Workplace fashion Dos and Don'ts

14 Signs You Love Your Job

1. You don’t talk about other people; you talk about the cool things other people are doing.

“I hear Mary is heading up a new project. What are they working on?” “I’d love to know how Mike managed to rescue that customer relationship.” “Sherry developed a new sales channel; is there some way we can leverage that?”

When you love your job you don’t gossip about the personal failings of others. You talk about their successes, because you’re happy for them – and because you’re happy with yourself.

2. You think, “I hope I get to…” instead of, “I hope I don’t have to…”

When you love your job it’s like peeling an onion. There are always more layers to discover and explore.

When you hate your job it’s also like peeling an onion – but all you discover are more tears.

3. You see your internal and external customers not as people to satisfy but simply as people.

They aren't numbers. You think of them as real people who have real needs.

And you gain a real sense of fulfillment and purpose from taking care of those needs.

4. You enjoy your time at work.

You don't have to put in time at work and then escape to life to be happy. You believe in enjoying life and enjoying work.

When you love your job, it’s a part of your life. You feel alive and joyful not just at home – but also at work.

5. You would recommend working at your company to your best friend…

In fact, you can't stop talking about how cool your company is and the awesome work you're doing even when you're away from work.

6. You enjoy attending meetings.

No, seriously, you enjoy meetings. Why? Because it’s fun to be at the center of thoughtful, challenging discussions that lead to decisions, initiatives, and changes – changes you get to be a part of.

7. You don’t think about surviving. You think about winning.

You don't worry much about losing your job. You're more worried about not achieving your potential. Not being as impactful as you can.

8. You see your manager as a person you work with, not for.

You feel valued. You feel respected.

You feel trusted.

9. You don’t want to let your coworkers down.

Not because you’ll get in trouble or get a bad performance review, but because you admire them – and you want them to admire you.

10. You hardly ever look at the clock.

You’re too busy making things happen. When you do look at the clock, you often find that the time has flown.

11. You view success in terms of fulfillment and gratification – not just promotions and money.

Everyone wants to be promoted. Everyone wants to earn more.

You definitely feel that way too… but somewhere along the way your job has come to mean a lot more to you than just a paycheck. And if you left this job, even if for a lot higher salary… you would still miss it.

A lot.

12. You leave work with items on your to-do list you’re excited about tackling tomorrow.

Many people cross the “fun” tasks off their to-do lists within the first hour or two.

You often have cool stuff – new initiatives, side projects, hunches you want to confirm with data, people you want to talk to – left over when it’s time to go home.

13. You help without thinking.

You like seeing your colleagues succeed, so it’s second nature to help them out. You pitch in automatically.

And they do the same for you.

14. You don’t think about retirement… because retirement sounds boring…

…and a lot less fulfilling.

How many of the above statements apply to you and your job?

If you said:

0-3: You may want to find a new job. Life is too short.

4-6: You don't hate your job... but you don't love it either. What can you do differently?

7-10: You really enjoy your job and the people you work with

11-14: You are deeply, madly in love with your job! (and your friends are jealous!)

 

[original article posted here]

Managers to Millennials: Advice for Young Job Seekers

Many college grads lack interview skills. They take calls, text and sometimes bring their parents or pets to interviews. HR execs blame a coddled generation weaned on smartphones and social media.

 

Newly minted college graduates soon entering the job market could be facing another hurdle besides high unemployment and a sluggish economy. Hiring managers say many perform poorly — sometimes even bizarrely — in job interviews.

Human resource professionals say they've seen recent college grads text or take calls in interviews, dress inappropriately, use slang or overly casual language and exhibit other oddball behavior.

"It's behavior that may be completely appropriate outside the interview," says Jaime Fall, vice president of the HR Policy Association. "The interview is still a traditional environment."

Fall and other HR executives say such quirks have become more commonplace the past three years or so, and are displayed by about one in five recent grads. They're prompting recruiters to rule out otherwise qualified candidates for entry-level positions and delay hiring decisions.

The trend reflects a generation of Millennials — ranging in age from 18 to 34 — who grew up texting and using smartphones and social media, says Mara Swan, executive vice president of staffing firm Manpower Group.

"Life has gotten more casual," Swan says. "They don't realize (the interview) is a sales event."

So much off-the-cuff speaking in tweets and text messages has left many young people with stunted social skills, says Jonathan Singel, director of talent acquisition for Avery Dennison, a packaging and label maker. 

