From Forrest Gump’s Guide to Becoming a Gazillionaire, on OnMoneyMaking.com:

Who taught Elvis how to dance, received the Congressional Medal of Honor, got Nixon impeached, became the world ping-pong champion, built a national shrimping empire, and fathered Haley Joel Osment?

One man: Forrest Gump.

If I could choose one mentor in business, or in life in general, it would be Gump. I don’t care that he’s not real. The wisdom that he conveys is real, and I think we could all learn something from it.

This advice is so great, I’m going to tweak it for you so you can use it for medical sales (and still make a little money):

“And cause I was a gazillionaire, and I liked doin’ it so much, I cut that grass for free.”

If you’re in sales, you better like people and love sales. If you’re in medical sales, you better love the science and technology of it, too, so that keeping up with trends and development in the industry is a pleasure, not a chore. Be in the kind of medical sales that really interests you-there’s a lot to choose from: medical device sales, laboratory sales, pharmaceutical sales, hospital equipment sales, imaging sales, pathology sales, cellular or molecular products sales, surgical sales, clinical diagnostics sales, or biotechnology sales. (Find out about how to get into medical sales.) If you love it, you’ll be good at it, and if you’re good at it, the money will come.

“I’m not a smart man, but I know what love is.”

E.Q. is just as important as I.Q. Successful salespeople know that sales are a lot about building relationships-it’s not just about the product. Customers know if you’re really in it to help them, or to help you.

“Stupid is as stupid does.”

Make good decisions. All the time. Don’t get caught not being where you said you’d be (sometimes they’re tracking you), keep your commitments, follow through, and make your company look good.

“When I got tired, I slept. When I got hungry, I ate. When I had to go… you know… I went.”

Take care of yourself. Keeping yourself in good physical condition by getting enough exercise, eating right, getting enough rest, and taking mental breaks from the job once in a while will keep you at the top of your game.

“Momma always had a way of explaining things so I could understand them.”

Find a mentor. Read books on sales. Read medical sales blogs. Come to the medical sales recruiter for custom consulting to help you be the best sales rep you can be and have the best job you can have.

“I gotta save Bubba!”

Loyalty matters.

“Jenny taught me how to climb. And I taught her how to dangle.”

If you had a mentor (or even if you didn’t), be one. Be a team player. Always be networking. You never know where your next lead is coming from, or whether you might need a job sometime in the future. Someone who has been willing to help others will almost always get that generosity rewarded in some way down the road.

“My Momma always said you’ve got to put the past behind you before you can move on.”

Don’t dwell on a sale that didn’t close, or a job that went bad. Learn what you can from it, and move on.

“I’m sorry I had to fight in the middle of your Black Panther party.”

Learning the art of apologizing will serve you well. Using it even when you don’t think you’re wrong will (sometimes) serve you better.

“Now you wouldn’t believe me if I told you, but I can run like the wind blows.”

If you’re in sales, you better know how to brag. About your products when you’re selling, and about yourself when you’re job searching. One great tip is to keep a brag book. What do you keep in it? Letters from happy customers, “good job” letters from sales managers, sales and revenue numbers, data on improvements you’ve made, training you’ve completed, awards and accomplishments. Learning how to use it in interviews will give you an edge.

“My Momma always said, ‘Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.’ ”

On medical sales: No kid ever said, “I want to grow up to be a medical supply sales rep!” Still, there’s satisfying reward, financially and otherwise, in educating customers and delivering a product that will benefit people. There’s a lot of ways to combine the loves of people, business and science in healthcare sales.

On job searching: Don’t be afraid to move on (and up) if you get the opportunity, and don’t be afraid to go after what you want. Be open-minded about relocating, because it could be the step that leads to really great things. One tool that can help you move up or get the job is the 30/60/90 day sales plan template

“That’s all I have to say about that.”

Just as important as knowing when to talk, and when to push for the close, is knowing when to shut up and wait.

Article courtesy of the Recruiting Blogswap, a content exchange service sponsored by CollegeRecruiter.com, a leading site for college students looking for internships and recent graduates searching for entry level jobs and other career opportunities.

