Anyone can claim to be great at what they do. Your task as a job seeker? Prove it. Don't tell a potential employer you are a skilled sales manager; show them. Tell a story, specifically an accomplishment story. Tell them you identified a problem in the sales department, implemented a strategy to fix it, and increased sales by a certain percentage as a result.

While most job seekers will find themselves in an interview at some point before they secure a job, not all job seekers experience the informational interview. What is an informational interview, and how does it differ from a job interview? 

 Margery Marshall appeared on KSDK news to discuss job search expectations. Watch the full interview and read the associated story at http://www.ksdk.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=171789.

Struggling economies worldwide continue to be a leading story for many news outlets. HR and global mobility managers are facing increasing reluctance to relocate, rising home inventories, and the need to bring expatriates home from assignment early. Employees in transition are dealing with even more stress than felt in prior years because of plummeting home prices, concerns over future employment, and the increased cost of food and other basic necessities. In short, it's a time of uncertainty and stress for employers and employees alike.

As economic concerns continue and companies take a closer look at costs, many are bringing their expatriates home sooner than planned. Read The New York Times article on how families and companies are addressing this challenge.

Margery Marshall appeared on KSDK's morning news show to offer insights on differentiating yourself in the job search to stand out from the crowd of applicants. Watch the full interview here.

Margery Marshall, president of Vandover, is quoted in the Workforce Management magazine article discussing expatriate early return trends and global talent management issues. Read the full article here.

Margery Marshall appeared on KSDK to discuss local companies with job openings and the importance of your Internet identity in the job search, with a specific focus on Facebook this week.

News about the economy is plastered everywhere – newscasts, newspapers, earnings reports, and business publications. Business leaders around the globe are facing uncertainty as we begin 2009. Times are tough, as we all know. Nearly everyone is taking a closer look at expenses from top to bottom and making difficult decisions about what can be cut. If those cuts include a staff reduction, it's critical to care for your departing and surviving employees during the process. 

We’ve talked a lot about online social networking tools and how they can help you in your job search, but as we’ve hinted, such tools can also be great in your personal life. In particular, if you’re planning a move – whether for yourself, you and your partner, or a family with children – you may want to include blogs, forums, and more formal social networking tools on both ends of the move. These websites offer great opportunities for you to maintain connections with friends and family in your old hometown, while providing ways to build new connections after your relocation.

While LinkedIn and similar sites may be great ways to build your network, there is yet another aspect to social networking to keep in mind: the more informal ways of networking through blogs and online forums.

We’ve posted several blog entries about social networking tools and online resources that can help you with your job search or your professional development. But all this talk about having an online presence with LinkedIn, Twitter, or a blog leads to questions about you portray yourself online.

You may have heard about many social networking sites, but beyond the hype, what are they really about, and how can they be useful to you when it comes to a job search?

What is social networking? As a job seeker, why should I know about it – and what do I need to know about it? As someone relocating, why does it matter to me?

A recent career transition panel offered insights to IT professionals on conducting a job search in today's economy. The advice given by HR executives, a professional recruiter, an IT contracting company VP, and Vandover's own Melissa VanVickle, is sound advice for any job seeker.

As major corporations continue to announce expected layoffs on a daily basis, how can employees improve their chances for survival and prepare for the possibilities?

In part three of our series on generations in the workplace, we focus on the alphabet generations - X and Y - and how employers can recruit, retain, and engage the youngest members of their workforce. Related posts: The 21st Century Multigenerational Workforce (part one) and The Multigenerational 21st Century Workplace: Understanding the "Older" Generations (part two).

For most people, commuting means traveling from home to work and back home every day. For a growing number of workers, the commute no longer happens daily, but rather every few weeks or perhaps even months. These are the people in commuter marriages – meaning one spouse works in a different location than the other spouse/family lives. In relocation, one spouse may move to the new location to start work while the family stays behind to finish the school year or sell the house. For some families, the commuter marriage period is a defined period and for others, a period of time that seems to have no end. In still other cases, the family may opt to send the majority of their time in different places for the duration of a short- or long-term relocation assignment.

For many people, the holiday season is busy and stressful. Holiday celebrations often involve cooking, cleaning, invitations, prep time, or gift purchases – small things that all add up to make many people feel like they have too much to do and too little time.

