Your interviewer is going to expect that as an interested applicant to their company that you’ve done some homework and will come prepared to ask some insightful questions. However, what many job seekers refuse to acknowledge is that the primary purpose of the interview is to make the interviewer comfortable and confident in their hiring decision. It’s not about you, it’s about them.

Most of the questions that should never be asked during an interview are focused on what’s in it for the job seeker. Asking these questions portrays the job seeker as interested only in their own interests, not in the company’s interests and can torpedo your chances to secure an offer.

1. What does your company do? There is simply no excuse to arrive for any job interview without thoroughly researching the company and understanding their company, their history, their products and something about their industry and their position in that industry.
2. Do you do background checks? This question will sound the alarms in the interviewer’s head, immediately triggering concerns about what you may be hiding. Assume that all companies will investigate your background, confirm your academic credentials, check with your references and validate all periods of employment.
3. Do you do drug tests? Like the previous question, asking if they do drug tests raises concerns that you might not be prepared to pass a drug test or need some advance notice. Again, assume that every company will require a drug test and adjust your lifestyle if necessary to pass the test.
4. Do you have any other jobs available? If it becomes apparent during the interview that the job you’re interviewing for is well below your qualifications or anticipated compensation, it makes sense to interrupt the interviewer and inform them that you need to understand the growth potential of the position since you have 15 years of experience, have managed people and earned 25% more. That allows the interviewer to either explain the potential of the position or shift gears and present another opening that is more congruent with your experience.
5. Can you guarantee me that I’ll still have a job here a year from now? There are no absolutes in business, and there is no guarantee of future employment. Asking this question suggests that you have an expectation that the company owes you your job, not that you owe them your best effort. Work hard, demonstrate your value and you’ll likely still have your job in a year.
6. Can you tell me what public transportation is available nearby? Getting to work is your responsibility. So is learning how to get to work. If you require public transportation, investigate its convenience and timeliness before your interview. It’s not the company’s responsibility to show you how you can get to work on time.
7. Is (my/my spouse’s/my child’s) medical condition covered under your insurance plan? Although it’s illegal to ask you about any specific medical conditions you might have, if you volunteer that you or a family member has a chronic condition, that revelation may influence their decision to hire you. It’s perfectly fine to ask for a copy of their employee benefits booklet after a job offer is made, but it’s a bad idea to reveal any serious medical conditions during the interview process.
8. How many breaks do I get each day? Can I see the break room? Asking any questions about breaks implies that you’re more interested in those times when you don’t have to work than you are in performing the job itself. This prohibition also applies to asking anything about smoking breaks. Many companies prohibit smoking entirely and others recognize the additional health care burdens that frequently accompany smokers and prefer to hire non-smokers. Best to keep your concerns about breaks to yourself than provide a reason for an employer to reject you.
9. How many warnings do you give before someone is fired? Asking about any type of disciplinary process will raise immediate concerns about your suitability for the position. The interviewer will immediately wonder if you’ve had disciplinary issues in the past and if you will be difficult to work with. Better to avoid you altogether if there are any management concerns.
10. How soon can I transfer to another position? After spending the interview convincing the interviewer that you’re competent and interested in the job, it would be a huge mistake to imply that you’re more interested other potential opportunities. This question announces that you’ll jump at the first opportunity that presents itself and won’t be fully committed to the job that’s being considered.

Now that Tim has laid the foundation for his job search, it’s time to raise his online profile by engaging and participating on the social media platforms so that others recognize his talent, intelligence and potential.

Most professionals start their social media participation on LinkedIn. It’s the social media platform most closely associated with professional pursuits and employment, so it makes sense for Tim to start there also. While Tim has completed the essential task of creating and populating his personal profile, even securing recommendations, the next step is just as important: join professional Groups to engage with others in your field.

Perform a quick search on your profession – sales, marketing, finance, healthcare – and review the list of Groups available. Narrow your search by inserting your city’s name in the search string. “Cleveland Networking” returns a much more precise list than the broader term “Networking.”

Then simply join some Groups. Visit their pages to see what types of conversations they’re leading. Find one that’s interesting to you and join the conversation. Provide your opinion, your insight and your expertise to the topic of the day. Become visible.

Do the same on Facebook. Search for professional groups that interest you, become a Fan and follow their posts, adding your own comments regularly.

