Sales Gnosis

Standing out at a Career Faire can make a difference in your job hunt. Career Faires are starting to pick up, and Dice is running some nice ones, called Targeted Job Fairs. At a Bay Area Career Faire in early 2010, 10 companies as showing up, and Dice has 82 job fairs scheduled for 2010 across the United States.

How do you compete at a Job Faire? The rivalry can be noteworthy, but you can help yourself leap out from the gang with advance planning. At AA-Careers, we have a simple six-step process to get ready. Plan to go? Here’s how to prepare:

First, research the companies that are going and pick your objectives. Use the World Wide Web to check out the companies that are there beforehand. Go to their websites and see if they have their openings listed. Pick a sound number to go after, and get ready to spend an hour or more researching each one. It’s hard to do more than 8 in a day, and three or four is a much more reasonable target. For each hiring company, you want to know: executive names, recent news, and key product lines. Try to see if you know anyone at the target companies. You should end up with a page or two of research for each company/job.

Second, if there are job openings on the web, read them to see what the hiring department is looking for. Create a mapping of your accomplishments and skills to the requirements of the job. Make the language match. If the hiring organization calls customers "clients", your resume should do the same thing. The achievements should be written in the style of the hiring organization.

Third, create a ‘short sales pitch’ for each likely organization/job combination. Write down a sixty second ‘thumbnail’ that you can repeat out loud showing why you are a special prospect for that position. You’ll use this in your resume and when you meet the company at the job stall.

Fourth, modify your resume for each opportunity. The objective on your resume should exactly match the job you’re aiming for. The executive summary should be a written form of your “mini sales pitch” for the job. Then choose the achievements and skills that most clearly match the job requirements. Especially at a Job Faire, the purpose of your resume is a sales tool for you – to get you on-site job interviews. It should be a no-brainer to see that you’re a match based on your resume.

Fifth, dress and prepare as if you’re doing on-site interviews. Dress well and be well groomed. Don’t over do-it (this isn’t a date!) and don’t underdress (no jeans or t-shirts, no matter how much you paid for them). Avoid strong cologne or perfume.

Finally, practice your ‘mini-sales-pitch’. Collect your research and the resume for each spot – bring a couple of copies for each – and put each in a understandably marked folder. Keep them in a lightweight briefcase or folio.

Remember to smile, and good hunting!

UK mobile phone operator 02 has apologised to it’s 3g internet customers for a fault which occurred last week. Users with pay monthly contracts, including iPhone users could not get online for a number of hours, reporting difficulties sending and receiving emails, browsing websites, and downloading music and files. Blackberry users were not affected by the fault. Users who access the internet using a wi-fi connection were also unaffected.

When the fault happened, O2 set up a default recorded message for customers phoning their support line. The message stated that the problem was with the GPRS satellite, and service may be affected in the London area. They also put out a message to their Twitter followers letting them know that they were fixing the problem.

O2 laid the blame for the internet outage on their IP configuration system, which assigns an IP address to individual users when the log in to the 3g service. The company said, in a statement: “From early afternoon yesterday, we suffered a fault with our data network. We have identified the cause of the fault, which relates to the allocation of IP addresses needed to establish a data connection.”

The outage occurred at a tough time for O2, where their contract to be the sole supplier of the iPhone in the UK is coming to an end. It would appear that the O2 3g usb broadband users were unaffected by the problem last week. O2’s main focus at the moment is to keep customers happy, with the economic downturn meaning more and more people are leaving their existing networks in the hunt to find the cheapest deal. Many people are ditching their contracts altogether and signing up to pay as you go deals. O2 have however secured an exclusive distribution contract for the new Palm-Pre, hotly tipped to be the next iPhone.