A behavioral job interview is a popular interview tactic for sales jobs.  It focuses on finding out how the candidate handled (behaved in) specific job-realted situations.  In sales, customer interaction is key—so how you handle people in a wide variety of situations, under pressure, in different circumstances, becomes a critical factor to hiring managers.  To [...]

Do you have a very important interview?  Make sure you have a brag book.  Brag books can be an absolutely critical way to tip the scales in your favor in an interview.  Not only do they highlight all your wonderful qualities, they allow you to demonstrate those intangible skills that make a great impression.  In this economy, [...]

How do you get the attention of a recruiter? Follow up phone calls can only get you so far.  What you need are the right keywords on your resume. The right keywords on your resume will flag you in a search.  So, if you are looking for a management position in a diagnostics sales force (and [...]

I’ve said that if you are interested in a job as a medical sales rep (in pharmaceutical sales, medical device sales, laboratory and clinical diagnostics sales, or pathology sales) you should do certain things:  study sales, have some sales experience, and especially do a ride-along with someone who works in the specific field you’re interested in.  [...]

Good sales skills transfer easily from one industry to another, so why should you consider healthcare sales?  Besides the fact that this area is continually evolving and changing with leaps in medical technology that will keep your job interesting and rewarding, healthcare sales are recession-proof.  A bad economy doesn’t affect the healthcare industry with nearly [...]

It’s likely you’re going to find yourself in a behavioral job interview sometime in your job search.  Do you know how to handle it?  Behavioral interviews focus on past job behavior and performance (what did you do in a given situation) with the idea that this information will predict your future behavior and performance.  Behavioral interviews [...]

Sometimes candidates with degrees in the sciences find that they have a lot more information that the employer might want to know about them that just won’t fit in the traditional resume format.  To combat that issue and give yourself an interview edge, consider building a “Technology Sheet” – this is a one-page, column-formated accounting [...]

    In the grocery store of life, you have to figure out why someone would pick you up off the shelf,” says Andrea Nierenberg, president of the Nierenberg Group, a business communication-consulting firm in New York. “Are you new and improved? Are you repackaged? What are you doing to get that competitive edge? What [...]

Internships can be tremendously valuable to college students looking for that resume experience, but I recently came across an article about how some college students are paying for the privilege. Bad idea. There are better ways to spend your money…like custom consulting from a recruiter in the industry you’re heading for. You can learn what [...]

Every job seeker looking for a dream sales job wants a “secret weapon”—the edge that will make potential employers eager to hire him or her, and willing to bestow high salaries, benefits, and bonuses.  In many cases, that weapon is the 30/60/90-day sales plan:  it’s a written plan that explains to the hiring manager how [...]