Article courtesy of  Carl Chapman - Founder CEC Search, LLC
    © Copyright 2009 CEC Search, LLC | All rights reserved

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Troy was tagged Moises Lopez got tagged by Amybeth Hale (she of research goddess – still in training!), who was tagged by Dan Sweet from FRACAT, who was tagged by Christine O’Kelly of Create Business Growth Offer, who was tagged by Wizzer…. And that is far back as I can go.  Having given you the history of our little lining pyramid scheme, now it’s time to lay out the rules of the game:

THE RULZ
1. Post these rules before you give you the facts.
2. List 8 random facts about yourself.
3. At the end of your post, choose (tag) 8 people and list their names (linking to them).
4. Leave them a comment on their blog letting them know they’ve been tagged!

So here we go… eight random facts about Carl:

1. I was an Eagle Scout.
    
2. Until high school, I never attended any school more than 2 years.
    
3. At the age of 11, I caught an Atlantic sailfish that was 4 inches off the then world record.
    
4. I was certified as a scuba diver in 1973.
    
5. I have a cousin who was the Mayor of the town where my mom grew up.
    
6. In 1970 I spent 6 days in the hospital after being shot in the chest.
    
7. My beautiful bride of 22 years and I met while attending the regional training center during our management careers with Pizza Hut.  I knew within a few days that I would marry her; we were married in less than a year.
    
8. Although I was slated to be a pilot after graduating from USNA, I HATE to fly.

Not sure that I’ll be able to find 8 people to tag, but here goes:

Jason Alba (he’s my favorite guy to dump work on) of Jibber Jobber.

Pat Lefler who is a shipmate from USNA and has an interesting blog called Intrepid Ideas

Tim Totten of Final Embrace

Janet Meiners of Newspapergrl

Dave Mendoza the wizard of networking from SixDegreesFromDave

The Recruiting Animal – of the recruiting animal talk radio show

Shally Steckerl – Master CyberSleuth [already tagged]

Jason Goldberg of Jobster <evil grin>because I’d love to see how he reacts to being tagged</evil grin>

Barbara Ling of Recruiter 2.0 Marketing Musings

Now here is a picture of Jessica Alba

 

Article courtesy of  Carl Chapman - Founder CEC Search, LLC
    © Copyright 2009 CEC Search, LLC | All rights reserved

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By the way, you can read breaking restaurant news and stories on our corporate website on our restaurant news page or find additional interesting stories in our news archives.

Article courtesy of  Carl Chapman - Founder CEC Search, LLC
    © Copyright 2009 CEC Search, LLC | All rights reserved

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So here is my offer, connect to me on LinkedIn, if you haven’t already. When you do, you should be able to contact a ton of people as my network of reachable professionals is approaching 5 million. I’ve already managed to be helpful in connecting dozens of career professionals who needed introductions.

Connecting isn’t really about what you can do for me; in fact it isn’t about what I can do for you. No, connecting is more about what we can all do for each other. Shally Steckerl, Master Cybersleuth, has a great post about being a promiscuous linker. It is a great read and Shally does a wonderful job of explaining why connecting to folks that you don’t know well can help your network become much more efficient. And efficiency translates into usefulness. You can also find a great post about using LinkedIn to help promote your personal brand, over at my friend Jason (not related to Jessica) Alba’s site JibberJobber.

Click to connect to Carl Chapman on LinkedIn. – use my email address carl @ cecsearch.com.

Or you can send me an invite to join your network by using Carl Chapman and my email address "carl @ cecsearch.com"

If you’d like to be promoted on my blog when I do updates of this post just drop me a line. About once a month I’ll do an article inviting people to connect to me and I’d be happy to included links to any of my readers who are open networkers.

Finally, since I mentioned Jason Alba, now here’s a new picture of Jessica.

Article courtesy of  Carl Chapman - Founder CEC Search, LLC
    © Copyright 2009 CEC Search, LLC | All rights reserved

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You see, Larry was discussing a new study that had just come out (and he compared it with an older study) about the disparity in pay between men and women. Of course the study was backed by scientific method and statistical analysis. I’ve always believed the old saying that there are lies, damned lies, then statistics. This report reminded me of that fact.

