6 tips for building confidence before your next job interview

Let's face it; interviews can be nerve-wracking and downright intimidating. Even when your work is top-notch and you love what you do, you may find yourself shaking, sweating, or stumbling over your words just before or during an interview.

How can you get the nerves out of the way so your confidence and competence shine through? Try these six tips for building confidence before your next job interview.

• Do your research. Preparation helps boost confidence no matter where you are. Start by learning everything you can about the company, the interviewers, and the job posting. Scour the Internet for news about the employer and the department, talk to people who work there, and plan a session with your recruiter so you can get the "inside scoop" on the job for which you're interviewing.
• Practice on sample interview questions. A quick Internet search will lead you to sample questions that are commonly asked in interviews. Review several of these to identify the questions you'll most likely be asked, and come up with some brief answers you can offer. Then, practice with a trusted friend or colleague to perfect your delivery.
•  Clean up your social media and review your career history. Cleaning the potential "skeletons" out of your closet does two things. First, it helps you anticipate any really tough interview questions, like "Why weren't you working last year?" or "Why did you leave your last employer?" Second, it helps you identify moments that would make good interview topics, like presentations you only vaguely remember giving or moments you solved a problem at work no one else could crack.
•  Prep and pack what you need the night before. Scrambling to find your portfolio or your best shoes the morning of an interview is a recipe for anxiety – and a great way to show up late. Instead, lay out everything you'll need the night before. This gives you time to decide exactly what image you want to project and to make sure you have everything you need to give that great first impression.
• Give yourself plenty of time to arrive. Pad your travel schedule with at least twenty extra minutes to help you ensure you arrive on time. If you're worried about having idle time in the waiting room, bring along materials to help you do some last-minute interview refreshing, like information about the company.
• Breathe. Simple deep breathing exercises can help you calm your mind, clear your voice, and center your thoughts on your passion for your work and your enthusiasm about the job opportunity. Take a few seconds to calm your mind and breathe several times for the best results.

Aerizo Group – HR Consultancy

Urgently Required Branch Manager Sales for Tanzania (Africa)

Experience : Sales Management with 10 years
Education : Graduate with English compulsory
Email: vacancy@aerizogroup.com

Required Branch Manager for a Wholesale Distribution network for FMCG and Cosmetics with 9 branches in Tanzania, Africa. Managing Sales Team, Achieving budgets (Sales Targets with the given resources), To manage expenses, To achieve targets product-wise. Candidate should have Computer literacy, Good Communications skills and knowledge in Tally accounting package.

Urgently Required Junior Accountant for Tanzania (Africa)

Experience : 1-2 years
Education : Graduate with English compulsory
Email: vacancy@aerizogroup.com

Required candidate having good accounting knowledge for a Wholesale Distribution network for FMCG and Cosmetics with 9 branches in Tanzania. Candidate should have Computer literacy, Good Communications skills and knowledge in Tally accounting package.

How to Handle Stress Interviews

During the course of your career, you may be subjected to many interviews. The purpose of an interview is to get acquainted and to learn about one another. For employers, it’s a time for them to evaluate your qualifications for the job and you help them with this evaluation by being prepared to sell your skills and experience. Apart from common job interviews like the first round telephone interviews, behavioral interviews and technical interviews, stress interviews are gaining in popularity.

What is stress interview, you may wonder?

Basically, the whole purpose of a stress interview is where the interviewer will try to put you under pressure or make you uncomfortable and see how you react to it. It’s a test to see if you could still think logically under such stressful circumstances.

The interviewer may try to stress you in one of several ways, such as asking four or five questions in a row, acting rude or sarcastic, disagreeing with you, or simply keeping you waiting for a long period.
Many people find this type of interview the toughest and not many could fare or perform well. Many ended feeling frustrated, annoyed and humiliated.

Here are some useful tips on how to handle stress interviews:

• Always keep yourself cool and composed throughout these stressful interviews. Try to control your anger. Pause and take a few deep breaths while you think of an appropriate response.
• Do not try to make an issue of the questions (even though they may be irrelevant and discriminatory). Make your answers concise and non-specific.
• Clarify the question and the nature of the answer desired. This can buy you some time to think. What is the interviewer trying to get at? Don't be afraid to ask questions to get clarification; sometimes, this is exactly what's expected of you.
• Communicate what you're thinking and doing. State assumptions, and ask for unknown information.
• Just remember that the purpose of the questions is mainly to test your response. The answers are not really important. Hence just focus on the way in which you're solving the problem. Don’t keep looking for the "right" answer.
• Most importantly: Be yourself, be open, be honest and be direct.

For any job interview, the better prepared you are beforehand, the better your chances are of walking out of the interview with a confident smile on your face that says, “I think I got the job!”

