Standing out at a Career Faire can make a difference in your career search. Career Fairs are starting to pick up, and Dice is running some nice ones, called Targeted Job Fairs. At a SF Bay Area Career Fair in January, 10 companies as showing up, and Dice has 82 career faires scheduled for this year across the States.

How do you get to the real interviews at a Job Fair? The rivalry can be significant, but you can help yourself leap out from the herd with early planning. At AA-Careers, we have a simple 6-step process to get ready. Planning to go? Here’s how to prepare:

First, investigate the organizations that are going and pick your objectives. Use the internet to check out the companies that are there ahead of time. Go to their websites and see if they have their openings posted. Pick a moderate number to target, and get ready to spend about an hour researching each one. It’s hard to do more than ten in a day, and 3-5 is a much more reasonable target. For each hiring organization, you want to know: recent news, key product lines, and exectuve names. Try to see if you know anyone at the target companies. You will end up with 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 organization is looking for. Create a mapping of your accomplishments and skills to the prerequisites of the job. Make the nomenclature match. If the hiring organization calls customers "clients", your resume should do the same thing. The accomplishments should be written in the style of the hiring organization.

Third, create a ‘thumbnail sales pitch’ for each potential organization/position combination. Write down a 60 second ‘thumbnail’ that you can repeat out loud depicting why you are a key candidate for that position. You’ll use this in your resume and when you meet the company at the job kiosk.

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 accomplishments and skills that most clearly match the job prerequisites. Especially at a Career Faire, the purpose of your resume is a sales tool for you – to get you on-site job interviews. It should be very easy to see that you’re a fit based on your resume.

Fifth, rehearse 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 intelligibly marked folder. Keep them in a lightweight briefcase or folio.

Finally, dress and prepare as if you’re doing on-site interviews. Dress well and be properly groomed. Avoid strong cologne or perfume…use any eau de cologne or perfume meagerly, if at all.

Remember to smile, and good hunting!

In addition to increased sales, profits can be boosted by reducing expenditure and by encouraging more effective use of employee time. One of the best ways of doing this involves performance appraisal software.

Armed with the knowledge of what the specific abilities of each of your staff are, it’s possible to streamline your procedures to maximize their effectiveness, and thereby get the most from the company as a whole. The core issue has traditionally been in identifying and metricizing this knowledge.

Determining and keeping track of development through employee appraisal alone can be a huge amount of work. You first put employee appraisal techniques together in order to assess work done by each employee. Should you be employing established methods, the next move will be the manual analysis of the vast amount of raw data you will have gathered just to follow further advancement and set goals. Using performance management software you can be confident that this assessment is taken care of and you only need to look at the various analyses to find what the right targets for this worker would be. It also renders keeping track of the worker’s progress much simpler. This eliminates the need to spend time on analysis and may even be more precise. If you choose to it’s possible instead to carry out your own analysis, simply employing the software to generate and maintain a full record to work from.

It goes without saying that it isn’t employee effieciency alone that you can improve by use of performance management software. You can also use the software to scrutinize your clients & suppliers. Identifying which suppliers offer the higher grade or best priced products can cut costs greatly. As for affiliates, clients, and retailers, it’s possible to demonstrate who sells the most of each product if there are payment issues, which one experiences the highest loss percentage, and more. You can then tailor your orders and move products around to maximize your profits while cutting spending. Who wouldn’t take advantage of that? As well as this, a greater awareness of your market will permit more efficient marketing. Performance appraisal software lets you study your sources to save money and analyze the market to tailor plans and develop your profit margin. It renders employee performance management quicker and much more effective in addition to helping you encourage staff members by assigning them definitive goals. What can be achieved using this software is truly unbelievable.

The current state of the economy demands that it’s simplest to ramp up profits by an examination of expenditure, rather than by growth of income. A simple and often forgotten asset when doing so is performance appraisal software. Armed with the knowledge of the specific specialties of your employees are, you can streamline your routines to optimize their effectiveness, and as a result make the most of the company as a whole. The main issue has always been in finding and tracking this knowledge.

