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Standing out at a Career Fair can make a difference in your career search. Job Faires are starting to pick up, and a major job search company is running some nice ones, called Targeted Job Fairs. At a San Jose Area Job Faire in early 2010, 10 companies as showing up, and Dice has 82 career faires scheduled for 2010 across the United States.

How do you get to the real interviews at a Career Faire? The competition can be considerable, but you can help yourself surpass from the herd with early planning. At AA-Careers, we have a straight-forward 6-step process to get ready. Plan to go? Here’s how to prepare:

First, investigate the organizations that are going and pick your objectives. Use the World Wide Web to research the companies that are there before you go. Go to their sites and see if they have their jobs posted. Pick a sensible number to target, and get ready to spend about an hour researching each one. It’s hard to do more than 10 in a day, and 3-5 is a much more reasonable target. For each hiring organization, you want to know: recent news, key product lines, and exectuve names. Try to see if you know anyone at the target companies. You should end up with a page or two of research for each company/job.

Second, if there are job openings on the web, read them to see what the company is looking for. Create a mapping of your achievements and skills to the prerequisites of the job. Make the nomenclature match. If the hiring organization calls customers "clients", your resume should do the same thing. The achievements should be written in the style of the hiring organization.

Third, create a ‘mini sales pitch’ for each potential organization/position combination. Write down a 60 second ‘thumbnail’ that you can repeat out loud showing why you are a fantastic candidate for that position. You’ll use this in your resume and when you meet the team from the company at the job booth.

Fourth, modify your resume for each opportunity. The objective on your resume should exactly match the position you’re targeting. The executive summary should be a written form of your “mini sales pitch” for the job. Then choose the accomplishments and skills that most clearly match the job description. Especially at a Job Fair, the purpose of your resume is a sales tool for you – to get you on-site job interviews. It should be quick to see that you’re a match based on your resume.

Fifth, dress and prepare as if you’re doing on-site interviews. Dress well and be well groomed. Don’t overdress (this isn’t a date!) and don’t underdress (no jeans or t-shirts, no matter how much you paid for them). Avoid strong cologne or perfume.

Finally, practice your ‘mini-sales-pitch’. Collect your research and the resume for each opportunity - bring a couple of copies for each – and put each in a clearly labeled folder. Keep them in a light briefcase or folio.

Remember to smile, and good hunting!

A modern job search campaign is by nature fairly intricate. While the internet has offered a variety of new channels, it also creates increased competition for choice jobs and possible challenges for job hunters.

Job search needs to be thought of as a personal, extremely aimed marketing process where you are the product. Your resume is an ad. Your extended network of colleagues is your source for job information.

So where does the web fit in? At AA-Careers, we recently posted a job on a popular job site and got 600 plus responses in a week. For a single opening. That’s increased job hunting competition.

Had a great candidiate gotten ahold of us before we ran the ad, they could have secured the position prior to running in to all that competition. How? By finding someone who knows someone at our office who became aware of the job prior to posting. Everyone was aware of the job for at least 9 days before it was posted. Who in your network might know of a job that’s coming available soon?

Be sure to check your cover letter and resume carefully! When we did an analysis of the 650 resumes, we found a large number of errors. 63% of the applicants were easily removed with a speedy triage process. How? The same way any manager would. By rejecting resumes where the objective didn’t match our job description. By rejecting prospects whose cover letters gave us grounds not to hire them, like "I know I’m overqualified but I really need a job". By eliminating job hunters whose documents that didn’t open properly. And by passing over job hunters who didn’t trouble to spell check their cover letter and/or resume.

So the great news is that job sites give you a feel of what companies are hiring, and for what kinds of positions. But once those jobs are posted, the competition is intense. You can still try, if you have a well honed resume, designed to appeal directly and clearly to the recruiter. And if you have practiced interviewing – so you don’t stumble at a critical point.