If you’re new to Twitter, visit twellow.com where Twitter users are indexed by their professions and specialties. With a click you can follow the thought leaders in any field and start receiving their tweets in your twitter stream. Click over to their Twitter profile to see who they follow and who’s following them, then follow the same people and start engaging with these professionals.

It won’t take long for your name to be recognized and for you to develop relationships with successful, networked professional in your industry who have the capacity to inform you of job openings and introduce you to others who can help you in your job search.

It’s understandable why most job seekers think that their resume is their most important written job search tool. After all, they’ve heard throughout their professional lives that the resume is universally demanded by virtually every company  engaged in the hiring process. So it’s natural that most people associate resumes with landing their next job.

Although it’s true that your resume will likely play an important role in your job search it’s best used only when you’re applying for a specific position. After all, that’s the purpose of a resume – to articulate your background, skills, abilities and credentials – with the hopes of obtaining an interview.

Sending out resumes blindly in the hopes of attracting attention will likely result only in high postage expenses, not any job offers. Studies repeatedly confirm that over 80% of jobs – especially skilled jobs – aren’t filled from responses to online or newspaper ads, but from personal networking with friends, family and current or former employees at the hiring company. It’s these contacts that get you in the door and face to face with the hiring manager.

Not all of these contacts are interested enough to read your whole resume, but they do want an understanding of your professional capabilities and background. The best way to provide them with this information: your bio.

Brief Biography

Your online bio can provide you with substantial leverage during your networking activities. If written effectively, it will convey  your background in a crisp narrative format before, during or after your networking meetings, providing just enough detail to garner interest and generate further inquiries.

Benefits

Your bio should provide a readable and concise description of your professional background to anyone who want to check you out online. It’s much more conversational than a resume and doesn’t require a significant level of effort to read and absorb. Written in the third person and without the rigid structure of a resume, you bio is much more readable and conversational than a resume.

The bio is also useful for those job seekers who don’t with to announce their intentions to pursue new job opportunities. While posting a resume online announces your intentions, your online bio is simply a convenient resource that informs any interested person of your professional capabilities and experience.

How to write your bio

Most people have difficulty writing about themselves and have trouble even getting started. A quick way to jumpstart your own bio is to visit LinkedIn profiles or blogs of people you admire. Read their personal profiles until you find one that you think can serve as a model for your own. I’m not suggesting that you simply cut and paste their profile to your own, but you can use their profile as a template for your bio, substituting your own professional details and personal skills.

At a minimum, your online bio should include a brief paragraph summarizing your profession and overall expertise. You’ll also want to add specific career highlights and significant accomplishments in your field. Ideally, you’ll also include some details concerning your professional philosophy and approach to your business. Details that illuminate how you differ in your professional capacity from everyone else in your industry. Include your education credentials and any type of professional associations that you belong to that can embellish your professional prestige. Finally, humanize yourself with a brief comment on your personal hobbies and pursuits – as long as they don’t have the potential to alienate any prospective employers.

Once your bio is complete, you need to paste in into every social media platform where you participate, on your blog’s About page and on your Google profile (don’t have a Google profile yet? Get one now at Google Profile)

Day 3 of our real-life, real-time job search with Cleveland sales executive Tim Krenn continues with a focus on how to create and market your personal brand. Over the course of our first couple of days, we instructed Tim how to create his social media identities, how to create a blog focusing on his sales experience and had him actually post his first entries on his blog.

Now, we’re going to focus on exactly how Tim is going to define and present himself to prospective employers. How is he going to stand out from the crowd to gain attention and, ultimately, job offers?

Your job search is marketing. You’re the product, and the employer is the consumer. You need a clear and compelling personal brand enables you to stand out from the pack and helps employers perceive the benefits of your product, giving you an advantage in the job market.

The first rule in developing your personal brand is that it must be founded in authenticity. It should be about who you are, what your work-life purpose is, and what you are committed to causing. As a starting point in developing your brand, brainstorm a list of all the things you’re good at.  Write down the stories of your professional successes. Your favorite memories of work. What really inspires your passions and gets you excited about going to work?

Then examine these stories to see what common elements and themes run through them. It’s not enough to be a great accountant or a terrific programmer, you have to really divine what makes you great at what you do, so you can translate that into a personal branding statement that appeals to employers.

Once you’ve identified your unique area of expertise you need to determine the advantages of that professional skill. For instance, if you are great at relationship building, the advantages to prospective employers might be greater loyalty from clients, more referrals and a more stable revenue base.

