Five Steps to Choose Where You Work

Job hunting can be a frustrating process. Unfortunately sometimes we are left with unanswered resumes and interviews that don't end with a job, but have you ever stopped to think if you would actual like for that particular company? When you are sending out resumes and applying for open positions, is it to places that you would actually enjoy working at and fit your interest? Or, is it just mindless applying and hoping to land some type of job?

Before you go further into your job hunting process, take the time to figure out what places that would fit your interests. You might not think that you have much of a say in choosing where you work, but you do. Start by following a few simple steps.

Find Out What Careers Your Skills and Interest Point Towards: If you made the flower diagram that I mentioned in my last post, you should have some type of idea what your interest and skills are. If you don't know, now is the time to figure it out. Once you have a list of interests or fascinations, pick the top three from that list. These will be your top three knowledges. Then, take the time to choose your top five transferable skills.

Once you have a small list of your top knowleges and transferable skills, take the time to show them to your friends, family, or professionals that you know. Ask them what jobs would fit your interest and skills and be sure to take note of the answers they provide. Once you have a few ideas, take the time to explore the job suggestions

Try On the Careers: To do this, you need to talk to people who already have positions in the careers you are interested in. Ask them questions and get to know how they feel about the work that they do everyday. Some helpful questions to ask are:
How did you get into this work?
What do you like most about it?
Where else can I find people who do this type of work?

This process is called personal interviewing. To get the most out of this step, ask as many questions as possible so that you can get valuable information about the careers you are considering.

Find Out What Organizations Have Jobs That Fit You: Different jobs have different hiring options. Some offer full time, other offer only part time. Maybe some organizations you are interested in are only hiring temporary or contract workers. There are also internships, and volunteer opportunities in a number of companies. So, figure out the type of work you are looking for, and see what companies match your interests, but don't rule out a company because at the moment they are only hiring contract workers. You never know, maybe eventually they will offer you a full time position.

Find the Names of Organizations Interest You: Once you have an idea about the job you would like to have, you need to find the places that have those jobs. To get started, take a look on LinkedIn, talk with professionals, and use the Yellow Pages.

It is also important to remember to narrow down your search. For instance say you want to get into the communications field. Don't search for jobs that just entail communications. Instead, narrow it down. A narrower search would be: I want to work in the communications field, in a corporate environment, somewhere in Chicago, where they sell makeup products, and have a 50 or fewer employees.

Learn As Much as You Can Before Approaching:  Now that you have an idea of where you think you would like to work, do some research on the company.  Find out about their company culture, the goals that their company has, and the company's vision for the future. Then, determine if it is actually a place where you would enjoy working. Some ways that you can determine if the place is for you is by looking on the internet, asking friends and neighbors, and even talking to people who work at the company.

So, the job hunting process is difficult at times, but remember that you have a choice in where you end up working. It should be at a company that fits your skills and interests. Most importantly you should find a place where you will enjoy working!

Understanding Who You Are

Understanding who you are is essential in the process of searching for a job. Maybe you're thinking that this is dumb and you already know who you are. You're a college student/ recent graduate looking for any job in your field so that you can start to pay back the thousands of dollars you owe in student loan. But that is not who you are!

In order to better understand who you are there a helpful phrases to keep in mind, but first let's talk about why it is important. 

By Doing Homework on Who You Are, You Will Be Able To: 

-Identify yourself in the job market in more than one way. For instance, don't just describe yourself as an accountant. Instead, say you are a person who has extensive experience with excel and quick books. That way, you don't limit yourself to just one job position. 

-Describe exactly what you are looking for and picture a job that excites you. If you are excited about a possible job, you will most likely be more determined in your search. 

-Stand out to an employer. We know by now that there is competition when searching for jobs, but if you can identify and describe yourself in multiple ways, you will stand out to that employer. 

Tips to Help Identify Who You Are: 

To start off, gather information about yourself on a sheet of paper. Then, take that information and organize it into some type of graphic. Once you have the information organized, prioritize the it in order of importance to you. One way to do this, is to organize it within a flower.

This might seem rudimentary upon first hearing, but it's extremely helpful! You will be able to write down your goals, people you would like to work with, what skills you can do, and anything else you find helpful. 

So, once you have a better understanding of who you are, you will increase your chances of standing out to potential employers and find a job that actually excites you! 

How to Change Your Job Hunt Approach

We all know that finding a job won't happen overnight, but sometimes it might seem like your never going to land your dream job, or just any job for that matter. Even when it seems that way, your wrong. Eventually you will find a job, maybe even your dream job, but you have to remember to never give up.