Identifying and keeping track of progress through employee performance management alone can be a significant hassle. First of all, you implement employee evaluation reviews to assess and keep track of all work carried out by each employee. Should you be using established methods, the next move is the manual analysis of the vast amount of raw data points you have obtained just to be able to study future advancement and set objectives.

Employing performance appraisal software you can be confident that this preliminary work is done for you and you only need to look at the various metrics and factors to determine what the right goals for this staff member would be. It also makes charting the staff member’s progress much easier. In this way you remove a significant time commitment and probably also receive more precise information. Should you choose to it’s possible instead to carry out your own analysis, simply employing the software to generate and keep up a record to work from. And improving the efficiency of your staff is merely one of the advances you can make using performance appraisal software. Such software can also be used to keep an eye on your suppliers and clients. You can find out who provides higher grade products, for the best prices as well as highlight those with high damage rates or slow delivery times.

When it comes to clients - retailers, affiliates, or similar - this kind of software can still provide a clearer picture there showing you exactly who sells the most of your products, their loss percentage and similar negatives, and providing a reminder of outstanding payments. With this information at hand you become able to customize your ordering and selling habits to maximize profits and reduce expenses. With this data you can identify a priority demographic. With this in mind marketing is free to become more effective and less difficult to plan.

You can analyze your sources in order to reduce costs and stay abreast of your market to boost profit utilizing performance appraisal software. It also streamlines the employee evaluation and assists you in setting definitive targets for your staff greatly. There doesn’t seem to be any upper limit with performance management software backing you up.

The Internet offers huge opportunities for a job seeker, but also presents several potential challenges. It also adds many complexities, and a lot more matters to consider…and be careful of.

Job search needs to be thought of as a personalized, highly aimed marketing process where you are the product. Your resume is an ad. Your extended network of associates is your lead generating machine.

So where does the net fit in? At AA-Careers, we recently posted a job on Craigslist and got 600 plus applications in a week. For a single job. That’s increased job hunting competition.

Had a strong person contacted us ahead of our posting that ad, they could have landed the job prior to having all that competition. How? By knowing someone at our office who became aware of the job prior to posting. Everyone was aware of the job for at least 10 days before it was posted. Who in your network might know of a job that’s coming available soon?

Be sure to check your cover letter and resume carefully! When we did an analysis of the 650 resumes, we found a large number of errors. 63% of the applicants were easily taken out with a quick triage process. How? The same way any HR professional would. By rejecting resumes where the objective didn’t match our position description. By eliminating prospects whose cover letters gave us reasons not to engage them, like "I know I’m overqualified but I really need a job". By eliminating candidates whose documents that didn’t open properly. And by passing over prospects who didn’t trouble to spell check their cover letter and/or resume.

So the good news is that job boards give you a feel of what companies are hiring, and for what kinds of jobs. But once those jobs are posted, the competition is intense. You can still try, if you have a well thought out resume, designed to appeal directly and clearly to the recruiter. And if you have practiced interviewing – so you don’t stumble at a critical point.

Another potential problem to be aware of is how easily you can be looked up on the web. As we Googled several candidates, we ran into some personal web pages that were in questionable taste. Nothing crazy, but enough to tilt our thinking about who to employ.

AA-Careers provides a encompassing set of services for Bay Area job seekers, providing our clients a personal career consultant, a managed job hunting campaign, modern tools like a personal website, video, highly targeted resume, and much more. Let us know if we can help you.

Be careful out there, and good hunting!

Numerous managers feel that, when each and every member of staff has decent health & safety education, they are well prepared for a catastrophe. In reality however, a basic education in safety regulations and risk asessment just is not adequate. You need to supply your employees with a great supervisor, not to mention provide the right safety gear and give them the opportunity to practice. Those in a supervisory job has an even greater purpose to play than just supervising the shop floor. Your choice of supervisor is required to agree that health & safety training is crucial and have the ability to encourage others to share their enthusiasm about it.

