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One in five receive more than 100 work emails every single day. (Source: USA Snapshots — Samanage survey of 1,500 adults – Jae Yang and Janet Loehrke)
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One in five receive more than 100 work emails every single day. (Source: USA Snapshots — Samanage survey of 1,500 adults – Jae Yang and Janet Loehrke)
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(From USA Today)
College seniors — 42 percent of them — expect to earn more than $50,000 at their first jobs while 23 percent of companies pay that amount.
Source: ICIMS analysis of 400 college seniors and 400 hiring managers. Jay Yang and Vernon Brave, USA Today.
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(From USA Today)
Where do you stand? Fourteen percent of people have shoes at least 20 years old. Note: Most pairs aged 5-9 years. Women average 30 pairs overall — men 11. Source: Alliance Date “Strictly Shoes” survey of 1,152 people. Terry Byrne and Paul Trap, USA Today.
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(From Mary Lorenz — CareerBuilder)
Here are what leading career coaches identify as their favorite interview questions from interviewees:
(Mary Lorenz is a writer for the Advice & Resources section on CareerBuilder.com She researches and writes about job-search strategy career, management management, hiring trends and workplace issues.
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By Andrew Hindes (From PR News)
Andrew Hindes |
Picture this: You’ve just applied for your dream PR job and everything seems to be falling into place. The company likes your resume enough to call you in for an initial interview. You nail it, so they bring you back to meet the senior executives, who also give you the thumbs up. But just when you think you’re home free, the recruiter utters two words that strike terror in your heart (cue the shower-scene music from Psycho): writing test.
Having graduated college—and perhaps even embarked on a successful professional career—you may have thought your test-taking days were safely behind you. But in today’s highly competitive job market, agencies and corporate PR departments expect candidates to possess a wide range of skills, including the ability to churn out basic press materials. That’s where the dreaded pre-employment writing assessment comes in.
“Writing tests are a very important part of the interview process for us,” says Dawn Miller, CEO of Miller PR, a bicoastal firm which reps digital and entertainment brands. “Typically we ask the applicant to prepare a press release, a pitch, a bio or a company boilerplate, depending on the candidate and the skills required for the position we’re looking to fill.”
And it’s not just recent college grads whose writing chops are being evaluated. “We use writing tests for every single hire—at every level,” says Amy Bermar, president of Corporate Ink, a Boston-based agency specializing in technology clients. “We began this more than 15 years ago, after the unhappy discovery that someone ‘senior enough’ to know how to write actually didn’t write very well at all.”
So whether you’re just entering the job market or you’re a seasoned pro considering a career move, here are five tips to help you navigate the PR writing test:
Following these guidelines should help you prepare for whatever writing test a prospective employer throws at you.
But just in case, you might want to bring along a couple of No. 2 pencils, too.
Interested in more PR writing content? Check out PR News’ Writer’s Guidebook, which gives actionable tips on writing for press releases, social media and SEO.
Andrew Hindes is a seasoned PR copywriter and the president of The In-House Writer, which provides PR writing workshops and pre-employment writing assessments for public relations firms and corporate communications departments. He can be reached at andrew@theinhousewriter.com. You can follow him on Twitter @inhousewriter.
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