By not giving up I don't mean keep repeating the same process over and over. If the your job hunting strategy isn't working out to your advantage, switch it up. Instead of sending out hundreds of resumes for every job posting that your eyes come across, try finding a company that you would want to work for and go meet them in person.

In chapter 6 of What Color is Your Parachute, the author talks about the different approaches to search for job. Here are the top few. 

1. Knock on Their Door: According to WCIYP, this method works 47 percent of the time. This method works best with small companies, which includes companies with 50 or fewer employees. Maybe you''ll get lucky and someone just recently quit, or maybe you'll impress the workers at the office. Whatever the reason, physically going to an employer will greatly increase your chances of landing the job. 

2. Use the Yellow Pages: Using the yellow pages allows you to identify potential places that interest you. It gives you a chance to narrow down where you would want to work and best of all, this approach works 65 percent of the time! 

3. The Parachute Approach: For this approach to work effectively, first you need to figure out what you love to do so that you can begin with yourself, instead of the job market. When you find the organizations that match your interests you should approach them in person or through a bridge-person. Do not wait until you see that they have a vacancy! You should start the process before that. 

So, there are a number of ways to approach finding a job. Many think that sending out hundreds of resumes, or looking online is the best way, but you now know three other approaches that have been proven to be effective. Like I mentioned earlier, remember to not give up and keep switching it up. Eventually you will land the job! 

CASA Marketing- Fun with Adwords

After doing the work to attempt to bring people to your website, it would awesome to be able to track conversions. Well, there's a tool that will do that for you! It's called Adwords and it tracks things all the way from the ad to the actual purchase. It's very simple to get started.

1)Set up an Adwords Account: To get started simple go to https://www.google.com/adwords/.

2)Create a Campaign: Although it was free to make an account, this is where you'll have to spend some money to start off the campaign. Don't worry, you might be spending some money now, but it will pay off in the future.

-Give the campaign a name: It can be anything that you would like, but I would suggest making it something simple that relates to the purpose of your campaign.
-Set a budget: If you're just trying to get some experience and learn from Adwords, $5 a day would    be a fair budget, but you can chose the amount that you think will suit your needs best.
-Enter a landing page: This will be the webpage that everyone sees after clicking on your ad. So, make sure it has great content and keeps potential buyers interested.

3) Experiment with Headlines: Here is where you should let your creative side shine. Think of words that will catch your audience's attention and make them click on your ad.

4) Use the Keyword Planner: Competition is part of social media marketing. The keyword planner tool allows you to search specific key words and see what the competition is for those words. If competition say "high" you might want to play around with other words to find some with lower competition.

5)Experiment with Ads: Try using a few different adds at once so that you can see which ones generate the best results. So, play around with the headlines, try using different keywords, and maybe even a different landing page.

Social Media marketing is competitive, but if you take advantage of online tools such as Analytics and Adwords, you can get the results that you desire. So, play around with these tools and remember that even though these ads may cost money now, they will pay off greatly in the future.

WCIYP- Salary Negotiation

Okay, so you made it through the dreaded interview process, and landed the job! You start on Monday and tell all of your friends and family the good news. And then someone says, "How much are you getting paid?" Uh...... you can't answer that question because you didn't ask. You do not want this situation to happen to you. Salary negotiation is an extremely important part of the interview process.

I know the term "salary negotiation"  may seem a bit intimidating, but you should always ask about it before accepting a job. You don't want to be working for $18 an hour when you could have been making $23.

You probably have some questions like when to bring it up? What to do if it isn't the amount your willing to settle for? Well, take a look at these few tips below that will help you along the path of the negotiation process.

Bring it up when....

• You know your in the final interview. 
• You know that they want you to work for them.
• You know that you want to work for that company 

Uncover the Range: One of the purposes of salary negotiation is to figure out how much an employer is willing to pay you. They usually have a range in mind, so you have to find out what that is and use it to your advantage. Employers are trying to pay you the least amount possible, whereas you are trying to get the most amount possible. For instance, and employer might offer $20 and hour, but they can actual afford to pay you $30. Most of us would prefer $30 an hour, so don't let intimidation keep you from negotiating.

Don't Give a Figure First: ALWAYS let the employer be the first one to state a figure. For some reason when an employer mentions a figure first, there is more of a chance of getting a figure higher than what was originally stated.

Tip: Try to avoid giving a figure when asked question like, "What kind of salary are you looking for?" You might think they are trying to be nice, but they are just trying to get you to state a figure.

Do Your Research: Let's say this is the first office job you have landed, and you have no idea what an average salary looks like. So, do some research!