On top of encouraging conformity with health & safety legislation, the role of a supervisor includes maintaining employee performance as well. This is no easy task. Extensive industry knowledge is an essential in a supervisory position as well as an in depth experience with current legislation regarding safety, risk assessment and first aid.

Supplying health & safety training actually is not adequate for your employees. They must practise risk assessment and the recognition of hazards. They need to know the best method of dealing with hazards not to mention how best to cope when something unexpected happens. Your employees are only completely prepared when everything they have learned has become automatic. Safety equipment is just as vital to the safety of your employees as any training. Without the right apparatus or alternatively if workers discover that equipment is not working correctly only after an emergency has occurred, the training your staff have undergone will have been a waste of time and effort. You need to perform thorough checks frequently to make sure that all the necessary gear is there as well as checking that everything is functioning correctly. If your gear will not come up to the relevant criteria, make sure it is repaired or serviced as soon as possible. Health & safety education is important for the well-being of your workers, but they also require the right equipment, frequent practises, and an experienced supervisor who gets the workforce charged up about being healthy at work. Then abiding by all the safety regulations be a natural component of working life instead of an inconvenience for the workforce to remember.

It’s belief in a significant amount of companies that, by providing employees with basic instruction in occupational health & safety, they have got all the skills they require to prevent a disaster. Realistically however, training in health & safety regulatory affairs just isn’t adequate. Equipping staff, hiring good supervision and supporting regular drills are all key factors. Your employees must have an approachable supervisor to watch over staff performance, however this individual also needs to fulfill an even more important function. Your selection of supervisor really needs to be enthusiastic, they should also see health & safety instruction as crucial.

In addition to checking compliance with health & safety legislation, the supervisor also should check that every employee works to the best of their abilty. This is a tricky task. It means that the supervisor needs to possess a broad understanding of the industry and the product not to mention a very high standard of knowledge of safety regulations, the identification of problem areas, and emergency assistance techniques.

Supplying health & safety training isn’t adequate for your workers. They must practise risk assessment and the recognition of hazardous areas. They need to know the best way of dealing with problems and knowing what to do when something goes wrong. Your employees are only properly prepared when their training and procedures have become a habit.

Safety equipment is every bit as critical to the safety of your staff as training. When they don’t have the appropriate apparatus or alternatively should they find that supplies are not working properly when they really need them, all the training there is to offer isn’t going to help them.

You should make frequent inspections to make certain you have all the necessary gear and to check it’s functioning correctly as well. When you have a fault with your safety apparatus, make sure it is mended or call out a maintenance engineer as a matter of urgency.

Health & safety instruction is essential for the health of your workers, however they must have the proper gear, the chance to practise, and a knowledgeable supervisor who gets everyone excited about working safely. If you follow this advice you will find that health & safety legislation will soon become ingrained in your business culture instead of something everyone has to try to think about all the time.

Innovation is different and distinct from creativity in that it is idea selection, development and commercialisation as opposed to creativity, which is problem identification and idea generation. The core issue with innovation management is, therefore, how to select those ideas that are most likely to succeed?

Ideas have to pass though an idea funnel as most organizations lack the resources to try out all their good ideas. The Economist (2003) states that 3000 bright ideas result in 100 worthwhile projects, which are winnowed down to four development programmes. And four such development programmes are required to stand any chance of getting one winner.

Within the idea funnel, ideas must regularly pass GO and KILL points. Here it is decided whether an idea should remain in order to ascertain its potential or be killed off and make way for a new idea. The selection process can be difficult - drop an idea and you may have lost that one gem; keep it in and you disallow another potentially good idea reaching fruition.

