Stepping in to the new career or a new job is not much easier as of now. That too in this competitive world it is in vain. So, it is better to follow the foot prints of our elders and to get their valuable advice in choosing one’s career and facing the interview. Here are some of the key points on how to face the Interview:
Before stepping in for an interview find out what is the company all about. Do a brief approximate calculation on the questions they ask in the interview and search for the answers. Practice answering interview questions.
Take a good portfolio with resume copies. Be polite to all employees of the company.
Have a good firm handshake with the interviewer and be enthusiastic. Speak out slowly and deliberately.

If you are in a bottle neck situation for the question asked by the interviewer please make use of the custom built exhibition stands through which you will be judged that you can handle any exotic situation and you are the right person for the company.

Dress smartly and reach the venue fifteen to twenty minutes earlier before the Interview begins. Be positive about you and your abilities. Always have a smiling face.
Body language plays the major role, through which a person coming for the job interview is judged. Stay calm and maintain eye contact with the interviewer. Take more care on how you are sitting, moving and your general impressions
Wait until you are provided a chair to sit down. Do not get embarrassed if you don’t know the answer for any of the questions and always have a positive thought within you. Avoid raising salary discussions on your first interview. Give short and sweet answers for the questions.

Here are the latest updates from CHC:: smart lipo, restylane stockport and phytoestrogen gel.

It’s exhibition season (apparently) and I need to vent my frustration at the unfairness of it.

So I work hard in the office, I pull my weight and I am more than profitable to the company. If, to choose a random example, I were to compare how valuable I am to the office in comparison to the office work experience girl, I am of course far more useful. However, it seems that my efficiency is my undoing in this case!

There is a big trade exhibition coming up in a couple of months. Things are well underway in the run up to make sure that everything is organised and that all boxes are ticketed. The exhibition is really important for us as a company. We only attend the main one that runs every four years, and so far we have always managed to score some really big clients every time, some of which have made this company what it is today. So there is quite a big budget to make it all happen.

The scale of the preparations are quite big. Guests are invited by us as a company, flights are booked, hotels for guests and workers alike. In terms of the actual exhibition preparation itself, exhibition graphics need to be sorted out right from scratch. This involved some people actually going up to Manchester to a brainstorming centre where they could work out exactly which pop up display stands they wanted, and whether or not they wanted to super size the whole set up.

I, of course didn’t get to go on this trip. That was acceptable, it made sense to me. However, I was really looking forward to a few days out the office at the exhibition… (you know what’s coming now)

I don’t get to go! Why? Because I’m too valuable in the office apparently, I’m ‘needed’ here. Who does get to go though? You guessed it, the work experience girl! I mean yes, she is cheap, but the cost of actually taking her up there and putting her up in a hotel etc is not cheap at all! It just really sucks. I feel like getting one of those gigantic building wraps you can buy, wrapping around the building opposite the hotel they are staying in with the words “you suck” on it. I’ve been a valuable employee here for years, I work hard, and I get penalised for it. I mean, great way to not motivate your staff.

The worst thing is, normally I get anything I need to out of my system whilst over at the coffee machine with my mates, but in this case I really can’t. See the work experience girl is really nice, and it’s not her fault at all, I just think that I would come across as a real… well as not very nice I talked about it. I just feel like I’m 12 years old again – it’s not fair!!!

AArrgghh!!!!

Over the Easter vacation we decided that if we hired a car rather than use some other form of public transport to visit family in another part of the country we could get out and explore the area rather than just sit around chatting the entire time.  After all with all the advertising that these big car hire companies have, it should be just a matter of ringing up and reserving the right sized vehicle on the relevant date for the daily amount quoted, right?  Well that’s what we thought anyway, but when you get down to the nuts and bolts of it, strangely enough it’s a bit more complicated than that.

Actually getting the right size of vehicle for the dates is simple enough if you book far enough in advance, but when it comes to the cost of hiring a car, the quoted daily figure is just a drop in the ocean to what is needed in actual “money in the bank” terms.  In order to pick up the keys of our car, which was only a compact family sized vehicle (nothing fancy) we were required to give a credit card imprint that basically put a hold on about £500 of our finances.  This we were told was the insurance excess that we would need to pay should anything go wrong with the car.  We were only hiring the car for a few days and the insurance was coming out at more than my pet insurance charges for an entire year! We were of course offered a reduced excess rate if we were prepared to pay the insurance premiums to upgrade our cover, but as this was going to cost over £100, plus we’d still have a couple of hundred pounds blocked on our credit card to cover the remaining excess we decided to cut our losses, keep our fingers crossed at hope that the other drivers played nice on the roads!  Our luck held and we returned the car in the same pristine condition it was in when we hired it and the hold on our credit card finances was released.  We took digital photos to prove there was no damage to the car when we returned it, but these weren’t needed and the hire company released our insurance excess “deposit” within 24 hours.

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Another area that almost caused us a financial problem was in the area of child seats.  These are required by law and the car companies are milking this one for what they can.  With a daily charge that’s more than the average cheap booster seat costs in the shop, my advice to anyone who needs one is to buy their own and then donate them to a charity shop or other goodwill cause afterwards if you no longer need them. 

I feel slightly battered by the entire hire car experience, but definitely a lot more knowledgeable about how it all works than I was a few weeks back.  We will hire a car in the future, but next time we’ll be wiser about what the real charges will be, especially with respect to the hundreds of pounds they “fence off” on the credit card until the vehicle is returned. 

My favourite type of office is the large, bright modern type. You know the kind I mean, all key fobs and coffee vending machines and everything is either glass or Teflon. 