It is easy, if you are prone to victimhood, to get exercised when some study from a prestigious sounding group announces that your "group" is getting the shaft. I imagine that is how a lot of women who first heard the news that they were only making 80% of the pay that men make felt. They were more than likely whipped up into a frenzy of anger because they weren’t being treated fairly.

I’m all for fair treatment, and in my recruiting practice, we don’t discriminate in anyway (other than skill set and experience) in our recruiting process. Men and women are treated equally, and paid equally for the same work with the same background and experience level. Because we live in a free market economy (well mostly free market, I lament the amount of government interference that we have now, but that is a topic for another time) it is impossible for the study to be correct.

As Mr. Elder points out, one needn’t refute the methodology, which is obviously flawed. There is no need to point out that there are sufficient justification to pay people differently based upon background, education, skill set, and accomplishment, that one could not possibly pin the pay differences between men and women solely on their gender. Mr. Elder has a much easier theorem that doesn’t involve knowing sample size, statistics, or sampling methodology. We just use simple logic of economic theory.

Here is how to easily disprove the irresponsible statement that women are only paid $.80 on the dollar compared to men. If you were a business owner, and women could be paid at only 80% the level of men, wouldn’t a business, one that was "for profit," stop hiring men and hire only women, thereby saving 20% of its labor costs? Of course it would, but that doesn’t happen. And it doesn’t happen because it isn’t real. Are there different salaries for workers based on what they know, what their education is, what they have accomplished in the work place, how long they have continuously worked, the skills that they bring to the job – absolutely. Are any of those things based upon gender, not really. Sometimes women choose to leave the workforce to raise a family, but sometimes men do as well. Those people will suffer a pay gap as compared with someone continuously in the workforce since leaving school.

So next time you are confronted with outrageously exaggerated "findings" of a study, use some common sense to filter what the ‘authors’ are telling you. No doubt if you utilize this methodology, you can save yourself some time trying to prove every instance where the authors have skewed the result.

-author: Carl Chapman. Carl is the founder of CEC Search – Executive Restaurant Recruiters. He has 20+ years of restaurant industry experience, spent 5 awarding winning years as an executive recruiter with a top 25 MRI franchise office. Carl graduated from the US Naval Academy in 1980. You can find Carl’s bio on his blog "Confessions of an Executive Restaurant Recruiter" you can also review his LinkedIn profile at http://www.linkedin.com/in/carlchapman

Article courtesy of  Carl Chapman - Founder CEC Search, LLC
    © Copyright 2009 CEC Search, LLC | All rights reserved

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One of the rules about writing blog posts, in fact any article for that matter, is to not be negative. However I chose the title because I think it is easier to tell people how to not blow getting the job by avoiding some easily avoidable mistakes than it is to tell them how to get the job, since there may be thousands of things that contribute to the success of the total job seeking effort. My (hoped for) words of wisdom are pointed most directly at the unit level restaurant managers. Those individuals who are on the front lines and directly responsible for providing leadership at the individual restaurant locations. There are many opportunities for them to move to different companies to obtain higher pay and expose themselves to better chances for promotion. By avoiding the ‘mistakes’ that I have identify, their job change campaign should be much more successful.

Let’s start out with the list of what I consider the biggest mistakes (below.) I’ll tell you that the order that I have them listed is intentional. I’ve listed what I think are the easiest to correct first and the most difficult to correct last. Each week we will discuss why I think each topic is such a big problem and how to overcome it. Hopefully we will be able to help guide a number of jobseekers to more successful outcome as a result of the series. Additionally, I’ll probably go ahead and create a PDF document (as Pat Lefler and Kent Blumberg like) so that those who wish, can have an offline resource to carry around, study, or distribute.

I’d also appreciate and enjoy my readers participating with some of their own ideas for errors or mistakes to avoid, which I would be happy to include, expound upon, or discuss. Feel free to email or comment here or on any of the posts. If we get more items than ten, I’ll just change the title. Now here is my list:

Top 10 Ways to Blow Getting the Job

Inappropriate dress – showing up for the interview in attire that is not proper for your industry and position.