Another downside to be aware of is how quickly you can be checked on on the web. As we Googled several job hunters, we ran into some MySpace comments that were in questionable taste. Nothing insane, but enough to swing our thoughts about who to employ.

AA-Careers provides a comprehensive set of services for Bay Area job seekers, providing our clients a personal career consultant, a managed job hunting campaign, modern tools like a personal website, video, highly targeted resume, and much more. Let us know if we can help you.

Be careful out there, and good hunting!

Creating and implementing wealth-oriented programs is the business that Premier Mentoring has been doing for years now. And they are having great success at it too. Helping young executives and businessman achieve their potential and be the best of what they can be is something that the company has adopted as its mission.

Through the years, Premier Mentoring has established proven marketing and mentoring implementation strategies that have generated powerful results in the areas of real estate, the stock market, and general wealth building coaching. Their unique focus on top-quality content delivery and complete coaching synthesis as a company has separated the company from all others in the industry. Students are made to do away with traditional theoretical teachings and instead are given real life applications of the strategies for them to be able to really appreciate and apply these in their workplace at the same time.

Combining a team of highly-trained and skilled individuals and business people as their mentors, Premier Mentoring Inc’s Web-based platform and advanced database system are able to provide the benefits of coaching and mentoring regardless of the executive’s location and position. Even big corporations like eBay and Pfizer believe in the advantages of mentoring for their businesses. Mentoring has indeed gone mainstream now and Premier Mentoring is leading the industry in the 21st century.

In essence affliliate marketing is a lot like a consignment store. You feature the various products on your site for this, each purchase or enquiry brings in cash. There isn’t as much time required, fewer overheads, it sells 24/7, and even better, it’s relatively simple to pick up. At the beginning, you must determine just which niche market you’d like to work in. A efficient way to do this is, identify solutions to issues a certain customer profile is looking for, and then find out how you can assist them. A great method of achieving this quickly is searching for specific narrow keywords; there are fewer searches for these as a rule, but they convert far more.

These crucial keywords can be obtained by using Micro Niche Finder or or a a similar program. Data collected by this program or similar programs or services results in related terminology in an extensive list which you can focus on in order to get a good listing in an internet search and bring in traffic.

Micro Niche Finder will also recount how many searches each keyword or phrase gets, just how many other sites are employing those keywords, even competitor information. Lastly, the info produced should help in loacting related domains, subject matter for your web site, and even draw attention to the best sales opportunities.

Next you need to put together a internet site; yet you still have some important things to do. Search engine optimization is an absolute must. This is where Seo Elite information become helpful. Your competitors’ internet sites are examined by the program which then provides suggestions on how to better search results. In SEO Elite the info provided by the software advises you where to get links, the best keywords, and even information on how to upload articles. In Brief, the results obtained are the same sort of advice you would get from a skilled SEO professional.

Once you know which niche you’d like to sell in, design your product advertisements, and your website is completed, all you need to do is get your internet site up in the search results. Your profits will roll in on regular basis and you will question why you didn’t consider this before!

Affiliate marketing is similar to an auction house. Your web site pushes assorted products and for this, every purchase brings in cash. There isn’t as much time involved, very low operating costs, it works 24 hours a day, and even better, it’s relatively easy to learn.

To begin, you need to decide what merchandise or market best suits you. A great way to do this is, you need to find out what solutions to a given problem a specific market segment is looking for, and then determine how you can help them. An easy method of doing this speedily is to search for groups of highly drilled down longtail keywords and phrases; more often than not customers look for these less often, yet they convert far more.

If you’d like to find these profitable keywords, it’s recommended that you use programs like Micro Niche Finder. Info generated from this software or other programs and computer software results in a list of associated terminology allowing you to get a headstart when it comes to ranking on an internet based search.

Additional information is supplied by the application, for example how many searches every word or phrase gets, the exact number of other sites using the particular word or phrase, and how strong the competition is. Lastly, the info created will help you find the right domain, material for your web site, and even find desirable goods to sell.

