Office Politics: When to stand your ground and when to be diplomatic

Rather than posting another how-to article, I'd rather hear from you the reader about your questions regarding working in a multinational and the troubles or challenges you have encountered in your time there. This post our topic will be: Office Politics. Knowing how to navigate relationships, be strong, but not too strong when you encounter difficult individuals, or even knowing how to tolerate those little things that drive you nuts not only can help you advance in your career, but even provide opportunities in other organizations or avoid the ax when the time comes for your company to cut staff. What questions do you have or encounters you wish you knew how to handle before they got too crazy?

Electronic Resumes: Who's really reading them?

For years I thought that when I attached a resume to job posting site, or online job listing it was read by someone. Maybe not printed and physically held, but at least read, and taking the non-response or passing over of my resumè sometimes was a hit to my ego. "What was wrong with I wrote?", I would ask. Sometimes, it's not you, it's the candidate selection software. Like a bad date, many times companies use software that only looks specifically for a certain number of things it likes, and if it doesn't detect these keywords out goes your application from the pool. It's nothing personal, but there is something you can do as a great candidate to get your foot in the door and actually get your resumè read.

The key is research the company, their target market, and most importantly what other candidates for that role would posses in regards to skills, experience, languages you can program in or speak. Now this may sound dishonest, but if you are honest with the keywords you select for this technique, there won't be any ethical issue: type all these words, even if you have already used them in writing your resumè, at the bottom of your resume and make them the smallest possible font you can. This normally would look like a bunch of garble, and would make no sense to you or me except as a list of keywords. However, for the software the employer uses, this will look like a gold mine of information about what you can do. Your call back rate for first interviews will greatly increase, and then you will have your chance to really sell yourself.

Just make sure to remove that line of keywords from your resume before you print it, because it will still be able to be read if your interviewer looks closely enough. Happy job hunting!