Making an Employer Want You

Splash Buddies Giant Inflatable Sprinkler - 20536850 | HSN
Shop Splash Buddies Giant Inflatable Sprinkler 20536850, read customer reviews and more at HSN.com.

Finding a job can be a stressful, intimidating, agonizing experience. The process of an interview is often something that is feared greatly by many people, who work themselves up in preparing for it. Then, after you’ve completed the interview, you may feel that you didn’t do your best at it, or you didn’t persuade the interviewers as much as you would have liked. Fortunately, there are things you can do to improve your skills, boost your self-confidence, give yourself an edge over all the other interviewees, and make an employer want, desire, even demand you.

As with all aspects of personal development, this requires a lot of hard work and dedication. There is no “get rich quick” approach here, true success is only achieved through work. Some people may need to work harder than others, it all depends on how hard you strive toward your goal and also your talents. People with talents in these areas below will naturally excel in them, and will have an easier time mastering them. Not to say that people who aren’t talented in them can’t achieve success. Not at all. It will just require a bit more (hard) work than if you did have talent in that zone.

Be professional

Being professional in your manner, your dress, in basically everything, will influence peoples’ first impressions of you, and will obviously help you get a job.

Dressing for the interview can be a task in itself. Fighting with yourself over what shirt or dress to wear, what tie or shoes, what perfume or cologne. If you don’t know what to wear, consider what the job is, and dress accordingly. For example, you apply for a job at a video game developer where all the programmers and other employees wear jeans and stained t-shirts. You probably wouldn’t want to show up at your interview there in a fancy suit. Of course, you would want to dress nice, but just not overdo it. The same concept applies to the more “corporate” jobs. You wouldn’t want to show up at an interview for insurance sales in jeans and a t-shirt, would you?

During the interview you will most likely be asked a number of bizarre, puzzling, and just plain weird questions that may or may not have anything to do with the job. Your best option is to simply try to remain calm, and answer the questions as professionally and carefully as possible. I know it can be hard to ask you to remain calm, as the questions during interviews tend to be quite intimidating.

Know your stuff

Being familiar with the company’s product is invaluable to your success in getting a job. Before you apply for the interview, take some time to research the company’s history, the products it sells, and know as much as possible. This will help you decide if this is really the place you want to work for, and will also help you handle the interview better.

Knowing about the company and its products will help you be a better worker, a better employee, and a better person. You will know how to handle certain (sometimes bad) situations that may come your way, and how to prevent them from happening again in the future. If you choose to be a salesman, you will have a more successful time selling your product if you know everything there is to know about it, rather than someone else who is just selling it blindly or following someone else’s theme.

You may even benefit from the knowledge further down the road. You may find unexpected treasures, you may be even promoted as a result of “knowing your stuff”.

Learn a foreign language

For those of you out there who are American, you may be thinking, “Wait a sec, why in the world would I need to learn ANOTHER language? English is the main language here!” That is true, in part, but that is rapidly changing. Spanish is becoming America’s second language. When I go to the grocery store, most of the food items have instructions and ingredients in English and Spanish. I don’t remember seeing this so often 10, or even 5, years ago.

Because of the increasing numbers of Spanish-speaking citizens, some employers are beginning that it is required that a potential employee speaks Spanish. This is happening in border states such as California and Texas. It really won’t be long before knowing a second language is required for most jobs in the entire USA. You can be prepared for this by learning a foreign language now.

Even if you don’t live in a state with a high Hispanic population, you can still give yourself an advantage over all other competing interviewees by learning a foreign language.

What language should you learn then? Well, if you live in the USA, the best language to learn is Spanish, as the USA’s second most spoken language is Spanish.

You may want to learn another exotic language as French or some other European language, instead of Spanish. Fortunately, if you learn Spanish first, it will be easier for you to learn any other language. Especially Italian, Latin, and French, which all have similar roots as Spanish. I have found that Italian is so similar to Spanish, if you learn Spanish first you get basically a “1/2 off coupon” for Italian!

That’s all to this article, I hope these tips will help you in your quest to get a job!