On the whole, the sleek uniformity of the corporate working environment tends to be a bit unpopular. At best it can be described as impersonal and, at worst, a bit sinister. However big offices are the best kind, for one simple reason. When you are at work in a big office you can pretend you are in space.

Here’s my top ten tips for pretending your office is a spaceship.

Ask your boss for a wireless headset. Then you can pretend that you are Captain Scarlett or, if you prefer, Madonna every time you answer the phone. The effect is better enhanced if you stare into the middle distance when using your headset and say things like “This is Leitenant Caracha, Captain, I’m on the bridge and they’re coming straight for us!”

Every time you open or close a door make Shhhhp noises, like the doors do in space programmes on the telly, or in any normal Gloucestershire property.

Every time you walk out of the main entrance without wearing a space suit pretend that you are suffocating from a lack of oxygen.

Equally, every time anyone else tries to walk out of the main entrance, rugby tackle them to the floor and scream “Don’t go out without a space suit, you’ll die out there!”

When in the canteen order weird futuristic sounding spacey type food, like “a star bun” or “an atmosphere sandwich”

When you get your food look at it dubiously and ask why is it not shrink wrapped in foil packaging.

Wear a goldfish bowl on your head and moon walk up and down the corridor.

Walk into other people’s offices and ask them if anyone knows where the Atomising Hydrogen Chamber is.

Chat up boys at work by asking them to show you more of this Earth thing called kissing.

Next time you order anything from a vending machine, pretend that it is an alien being left over from an ancient civil war and sent through time by a war lord to infiltrate your spaceship disguised as a packet of Hula Hoops and the minute it is released from the machine it attacks your neck, pinging you screaming to the floor.

We've been given a whole load of 'money-off' schemes via work this week, my favourate being getting a sculptra face lift. Birmingham branch is where I'd have to go to make myself look

young and beautiful again! Well lets face it, we can't all be as beautiful as I am!

There are a number of reasons why a temp is required in an office, and usually this is because of a shortage of permanent staff created by sick leave or holiday periods.   This temporarily member of staff isn’t thought to be just there to pick up the shortfall however, often regular office members think temps are there so that the permanent staff get to offload some responsibility that the sick or vacationing member of staff wouldn’t even be doing!  There’s also an office tradition that once the temp has left, anything that goes wrong for the 2-3 weeks immediately afterwards is blamed on something they did.  Next time your office hires a temp, think about the following before assigning them responsibility for something they didn’t do, or did do but not in the right way!

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1.       Not enough office supplies ordered

Unless the temp was given a previous list from which to create a new order, how on earth are they supposed to know how many paper clips and envelopes your office uses? Did you mention that you only order the recycled cups for the vending machine?  If you want the temp to do the supplies order, make sure that someone else provides the information – or alternatively, if it can’t wait until the person who usually does it comes back, or it couldn’t be done before they leave, assign that task to someone else in the office who has more idea about what needs to be ordered. 

2.       The filing isn’t done

Unless they are there to file, the temp probably won’t file.  Would you file stuff if you didn’t have to?  It’s not as if they will need to find any of these papers again.  They don’t care if later down the line its going to turn into one of the many office treasure hunts to find the contact that will save someones bacon.  Be honest, you wouldn’t care about filing papers either if you didn’t think that at some time in the future you might be required to put your hands on them again.  Temps have enough to do remembering who takes milk with their coffee, whose name comes first in the business when they answer the phone and where the bathroom is, they don’t need to be filing stuff that the regular member of staff can do when they return!

3.       Phone calls get transferred to the wrong people

 It’s easy done, especially in a large office environment.  If there are 3 Johns,  2 Susans, 4 Mr Smiths, and any number of people who could be the “person responsible for advertising”, it’s to be expected that a temp on reception is going to transfer calls to the wrong people from time to time.  Either make sure that the temp gets a more detailed telephone list than permanent staff have, or create a cheat-sheet so that they know where to transfer callers who don’t ask for a specific person.

4.        They aren’t the person who’s work they’re covering

 You’d think that was self-evident wouldn’t you?  It should be like having an entirely new member of staff who everyone in the office wants to be friends with and helps them out by giving on-the-ground information about how the office runs etc.  Unfortunately there’s a general misconception that a temporary employee is a clone of the person whose workplace they’re sitting at, and they know all of the information that member of staff knows without being told.  A temp is not clairvoyant. A temp is not a member of the BACD.  A temp is a stranger who needs their hand held almost as much as a new member of staff – almost being because they don’t need to know stuff like who’s in line for promotion or other office politics and gossip.  Treat a temp with the respect and care you’d treat a new permanent member of staff.  Remember there’s always a possibility that a position will come vacant, the temp will become permanent and they will hold a grudge against those of you who walked away leaving them with an unfamiliar paper jammed photocopier to fix!

5.       Not watering plants and washing used coffee cups

There can be very few office jobs where these tasks are part of the job description.  If the permanent member of staff that the temp is covering for usually does these things, don’t naturally expect that the temp will do them.  Use the opportunity of having to do these things yourself as a chance to be more appreciative of the member of staff who usually makes sure that such seemingly trivial things get done without making an issue about it. 

A temp may not be experienced in how your particular office equipment works, or understand the various office systems in place without being shown – but they are used to being at a new workplace and with a bit of induction training can usually adapt quickly to the new environment.  If they don’t, don’t blame the temp – they’re just doing the best they can with what they’ve got, and usually, it’s nowhere near what they need!