The Feel-Good Guide for Getting a Job In Bad Times and Good

How to Interview Like A Pro

Subtitle: Forty-Three Rules for Getting Your Next Job [Kindle Edition]
Mary Greenwood. JD. LLM (Author)
Published by iUniverse
Kindle Edition
ASIN: B004JHZ26C

Who would have guessed.

I read this book because I thought I might be able to recommend it to my retail clients, but it turns out, getting a job is very like selling a book! So it’s suitable in many ways for my author-clients, too.

Getting a job isn’t much different than it was in the back in the days when I interviewed at PR firms and magazines like Good Housekeeping. Though we have many tools at our disposal that weren’t available back then, the basics are similar. And industry to industry, we can learn so much from the general (yet detailed!) information Mary Greenwood gives us in How To Interview Like a Pro. Basic business skills like Mary imparts here, are useful for at some level for about anyone who must earn a living.

Mary’s number two rule is that a job hunter must “prepare a good elevator speech.”  It’s a subject (along with pitches in general) that I cover in depth in my book, the new edition of The Frugal Book Promoter (www.budurl.com/FrugalBkPromo) .

She also says “Make a list of everyone you know. Well, if authors had followed my advice on building contact lists in that same book, they’d already have a list of everyone they know. A job hunter would only need to review that list to find influential people with contacts of their own who will lead them to other jobs, recommend them to others, and generally hold their hands through the process.

Going hand in hand with this process is Mary’s rule “Telling everyone you know you are looking for a job.”  Mmm. Chapters in The Frugal Book Promoter on networking, too! Greenwood, of course, expands this rule to “Tell everyone you would like to know you are looking for a job.” Here she covers making new contacts using social networking.  Yep, industries are all pretty much the same. We can surely learn from one another!

Mary’s rules are born of experience, both general and legal. Her book moves us along from rule to rule—lickety split—right down to the never-nevers like “Never say you don’t have any more questions.” Interviews go both ways. If they don’t, the interviewer may form some opinions you’d just as well he or she didn’t.

One of the reason things move so quickly are Greenwood’s anecdotes. You’ll come away from this book feeling as if you aren’t alone in your search and knowing how to make sure you aren’t. You’ll know the basics and the details, like how to answer about any question an interviewer is likely to ask.

One of the best things about this book is Greenwood’s Introductory Rule: “Getting a job is like parking. You have to be at the right place at the right time.” If you keep that in mind—along with her little protractor story (yes, this is a tease—I think you should read this book!), you’ll hang in there and know one day you’ll be exactly in that place at that time.

Now, here’s the thing. I believe that almost anyone in the business world could benefit from this book. From interviewee to interviewer. From author to retailer to IT guy or gal. Sometimes the books we get the most from are the ones we don’t think we need in the moment.  Have it ready. It’s way more than a get-a-job book.

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The New Book Review is blogged by Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of the multi award-winning HowToDoItFrugally series of books for writers. It is a free service offered to those who want to encourage the reading of books they love. That includes authors who want to share their favorite reviews, reviewers who'd like to see their reviews get more exposure, and readers who want to shout out praise of books they've read. Please see submission guidelines on the left of this page. Reviews and essays are indexed by genre, reviewer names, and review sites. Writers will find the search engine handy for gleaning the names of small publishers. Find other writer-related blogs at Sharing with Writers and The Frugal, Smart and Tuned-In Editor. As a courtesy to the author, please tweet and retweet this post using this little green retweet widget :