The Contester Blog

Standing out at a Job Fair can make a difference in your job hunting. Job Faires are starting to pick up, and Dice is running some nice ones, called Targeted Job Fairs. At a Silicon Valley Career Faire in early 2010, 10 companies as showing up, and a major job search company has 82 career fairs scheduled for this year across the States.

How do you rise above the crowd at a Career Fair? The contention can be considerable, but you can help yourself stand out from the herd with early homework. At AA-Careers, we have a simple six-step process to prepare. Plan to go? Here’s how to prepare:

First, research the companies that are going and pick your targets. Use the internet to check out the organizations that are there before you go. Go to their websites and see if they have their job openings posted. Pick a sound number to target, 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 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 achievements and skills to the demands 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 potential organization/job combination. Write down a 90 second ‘thumbnail’ that you can repeat out loud showing why you are a special prospect for that job. You’ll use this in your resume and when you meet the company at the job booth.

Fourth, modify your resume for each job type. 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 description. 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 very easy to see that you’re a match based on your resume.

Fifth, dress and prepare as if you’re doing on-site interviews. Dress nicely 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, 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 distinctly marked folder. Keep them in a lightweight briefcase or folio.

Remember to smile, and good hunting!

Self-build is a phrase that is getting ever-popular in the housing market. Wait up a minute, what exactly is “self-build”? It’s a property you build yourself. It doesn’t have to mean LITERALLY by yourself, but you place yourself in the position as planner, foreman, architect of your property and allow trained workers do the task you tell them to do. More and more individuals are doing just that – in fact, the army of “self-builders” in the UK outnumbers the amount of properties being developed by any professional developer. The purpose of self-build is to create a property to your precise specifications, not a template that the large developers work to.

I know what you’re thinking: “I haven’t a clue about how to build a house”. The good news is that self-build doesn’t have to involve you with the physical aspects of the house building (in fact, just 5% of self-builders actually get involved with the actual building work). Even when it comes to design, quite often this is delegated to a professional designer.. Self-build, generally, is about you articulating (in laymen’s terms), what you need to the property designer – who then develops a plan dependent on your necessities. This plan then becomes the draft the developers work to. See? It’s not required to have any proactive participation in self-build. Having said all that, the DIY fan can use self-build as an opportunity to save some notes by contributing toward the tasks of self-build they have experience in – it’s up to you how much participation you want during the construction.

Self-build sounds expensive, but actually it’s in general cheaper than buying an already developed property of identical specifications (up to 30% cheaper). Not only that, self-built properties sell very well too – up to 25% higher than the actual build cost, so self-build can be simply an investment, rather than a place to live.

You must ensure the squad of workers you choose are 100% competent and that they can work as a squad. Without doubt, you will need builders with lots of experience, particularly with specific types of construction machinery, such as floor saws, wall saws, angle grinders with diamond blades, masonry saws and stihl saws. Not only do they want to be safe with such equipment, they of course need to do their job well too!

This article is only an introduction to self-build, and I trust it will encourage those of you who are intimidated by the thought of running a task of this kind of scale. It needn’t be time-intensive, and you won’t need house building / designing skills, but you will need to be careful as to who you hire, and you will need to cautiously work out the budget of the project.