Certain ideas have more probability of success than others.

a) Some ideas will naturally have cultural, technical or other impediments. Condom use in Africa to prevent AIDS is subject to cultural taboos. Non-carbon fuel cars must beat back resistance from the oil industry. E-commerce suffers from fear of Internet fraud. Impediments can be plotted against the S-curve in order to generate a risk profile for each idea under consideration.

b) Some ideas have an inherent greater chance of success than others, depending on their origin. Franklin (2003) argues that ideas that have resulted from solution spotting - when individuals have sought solutions for particular problems - have a significantly greater chance of success than most other ideas. The nearest competitors are ideas that originate from random events.

This topic is covered in depth in the MBA dissertation on Managing Creativity & Innovation, which can be purchased (along with a Creativity and Innovation DIY Audit, Good Idea Generator Software and Power Point Presentation) from http://www.managing-creativity.com.

You can also receive a regular, free newsletter by entering your email address at http://www.managing-creativity.com.

Kal Bishop, MBA

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You are free to reproduce this article as long as no changes are made and the author’s name and site URL are retained.

Kal Bishop is a management consultant based in London, UK. He has consulted in the visual media and software industries and for clients such as Toshiba and Transport for London. He has led Improv, creativity and innovation workshops, exhibited artwork in San Francisco, Los Angeles and London and written a number of screenplays. He is a passionate traveller. He can be reached on http://www.managing-creativity.com.

There is no doubt that Toyota is one of the most successful
manufacturing companies in the world. In fact lean manufacturing
is derived from the management and manufacturing practices of
the Toyota Corporation.

The manufacturing techniques and way of thinking at Toyota have
been well documented. In essence the focus at this carmaker is
the absolute elimination of waste. The result is a constant
improvement in the flow of material from raw material to
finished product. With every tiny improvement, costs of
manufacturing are reduced and efficiency improved. The result is
higher profits all the time. The Toyota way is all about
attention to detail right from the ordering of raw materials,
which is done according to the needs of the day. This virtually
eliminates the need to keep large stocks of raw material which
end up reducing costs.

Still, there is one element in the whole lean manufacturing
process that is usually not given enough prominence and at times
is ignored altogether by corporate concerns seeking to implement
lean manufacturing. This is the element that is the real secret
behind the amazing success of Toyota as an automobile
manufacturer.

The element I am referring to here is of course people. In fact
people are the most valuable resource in any company. The
constant improvements and lean-manufacturing principals that are
the foundation of Toyota are heavily dependant on the staff. It
is the workers’ flow of information and ideas that ensures
constant and consistent improvement. Bluntly put, without the
human resource element, a lean enterprise will just not happen.

In a lean organization it is absolutely critical that people
grow with the system so as to be able to take extra
responsibilities and become more productive. Workers usually
grow and improve on their productivity much more quickly where
they are highly motivated and in a position where they can
regularly suggest and implement ideas for improvements and
elimination of waste in the manufacturing process.

Copyright © 2005 Chuck Yorke - All Rights Reserved

Regardless of whether you are a student, work at home mom, a web designer, or a CEO of a Fortune 500 company, prioritizing your work is critical to your success. Failing to prioritize your work load usually results in being extremely inefficient and extremely stressed out. How many times have you thought to yourself “I have so much to do today, how am I ever going to get it all done?”

There is no exact science to prioritizing, but there are several tips that should help you become a more efficient, less stressed version of your current self:

• Make a list - this may seem obvious but you’d be surprised at how many people try to organize their tasks in their head. You’ll often find that you feel a lot better just getting everything out so that you can see it in one place.
• Consider time constraints - what absolutely needs to get done today and what can wait until tomorrow or next week. Everything may be important eventually, but some things are more important now.
• Consider people constraints - all things equal, move things that other people are waiting on to the top of the list. If you know that your manager can’t finish his proposal without your part, that’s more important than the thing that you always do on Wednesday that could just as well be done on Thursday.
• Consider the consequences - are you going to get fired if you don’t do something? Is another task going to give you the inside track on that promotion? Those things should be more important than mildly inconveniencing the sales manager by responding to their email a day late.
• Re-prioritize as necessary - let’s face it, priorities change. As they do, update your list. It will give you a sense of control over the situation.
• Remove unimportant items - is there something on your list that you always push to the bottom and never end up doing? Then get it off the list. It doesn’t belong there.
• Don’t list EVERYTHING - only list crucial tasks. You don’t need to list routine tasks (like lunch) or menial tasks (like checking your email). Also, you’re going into too much detail if you put down prioritizing as a task.
• Do everything you can to keep your list small - this means saying NO sometimes. You are not other people’s gopher. Do your work and help other people with theirs when you have something to offer, but don’t do their work for them. Along the same lines, learn to delegate things to the people that are supposed to be doing them. Why book your plane tickets when you have an assistant for that?

Adam McFarland owns iPrioritize - the efficient way to get organized. iPrioritize is the next evolution of list making. We take your pen and paper list and turn it into a live list that can be edited at any time from any place in the world. We make it easy for you to email and print your list, subscribe to your list via RSS, share your list with others, and check your list on your mobile phone.

Answers are often before our very eyes or in front of our noses - particularly if we read the American Heritage Dictionary!

Explore with me how some of the multitude of definitions for the word “leader” actually serve as a performance standard for leadership.

Leaving behind the standard definition of “one who leads or guides”, consider the second definition: “one who has power or influence”. Have you known people in a leadership role who seem unable to influence the people around them? The ability to make connections, to speak clearly and to frame information so everyone hears a “what’s it in for me” message are essential for influence. We are also persuaded by people with conviction and passion. We are influenced by people whom we think we can trust. Lose or misuse any of this and a leader’s power vanishes.

A leader is defined as “a conductor or the principal performer in an orchestral section”. Finding ways to bring together the different talents of employees or volunteers so that all play from the same sheet of music and blend their instruments into a harmonious whole is a skill demonstrated by the finest of leaders! As a principal performer, we look to a leader to have one talent that is heads above the other people in that arena of “play”. We don’t want a leader who professes to best at everything. But we do want a leader to have one clearly recognizable skill.

The foremost animal in a harnessed team is a leader. Do we not look to leaders to guide the way, joined shoulder by shoulder to the rest of the team? Remember how the presence of a leader at a front line became the rallying point for many a battle?

Leader is also defined as “a duct for conveying warm air from a furnace.” Care is a four-letter word heard more and more frequently in business circles. Employees want to know that a leader cares for them. The cold, stern dictator might get some results but never the full-blown commitment, creativity and loyalty of a warm and caring leader.

There’s the leader that is an economic indicator and the leader that is “loss”. A leader better be in command and have a clear indication as to the economic viability of the enterprise. A leader also needs to know when something is done to attract talent or customers - not to make money.

A short length of gut, wire or similar material by which a hook is attached to a fishing line is a leader and so is the blank strip at the end or beginning of a film or tape used in threading or winding.

What’s the correlation with the world of leadership in these final definitions? Both are used for setting up the profit potential of the venture. Depending upon the type of fish one wishes to catch, a fishing leader strengthens the connection between the hook and the rest of the line. There are times in which the executive’s presence helps solidify the relationship between the customer and the sales team so that the customer “bites the hook”. Other times, a leader gently paves the way for the real presentation to the potential buyer or the investment community. He is the “blank tape” that opens the doors for the full presentation of the company.

If a picture is worth 1000 words, a metaphor is worth 1000 pictures. Using the metaphors provided by other meanings to the word “leader”, we gain a rich image of the scope and possibilities of true leadership.

© 2003 by Eileen McDargh. All rights reserved

About The Author

Eileen McDargh is a woman of many hats: author, radio commentator, organizational development consultant, acclaimed international speaker, and retreat facilitator. Visit her web site www.eileenmcdargh.com or contact her toll free at 877-477-4718.

Reprint rights are granted to all venues so long as the article and by-line are reprinted intact.