First, prepare your resume. A good resume is more than a list of your skills, education, and work history; it also “sells” you to an employer. Find current resume-writing books that provide effective examples and templates for any career you’re considering. Avoid flash; use white or cream paper in rag or linen and a plain, readable font to appear professional. Don’t be modest; list your employment skills and achievements with confidence. If you have little or no work experience, focus on your education and list part-time jobs, internships, volunteer work, special projects and applicable school and extracurricular activities, emphasizing the ways these experiences have prepared you for the business world. Target your resume and cover letters to each potential employer, and make sure your contact information is complete and accurate. Finally, never lie on resume! People who do aren’t hired or are fired when their deception is uncovered.

Second, decide what kind of position and salary you’re looking for, and find out what is realistic for someone with your education and experience. Second, if you are unemployed, make the job search your job. You have many great job-hunting sources at your disposal. The Sunday paper want-ads are still contain many good prospects. Let your friends and relative know you’re looking; you might be surprised at the contacts they can provide. The internet is a mother lode of job information. Try general websites: Careerbuilder.com, Monster.com, LinkedIn, Craigslist, and USA.gov are just a few. You can also search company websites for available positions, and apply and upload your resume online. Another way to find employment while gaining job experience is to work for a temporary agency. Many “temporary” jobs lead to permanent employment, plus you’ll make valuable contacts and learn about the company culture while you’re getting paid.

With your terrific resume and dedicated job hunting efforts, it won’t be long before you’ll be interviewing. Here are some tips to ensure a successful performance. Be on time. Allow plenty of time for transportation complications, such as a traffic back-up or lack of parking. Arriving early will also allow you to check your appearance.

Dress appropriately. Get a haircut, wear makeup, and dress cleanly and neatly for business, not a date.

Research the company. You’ll want to be able to ask intelligent questions and discuss how your skills and education will benefit your employer.

Be positive, confident, and friendly.

Show interest and enthusiasm for the position and the company.

After the interview, send a brief thank-you note, reiterating your interest in the position.

Finally, be patient. A successful job search takes time. If you follow these suggestions, however, you’ll find your degree in business administration will open doors to a life-enhancing career.

There are many nursing schools you can attend. Many community colleges have nursing programs available. There will be a waiting list in many cases because a lot of people know this is a good career to train for. But the sooner you place your name on the list, the sooner you will be able to start your training.

You can also find many private vocational schools that offer accredited nursing training. Make sure, if you decide to attend a private vocational school, that the school is accredited so that when you complete your training you will be able to sit for your state board licensing test.

Once you become a nurse or LVN. You can choose to work full time or part time basis. The next level of nursing is registered nurse. This level of nursing is reached by taking extra classes and going through more training.

You have to be working as a LVN in order to take these courses. Many larger hospitals only hire registered nurses. Or if they hire the LVN, they require their staff to complete a registered nurse program within a specified time frame. The registered nurse earns a higher income but also has more responsibilities.

The registered nurse can then study to be a nurse practitioner. This position requires a masters degree in nursing. It is a high paying job relative to other nursing positions.

There are other areas of nursing that are available. Many like working in a home health care setting where they perform patient care for people in their homes. As the population ages, there are many who need a nurse either on a part or full time basis to administer medication or to care for them generally.

There are also many opportunities in the area of physical therapy. Many people, who are recovering from injury or disease, need help learning how to walk again or how to move their bodies again. The nurse helps people with their exercises and other steps to recovery that they need to function before the injury or illness.

If you are looking for a good career, consider the field of nursing. But do not go into this career only because of the earning potential. It takes a person interested in caring for others to make a good nurse.

There are many going into the field because the job market is in bad shape. There are not many jobs that are actually in demand today. Health care is unique in this regard. But many are going into nursing with the wrong intent. They want to make good money and have a steady job. Before you go into this career, make sure you want to take care of people in need.

It is always a wise idea to download the aptitude questions which are available with thorough explanations. This is possibly one of the best tips that I can suggest you through which you would get placement in some good and reputed companies. If you download the already solved papers, you would be able to save lot of time and consequently you would be able to prepare yourself for the interview.