Constructing a web site is the next step; yet there are still fundamental tasks to complete. Search engine optimization is absolutely fundamental. This is where Seo Elite information and other similar programs comes in. This computer program automatically analyzes the internet sites of your rivals and helps you by stating exactly what you must do in order to achieve a good ranking in the search engine results.

With SEO Elite the information generated from the program advises you on links, which words to focus on, and even details on where and how to upload articles. Briefly, the data obtained are the same kind of information that an SEO professional would offer.

Once you know what market sector you’d like to focus on, set up your product promotion, and your internet site is ready to go, then all you need to do is significantly upgrade your search results. Your profits will roll in regularly and wonder why you always struggled to make money!

Naveen Jain, the founder of Intelius, has always been a man with ideas way before our time. He saw the need and benefits the Internet can provide for the public; the need for businessmen to avail of valuable information at their fingertips, and the need for a service where ordinary individuals can stay connected in a safe and secure manner. He also understood that any information from the Internet needs proper management for the safety of the users.

Intelius is all about anticipating what any businessman and individual needs to make daily decisions about their business or the people they deal with on a daily basis. With this vision, the company launched a pilot run for a cell phone directory services. The service ran cell phone numbers in people searches and reverse phone searches. It was the first time that any company did something like this.

Over the years, the cell phone has become man’s primary means of communication. With the cell phone directory services, Intelius offered the public the chance to find out who their mystery callers and wrong-number callers were. The service also helped people connect with friends and relatives that they have long lost contact with.

A few months after the pilot run, Intellius realized that the public was not yet ready for the advance technology used by the cell phone directory service. As always, Intellius listened to their customers, so the company decided to discontinue the cell phone directory services for the meantime.

However, Intelius continues to offer a Cell Phone Caller ID service. The company believes that the public has the right to protect themselves from any phone harassment, prank calls, and other similarly offensive and dangerous calls. With the Cell Phone Caller ID service, customers will feel safer and at peace every time their cell phone rings.

In June 2008, the business world’s version of the Academy Awards, the American Business Awards, nominated Intelius in the category of “Best New Product or Service.”

The product in contention was Intelius’ very own Reverse Cell Phone Directory Service. This service lets mobile phone users identify unrecognized callers, their addresses, network providers, and other intimate details. Essentially a caller ID service, this is indicated against cell phone pranksters, harassers, and telemarketers.

Although it did not take home the award, which was given in New York City’s Marriott Marquis Hotel, the product surely made an impression on consumers on the lookout for greater security and safety.

Nonetheless, Intelius is already a winner of an American Business Award. In 2006, more than three years since its founding, Intelius bagged the American Business Award for Best New Company. Various publications have since touted it one of Washington’s fastest-expanding private firms.

Intellius was created in the wake of InfoSpace, a highly successful dot-com company that flourished in the 1990s. Both are Naveen Jain companies.

The newer company sells background reports and other intelligence products to consumers and commercial establishments. Intellius procures courthouse documents, government files, telephone directory listings, real estate deeds, and other forms of public records to run background and criminal checks of people living in the US. At the request of seven million users, the company has also tracked down the addresses of countless individuals, the properties they have owned, and the addresses they have lived in for the past 30 years. It has also screened employees and tenants for a number of companies as well as monitored the identity and credit histories of individual consumers.

Bodybuilding isn’t the most inexpensive hobby you decide to start up. This hobby factors in many more things other than just working out and lifting weights, especially if you are planning to make it a competitive hobby.

This is partly because of all the expensive vitamins and Bodybuilding Supplements that you may purchase to help you get the results you are picturing.

Many of these vitamins and supplements can be found at discounted prices though. If you make sure to only purchase the ones you will really use, and if you take the time to shop around, it is possible to find many of these at lower prices.

