is headquartered in the center of Washington DC which would provide more opportunities to exhibit my knowledge and contribute to the company’s growth, etc.”

Regardless of how comfortable you feel with the person you’re interviewing, act professional! Never bad mouth your past bosses, by doing so, it could display you in a negative manner.  Don’t talk about the salary or benefits during the first interview, you don’t want that to seem like it’s the only reason you’re applying for the job.  When asking questions, ask about internal growth within the company; it reinforces your interest.

AtlasAdvancement prepares each candidate before going to an interview and recommends you follow up by sending a thank you note.