Before Interview

Before Interview

An interview is an opportunity to put your best foot forward before a prospective employer. In my earlier features, I gave you some sample answers to possible interview questions.

Unfortunately, most candidates do not indulge in any introspection before going for an interview. While it's important to prepare for common questions from the interviewer, here are the top six questions you need to ask yourself before showing up for any interview.

1. What are your skill sets and how do they apply to the job?

Almost 80 per cent of the candidates cannot identify and/ or describe desirable skills.

A typical question is, "What are your three greatest strengths?" Be ready with answers that include an example or brief experience to illuminate your point. Use specific examples to highlight your accomplishments.

Explicit numbers, results and outcomes give a better description of your accomplishments than subjective statements. You could talk about your action-oriented nature helped the company meet a client-imposed deadline in your last job. Read more after the break...


2. Are you a problem solver?

Again, 90 per cent candidates cannot answer 'problem' questions.

You should be able to tell the interviewer why they should hire you and what the company will miss out on if they do not hire you. Show your ability to think logically and demonstrate problem-solving capabilities by asking questions and analysing the information given to you.

3. Have you researched the prospective organisation?

Most candidates do not research companies for information and the problems they are facing. You should develop your own tactful suggestions for solutions without appearing to be a 'know-it-all.'

Read trade magazines to learn more about the specific industry. You could also visit the company's website to get first hand information about their products/ services.

Knowledge about the domain and the company shows the interviewer you are interested. It also demonstrates initiative on your part.

4. Would you hire someone like yourself for the job?

A lot of candidates have attitude problems. Most attitude problems come from fear, but show up as defiance.

Hiring managers want candidates who they can train and rely on, not ones with inability to take instructions or feedback.

Be honest to yourself and keep your eyes and ears open. If your friends always complain about your indecisiveness or poor listening skills, now is the time to pay attention and take some corrective action. If unattended, these can become roadblocks in your career.

5. Can you communicate clearly and with conviction?

A lot of candidates give a negative impression by performing poorly during the interview.

Speak up, speak clearly, make eye contact and use facial expressions.

The first impression you make on the interviewer depends primarily on your communication skills. If you can't get the interviewers' attention in first few minutes, they won't really give you a chance to demonstrate your technical know-how or knowledge.

Ask your potential employers for feedback every time you attend an interview.

6. Can you stay from cribbing and complaining?

Most candidates complain about past employers or bring up personal information. Perhaps it was not your intention to complain or reveal information, but you honestly answered the beguiling 'entrapment' question of "Tell me a little bit about yourself."

Caution! Stay focused on the job interview with answers about your experience, education, skills, and success. Be positive and, remember, never say anything bad about a former employer or give unnecessary details about how your last job ended.

Any employer would love to hear about how you took responsibility for your actions and learnt from your mistakes.

If you left your last job under less-than-ideal circumstances, don't lie about it. A background check would reveal the truth anyway. Make sure the interviewer understands what happened to cause you to leave your last job was the exception, not the rule.

An honest introspection is critical to your success in an interview. So, put on your thinking cap and impress yourself before you impress a potential employer.

Your future Boss

Your future Boss

People don't leave organisations; they leave their bosses.' This is an old cliche. According to a survey, almost 71 per cent of employees look for new jobs because of problems with their bosses. A recent Gallup survey of over 1,000,000 employees found that, if a company was losing good people, the biggest reason was their immediate supervisors.

What makes it ironical is that, more often than not, it is your future boss who ends up taking your final interview. And while they try and understand the way you fit in with their teams, it is your responsibility to understand their management style as well. So, when you get an opportunity to turn the tables on them, here are some questions you must ask.

1. What are your key expectations from team members?

Often, as an answer to this question, most supervisors start by describing traits demonstrated by their favourite employees in the team. This can be a great clue to understanding what it is going to take to get into your boss's good books. If your boss-to-be says he wants team members to take initiative and perform independently, you know he is not going to micromanage and breathe down your neck everyday. If he says that they expect team members to 'go the extra mile' and work hard, you will spoil your impression by trying to sneak out of office early every day.
Read more after the break...



2. What does it take to succeed in a role like this?

This question will help you achieve two things. First, it will help you understand the standards your boss expects you to meet. Second, you will come across as someone who is keen on succeeding. You must also ask how success is measures in the team as it depends on a boss's managerial style. For instance, if it's a sales oriented position, will you be rewarded only for exceeding sales, or are there rewards for customer satisfaction, teamwork etc? Try and get specific answers from the employer, as this will be an indication of where you should focus your energies if you intend to take up the job.


3. Could you tell me more about the composition of the current team?

What you are really asking your boss-to-be is to describe the people in his team. This is a great question to check his or her people skills. You will find out if he or she invests enough time in knowing the team well. Watch out for what is said. Is there pride when he or she speaks about the team? Does the boss know a lot about the team members? Often, a good boss will take pride when describing his or her team, and this will reflect in the tone and enthusiasm. You don't want to work for someone who hardly bothers to connect with you as a person.

