Feedback - Design Your Life Workshop

I had the pleasure of conducting a workshop entitled "Design Your Life" recently for 30 young participants of St. Blaise Church,  Amboli.  They were initially shy and then warmed up to ask interesting questions and make the workshop more engaging.  Interestingly, we had a few parents who also attended too, and that added an interesting dimension to the discussions.

We covered aspects of planning one's career and life (both are intertwined anyway). 

I shared with them tools such as a Personal Values Exercise, a Personal Brand Exercise, How to identify where they may have talents, how to build flow, how to identify areas of success to work on, and a few more reflective exercises, that would help them make better decisions for their career.  I also spoke about the #PRISM Brainmapping Career Match Report that is great in helping people identify possible career paths. Please call me onn +919820155778 or write to me on ryanbbarretto@hotmail.com to know more about this neuroscience-based tool..

My sincere thanks to Fr. Leon and the volunteers who provided all the necessary support.  Here are some images that depict what the participants are going to work on, and a wordcloud that shows what they felt after attending the session (the range of feelings was expected, as it demonstrates to me that they started to think about designing their careers).

Trust, accountability and mindset: The 3 musketeers of hybrid working

From the article - "The risk is a loss of social capital in the long haul – will people enjoy working here if there isn’t a sense of collective bond?"

Read the rest of this interesting article here

How to get the most out of your team.

Here's a super read with practical pointers about #teammanagement, particularly #motivation of the #team.

Click here for the article

Some of these are a part of a #managerialskills / #leadershipdevelopment #workshop that I run for organizations.

Inbox or call me on +919820155778 for a discussion to do this type of #intervention for your organization.

#strengthsdecoder #leadershipstrategy

The Road to Independence starts here

 

What hiring manager's think of job-hopping!

This is an extremely critical article for all jobseekers.

You should keep this in mind when thinking about leaving a job that you have recently joined.  

Here's the article.

My personal thoughts:

1) I have done my best to meet all candidates if their resume matched the job criteria.  This has included those candidates who have left jobs frequently - within 3 months to one year of joining and those with career gaps.

2) With candidates who have switched many organizations within a short timeframe, I do my best to understand their reasons.  If the switch is due to compensation reasons only and the candidate is being adequately compensated as per market standards, doesn't show anything more than average performance, then I consider such candidate to be motivated by greed first, other factors would be lower down the list.  Such candidates are not shortlisted for further interviews.  The other candidates are what I call Diamonds among Gems (see my article about this here).

3) A job-hopper who has less that 12-15 months of tenure with an organization will have a challenge in demonstrating how they can contribute to the growth of the organization.  It does take time to learn the organization's systems, products, processes and culture, not to mention fitting within the team, and then delivering above average performance.  If the external environment wasn't so fast-paced as it has been over the past two decades, then it might be possible to show superlative performance.

4) The points mentioned in the article are definitely on the mind of every recruiter who gets the resume, particularly the one about achieving  learning, but no depth of knowledge. Job hoppers may get interview calls if they have niche and high demand skills.

If you have a record as a job-hopper there is hope for you.- if you are able to show how your strengths have delivered value to  your previous employers, and can do the same for your current employers too.

Write to me on ryanbbarretto@hotmail.com to know how to do this.

Songs of Resilience

 Songs of Resilience.

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Mondays (and a few special other days) sometimes can be really tough and knock us down really hard. Coming back the next day is a challenge at times. So we use difference tools to build our #resiliency to these days. Some of us use music.

Here's one of my favourite tracks, particularly since it brings a lot of energy back. I have shared the lyrics version to make it easier to understand the words.

Check it out here

If #music is what you use to bounce back, please share your favourite track / tune.

What a customized cover letter and resume can do for a candidate!

Cover letters are mostly ignored by recruiters, mainly because they're templates and don't tell you anything interesting or useful about the candidate.  It takes about 5 seconds to recognize a template, in my experience.

This is also the reason why recruiters scan through resumes.  You can scan  (but not discern much from) a templated resume in 10 seconds, but you can't read and discern much from a customized resume or cover letter, without reading it attentively.  Templates resumes and cover letters don't tell you much about the candidate, other than they know (hopefully) how to copy and paste.

The main benefit of a covering letter is that you can link your strengths to the job vacancy.  The resume can't do this well enough, because, hey, we have done a lot of different stuff in our career and we want to showcase our all our versatility.  Unfortunately this makes it difficult for the recruiter to decide.  This is where a well thought-out cover letter helps.  When the recruiter scans the cover letter and realizes that it is not a template, he /she tends to pay more attention and will likely read the resume in more focus.  

If the cover letter is well written and draws relevance to the vacancy, then the recruiter is sufficiently interested to read about other areas of the candidate mentioned in the resume.  If that is also interesting and bears relevance to the vacancy, there are great chances of the candidate receiving a call for the interview.

Among other services, I also help my clients write their cover letters, resumes and prepare for interviews,  based on their strengths.  This allows them to showcase their uniqueness from other candidates who use templates, as well as stand a better chance of landing an offer for a job that will satisfy and engage them, while benefiting their employer.  

Watch my video "Why you need a Strengths-based Resume" here.

Write to me on ryanbbarretto@hotmail.com if you want to prepare for your next job like this.