If you’re still lost among the crowd, make your brand more specific by fine tuning. With Tim, his positioning as a sales executive, while true, just isn’t powerful or memorable enough, so he’s going through this exact exercise to determine how he’ll position himself with prospective employers.

I’ve told him to focus on developing a Three-Point Marketing Message that conveys his unique strengths. Three things that define who he is, why he’s successful and most importantly, will appeal to prospective employers.

Tim selected:

• Strategic sales and business development
• Relationship development
• Consistent performance and achievement

Once you know what strengths you’re going to focus on, the next step is creating a powerful branding statement that defines who you are, why you’re valuable and why they need to meet you. And that’s what we’ll cover next as our real-life, real-time job search continues on the Job Shopper.

Our real-life, real-time job search experiment continues with Episode 2: Your Blog.

Yesterday we suggested to our job seeking executive, Tim Krenn, that he create his social media identities on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, that he  take a headshot that could be used across all the social media platforms and that he think of a blog topic that he could write about.

Today we take a second step and discuss why the blog is so important and the specific steps to create a blog of your own.

For the uninitiated, a blog is a website with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material including graphics or video that relate to a specific topic. For our purposes we’re talking about a professional blog. One that relates directly to your professional experience and expertise.

WHY BLOG?

There are a lot of reasons why a professional blog can serve as your single biggest resource in your job search.

1. Build your personal brand – you have the capacity to determine how you are perceived by others through the content you generate and publish on your personal blog. You can demonstrate your particular expertise, your insight, your ability to analyze industry trends and convey your unique professional skills in a way that a resume simply can’t. Post by post, you can demonstrate your thought processes and perspective and differentiate yourself from every other job seeker with a similar background.

2. Provide thought leadership –your blog can be used to express your personal expertise in your discipline, answer questions that are important to people in your industry (and prospective employers), provide useful resources and information and even showcase your past successes.

3. Become more human – increasingly blogs are being used as a way to bring a more accessible and personal voice to life. Blogs are always personal in that they’re written by an individual with a unique perspective, experience, humor and a distinctive voice, and your readers can gain a more thoughtful and intimate knowledge of who you are by reading your regular posts.

4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – done right, your blog posts will be indexed by all the major search engines so when a prospective employer Googles your name, your posts will appear in the results, reinforcing your reputation as a thought leader in your industry.

GETTING STARTED

There are a lot of blogging platforms out there that provide you with the tools to create your personal blog at prices ranging from free to about $100/year. You can research them all or you can take my advice and build your blog using Wordpress.

If you go to wordpress.org, you can reserve your blog name and start creating right away for free , or you can take the advice that we gave Tim Krenn and use a Wordpress hosting company like Bluehost (Google Wordpress hosting to get a list of companies providing this service) to get your own domain name and email account for about $80. Although you have to pay for this service, owning your own domain means that you can modify the look and feel of your blog in much greater detail and also provides you with your own branded email address.

From a branding perspective, you’ll be perceived as more professional if you have your own domain, and preferably one whose name conveys what you’re writing about. Tim selected the blog name BullGooseSales.com to write about power sales and networking and created an email address tim@bullgoosesales.com that would automatically forward to his Gmail account.

Now, the tough part – creating content on a regular basis that demonstrates your professional expertise and resonates with your target audience.

And how do you build an audience? Stay tuned, we’ll be getting to that.

This week starts a new real-life real-time experiment detailing the job search efforts of Tim Krenn, a Cleveland sales executive who like millions of Americans recently found himself out of work and in need of a new job.

Tim approached me a couple of weeks ago asking for advice on how to refine his resume and get the word out to prospective employers who might be interested in meeting him. The more we spoke, the more apparent it became that Tim didn’t just need a better looking or more adroitly phrased resume, he needed a job search strategy that encompassed personal branding, networking and effective use of social media.

I’ve known Tim for nearly 20 years, and I’ve worked with him professionally, so I know how talented he is, I could see the enormous amount of see the untapped potential that could be released with the right strategy and disciplined and consistent tactical execution.

We’re going to be documenting the advice that we provide to Tim, discussing why we’ve selected the strategies, platforms and tactics that we pursue, and track the results of our efforts until Tim lands a new job. It could be six weeks or six months, but we’ll be there to document the highs, the lows, the technical challenges, the mistakes and hopefully the ultimate success.