Aerizo Group – HR Consultancy

Cost-effective methods for employee training and development

Employee training and development needs to suit your organization's context, job descriptions, employment contracts and collective agreements. When selecting employee training and development methods, it is important to remember the learning process. There are many ways to provide employees with learning opportunities, including:

•  Committees: Set aside part of the committee's work time to discuss issues or trends that may impact on the organization in the future.
• Conferences and forums: Employees can attend conferences that focus on topics of relevance to their position and the organization.
• Critical incident notes: Day-to-day activities are always a source of learning opportunities. Select the best of these opportunities and write up critical incident notes for staff to learn from. Maybe a client complaint was handled effectively. Write a brief summary of the incident and identify the employee's actions that led to a successful resolution.
• Field trips: This helps your employees gain a better understanding of the full range of programs and clients that your organization serves. Follow up the field trip by having staff explain what they have learned and how they can apply that learning to your organization.
• Job aids: Job aids are very useful for new employees, employees taking on new responsibilities and for activities that happen infrequently.
• Job expanding: Once an employee has mastered the requirements of his or her job and is performing satisfactorily, s/he may want greater challenges. Consider assigning new additional duties to the employee.
• Job rotation: On a temporary basis, employees can be given the opportunity to work in a different area of the organization.
• Job shadowing: If an employee wants to learn what someone else in your organization does, your employee can follow that person and observe him or her at work.
• Special projects: Give an employee an opportunity to work on a project that is normally outside his or her job duties. For example, someone who has expressed an interest in events planning could be given the opportunity to work as part of a special events team
• Networking: Some professional specialties have informal networks designed to meet the professional development need of the members. Members meet to discuss current issues and to share information and resources
• Performance appraisal: Performance appraisals are partly evaluation and partly developmental. In traditional performance appraisals the manager and employee evaluate the employee's strengths and weaknesses. In a 360-degree performance appraisal, feedback is gathered from supervisors, peers, staff, other colleagues and sometimes clients. The results of an appraisal can be used to identify areas for further development of the employee.

Aerizo Group – HR Consultancy

Failure Resumes - A Training Guide for Success

Today’s unemployed may have failed in nailing a specific job or holding on to one in hard economic times, but they are learning fast from previous mistakes and have an attitude more in tune with success than failure. If they don’t get a job, they’ll make one. Highly successful start-ups are one result. And leaders who think finding alternative options and problem-solving are sometimes one and the same. Today, fewer people may be unemployed statistically because rather than be unemployed, they kept plugging away at re-designing themselves to fit in, but since that didn’t appear to be happening, they had to do something on their own. So they created.

Do employers really think a job hunter will be with the company for 30 years with an eye toward retirement? If they do, they’re out of touch. Especially when it comes to employing the millennials in the workforce today; a long-term commitment, tied to one place, is not the life for a millennial. In fact, most millennials would probably prefer to be unemployed than work for a company that puts itself first. Companies and organizations are forever complaining they can’t find innovative workers with problem-solving abilities. However, the real problem is that companies aren’t hiring employees or even training employees in most cases to be innovative; instead they hire people, using the same barometer and that barometer has changed. Experience is still what we need in business or any organization. The hiring system needs to be more welcoming as far as candidate failures. Negative candidate behaviours such as stealing from the company, abusing their position or treating their workers inappropriately are still not forgivable. But some failures, any failure at all really, is used to narrow the pool of otherwise qualified candidates.

Aerizo Group – HR Consultancy

Resumes Can’t Speak

The Age of Technology seems to be creating more introverts than ever. Although not true in every workplace, introverts in most work environments used to be the minority. Now that’s changed. Our electronic devices are pulling us inward. We all have phones but rarely use them to make a call. The idea of talking to someone directly or via a device is not the preferred method to communicate. We text, text and text. Well, sometimes we Skype, but mostly we communicate with abbreviated text, in the freedom of the internet world. Naturally, good communication is important in work, play and home. You know how bad it feels when someone sends a text or email and you think they should have called or spoke in person. We need to communicate honestly with spoken words.

At work, more people are sitting in the shadows these days, hiding behind a computer screen, locked on to hard-fast rules, knowing only one answer to a problem. It is comfortable to stay invisible. We all know that the world of work may appreciate that some people have to turn in work without communicating; however, few would deny that most of our business and community leaders are high achievers in part because they are good or great communicators. These leaders know the value of face-to-face communication and have the confidence to use it.

Today’s reality is not so stark, yet employers are concerned that workers have problems interacting and problem solving. The idea of selling oneself is almost a thing of a past–or at least in eyes of job-seekers. Mostly, they want their resumes to do the talking when good communication skills are what the job interviews and the jobs really calls for.

Aerizo Group – HR Consultancy