Fat loss is a big problem area for most people entering the bodybuilding field. Many times this is due to poor nutrition habits, but other times this can be solved with something as simple as Bodybuilding Supplements specifically designed to help with fat loss.

These supplements can give you just the right amount of help to get you over the hardest part of burning the fat. When combined with the right amount of fitness and a proper diet, these supplements can create dramatic results that you never thought were possible.

For the best results possible, consult with professional who are experienced in using the best products on the market, instead of wasting time and money on products that may not work.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is one of those magnificent concepts
that swept the business world in the 1990’s with the promise of forever changing
the way businesses small and large interacted with their customer bases. In the
short term, however, it proved to be an unwieldy process that was better in
theory than in practice for a variety of reasons. First among these was that it
was simply so difficult and expensive to track and keep the high volume of
records needed accurately and constantly update them.

In the last several years, however, newer software systems and advanced
tracking features have vastly improved CRM capabilities and the real promise of
CRM is becoming a reality. As the price of newer, more customizable Internet
solutions have hit the marketplace; competition has driven the prices down so
that even relatively small businesses are reaping the benefits of some custom
CRM programs.

In the beginning…

The 1980’s saw the emergence of database marketing, which was simply a catch
phrase to define the practice of setting up customer service groups to speak
individually to all of a company’s customers.

In the case of larger, key clients it was a valuable tool for keeping the
lines of communication open and tailoring service to the clients needs. In the
case of smaller clients, however, it tended to provide repetitive, survey-like
information that cluttered databases and didn’t provide much insight. As
companies began tracking database information, they realized that the bare bones
were all that was needed in most cases: what they buy regularly, what they
spend, what they do.

Advances in the 1990’s

In the 1990’s companies began to improve on Customer Relationship Management
by making it more of a two-way street. Instead of simply gathering data for
their own use, they began giving back to their customers not only in terms of
the obvious goal of improved customer service, but in incentives, gifts and
other perks for customer loyalty.

This was the beginning of the now familiar frequent flyer programs, bonus
points on credit cards and a host of other resources that are based on CRM
tracking of customer activity and spending patterns. CRM was now being used as a
way to increase sales passively as well as through active improvement of
customer service.

True CRM comes of age

Real Customer Relationship Management as it’s thought of today really began
in earnest in the early years of this century. As software companies began
releasing newer, more advanced solutions that were customizable across
industries, it became feasible to really use the information in a dynamic way.

Instead of feeding information into a static database for future reference,
CRM became a way to continuously update understanding of customer needs and
behavior. Branching of information, sub-folders, and custom tailored features
enabled companies to break down information into smaller subsets so that they
could evaluate not only concrete statistics, but information on the motivation
and reactions of customers.

The Internet provided a huge boon to the development of these huge databases
by enabling offsite information storage. Where before companies had difficulty
supporting the enormous amounts of information, the Internet provided new
possibilities and CRM took off as providers began moving toward Internet
solutions.

With the increased fluidity of these programs came a less rigid relationship
between sales, customer service and marketing. CRM enabled the development of
new strategies for more cooperative work between these different divisions
through shared information and understanding, leading to increased customer
satisfaction from order to end product.

Today, CRM is still utilized most frequently by companies that rely heavily
on two distinct features: customer service or technology. The three sectors of
business that rely most heavily on CRM — and use it to great advantage — are
financial services, a variety of high tech corporations and the
telecommunications industry.

The financial services industry in particular tracks the level of client
satisfaction and what customers are looking for in terms of changes and
personalized features. They also track changes in investment habits and spending
patterns as the economy shifts. Software specific to the industry can give
financial service providers truly impressive feedback in these areas.

Who’s in the CRM game?

About 50% of the CRM market is currently divided between five major players
in the industry: PeopleSoft, Oracle, SAP, Siebel and relative newcomer
Telemation, based on Linux and developed by an old standard, Database Solutions,
Inc.