4. What is your personal management style?

Ideally, you would want to know the boss's problem-solving approach and the way he or she manages people and resources. Does the boss have a hands-on approach or prefer to delegate responsibilities? He or she may like to take charge and be in control all the time, or may trust the team completely and simply supervise. This is important to know or you may mistake the boss's enthusiasm to help you as interference with your work.


5. What has your experience with the company been like so far?

This is a tricky question, as almost every boss will try and give you a positive response. You need to watch out for body language, tone and overall attitude while they describe their experience. If they show indifference or give you a lukewarm response, it is an indication that what they say is just an attempt to get you into the organisation. If they have a smile on their faces and enjoy describing their experience, you shouldn't have any hesitation about working for them.


Even a great job can turn into a bad experience if you don't get along with the person you work for. Asking the right questions at the interview will save you from nasty surprises later.

Self Confidence

Self Confidence

There is something common in all achievers and that is self- confidence. It gives them courage to take greater risks and achieve more than they ever thought possible. Self-confidence extends their reach and makes them do miracles.

Self-confidence is our attitude which gives us a positive and realistic views about ourselves. It helps us to trust our abilities and believe that we can achieve what we dream.
Read more after the break...


Self-confident people have realistic expectations of themselves and others. Even if some of these expectations are not met they remain positive, accept themselves and look optimistically to conquer greater heights.

They feel good about themselves even when others don't appreciate and acknowledge their efforts. They don't long for the approval of others and are willing to risk and do what others are scared of doing because they believe in their ability to win. Jack Welch says, "Self-confidence gives you courage and extends your reach. It lets you take greater risks and achieve far more than you ever thought possible."

Self-confidence is contagious. Self-confident people instill confidence in others and gain the confidence of others. It is the secret of effective and successful living.

Our self-confidence is expressed in our behaviour, body language, the way we dress, talk, look, walk, what we say and think, the way we act and relate etc. A self-confident person fears nothing, has attained the truth and lives free of error.

The signs of low self-confidence are feeling of guilt, skepticism, self-shame, pride, fear, pretension, laziness, unforgiving attitudes, depression, lack of trust in oneself and others,
pessimism, inferiority complex, procrastination, self-doubt, passivity, submissiveness, isolation and jealousy etc.

Be glad there are ways by which we can build up our self-confidence.

1. Have faith in yourself

Our self-confidence increases when we believe in our abilities to perform and manage things. All of us have innumerable talents and potentials, only we are often not aware of many of them. To believe in our capabilities we first of all must identify what we have. For this we have to do a SWOT analysis and realistically look at ourselves. We will discover that we are people of great
possibilities and potentials. This faith in our abilities will boost our self-confidence. We must dwell more on our strengths and use them to negate and correct our weaknesses.

2. Look at your achievements

We can successfully do so many things. We too are great achievers. But we often brood over our failures and make our lives miserable. Think often of your successes and this will help you to increase your self-confidence. Our fear of failures prevents us from taking up anything new and challenging. Remember that we have so many qualities and abilities and that we too can be successful if we perform with all our energy, mind and heart.

3. Feel good about yourself

No one can make us feel inferior without our permission. To boost our self-confidence first of all we must feel good about ourselves. The secret of all successful and happy living is to love oneself. When I am unhappy with myself I see unhappiness everywhere and I make all those around me unhappy. I must accept myself and feel good about the way I am, the way I look, my colour, my size, my shape and believe that the world can't be same if I am not there. Enjoy yourself once in a while by joining your friends for a night out, enjoying a good meal, going for a movie, playing some games etc. Laugh and forget yourself and enjoy some moments and run away from
your work and stress. Such activities can boost your self- confidence.

4. Fix challenging goals

Goals can do miracles in our lives. Greater the goals greater is our self-confidence. We should have both small goals and big goals. The achievement of small goals will give us enough enthusiasm and self- confidence to run towards bigger and more challenging goals. We must
think positively about our abilities to achieve our goals and reward ourselves when we achieve them.

5. Bring in commitment and passion

Our self-confidence depends on the degree of our commitment to a cause. If we are mediocre and half-hearted the result will also be same. We must commit ourselves to success and become passionate about what we do. Our commitment is expressed in our eagerness and desire to learn and develop new skills, knowledge and talents. When we are more prepared with commitment, knowledge and skills to do a thing we become more confident.

The elephant and the maina were great friends. But the elephant always felt sad that he was not able to fly like his friend maina. So one day he asked maina to teach him how to fly. The maina agreed and led him to a cliff.

Pulling out a feather she said: "hold this feather tight in your mouth and flap your ears and jump down this cliff and you will fly."

The elephant belived her words, held the feather in his mouth and flapped his ears and behold he began to fly.