Margery Marshall appears on KSDK news to discuss who is hiring in St. Louis and what steps to take before you apply. Watch the interview here: http://www.ksdk.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=163112&catid=3

Writing, editing, or updating your own résumé can be one of the biggest headaches for many job seekers. While we can’t tell you exactly what the hiring manager for your dream job wants to see in your résumé, we can offer a few tips that may make your work a little easier…

Local TV station KSDK interviews Margery Marshall on job hunting and résumé writing tips. Watch the video here.

 Local TV station KSDK interviews Margery Marshall on women returning to work. Watch the video here.

Key success factors include identifying objective/goal, networking, recognizing nontraditional skills developed during time away from work, and not doubting past decisions to exit the workforce for personal reasons.

Quick: you have an interview tomorrow – how do you prepare? In addition to reviewing your résumé and accomplishments stories, as well as your research about the company, don’t forget to write a few questions that you can pose to the interviewer.

Cullen Bunn, Vandover's vice president of marketing and communications, appears in a web-exclusive article on KSDK.com. Read the article "Experts say you can get a new job and maybe even a better one" here.

Tough economic times are forcing some individuals to pursue a job search after an extended hiatus.  Vandover President, Margery Marshall, offered viewers of KMOV’s Great Day St. Louis some suggestions and strategies for embarking on a new job search and returning to the workforce. View the interview here.

Vandover will participate in a career panel hosted by local NBC affiliate KSDK on Monday, November 10 from 5:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. Viewers can call 314.969.8655 or visit www.ksdk.com for a live web chat to ask career and job transition questions. The panel is free and open to everyone.

Veterans and Baby Boomers, who sometimes get lumped into one category when people talk about the multigenerational workplace, represent employees who were born before 1964. Although there are quibbles over exact dates, Veterans (or Traditionalists) include workers born by the end of World War II, while Baby Boomers are – you guessed it – the product of the famous postwar baby boom that spurred population growth worldwide.

But although these two groups make up the older end of the current workplace spectrum, this doesn’t mean they are identical. Just as it can be easy to see the differences between these two generations and the two younger generations in today’s workplace, at one time during the 1960s and 1970s, these two groups were the younger generations themselves – and they have their differences, too.

Each year, more than 600,000 new businesses are started in the US, according to the Small Business Administration.  Many of these businesses are the result of a transition in the career of the entrepreneur, whether that is a spouse’s relocation, a downsizing, or an innate desire to change paths.  Vandover, a leading provider of career management and relocation assistance, coaches entrepreneurs and recently announced that senior consultant Jim Wojtak will present on this issue at the 2008 International Career Development Conference in Los Angeles in November.

According to a recent survey by Workforce.com, overseas assignments of less than one year nearly tripled from 10% to 27% during the past seven years.  With that increase comes a greater need for innovative products and services to support the employee – and the family – facing a global or domestic short term assignment, relocation, or split family situation.  Vandover, a premier provider of global relocation and transition assistance, recently announced strategic planning initiatives to support this growing need, and has hired Karen Sztencel to lead the efforts.

Vandover, a leading provider of career management and relocation transition assistance, announced today the promotion of Linda Russell to Manager of Marketing and Communication. In this role, Russell will continue to be a central member of Vandover’s marketing team with a central focus on overseeing product development, leading internal communications efforts, and spearheading corporate website enhancements.

The American workplace at the end of the twenty-first century's first decade is brimming with a diverse group of workers. In particular, American employees are diverse partially because they represent a total of four generations between them. If you think about it for a moment, that's pretty amazing in and of itself, to have such a wide span of experience represented in the workplace.

Finding job listings online might just be the easy part: whether you’re checking the online version of your local newspaper, looking through Craigslist, or visiting any of the popular job boards you’ve seen mentioned on television or in magazines, you’re likely to find a wide array of job possibilities. (Of course, whether they’re relevant to you may be another matter.)

In 2007, Ernst & Young’s Mergers and Acquisitions Resources Index showed that there has been a steady increase in corporate acquisitions since 2004. In 2004, there were 30,000 acquisitions worldwide – or about one transaction every 18 minutes (Cartwright, S., & Shoenberg, R., “Thirty Years of Mergers and Acquisitions Research: Recent Advances and Future Opportunities,” British Journal of Management, 17, 1, 1-5, 2006.)

