You can be asked to answer "a few routine questions" that end up being anything but routine. These testing instruments are frequently used as a litmus test to rule people into or out of consideration. If one of these tests is in your future, you should understand what you are likely to face so that you can present yourself as a consummate professional, without compromising your integrity.

Understanding The Different Tests

There are five different types of tests:

Personality Tests. Are you a people person? Do you get upset easily? Are you quick to anger? Employers are using tests of general personality more frequently these days to screen job candidates because they believe that certain personality traits are required for success in a particular position.

There are two basic kinds of personality tests: projective and objective.

Projective personality tests ask you to tell a story, finish a sentence, or describe what you see in a blob of ink. In an employment selection context, these tests are generally looking for leaders, achievers and winners. They search for analytical and system thinking skills, and look at decision making and consensus building styles.

Objective personality tests ask dozens, sometimes hundreds, of questions using a rating scale, for example strongly agree to strongly disagree, true/false, or just yes/no.

Personnel selection. Personnel selection tests are personality tests designed specifically to screen job candidates. These tests measure psychological behaviors such as trustworthiness, reliability and conscientiousness. Some of them also psychologically screen you for potential alcohol or substance abuse............Read More About Test Preparation 

Telephone interviews often happen unexpectedly: in the midst of uneventful networking calls, as the result of a resume sent out weeks ago, or even as the result of a short phone conversation from the other afternoon. Telephone interviews are going to occur frequently during your job search.

With telephone interviews the employer has only ears with which to judge you.

If you are heading out the door for an interview or some other emergency makes this a bad time for an unexpected incoming call, say so straight away and re-schedule, "I'm just heading out the door for an appointment Ms Bassett, can we schedule a time when I will call you back?" Beware of over-familiarity, you should always refer to the interviewer by his or her surname until invited to do otherwise.

If the kids are screaming or dogs barking, stay calm: "Thank you for calling, Mr. Wooster, would you wait just a moment while I close the door?" Put the call on hold, take a minute to calm yourself, call up the company website and get your paperwork organized.

Take a few controlled, deep breaths to slow down your pounding heart, put a smile on your face (it improves the timbre of your voice), and pick up the phone again. Now you are in control of yourself and the situation.

Allow the interviewer to guide the conversation-and to ask most of the questions, but keep up your end of the conversation by asking a few questions of your own.

The following questions will give you an excellent idea of why the position is open, and exactly the kind of skilled professional the company will eventually hire,

"What are the major responsibilities in this job?"

"What will be the first project(s) I tackle?" ...........Read More

1. Not all jobs are posted on commercial job banks
2. Not all jobs are posted where you happen to be looking
3. Not all jobs are posted

No one knows how many job banks there are, but include the commercial job banks, company job banks and headhunter job banks and it is in the millions; you can't possibly expect to find all the available opportunities given these numbers.

Now open your eyes to a new way to locate suitable companies, jobs and the hiring managers for those jobs.

Successful Job Search strategies focus on getting in conversations with the managers who can actually hire you; so the more target companies you can identify the more opportunities you have for getting into direct conversation with hiring managers. Try these four steps to add a new dimension to your job search strategy.

Step One. Find suitable target companies. Go to any job site and search job postings in your usual way, and then repeat your search with different parameters

1. Widen search using minimal keywords and restrictions
2. Search for postings of job titles that represent the people you interact with at work: look for the titles that come above, below and around yours. Save these postings

Using this approach will get you suitable postings as usual, a slew of companies who hire people like you (even if you didn't see a specific posting), and a mass of job postings that you can see no use for -- yet............Read More

Here are seven networks you can use to accelerate your job search, stabilize your long-term career management strategies, and enhance your quality of life.

1. Colleagues. Make a real effort to build networks at your current, prior and next jobs. Reach out to people you've worked with, as a colleague and as a friend. You can use any approach you like, but might consider the truth,

"We've worked together in the past and with both of us furiously pursuing our careers, we haven't stayed in touch as we might. Lately I have realized that jobs come and go but that the people in our lives shouldn't. I'd like to establish contact again so that we can help each other and those we care about."

You will of course personalize this call, letter or email to the history and circumstances of your relationship.

2. Social networking. There are now many sites expressly created for professional networking. Headhunters and employers use them as recruitment channels.

These sites also have special interest groups for people with common professional interests and jobs get posted to these groups. Networking sites often have job banks or links to job sites and also offer local opportunities for in-person networking. Here is a comprehensive resource of social networking sites www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network

3. College alumni associations. Alumni associations can play a pivotal role in your professional life. Alumni association membership means access to the membership database and with it a wide network of professionals with whom you share a common bond..........Read More

1. Join social networking sites. You can search the membership databases by name, title, company and other variables. They usually have job banks or links to job banks and special interest groups where jobs also get posted. Try www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network for a comprehensive list of social networking sites.