The other half of the market falls to a variety of other players, although
Microsoft’s new emergence in the CRM market may cause a shift soon. Whether
Microsoft can capture a share of the market remains to be seen. However, their
brand-name familiarity may give them an edge with small businesses considering a
first-time CRM package.

PeopleSoft was founded in the mid-1980’s by Ken Morris and Dave
Duffield as a client-server based human resources application. In 1998,
PeopleSoft had evolved into a purely Internet based system, PeopleSoft 8.
There’s no client software to maintain and it supports over 150 applications.
PeopleSoft 8 is the brainchild of over 2,000 dedicated developers and $500
million in research and development.

PeopleSoft branched out from their original human resources platform in the
1990’s and now supports everything from customer service to supply chain
management. Its user-friendly system required minimal training is relatively
inexpensive to deploy. .

One of PeopleSoft’s major contributions to CRM was their detailed analytic
program that identifies and ranks the importance of customers based on numerous
criteria, including amount of purchase, cost of supplying them, and frequency of
service.

Oracle built a solid base of high-end customers in the late 1980’s,
then burst into national attention around 1990 when, under Tom Siebel, the
company aggressively marketed a small-to-medium business CRM solution.
Unfortunately they couldn’t follow up themselves on the incredible sales they
garnered and ran into a few years of real problems.

Oracle landed on its feet after a restructuring and their own refocusing on
customer needs and by the mid-1990’s the company was once again a leader in CRM
technologies. They continue to be one of the leaders in the enterprise
marketplace with the Oracle Customer Data Management System.

Telemation’s CRM solution is flexible and user-friendly, with a
toolkit that makes changing features and settings relatively easy. The system
also provides a quick learning environment that newcomers will appreciate. Its
uniqueness lies in that, although compatible with Windows, it was developed as a
Linux program. Will Linux be the wave of the future? We don’t know, but if it
is, Telemation’s ahead of the game.

The last few years…

In 2002, Oracle released their Global CRM in 90 Days package that promised
quick implementation of CRM throughout company offices. Offered with the package
was a set fee service for set-up and training for core business needs. .

Also in 2002 (a stellar year for CRM), SAP America’s mySAP began using a
“middleware” hub that was capable of connecting SAP systems to externals and
front and back office systems for a unified operation that links partners,
employees, process and technologies in a closed-loop function.

Siebel
consistently based its business primarily on enterprise size businesses willing
to invest millions in CRM systems, which worked for them to the tune of $2.1
billion in 2001. However, in 2002 and 2003 revenues slipped as several smaller
CRM firms joined the fray as ASP’s (Application Service Providers). These
companies, including UpShot, NetSuite and SalesNet, offered businesses CRM-style
tracking and data management without the high cost of traditional CRM start-up.

In October of 2003, Siebel launched CRM OnDemand in collaboration with IBM.
Their entry into the hosted, monthly CRM solution niche hit the marketplace with
gale force. To some of the monthly ASP’s it was a call to arms, to others it was
a sign of Siebel’s increasing confusion over brand identity and increasing loss
of market share. In a stroke of genius, Siebel acquired UpShot a few months
later to get them started and smooth their transition into the ASP market. It
was a successful move.

With Microsoft now in the game, it’s too soon to tell
what the results will be, but it seems likely that they may get some share of
small businesses that tend to buy based on familiarity and usability. ASP’s will
continue to grow in popularity as well, especially with mid-sized businesses, so
companies like NetSuite, SalesNet and Siebel’s OnDemand will thrive. CRM on the
web has come of age!

This article on the “The History of CRM” reprinted with
permission.
Copyright © 2004-2005 Evaluseek Publishing.

About the Author
Lucy P. Roberts is a successful freelance writer providing practical information and advice for businesses about everything related to CRM software solutions and live chat software. Her numerous articles include tips for saving both time and money; product reviews and reports; and other valuable insights for persons searching the Internet for information about how CRM software works and related topics.

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