Not showing desire - not showing the interviewer(s) at every point that you are ready, willing, and able to make a job change and that you want to work for them.

Not exhibiting a "can do" attitude – when asked to provide additional info, take additional tests, go to a different location, or do anything out of the ordinary; hesitating and making it out to be a hardship on you.

Talking badly about your former/current employer – mentioning information with a negative attitude or tone in your voice or really talking derogatorily about your employers.

Discussing your personal life – talking about things in your personal life to such a degree that it could cause negative feelings or outcome with the prospective employer.

Asking for too much money – when negotiating, going beyond the reasonable limits that have been pre-discussed with your recruiter, the hiring authority, or stated in the job ad.

Inflexibility with regard to location – unwillingness to consider relocation or working in a particular location that may require a longer commute than you would enjoy, for some period of time.

History of job hopping – moving from one company to another (more often than not, at the same level) so frequently that you look unstable.

Lack of knowledge – not knowing about your business and profession, and not knowing about the company where you are interviewing.

Poor language skills – inability to communicate effectively, inability to articulate ideas using proper English, using curse words or slang during the interview.

Article courtesy of  Carl Chapman - Founder CEC Search, LLC
    © Copyright 2009 CEC Search, LLC | All rights reserved

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Having judged the suggestion worthwhile, I went about looking for a suitable method of turning the document into a PDF. What I found was an online PDF document translator that worked with tons of different formats. So I spent about an hour working on the production of the PDF using the free online resource at PDFOnline. I posted the PDF as a gift to my readers and, judging by the links to it from other sites including Shally Steckerl of Job Machine on his CyberSleuthing blog, it was pretty popular.

However, it wasn’t until last week that I discovered that the online PDF creator didn’t preserve the hyperlinks in my article. I was sorely disappointed by that. I also had noticed that one of my pals, Kent Blumberg, had posted on his blog about a PDF tool that he uses, easyPDF Printer 4.3 from BCL Technologies [while not free, very reasonable at around $15], preserves the links in documents when it creates the PDF. So I thought to myself, this is the solution. On Thursday [I think it was Thursday, busy days have a habit of running together] I went to the site to download and purchase easyPDF Printer, and to my utter disappointment, discovered that they don’t yet support Windows Vista [another reason to just say no to Vista]. Now I have a problem that I dearly want to fix, but don’t have the ability to do it. So, I call on my friend Kent and ask a favor of him. I didn’t expect how wonderfully he would reply. I asked Kent if he would make a quick run through of my original document turning it into a PDF using his copy of easyPDF Printer so that I could have active hyperlinks in it and repost it. Kent said that he would be glad to and told me he could get it done by the weekend. I responded that would be great.

Well, Kent got it done much faster than that. In fact he built a TOC with active links, reformatted it for better flow, and made it look like a Million bucks [well much better than I had originally done it anyway, we have to consider the source material. ] So I’m going to make a permanent link to the document so that people can get to it very easily. I also want to express my deepest gratitude for Kent’s help. Kent knows something about helping others as it is a foundation of great leadership. Read Kent’s blog – Kent Blumberg – Leadership, strategy, and performance and find out more about his leadership style and thoughts.

Finally, I would like to refer my friend the Recruiting Animal, author of The Recruiting Animal blog, RecruitingBloggers, and Recruiting Pundits to the last sentence in my opening paragraph. I think that qualifies as humor Animal… now where is your "monetization"?

Link to 10 Ways to Make Recruiters Love You PDF.

Article courtesy of  Carl Chapman - Founder CEC Search, LLC
    © Copyright 2009 CEC Search, LLC | All rights reserved

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Article courtesy of  Carl Chapman - Founder CEC Search, LLC
    © Copyright 2009 CEC Search, LLC | All rights reserved

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I don’t really know how many of you (all 5 of you, I am up to five readers now, right?) know that I have established another business unit whose goal is provide SEO (search engine optimization) and web services for recruiters and small business, but if you don’t, you will after reading the rest of this post. My favor is that I’d like for you to visit another website and give me some feedback on it.