Fall says Millennials also have been coddled by parents. "It's (a mindset of) 'You're perfect just the way are,' " he says. " 'Do whatever you're comfortable doing.' "

About half of HR executives say most recent grads are not professional their first year on the job, up from 40% of executives who had that view in 2012, according to a recent survey by the Center for Professional Excellence at York College of Pennsylvania. 

The HR Policy Association recently launched a website, jobipedia.org, to provide advice to first-time job seekers about interviewing, resumes and workplace behavior. 

Why some job candidates flunked their interviews:

• Taking calls and texting. A male graduate student seeking a managerial position in Avery Dennison's research and development unit took a call on his smartphone about 15 minutes into the interview. The call, which lasted about a minute and wasn't an emergency, ruined his near-certain chance for a job offer, Singel says.

"If he thought that was OK, what else does he think is appropriate?" he says.

• Helicoptering parents. A man in his late 20s brought his father into a 45-minute interview for a material handling job on an assembly line, says Teri Nichols, owner of a Spherion staffing-agency in Brooksville, Fla. At Cigna, a health insurance provider, the father of a recent grad who received an offer for a sales job, called to negotiate a higher salary, says Paula Welch, a Cigna HR consultant.

• Pets in tow. A college senior brought her cat into an interview for a buyer's position at clothing retailer American Eagle. She set the crate-housed cat on the interviewer's desk and periodically played with it. "It hit me like — why would you think that's OK?" says Mark Dillon, the chain's former recruiting director. "She cut herself off before she had a chance."

Original article by  Paul Davidson of USA Today here.

Straighten up!

Weak or Powerful: How Does Your 

Posture Make You Seem?

Practicing your posture before a big meeting may sound silly, but scientists have found that how your stand has dramatic effects on your mood and therefore how you are perceived.

If you came into the bathroom one day to find a colleague standing in front of the mirror, hands on hips, shoulders spread wide, doing her best impression of Wonder Woman about to save the world, your first thought would probably be to back out slowly.

But the truth, according to scientists, is that your silly-looking colleague may be on to something not silly at all. Practicing certain "power postures" can actually have outsized effect on mood and confidence and thus on the impression you make on others.

An in-depth post covering research on and advice around body language on the buffer blog recently highlighted a TED talk by Harvard Business School professor Amy Cuddythat explains the biology and impact of body language.

"Cuddy distinguishes between two different types of body postures. One are powerful poses, and their counter part are powerless ones," buffer's Leo Widrich writes, adding that the difference between the two "goes a lot further than to just change the positioning of your legs or arms. Cuddy explains that inside our bodies, actual changes are happening as our body language changes. These changes largely have to do with hormones."

Power poses, where we spread our bodies wide or lean back in a relaxed, open manner, actually raise testosterone, which it turns out, significantly changes your demeanor. How do we know? Cuddy not only measured hormone levels but also asked research subjects to perform power or powerless poses before interviewing for a job. Those that used power poses prior to the interview were consistently rated more favorably by recruiters asked to evaluate them.

What's the takeaway of all this? If you have a big meeting coming where you need to impress, it might be worth your while to spend a couple of minutes practicing power postures beforehand. OK, it'll probably feel pretty silly, but science says it will boost your confidence, so if you're interested in giving it a try, check out buffer for images of the postures.

And you don't have to take one blog's word for the effectiveness of changing your body language. It's a big theme of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg's book Lean In as well. In it she urges women especially to focus on using their body language to convey confidence and power.

-Jessica Stillman, inc.com [original article]

5 ways to give your résumé a makeover

Fashion and what’s in style change over time—and so should your résumé. What may have been a trendy way to format five or 10 years ago could now be considered outdated. And with technology changing how jobs are found and applied for, being current is more crucial to your job search than ever. Whether you’re just putting together your résumé or feel like your job search is in a rut, take the time to update your résumé’s look with these five tips.

1. Swap out dated categories for modern informationRésumés used to serve as a very different form of introduction than today. While hiring managers used to wonder who you were and what you were looking for, as well as if anybody could vouch for you, today’s hiring process is much more streamlined. “Today, like the understanding of the unspoken objective, everyone knows that a job candidate will provide references when and if they advance to the next stage of the hiring process,” says Karen Southall Watts, business coach, consultant and author.

Instead, find a way to use your résumé’s valuable space more wisely. “The top third of your résumé is prime real estate and should not be home to something as obvious and outdated as an objective statement,” says Watts. “The reader already knows you are looking for a job like the one advertised. It’s better to put a personal branding statement or skills summary in this key area.” Below your contact information, write a short summary of your achievements, years of experience and highlight your skills.