And as a starting point, I’ll share with you exactly how I started with Tim. Laying the social media foundation that will enable you to create and distinguish your personal brand, build your personal network and start engaging online with professionals who have the capacity to recommend or even hire you.

So, let’s start at the beginning and start building your social media persona.

First steps: create identities for yourself on the three big social media platforms: LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

Don’t feel overwhelmed by the fact you don’t know how to use these platforms yet, you don’t know how to build a network and you think that Facebook is for teenagers and Twitter is time wasting text messaging. They’re all simply tools that you need in your job search toolbox right now. We’ll learn how to use them effectively later.

Second, find a terrific professional headshot that you can use on all your social media platforms. I want to make sure you heard that: pick one headshot to use across all the platforms. The same picture. This is all related to personal branding and your creation of a brand image that is unmistakably you.  And there’s a reason that I qualify the shot as a headshot, not a full body shot or a full torso. The photos on social media sites are often displayed at 40×40 pixels. That’s tiny, and if you use a large shot, you’ll be unidentifiable.

It’s also crucial that you select a photo that conveys the appropriate professional image. This means that your shot should capture you dressed as you would for work, not at a party or a wedding, not with your spouse or kids and not a grainy shot you grabbed from your laptop’s webcam. Your photo may be the single most important visual element in your entire personal branding effort, so take the time to get it right.

Third, and finally for now, think what topic you can write about and contribute professionally on your own blog. What’s your area of expertise? Where have you had your greatest successes? What aspects of your profession get you excited? Write down some ideas, because your professional blog will serve as the focal point of your job search, will provide the content you need to display your expertise, generate conversations, feed your social media channels and position you as a leader in your field.

So, get busy, start thinking, because tomorrow’s topic is going to be all about the blog as the central element in your job search.

Sarah Palin was photographed this week glancing at the palm of her hand while engaged in a tv interview. A closeup of her hand revealed that she had written three phrases on the palm of her hand:

• Energy
• Tax cuts
• Lift American spirits

While some in the media mocked her reliance on crib notes to help her formulate her interview responses, her idea was actually a good one that served as a convenient and reliable reminder of the main points she wanted to make with each answer.

I’ve written before of the importance for job seekers to focus on communicating three main attributes during their job interview. Three things that define who you are, how you work and illustrate the value you bring to an organization. It doesn’t matter what those three things are, as long as they’re authentic, demonstrable and desirable.

For a salesperson, those three things might be: networking, self-directed production and strategic business development. For a software project manager, they could be: organization, project management and team leadership. It doesn’t matter what your three things are, but what matters is that you craft every single response so that one of your three traits is reinforced.

Too many job seekers ramble through their interviews without focus or clarity. The interviewer is left to sort through a random collection of jumbled responses and attempt to divine the candidate’s strengths. Left to their own devices, they’ll make the easy choice and hire the individual who clearly communicated their strengths.

My advice: take a page out of Palin’s playbook and write down the three attributes about yourself that you will focus on with every response. You don’t have to write it on your hand, but have them handy on a notecard or in a readily available note on your Blackberry. Just have them written down and memorized so you stay on message with every answer.

The Wall Street Journal published an article yesterday that described how many major search firms actually keep a blacklist of candidates that they would never consider for any job opening.

Typically, these firms add candidates to their blacklist who have exaggerated their qualifications, pitted recruiting firms against each other, received negative references or performed badly during the search process.

Previously, having your name blacklisted at a single search firm may not have affected your ability to find a new position, but with the proliferation of social media platforms, including industry specific social networking sites, your poor behavior won’t be limited to a single recruiter, but has the potential to be broadcast to a national network of recruiters.

Recruiters spend their entire day on the phone and online chatting with prospective candidates, checking references and engaging with other recruiters. They are professional communicators who have the ability to broadly disseminate negative information about any candidate who lied to them, falsified their accomplishments or behaved deceptively.

Job seekers often feel pressured to enhance their education and their professional achievements to merit consideration for a new job. However, it’s easier than ever to verify the details of a candidate’s background and once caught in a lie you may destroy the prospect of being considered by any recruiting firm. For years, perhaps forever.

The same social media platforms that allow you to reach recruiters all around the country with a single tweet also enable them to check on your qualifications and professionalism. If you’re honest and open, you’ll have nothing to worry about.