Today our topic covers a simple yet important point related to resumes: White Space. Your resume serves a pretty simple purpose: to convince a hiring authority that you are worth interviewing. Generally, that means your resume needs to provide a hiring manager a clear sense of your education, work experience, and accomplishments. But just because someone sees your […]
Interviewing
Three Resume Dilemmas and How to Deal with Them
We’ve got resumes on our minds here at Alliance since we are deep into providing resume feedback to candidates slated to attend our November hiring conference. After having coached thousands of military candidates over the years, we thought it would be a good idea to mention three common dilemmas that many have asked us about, […]
What vs. Why
As you ponder future job interviews, you may be thinking about all of the stories that you could be telling. Most interviewers tend to rely heavily on behavioral-type interviewing questions which are ripe for story-telling. These questions call upon you to describe how you behaved in various situations. Some common examples include: The common feature […]
Why You Lost the Interview You Thought You Won
Perhaps the worst part of competing for a job is to come out of an interview believing that you nailed it, only to find out that you didn’t make the cut. If this should ever happen to you, you might think “How could they not have liked me? I had a great answer to all of their […]
How to win an interview but lose the job
How to win an interview but lose the job When writing an article to help people achieve a more successful transition, I prefer to focus on positive items. Yet, here’s a case where I want to address some negative topics that could kill your job opportunity, even if you’ve got a stellar resume and provide […]
Focus on the Job at Hand
There is a chance that one day you find yourself interviewing for a very large company – the type of company that, when you go to their website, overwhelms you with the amount and diversity of their various business units. Perhaps the classic example of such a company is General Electric. Though maybe a fraction […]
Ask this question instead
As a candidate, it’s vitally important to ask good questions when given the opportunity during a job interview. Over the years, I’ve heard some pretty insightful questions that were guaranteed to spark interest from the interviewer. I’ve also heard those questions that might cause the interviewer to think: “Why on earth would he/she ask me […]
Put Yourself in the Interviewer’s Shoes
One of the keys to nailing an interview is to have a good variety of stories prepared ahead of time. And one thing I really love about my job is that for the last 15 years I have heard some truly amazing stories. But a story is only effective when the interviewer has a good appreciation […]
Don’t let your iPhone cost you an interview
This week I want to share the many ways your very expensive high-tech cell phone could hurt you in an interview. And by the way, you should expect that you will have to conduct a telephonic interview at some point. Several of our corporate partners like to conduct interim follow-up interviews over the phone. While […]
7 Reasons Why You are More Marketable than Your Commanding Officer
A few years ago I started following the blog of a distinguished Army lieutenant colonel who wrote about his transition experiences as he was about to retire and explore life in the corporate world. It seemed that week in and week out he described the many rejections he received or the fact that he couldn’t […]