2. Use the latest technology to your advantageWhen designing your résumé, keep in mind both who and what will be receiving it.Bruce Blackwell, managing partner of Career Strategies Group in White Plains, NY, says, “Rule number one is to keep your design simple! Make sure it is compatible with the résumé database programs used by employers and recruiters. Called applicant tracking systems, these programs electronically ‘read’ incoming résumés, parse their keywords and slot them into a database file. Résumés with headers on the name and address lines, with bullet points in the contact area, with fancy lines and other graphic effects, often cannot be read and end up in the garbage.”

Having more than one format of your résumé is crucial to your search. Watts says, “There should be a résumé that works no matter where you need it to go: A printed paper version for traditional employers, a PDF version that can be scanned and a hyperlinked version that ties to samples of your work or your social media links.”

[find 3 more ways here]

Network Like a Millionaire: 6 People Who Determine Your Future

The most successful people in the world have a small, structured network of core contacts. Here's how you can, too.

How many "best friends" do you have? Social scientists say most people count just four friends with whom they can discuss very important matters, but the maximum possible number of such friends is around six. With rare exceptions, it's just not practical for anyone to maintain close, truly meaningful relationships with more than six people.

Super-successful people know this better than anyone. In the survey research I did for my book Business Brilliant, I found that the wealthier you are, the fewer "best business friends" you have. Specifically, when asked to count how many people they closely network with in order to source new business, the average number was 4.8 for millionaires who have a net worth over $30 million and 5.7 for millionaires who have a net worth below $10 million. 

Ordinary middle-class people? They reported an average of 9 close contacts. That's right. The people at the lowest level of financial success counted the highest number of close networking contacts.

The reason is very simple. If you count nine people as very close, the odds are you're not really close to them at all, which means they won't be inclined to offer their close network connections with you. If, on the other hand, you are very close to six highly-connected people, as most super-successful people are, those six people will make their networks available to you, giving you potential access to 36 more people, as well as access to their networks, by which time your effective network numbers in the hundreds.

[Original Article and Five Steps to a Better Network]

Health IT VC funding sees 'torrid' Q1 -- $493M raised so far

Mike Miliard, Managing Editor at healthcareitnews.com

With nearly half a billion dollars raised in venture capital funding for health information technology, the first three months of 2013 represented a "record quarter," according to Mercom Capital Group.

Some $493 million was raised industry-wide, according to Mercom's 2013 Healthcare IT Funding and M&A Report, in twice as many deals as the previous quarter (104, up from 51). There were nearly four times as many early stage deals – 42, up from 14 – compared to the fourth quarter of 2012.

The top deal for Q1 was a $41 million round of funding raised by Salt Lake City-based Health Catalyst, which developsdata warehousing technology. That was followed by $40 million raised by Geisinger Health System spinoff xG Health Solutions, whose data analytics platform is aimed at patient and population-focused care management.

Los Angeles-based NantHealth, which is working on advanced secure fiber networks, cloud computing and wireless technology for care delivery, raised $31 million. Fitbit, a fitness and health tracker company, and One Medical Group, a provider of online primary care services, both based in San Francisco, raised $30 million each.

"The trend we began to see last year of VCs investing in consumer-focused companies like mobile health, telehealth, personal health [and] social health ... has become much more pronounced," said Raj Prabhu, CEO of Mercom Capital Group, in a press statement. "The enormous market opportunity in consumer-focused health has appeared to pique the interest of investors and is likely to continue to grow as witnessed by the surge in VC activity."

More than 100 investors participated in deals in the first quarter of 2013, with ten investors involved in multiple funding rounds. Those with multiple rounds include Blueprint Health, Google Ventures, Maverick Capital, Merck Global Health Innovation Fund, Nike+ Accelerator, Norwest Venture Partners, Oak Investment Partners, Psilos Group, The Social+Capital Partnership and Y Combinator.

On the merger and acquisition front, there were 46 transactions this quarter, according to Mercom. Health information management companies were acquired most, with 22 transactions, followed closely by service providers with 11 acquisitions.

The largest disclosed transaction was athenahealth’s acquisition of Epocrates, which develops mobile medical apps for the point of care, for $293 million. Allscripts’ acquisition of health information exchange and interoperability firmdbMotion, for $235 million, was a close second, followed by JLL Partners’ $123 million acquisition of BioClinica, which develops technology for clinical trial management.