Our new company is located at www.recruiting-usa.com and it is packed with service offerings that could be useful to many of you. Recruiting-USA.com started out as a domain name that I purchased to provide one master domain for many recruiting specialties. If you wanted to find healthcare recruiters and jobs you would go to healthcare.recruiting-usa.com; IT recruiters and jobs would be at it.recruiting-usa.com; general sales would be sales.recruiting-usa.com… you get the idea. It was going to be a memorable, findable domain name where I could add top recruiters with different sub-specialties to my firm and have a separate look and feel for each one.

A funny thing happened on the way to that plan. I left my old job at an MRI franchise office and started my own firm – CEC Search. With the business just starting and without the umbrella support of a large organization like MRI, I felt that I needed a first class website that ranked very highly in SERPs (search engine ranking placements) so that CEC Search would have legitimacy, weight, and reach. The project of building the website and obtaining high rankings on Google and Yahoo was rather daunting and could be very expensive. I decided that I would take the project on myself. So I dove in and did tons of research on SEO and effective ways to make search engines rank your site in the top results. After building the website, I put together my comprehensive program for moving CEC Search steadily up the rankings. I was pretty successful at doing that (you can see some of the results for SEO consulting here) with over 55 #1 keyword listings in major search engines and over 230 first page listings, all for great, relevant keywords for the restaurant industry and recruiting specialty.

Shortly after having achieved what I thought were spectacular results I had the chance to consult for another recruiting firm owner, Peggy McKee of PHC Consulting. Peggy had a one page site that was static and hosted for free one DotEasy. The hosting and website were worth the price that she was paying, with traffic to her site that was very minor and no listings on major search engines. Peggy hired us to redesign her website, build her blog, integrate her recruiting software [Big Biller] with her website, and perform SEO on an ongoing basis. Peggy’s firm, PHC Consulting recruits in the medical sales arena, specifically laboratory sales. Her new site went live on Jan 31. I’m happy to report that she has seen traffic increases on the order of forty fold (so far) and business has grown so much that she is adding another recruiter (after being a solo practitioner for over 7 years.)

The great success of my site and the work that we did with PHC Consulting (especially the targeting of medical sales jobs, pharmaceutical sales jobs, and laboratory sales jobs in search engines) gave me the idea that a lot more small to medium sized recruiting organizations could use that kind of service. So I decided to launch our next enterprise, web services for recruiters and small businesses and give it the domain name that I had set aside for me – Recruiting-USA.com. That we we could have a site that acts as a portal for all kinds of niche recruiting firms and give them a one stop shop for all of their SEO and web service needs. We offer website design, hosting, domain name forwarding, blog building and hosting, SEO consulting, and technology consulting.

What I would like from you (if you’ve read this far, thanks so much) is for you to visit the site and give me your feedback. We have a home page that describes our services and a blog with helpful free tips on blogging, search engine optimization, and search engine marketing; plus free webmaster tools.

The Recruiting-USA.com website is pretty new and I’d love to hear what y’all think needs to be added, changed, intensified, reworked, better explained, or left alone. If you would be kind enough to share you thoughts, it would be amazingly helpful.

There is a contact page for the site, which will send me an email. Be sure to check out some of the articles including my series on WordPress 2.1 plug-ins and one that should be helpful to all (inspired by a post on JibberJobber about their winner of the You Get It award) "Building a personal brand? You need SEO too!"

Article courtesy of  Carl Chapman - Founder CEC Search, LLC
    © Copyright 2009 CEC Search, LLC | All rights reserved

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I would highly encourage you to read the series there and see what the experts have to say about formatting, content, power statements, and targeting your resume and cover letter.

Hopefully you have also read my two posts on this site about resume writing and why it’s the content that is king.  Also I hope that you have downloaded my resume templates so that you at least have a guideline that will give you confidence as you prepare your resume.

If you have questions, feel free to contact me via the contact form.  You could try to contact Jessica, but I don’t think you’ll have much luck…. "Now here’s a new picture of Jessica!"

Article courtesy of  Carl Chapman - Founder CEC Search, LLC
    © Copyright 2009 CEC Search, LLC | All rights reserved

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