However, when you download the papers, make sure that you download the latest papers. This would give you an idea of the latest questions that were asked in the recent tests for aptitude.

Here are few tips for you. If you follow them you would definitely be successful.

• Download the latest aptitude questions.
• Some of them might be solved while some of them unsolved. Try to solve the unsolved portion. Give special emphasis on the numerical part and the English parts. These are the two basic levels where maximum emphasis is given for testing the skills.
• Try to practice on a regular basis so that your skill gets improved.
• Give special emphasis on the analysis of each of the sections. Listing out the essential areas would help you to give an idea of your particular weaknesses. Consequently, you would be able to lay emphasis on it.

If you follow these few essential tips, you would definitely become successful in clearing the aptitude questions and consequently get a good placement.

How to Prepare?

Now the question arises how you would start with your preparation. Being a part of the HCL family, I would suggest you to download the solved question papers. It recruits employees on a wide scale. At regular intervals they take attempts to recruit fresher at their various branches. If you sit for any of the exams conducted, you would find that the questions resemble very much like the latest issued papers for recruitment. Therefore if you are updated with the latest question papers it would definitely help you.

It is always a wise idea to download the solved question papers and not the unsolved ones because you would not get sufficient time to solve the unsolved papers. This is time when you would be busy preparing for the different interviews. Therefore it would be absolutely useless to waste time in solving the question papers.

When you finish downloading the papers of the HCL, you would have to carefully make an analysis of the each of the sections that are there in the question papers. There are different sections in the question paper and it would be wise if you make a list of each of the sections. Consequently, you would be able to point out the areas where you are particularly weak. This in turn would help you to brush up your skills and get good placement.

In the act, Homeless Guy demonstrated two classic entrepreneurial characteristics: charisma and the ability to get something for nothing. Both traits are essential to an entrepreneur’s success, but the second (something for nothing) cannot exist without the first.

“I’ll Gladly Pay You Tuesday, for a Hamburger Today” – J. Wellington Whimpy, free-loading friend of Popeye

The dictionary defines bootstrapping as “helping oneself without the aid of others.” But Jim Beach, professor of entrepreneurial studies at Georgia State University, teaches that for an entrepreneur, bootstrapping can also mean asking for handouts. Like Homeless Guy, Beach suggests it’s as simple as asking people to do something for free. And people are happy to comply. “You think that it’s impossible to have people not get paid,” Beach asks in his lecture. “I don’t think I ever paid an employee for the first two or three months.” He goes on to say “if you want to work for me, you show up. Earn your job.” An entrepreneur, Beach explains, can do these kinds of things.

Beach is not alone in this belief. Wild Women Entrepreneurs (a business run by an ex-opera singer) put this enticing post on Craigslist:

“Are you looking for a unique opportunity? Learn from experts and leaders of their industries. Wild Women Entrepreneurs is currently looking for creative, hard-working individuals to join the Wild WE team.”

The posting goes on to explain that for the first three months of (full-time!) work, new hires are paid in a currency exchanged only within the walls of entrepreneurial America. The salary is listed as “experiential.” But don’t worry, the salary is negotiable….after you’ve put in three months.

Why would someone (other than recent college grads or interns) offer their services for free? Blame it on charisma. Successful entrepreneurs are often Pied Pipers able to develop legions of loyal followers. The entrepreneurs can be fun to be around, and their dreams are infectious. The perfect employee is one who follows the dream believing there’s pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. And sometimes there is.

Professor Beach says that after one employee worked for six month without pay, he bought the employee a house. (Will forward Homeless Guy’s resume to Beach later today!) But should you expect this kind of recompense for your services? No. The fact is, 50 percent of small businesses fail in the first few years. If you’re on the unfortunate side of that statistics, and you put in your time for free, you just might find yourself on the street begging for change.

Memo to self: Sidewalk credit card exchange between strangers aside, in life there really are no free lunches. So don’t work for one.

1. Overvaluing first impressions and hiring those who are more talkers than performers, and not hiring top people who were temporarily nervous.

2. Overvaluing gut feelings (a.k.a., intuition). This results in hiring people who are good at some things – like communicating and planning – but not everything, like delivering high-quality results on time.