He flew over the villages, the rivers and cities and returned to his friend very happy and told her " Your feather is very powerful. Can I have this feather because I want use it whenever I want to fly."

The maina said, "its not my feather. It's a hair from your tail. You only need to believe in your ability to fly. Believe in yourself and you will do miracles."

Believe in yourself, have confidence in yourself and you will indeed do miracles.

Tips To Write Powerful Emails

Tips To Write Powerful Emails

1. Make the effort to learn about the etiquette (these days known as "netiquette") involved in writing emails. There are loads of good reference websites and books about the internet which will tell you the basics. I know it might seem a bit precious to attach so much importance to social niceties when the internet is basically very informal. However, whether we like it or not many people do take online etiquette very seriously. So if you're writing emails for business, you should assume that your recipient may well be one of those...
Read more after the break...


2. Never send and preferably don't even try to write an email if you're angry, upset, drunk, or otherwise not in total control. If you have a heated conversation with someone on the telephone you can sometimes fudge things over. But with emails, once you hit "send" whatever you've written is there, carved in tablets of stone, for as long as the recipient wants to glare at it. The old adage about "counting to ten" before responding couldn't be more true here. Only send angry emails if you can handle, or really don't care about, the recipient's resultant feelings!

3. One thing that you may not think of is that it can be useful to consider carefully the time you send your emails. To begin with it's always a good idea to avoid sending emails that coincide with the Monday morning rush and Friday afternoon lethargy. In addition, I've occasionally found that emails sent to companies over the weekend end up getting lost in cyberspace. And on a rather more subtle level, if your recipients see that you're sending emails on a Sunday morning or late at night, they may feel they can interrupt you for a business talk at the same times. Although you may think it's cool to impress a client that you work all hours, your partner won't when the same client calls you on the phone at midnight.

4. Because almost everyone at some time or another has been infected with a computer virus, people are understandably wary of attachments. I never send attachments to anyone I don't know very well, and equally never open attachments unless they're from people I know well. And then, some contemporary viruses and worms clone themselves on to genuine email names and addresses, so even an email purporting to be from someone you know might just be infected. When in doubt append text to the body of your email message, or contact the recipient beforehand and make sure they're happy to receive it as an attachment.

5. Layout of emails is something few people pay attention to, especially if (like me) their system uses text only. However even with simple text a sensible layout can make the whole thing more readable. Above all, you should avoid writing emails that sprawl all the way across the screen. Those are very hard to read and to be able to see everything properly as text, your reader may have to fiddle about changing fonts. The safest format to use consists of lines no more than 65 characters long. That fits, works everywhere and makes the email much easier on the eye.

6. Your subject line should focus on what's in it for the reader so it grabs their attention. You'll find that the best way to do that is to include some sort of benefit. For example, if you're writing an email about a downwardly-revised project budget, instead of saying "Project X -- revised costs" say "Project X -- costs reduced by XX%"). If there isn't a genuine benefit to use, try to make it interesting and intriguing anyway. Also, avoid the words most hated by spam filters like "free," "subscribe," etc.

7. Online writing has to be kept concise and clear, largely because the screen is a particularly unfriendly reading medium for most people's eyes. If only for that reason the KISS principle (Keep It Short & Simple) is useful. With emails you need to get straight to the point and keep to it. Someone who receives dozens of emails per day doesn't have time to wade through a lot of preamble. By making your point concisely you'll stand the greatest possible chance of avoiding the undignified fate of being deleted.

8. As far as writing style is concerned, here more than with any other medium it's very, very helpful to write as people speak. In addition, it will make your email clearer and more concise if you leave out all but essential adjectives and adverbs. Keep your sentences short, and only ever include one main idea or thought per sentence. Paragraphs shouldn't consist of more than 6 sentences max -- fewer if possible. And if you list more than a couple of items, use bullet points.

9. If you write emails for business, make good use of the signature facility that goes after your name. It's surprising just how many people fail to use that facility properly - yet it's an excellent opportunity for you to put across a few words of promotion. Because the email signature appears at the end, your recipients are not likely to be irritated by it. In fact provided that it contains useful contact information it will be seen as a helpful addition to your message. And even if your email is text only you can still make it look reasonably smart.

Gift for JRD Tata

Gift for JRD Tata

Here are two pics of an amazing piece of art. Location: Tata Museum ,Jamshedpur . In the first pic, you can see a painting. This was a gift to JRD Tata on his Birthday by a street artist. Nobody was able to understand his art. Unfortunately, only the painting was given to JRD and the artist had promised to reveal the secret shortly . However, JRD was no more when the secret was actually revealed . More after the break...

Here's the secret revealed. When you place a steel rod at the circle in the first pic you saw, you will see the image of the JRD Tata as a reflection on the steel rod as seen in the second pic below. Isn't it incredible!!