Shine A Spotlight In Your Next Job Interview

Spotlight by Blondinrikard Fröberg on Flickr under Creative Commons by/2.0 As a job candidate, it’s up to you to shine the spotlight on the skills and experiences you’ve had that are relevant to the job or company you are interviewing for. Listen to this article on ConversationsOnCareers.com Take a moment It is not enough to have a dozen well-rehearsed stories that illustrate examples in response to the interview questions you anticipate. Invariably, you will get asked a question that you haven’t prepared for. In a few seconds you will have to decide which story fits the question best and start your answer. The danger is that you will tell the story as you’ve prepared it without tailoring it to your audience or the exact question. Interviewers remember when a response doesn’t answer their question. But they don’t remember that you took an extra few seconds before starting your response. Focus on what your audience wants to hear The AIM framework from Lynn Russell and Mary Munter is a great tool to employ when preparing any communication, including job interview responses. The acronym stands for Audience, Intent, Message. The audience is the person or people receiving the communication. The intent is both your intent: what you want to happen, and the intent you want to create in your audience. The message is both the delivery mechanism and the content. When preparing for any interview, take the time to really think about your audience. Are you speaking with the recruiter, or the hiring manager? These are two different audiences, and your intent will be different. For the recruiter, your intent is to...

Podcast Recommendations For and By MBAs – 2021 Edition

I recently asked University of Washington Foster MBA students and Alumni for podcast recommendations. I received the following 28 recommendations from 11 people (including myself), and I didn’t recommend my own ConversationsOnCareers.com podcast, but I do recommend it! Here is list, in alphabetical order. Sorry I do not have links, nor have I fully categorized it, but I will try to update this post soon. For now you can search the titles in your player of choice. AcquiredAll-inBabbageConnected & ReadyEconomist AsksExponential ViewFreakonomics RadioFunction with Anil DashHBR After HoursHBR IdeaCastHBR Women at WorkHidden ForcesHow I Built This w/ Guy RozHow to Be Awesome at Your JobHow We Survive (from Marketplace, about the environment and sustainability)MarketplaceMarketplace TechMasters In Business (from Bloomberg)Money TalksOdd LotsPivot (w/ Kara Swisher from NYT)Planet Money & The IndicatorSwitchedOn – future of energy, transportation and sustainabilityThe IntelligenceThe PitchThe Prof G Show (w Scott Galloway)Why’d You Push That ButtonYour Undivided Attention (w Tristan Harris and the Center for Humane...
Tips For Taking A LinkedIn Profile Photo

Tips For Taking A LinkedIn Profile Photo

A good headshot on LinkedIn is important for your profile. Users with photos receive 21x more views than profiles without, and are 36x more likely to receive messages. A “professional” photo increases those chances even further.  But you don’t need to pay a professional photographer to have a “professional” looking photo.  We’re going to provide some tips for getting a good photo. The good news is that smart phone cameras are perfectly capable of capturing and editing a high quality photo for your LinkedIn profile. While you will probably get better results if you have a friend or family member take the photo, you can also achieve good results with a selfie.  Either way, here are some considerations: Look your best: pick out a professional outfit that is aligned with the role and industry you are targeting. Look at the profiles of people with that role/industry and see how they are dressed. IE Bankers are buttoned up with a suit and tie, or blouse and blazer, product managers in tech are probably going to be more casual, think collared shirt, no tie. Take care of your personal grooming, hair (including facial hair for men), makeup, jewelry, etc… Make eye contact with the camera and remember to smile! This is another reason having someone else take your photo will likely yield better results, a friend can make you smile and capture multiple shots in a row to capture that perfect moment, and you will be looking at the lens, not your own image on the screen. Setting, background, lighting: find a place to take your photo where the background is...

Podcasts I’m Listening To (Summer 2020 Edition)

When the topic of podcasts comes up, the next question is always, “What do you listen to?” and since my listening habits change regularly, I figured it was long past time to update my current heavy rotation. News and Current Events Seattle NowUp FirstConsider ThisNPR Politics PodcastMarketplace TechShortwave Long Form Interview and Though The Ezra Klein ShowTen Percent HappierThe Science of Happiness Business and Industry Planet MoneyThe Indicator from Planet MoneyHBR IdeacastHBR Women at WorkHBR After HoursMasters In BusinessPrimedWorkLife with Adam GrantThink Fast, Talk Smart Kids and Stories I listen to alot of podcasts with my son, some of them include Myths and LegendsStories PodcastCircle RoundMystery RecipeTumble ScienceBrains OnForever AgoTreasure Island...
Zoom Backgrounds For Your Next Virtual Meeting

Zoom Backgrounds For Your Next Virtual Meeting

Are you #WFH (working form home)? Do you need a new background for your virtual meetings on Zoom, or Microsoft Teams? I found some great options with an interior design flair: Arhous furnitureRentFurniture.comWest ElmCurbed.comBruntwood.co.ukBEHR (the paint company)One Fine Stay (more exotic travel inspiration backgrounds)Search Pexels for “Zoom Office Backgrounds” So why not download a new background and virtually transport yourself to a new...