2. Become visible to recruiters. Recruiters use networking sites all the time and this should affect what goes into your profile. Best bet? When your resume becomes your profile, it dramatically increases your visibility to recruiters.

3. Have a clear focus for your search. Networking will be more productive when you have a clear focus on industry, type of company, and then a clearly definable target job in mind. Your profile will be more focused and you can offer networking contacts something to work with.

4. Make it easy to help you. Have a clear focus for your job search but don't be too specific about what you need from an employer when you network, that's not relevant at this stage of your search and it can only serve to reduce the leads you get. Stick to your title, skills and what you can offer.........Read More

Your resume goes into resume databases that can have over 30 million other resumes against which yours has to compete. A resume that's simply a recitation of all you have done in your career is too unfocused to work well in this environment.

Here's how a resume database search works for the recruiter: like a Google search, he recruiter puts in keywords from a specific Job Description and up pop the resumes that match based on the frequency of the relevant keywords they have used.

So what can you do to create a resume that competes in this fierce environment? You can develop an understanding of what employers want when they hire someone like you, how they prioritize those needs and how they describe them.

Focus on the single target job title that captures what you can do best and analyze how employers think about and describe that job. Collect ½ a dozen Job Postings for your target job and deconstruct them, creating a composite job description for your target job: Prioritize the common requirements and the ALL the specific words and phrases used to describe them. From this composite you can say, "this is how employers think about and describe the job I want."........Read More

Step One. Collect 6-10 job postings of the job you are best qualified to do. Save them in a folder and also print them out. Not sure where to start? Try www.indeed.com, it's a job aggregator (or spider) that runs around thousands of job sites looking for jobs with your chosen keywords.

Step Two. Create a new MSWord doc and title it TJD for Target Job Deconstruction.

Start with a first subhead reading JOB TITLE, then copy and paste in all the variations from your samples. Looking at the result you can say, "when employers are hiring people like me they tend to describe the job title with these words."

This will help you to come up with a suitable Target Job Title for your resume, coming right after your name and contact information. This helps your resume perform well in resume database searches and acts as a headline giving human eyes an immediate focus.

Step Three. Add a second subhead titled

SKILLS/RESPONSIBILITIES/REQUIREMENTS/DELIVERABLES ETC

Look through all the print job postings across your desk for a single requirement that is common to all six of your job postings. Take the most complete description of that single requirement and copy and paste it (with a bullet) into your TJD doc; put a #6 by your entry to signify it is common to all.

Underneath this pasted entry add any other words and phrases from the other job postings used to describe this same area. Repeat this exercise for any other requirements common to all six of your job postings.

Step Four. Then repeat the exercise for requirements common to five of the jobs and then four and so on all the way down to those requirements mentioned in only one job posting.

When this is done you can look at your work and say, "when employers are hiring people like me they tend to refer to them by these job titles and they prioritize their needs in this way and use these words to describe them."

Step Five. This step will get you focused on the very practical competency issues of interest to employers, it is information you might well use in an interview as well as in your resume........Read More

This is a case where the diagnosed problem, articulated as, "no job offers because of inability to answer questions like this," is more likely to stem from a combination of factors. Here is how I answered the question and how you might approach similar challenges in your own career shift:

A common misperception is that you just haven't yet latched onto a slick way to justify your career shift. However, getting a new career direction off the blocks and heading along the right track will to take more than one snappy answer to a tough interview question. Try these six steps to overcoming obstacles to a career shift.

Step #1. Understand the target job. Your job interviews will multiply and your performance will improve with greater understanding of the function your target job is there to fulfill.

No job is added to the payroll for the love of mankind, it exists to solve problems and contribute to the bottom line. Understand the job's real-world deliverables: the problems it is there both to avoid and to solve, the small role that job plays in contributing to the bottom line and as part of a specific department, and you begin to understand what employers look for when they hire people for this job.

To achieve this understanding, you will want to complete my Critical Target Job Deconstruction exercise so that you understand how employers prioritize the needs of your target job and the words they use to express these priorities.

Step #2. Get the inside scoop on the job. Increase your grasp of the target job by talking to people who are doing this job successfully today. You want to understand the target job in terms of

1. Major responsibilities and critical deliverables
2. Education and desirable skill sets
3. What problems is the job is there to solve?
4. What problems it is there to prevent?
5. Typical day-today challenges?
6. Who does this job interact with?
7. What are those interactions?
8. The business processes of the new industry/profession & commonalities with your current professional experience

Talk with people working in your target job's department, ideally people doing this same job and whenever possible with people who have already made a similar career shift successfully.......Read More