-Ask people: Maybe you know someone with a similar position in another company. So, take the time to ask them what their salary looks like so you can get a fair range.

-Use the internet: There are a handful of websites that help you find accurate salary information.


Some common ones include:
-www.salary.com
-www.bls.gov/ooh
-www.salaryexpert.com

Maybe you haven't had any experience with salary negotiation, but that's okay. Just remember that you never want to accept a job offer without know the pay. If you have no idea where to start or how to bring it up, just try following a few of the tips above!

Tracking Google Analytics Results

In previous posts I have talked about why analytics is important and how to use it, but it is extremely important to know how to track the results you receive. On Google you can find many articles to help you get started with tracking your website results. In class I read an article titled, "The Six Most Important Web Metrics to Track for Your Business Website" and I found it to be particularly helpful.

To get started, there are a few areas that you should focus on.

1) Visitors: It is always helpful to know how many people are visiting your website, but it is also helpful to know how many of those visitors are new, and how many are returning. To check this, you can simply look at the pie chart on the top right side of the page.

2) Referrals: Let's say your website has 9,000 new visitors. That's obviously great, but take that information and break it down even further. Find out where those new visitors are coming from. Are they from the Facebook Ad campaign you created, or are they from a website who you are cross linking? Once you find out where the traffic is coming from, you can use the information to make changes and attract even more visitors.


3)Bounce Rate: Okay, so now you know how many people are visiting your site and where they are coming from. Now it's time to take it to the next step, which is finding the bounce rate. If you are not familiar with what a bounce rate is, it is simply the percentage of single page visits. The point of knowing your bounce rate is that you want people to visit more than one page! You do not want visitors to just click and leave. So, if you know the bounce rate you can make changes to your content to get them to stay and click around some more.

4)Exit Pages: The bounce rate and exit pages might seem like they mean the same thing, but they don't. Exit pages are the pages that were last in the session. To check the percentage of exits go to <Behavior <Site Content <Exit Pages.

5)Conversion Rate: This is simply taking the number of conversion and dividing that number by the total ad clicks during the same time period. The higher the conversion rate the better!

6)Top 10 Pages: Knowing which pages on your website people like the best is crucial when making changes to your content. For instance, if you see a high exit rate when people go to you About Us page, but a low exit rate when people go another page, you know that you should make some changes to the About Us page.

At first Google Analytics might seem like an overload of information that is hard to understand, but it is actually very helpful and simple. You just find a place to get started, and following these steps are a great place to start!

Facebook Ad Campaign Update

In my previous post I gave some information about how my ad was going on the fourth day. My ad is ending in about 4 hours, so here is a little update about how it went.

The campaign had a reach of 15,943 people.

From the reach of 15,943, I have received 105 website clicks.

So, my total click through rate is about 0.66 percent.

I have spent $19.26 from my $20.00 lifetime budget.

Per website click, I pay an average of $0.18.

Overall, my ad did get my website more views! Now I know what to change next time to get more views and gained some hands on experience with analytics.

WCIYP- Interview Tips

If you have read any of my other blog posts lately, I have mainly been focused on expanding your social media presence and how to track those results. While those skills are extremely helpful to have on your resume when you are searching for a job, it is also helpful to know how to increase your chances of getting that job.

The interview process is key. It is where the employer determines if they like you for their company, and if you would like working for that company. I know just as well as anyone else that the interview process can be nerve wracking, but below are a few tips to make the process go smoothly.

1. Prepare: You wouldn't go take a test without studying and expect to get an A, right? If you wouldn't do that, then you shouldn't expect to go into an interview knowing nothing about the company and expect to get hired. It helps to do your research and know a few facts about them. It's so simple to do too. Just take a few minutes to look at their "About Us" page and you will learn about their history and values.

2.Know the Expected Questions: We all know the cliche questions such as: Tell me a little about yourself, what's your greatest weakness, why should we hire you", but for some reason we still can't easily answer these questions. So, rehearse before hand. Use this time to sell yourself and skills to land the job!

3. Remember the Small Things: Let's be honest: Appearances do matter during the interview process. No one wants to hire someone who couldn't take a few minutes to clean up their appearance. So, remember to dress appropriately, bathe, don't show nervous mannerisms, and be confident!


4. Send a Thank You; Let's say you kill it at the interview, but someone who interviewed yesterday might have also killed it. But there's one difference. You took five minutes of your time to send a well written thank you note, and they didn't. Guess what? That note will give you a great advantage! It shows that you are enthusiastic and you can use the note to mention anything you forgot to say in the interview.

Nerves are something we all have, but these tips should help to ease them...at least a little. You have the skills for the job required and now you have the skills to kill the interview!