Conversations On Careers and Professional Life

In addition to my work as a Career Coach and Business Communications Advisor at the Foster School of Business, I host the podcast Conversations On Careers and Professional Life. To better serve my listeners, I recently launched a website for the podcast specifically. You can visit ConversationsOnCareers.com to learn more about the podcast, find episode show notes and linked to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes/Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Play, or listen on...
How to change text to all caps/UPPERCASE in Google slides

How to change text to all caps/UPPERCASE in Google slides

Have you ever wanted to change text to all caps or UPPERCASE in Google slides? I did, and couldn’t quickly figure it out. I googled it, and only got answers that related to google docs at first. But then I figured it out, so you don’t have to. Select the “Format” menu, then “Text”, then “Capitalization”, then “UPPERCASE” Screenshot showing how to change text to ALL CAPS or UPPERCASE in Google Slides (or Title Case, or...

Announcing my podcast: Conversations on Careers and Professional Life

Earlier this year, I was awarded a Compassion and Resilience Seed Grant from the UW Resilience Lab so support creating a new podcast for the Foster School of Business, MBA Career Management Office. The grant is supporting four episodes on topics including and relating to resilience, self-compassion and mindfulness.  Additional episodes will feature interviews with UW Faculty and Staff, Foster students and alumni, and business leaders. The first 4 episodes are out now featuring interviews with: Naomi Sanchez, Assistant Dean for MBA Career Management at the Foster School of BusinessColette Vogel, Sr. Associate Director of Career Management and Corporate Relations at the Foster School of BusinessDr. Polo DeCano, lecturer at the UW School of Psychology and College of Education,Dr. Jane Compson, Associate Professor at UW Tacoma “Conversations on Careers and Professional Life.” Can be found on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or listen...

My Podcast Recommendations #trypod

In the spirit of #trypod, the industry promotion to get more people to listen to podcasts, here are my recommendations.  I will group them into two loose categories, 1) news and information, 2) entertainment News & Information Planet Money (NPR) – I’ve been listening since the beginning. About the economy and business. NPR Politics (NPR) Freakonomic Radio (NPR/WNYC) Entertainment Think again from Big Think – thought leaders James Altuscher Show – interesting guests and he is a good interviewer Startup (Gimlet) – deep info-tainment reporting on startups  (not a “news” program, they go deep into a startupeach season while also chronicling their own startup experience) Reply All (Gimlet) funny, a show “about the internet” Hidden Brain (NPR) – you’ve probably heard segments on NPR, interesting stories about human nature and brain science Pivot Podcast – the author of Pivot, Jenny Blake. Some good episodes, but sometimes they are a bit long winded How I built this (NPR) feature length interviews with people who have created things (like companies, just listened to the episode about the founder of southwest) Twice Removed (gimlet) a show by AJ Jacobs that delves into geneology The Eater Upsell – about the food/restaurant industry Invisibilia   The podcasts I listen to fall into two other categories: 1) those i listen to every episode of, and 2) those I listen to sporadically. I listen to nearly every episode of Planet Money, Hidden Brain, Reply All, StartUp.  All the others, I pick and choose, or used to listen to each episode and am now more selective, or have just started listening to and am not sure that I will listen...

Quadrennial Exercise in Criticizing Election Maps

Every four years, it seems, after an election the coverage of which is dominated by red/blue maps and warnings about how divided our country is, a series of news stories or blog posts will start to emerge on social media proclaiming, “no, its not a big red map with some blue islands, its a really purple map with some red and blue islands” or something like that. Actually, something like this post on Gizmodo. But there are still problems with a purple map, and they are detailed in a post from 2014 on medium about the work of an MIT student even earlier. it is based on color theory. TL;DR: human perception of color is affected by adjacent colors. The same purple is perceived differently depending on whether there is red or blue adjacent to it. The solution: use green to neutralize. Red and blue then desaturated toward gray to indicate the margin of victory. There is still a problem with a map colored in this way, not that you will find any on popular news sites. That problem is population density.  The map still is a geographically accurate map of the US, as most electoral maps are presented, so vast unpopulated areas are unfairly weighted in the mind of the observer. The map on Gizmodo tries to deal with that by desaturating red, blue, purple by population density, however, then we run into the color perception problem. Enter the cartogram. A cartogram uses something that is map-like, but then skews the areas so that they reflect some other measure, like population density (2012) and  2016, or in some other cases, electoral vote density, in fact, a number of...