If your company is going through a merger or acquisition, and particularly if your firm is the one being acquired, you may be concerned about how this business change will affect your job.

At the midpoint of the twentieth century, most women’s careers revolved around raising their children and caring for their homes. While that’s still an option for many women, things have changed a bit in the last few decades: today, at least 63% of American women work in paid employment outside the home, and 54% of women hold full-time jobs.

Not too long ago, flexible work arrangements seemed to be the purview of moms juggling family and work needs, or reentering the workplace after time spent raising children. Part-time options, job sharing, telecommuting – these have long been some of the most popular flexible work arrangements for employees.

In our global résumé series, we offered a brief look at current standards in Europe, Asia, and Australia, with consideration to how those compare with American résumés. As we explored CV/résumé standards around the world, beyond the countries discussed previously, one thing that struck us was that résumé expectations around the world are becoming a bit more uniform.

Yes, in Australia, it’s called a “résumé,” rather than CV. And no, there’s nothing like the Japanese rirekisho we discussed recently: when it comes to job searching in Oz, you’ll probably find that transitioning your résumé to an acceptable Australian format won’t take much at all! Depending on your work experience, it may need to be a bit longer than your American-style document, but the general principles are the same as an U.S. résumé. And, as in many other countries, the aim of an Australian résumé should be to get you an interview.

The ubiquitous Cleaver family (of Leave it to Beaver fame) is becoming more and more of a minority in 21st-century America. And move over, Donna Reed: the American family is changing faster than ever. Americans now embrace a wider variety of family arrangements than ever before. Heterosexual marriage is no longer the only acceptable lifestyle choice, although the 2000 Census revealed that nearly 52% of Americans still pursue this option. Your own company likely reflects the changing face of the American family.

Our previous entries in this series have discussed the differences between a résumé and a CV, and have highlighted how these documents are used in U.S. and in a couple of European countries. On the other side of the world, however, Japanese employers expect a standardized type of job application document that is a bit unlike a western-style CV or résumé.

The July 2008 edition of St. Louis CEO magazine includes an article written by Vandover CEO Mary Quigg. In “Continental Adjustment,” Quigg highlights the importance of employee satisfaction to making international work assignments successful.

Vandover President Margery Marshall reflects on her first six months as company president and discusses key objectives for the remainder of the year and beyond. Click here for the complete PDF report.

One of the biggest challenges to job hunting in another country can be language. For example, if you’re target country is Spain, consider how adept your Spanish language skills are. For that matter, keep in mind that businesses in a country may conduct affairs in not just one, but two or more languages. In Spain, some regions of the country use Catalan – although you could likely get by on Spanish for awhile.

This blog entry is part of Vandover’s ongoing series of global résumé trends. More countries coming soon!

You may think you know how to write your résumé, but if you move beyond the U.S., you’ll probably start to notice that résumés look a little different elsewhere in the world. As we mentioned previously, you may not even see the word “résumé” listed anywhere in a job description for a position outside the U.S. – often, employers elsewhere in the world employ the term “C.V.”, an abbreviation for the Latin “curriculum vitae,” or “life story.” However, this trend is changing. No matter what you call it, the goal is the same: your CV or résumé is the first thing an employer will see about what you can offer them. Regardless of where you go in the world, your résumé/CV should be your best effort to shine and show your abilities.

Previously, we discussed employee retention as a topic very much on employers’ minds these days. The War for Talent, though, also involves employee recruitment: in addition to formulating effective talent retention strategies, you first need to be able to attract the employees that you’ll want to retain for the long-term.

If you’ve spent time in the American job market, you probably know that the “ideal” U.S. job résumé is one page long – and no more than two pages (with very, very rare exceptions). But in other countries, résumés might also include a photograph of yourself, as well as such details as your birth date, marital status, and nationality. In addition, international job ads may not even mention the word “résumé.” Outside of the U.S., “CV” (short for “Curriculum Vitae”) is a more common term.

Vandover consultants tell spouse/partner program participants frequently that a variety of strategies will help create an effective job search. Again and again, Vandover participants will hear their consultant discuss how important networking can be to finding and landing a job.

Vandover President Margery Marshall was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal for an article about the factors to weigh when considering a possible relocation.  You can read the article here.