3. Focusing narrowly on technical skills, which results in hiring people who might be technically brilliant, but who can’t work with non-techies, and/or have no clue about meeting commitments, and/or are poorly organized, and/or don’t fit with the culture.

4. Assuming everybody should be excited about the job, even those top performers who are not looking or who have multiple opportunities. The best candidates then voluntarily opt out because the manager came across as unprofessional.

All of these false positives (hiring someone you shouldn’t) and false negatives (not hiring someone you should) can be eliminated by having the hiring manager use a structured career-oriented exploratory interview in combination with video before proceeding down a path towards mediocrity.

The exploratory interview is the more important aspect of this new process. If someone is not looking, the focus of the first meeting must change to an open discussion about the career potential of the position, rather than the hiring manager assessing the person’s ability to do the work. Most managers aren’t very good at this part.

Here are the steps involved in this exploratory interview process:

Opening. Clearly state that this is an exploratory interview to determine if the open job offers the candidate a career move. This is a critical statement, since it shifts the interview from investigatory to collaborative. Then describe the process you’ll use to conduct the conversation. The steps are described below, but basically it consists of a back and forth sharing of information.

1. Quick review of the candidate’s background and career focus. Ask the candidate what she’s looking for career-wise, how long she’s been looking, and why her current job is less satisfying. Also find out what other positions the person is considering. Then spend five minutes reviewing the candidate’s current job in some detail, focusing on span of control, impact made, and overall responsibility. You’ll gain a sense of fit from this.
2. Quick review of the job and career opportunity. Provide the candidate a high-level view of the job, why it’s important, and the impact it could have on the company. If obvious, highlight the possible areas of growth for the candidate based on the person’s resume and what was just discussed.
3. Conduct a short work history review. Assuming there’s mutual interest start reviewing the candidate’s background in some detail. Just get highlights at first, looking for evidence of the achiever pattern. Focus on possible gaps in the candidate’s background where there appears to be opportunities for growth (e.g., bigger team, more learning, bigger budget, more impact, faster growing company/industry).
4. If a reasonable fit, describe the next steps, being semi-positive, but introduce some areas of stretch. Shift the conversation a bit, describing what you like about the candidate and areas where the job could offer some stretch. Ask if the candidate finds this appealing in comparison to other opportunities the candidate is considering. If so, suggest you’d like to dig in a little more to see if the person has the potential to handle a bigger job at this time and if there is a good cultural fit. It’s important to make this shift since the conversation now moves from a dialogue among equals to more of a standard evaluation interview.
5. More detailed job fit assessment. Describe a major job challenge and ask the candidate to describe her most comparable accomplishment. This is my one-question interview with fact-finding. Spend 10 minutes on this to see if the candidate is a contender, meaning the person is an achiever and has accomplished something reasonable in scope. If so, describe some of the growth opportunities in the job – often these are the gaps in the person’s background that your opening fills in – and ask if she’s interested in proceeding.
6. Allow for candidate questions. Ask the candidate what criteria she’s going to use to compare positions in general and what things she would want to know about your open position in particular. Answer a few of the big ones, but don’t oversell. Find out the person’s timing regarding a move.
7. Recruiting and next steps. Instead of rushing to a close, tell the candidate that you’re impressed with her background, but that you have some other strong candidates to also consider. Ask her if she believes the job as described represents a career move, especially in comparison to others she’s considering, and if she would like to come back for a more detailed interview.

You can conduct this type of interview over the phone, but adding video adds an important dimension. Most important, when you actually meet the candidate the impact of the person’s first impression will largely be neutralized. From the candidate’s perspective, she’ll be coming in ready to sell herself as to why she’s a great fit for a possible career move.

Starting the conversation with a hot prospect about a possible career move rather than a standard interview represents a shift in approach that great managers use all of the time. All managers need to do the same thing if they want to hire more top performers. It starts by recognizing that the best people are only willing to enter into the hiring process when there is the possibility of a career move at the other end. The exploratory interview is a great way to prove it.

First of all, nobody should want to stay on unemployment. Unemployment is a wonderful benefit to get you through a rough patch, but it should never be used as a crutch to be relied upon as a long-term solution. Therefore, your decision should be thought over with great care and here are some of the things you will want to consider when making your choice: