Monthly Archives: December 2017

Goals To Set For 2015: Where To Take Your Engineering Career

With the new year fast approaching, now is a great time to sit down and think about where you want to take your engineering career in 2015, especially if you’ve been feeling stalled in your current position. Goals give you something to strive for throughout the year, and help ensure you’re constantly pushing yourself to achieve more.

Every engineer will have his or her own unique recipe for success. Whether you are a new engineer or a seasoned professional, it’s important to set goals that will keep you moving forward, and goals that are realistic and attainable. While your overarching goal may be to land a new job, it can help to set smaller goals to create the forward motion that will set you up for success. Goals to consider to help you advance your engineering career this year include:

  • Getting out and meeting people in your industry is critical for professional success. Whether or not networking results in a job offer, expanding your professional network is always a good idea. Attending professional networking events, industry association events, conventions, and other functions will afford you the opportunity to meet new people and learn new things in 2015.
  • Document your accomplishments. The most effective resumes quantify achievements. It can be difficult to pull all of your accomplishments out of your memory when you decide it’s time to revamp your resume. If you keep a running list of those achievements as they happen, and update your resume accordingly, you can be sure none will get left out. This year, make it a point to track and document your accomplishments on the job.
  • Know your value. Engineers should always be aware of their value in the marketplace. Research local engineering salaries online so that you know where you fall in terms of your experience and education. You don’t want to find out the day after you accept a job offer that you’re actually getting paid $20,000 less than what you’re worth.
  • Learn something new. The one constant in the world is change. What can you do this year to keep your skills sharp and learn something new? Whether you take a class or attend an industry conference, do something to enhance your skills this year.
  • Focus on work-life balance. Engineers work hard, and getting ahead in the field can mean clocking long hours, often to the detriment of personal time and family time. What can you do this year to give yourself more time for the people and hobbies you love?
  • Partner with a recruiter. Searching for new opportunities can be difficult for busy engineers. Partnering with a recruiter can help you connect with exciting jobs that aren’t necessarily posted on public job boards. A recruiter can also help you set goals, polish your resume, and perfect your interviewing technique so that when the right opportunity comes along, you are prepared to rise to the challenge.

If you are an engineer in northern Illinois looking to grow your career in 2015, the engineering recruiting consultants at The Prevalent Group would love to meet you. We work with market leaders in a variety of industries that are always on the lookout for strong engineering talent.  Our recruiters can connect you with  engineering jobs in northern Illinois that align with your skills and qualifications, and we can work with you to help you achieve your career goals in 2015.

4 Skills To Highlight For Medical Directors

Medical Directors have to balance a unique set of priorities that range from the implementation of policies and procedures, to managing expectations of medical staff, to overseeing patient care, and more. This role requires advanced clinical knowledge as well as management and administrative skills, and knowing which skills to highlight on a resume can be difficult.

If you are reworking your resume, there are some critical areas to focus on that will help paint a picture of yourself as a versatile, knowledgeable, and skilled medical director. They include:

  1. Demonstrated Focus on Patient Care. Patient care is the most important aspect of a Medical Director’s job. Be sure to showcase your problem-solving abilities as well as your skill in yielding positive patient outcomes. Show how you have been able to cultivate a patient-focused atmosphere regardless of regulatory, budgetary, and administrative challenges.
  2. Communications Skills. Medical Directors must be precise and descriptive when communicating expectations and objectives, and they must be able to create and cultivate open lines of communication with clinical and administrative staff. They must be diplomatic in all circumstances, especially in sensitive situations. Be sure to showcase your communications skills in your resume.
  3. Successful Medical Directors are accessible to their administrators and clinical staff. This is no easy feat, as Medical Directors are often pulled in a variety of directions at once. Those who are able to cultivate meaningful relationships with administrators, staff, and patients often achieve faster results than those who do not make themselves readily accessible. Medical Directors must also be responsive. Responding quickly to communications will ensure that clinical team can focus on their most important tasks.  What systems or processes have you put into place to ensure that you are accessible and responsive to colleagues?
  4. Organization and Attention to Detail. Medical Directors must be exceptional organizers. Because their workload is heavy and their tasks are so varied, disorganization can spell imminent disaster. Scheduling, paperwork, email, and project schedules must be handled and managed efficiently and in a way that is easy for the entire medical team to understand. Have you developed any strong organizational processes that help keep you and your clinical staff focused on the task at hand?

Focusing on these four areas when crafting a resume shows that as a Medical Director, you are trustworthy, caring, dependable, and a top-notch manager. If you are a Medical Director looking for new career opportunities, contact the executive recruiters at The Prevalent Group today. We can help you polish your resume so that it shines a spotlight on your best qualities, and we can help connect you with exciting career opportunities that will help you meet your long-term goals.

How to Answer Behavioral Interview Questions

Now more than ever before, hiring managers are integrating behavioral questions into their interviews. These questions are designed to help the interviewer determine whether or not an applicant possesses the qualities, skills, and traits to be successful on the job.  It is essential to prepare for these questions so that you aren’t caught off guard during an interview.

What Are Behavioral Interview Questions?

Behavioral interview questions are designed to give the interviewer a look at how you’ve handled yourself in the past. Traditional interviews rely on hypothetical questions like, “How would you handle it if your boss asks you X?” “What would you do if a customer presented you with Y problem?” It’s relatively easy to craft answers to these questions, whether or not you’d actually handle yourself in the manner you describe. Therefore, hypothetical questions actually provide very little insight for employers.

Behavioral questions, on the other hand, ask you for examples of how you handled specific situations in the past. They often begin with phrases like, “Tell me about a time when X.” They may include questions such as:

  • Tell me about a time when you had to take initiative to solve a difficult problem.
  • Give me an example of a time when you had to complete a project when you did not have all of the information you needed in order to get started.
  • Tell me about a time when you had to deal with a particularly difficult customer.
  • Give me an example of a challenge you faced in your current job and how you solved it.
  • Tell me about a time when you had to solve a problem by tackling tasks outside of your job description.

Assessing how you’ve handled specific situations in the past can help the interviewer determine how you will handle those types of situations in the future.

How to Answer Behavioral Interview Questions

Preparation is the key to successfully answering behavioral interview questions. While there is no way to determine just which questions you will be asked, there are some steps you can take to determine the types of questions that might be likely:

  1. Read through the job description. What are the responsibilities of the role? What challenges might that person face?
  2. For each of those responsibilities and challenges, generate examples from your career that illustrate how you would excel on the job.
  3. For each example, write an outline of an answer that addresses the problem, your response, and the outcome.
  4. Practice your answers with a friend, family member, or with a professional recruiter. Don’t memorize your answers. Simply practice telling your stories out loud in a concise manner.

As a job seeker, it’s important not to fear behavioral interview questions. Instead, look at them as an opportunity to showcase examples of how you rise to challenges and overcome them. If you are a professional in sales, marketing, engineering, IT or operations looking for new opportunities, contact The Prevalent Group today. Our team of executive recruiters can help match you with a position that aligns with your long-term career goals, and we can work with you to help perfect your interviewing skills to ensure that you enter each interview with poise and confidence.

Tell Me About Yourself: How to Develop an Elevator Pitch

Many interviews open with the same question, “Tell me about yourself.”  Many interviewees see this as an invitation to tell their personal life story, but this is not what hiring managers want to hear. “Tell me about yourself,” is an invitation to provide an overview of your career background, your achievements, and where you see yourself in the future. The answer to this question is often a great place to utilize your elevator pitch.

What is an Elevator Pitch?

Elevator pitches are named for a challenge: How would you express your value as an employee if you found yourself on an elevator with your dream employer and you had to describe yourself to that person in the time it took you to reach your floor?

Your elevator pitch should be concise, illustrating who you are and how you can help the listener. It is a sales pitch about yourself that you deliver verbally, which means it takes focus and practice in order to deliver it with confidence. To be effective, an elevator pitch should be compelling and memorable, and it should clearly illustrate your value to the employer.

How to Create Your Elevator Pitch

Developing an effective elevator pitch takes some time. Though it is short, it carries a lot of weight, and determines the tone of the rest of the interview. Here are some tips to help you craft a compelling elevator pitch:

  1. Set aside time to sit down and create a career inventory.

    Write down the things you would want potential employers to know about your skills, achievements, and relevant experience.

  2. Edit, edit, edit.

    Once you’ve got a nice, long list written down, it’s time to edit. Delete anything that is not absolutely critical to your elevator pitch. You want to be left with just a few bullet points. Remember, the elevator pitch is not your life or career story, it is more of a highlight reel of your “top hits” that should leave the interviewer wanting to learn more about you.

  3. Format the pitch.

    Now that you’ve got a list to work with, you can begin to craft your pitch. A solid elevator pitch will answer the questions: Who are you? What do you do well? What are you looking for from your career?

  4. Tailor your pitch to your audience.

    Remember that you are giving a sales pitch, and the listener only wants to know what’s in it for them. Therefore, the message should focus on your benefits as an employee. Instead of saying, “I am an HR professional with 12 years of experience in the finance industry,” it would be much more powerful to say, “I am an HR professional with a track record in successfully recruiting top-level management.”

  5. Practice, practice, practice.

    After you’ve got a solid draft in place, practice your pitch out loud with friends, family, or your professional recruiter. They can help you make any edits that might be necessary, and the more you practice delivering your pitch, the more confident you will be in your delivery.

Professional recruiters can be an invaluable resource when it comes to perfecting your elevator pitch and your entire interviewing technique. If you are a professional in engineering, information technology, operations, sales, or marketing, and you are looking for new and exciting career opportunities, contact The Prevalent Group today. We are a nationally recognized management and executive placement and recruitment agency that works with innovative organizations in northern Illinois and beyond. We can help you locate job opportunities that align with your long-term personal and professional goals.