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 

1. Visit the company website for insights into what they do and how they see themselves, take time to travel all over the website.
2. Google the company and also Google News (link is right above the basic dialog box for your Google searches) where you'll find media coverage of the company and its key executives.
3. www.vault.com and www.wetfeet.com will tell you what past and current employees think about their employer and can also give you great intelligence about your target company.
4. Cross reference your target company with your networking databases (HOTLINK TO 7 networks for your search) to find people who work or have worked at this organization and can give you insight into the company and the job. You might even come across biographies/resumes of the people who will interview you.

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Here are seven simple steps to dramatically improve your performance at job interviews and make a greater success of the job once you are in the saddle. Listen up, your ability to turn job interviews into job offers is going to undergo an exciting transformation.

Step #1 Understand Employer Priorities. Really know that target job by developing your own job description for the coming interview. Take any job description that is available from the employer or recruiter of the target job, and then collect six more job postings for the same job. From this collection create one single all-embracing job description:

• Find a requirement that is common to all 6 jobs. Write a single entry that captures how all employers seem to describe this area; be sure that you list all the keywords the different employers used to describe skills, responsibilities and deliverables in this one area.
• Repeat this process for every other responsibility common to all six jobs.
• Repeat this process again for requirements common to 5, 4, 3, 2 and then just 1of your collected job postings

The result is a comprehensive document that defines the priorities and demands of job and puts in your hands an outline of all probable areas of inquiry.

Step #2 Define the relevant skill sets you bring to the table. Under each bullet point created in Step #1, enter the relevant skills used in the execution of that particular responsibility, plus the education and/or special training necessary.

Step #3 Practical problem solving. Jobs hold one thing in common: success and failure ride on the solution and prevention of the problems that regularly occur in that job's daily grind. Think about your job in terms of the problems it is there to solve and to prevent, and then go through that first, "common to all six jobs" bullet in your composite job description and identify the typical problems that occur with executing this aspect of the job.

Consider the ways you have both prevented and tackled this type of problem in your work: addressing the problem's origin, followed by your analysis, the solution, its implementation and the results. Read More

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

Like many great ideas, the Executive Briefing is beautiful in its simplicity. It works as as an e-mail or on your standard letterhead. The job's requirements are listed on the left side, and your skills, matching the job's requirements point by point, are on the right. It looks like this:

To: rlstein
From: top10acct
Date: February 18, 2009 10:05:44 PM EST
Re: Accounting Manager

Dear Ms. Stein:

I have nine years of accounting experience and am responding to your recent posting for an Accounting Manager on CareerBuilder.com. Please allow me to highlight my skills as they relate to your stated requirements...........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

This means that writing a resume is serious business that

1. Requires an understanding of how recruitment and hiring strategies affect resumes
2. Demands the clarity of objective analysis to decide how best to package the commercial commodity that is the professional you
3. Insists on unique writing skills, because resumes abide by their own rules

When you've done the best you can and see that resume writing is never going to be your strength, you begin to realize that with your personal stability and professional future at stake, maybe you should think about a professionally written resume.

A professionally written resume takes time and thought to determine how best to package the professional you, then more time to write, edit, edit again with your input, then layout and polish the final document. Resume writing is a labor-intensive process for a marketing tool that is mission-critical to your job search; and like most things in life, you usually get what you pay for.

Working with a professional resume writer you get the writing skills, and the objectivity to determine the right focus for your situation, skills that come with writing resumes every day for a living.

The result, when you choose wisely, is a resume that opens the doors to more and better job opportunities, in less time, and with potentially higher earnings; assuming of course you have good professional skills to begin with and that you learn to use the resume effectively in your job search.

In addition you'll receive an education in self-awareness, personal branding and career management issues that you can leverage through the years.

What do professionally prepared resumes cost? Prices vary greatly, but the following accurately reflects the competitive mid-point you are likely to pay for resumes prepared by professionally credentialed and experienced resume writers:

Entry Level Resume: $295

Students, New Grads, Professional Trades (non-management), Customer Service (non management), Administrative (non management) and Professionals with up to 3 years experience

Professional Resume: $395

Professionals with 3+ years experience, not in management and not in IT or other Science/Technical careers

Mid-Career/Mid-Management Resume: $450 

Managers, Career Changers, IT and other Science/Technical careers

Senior Management/Executive Resume: $550

VP, SVP, EVP, Director-Level, C-Level, Entrepreneurs

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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