Interview Success Tips

Product Description

Social Skills 101: An Essential Dining Etiquette Guide

A valuable client is in town and needs to be entertained. You are interviewing for a great new job and your prospective employer suggests you go out for lunch. You are on a first date with someone special. It is time to finally ask your boss for a raise. No problem, right? You are charming, well-dressed, funny, smart, and successful. Everybody loves you. You are going to knock’em dead……but, what about your table manners? Pass the bread the wrong way and your valuable client thinks you are clumsy. Grab your prospective employer’s water glass by mistake and she begins to question your poise under pressure. Argue with the waiter and someone special decides you are really a jerk. Tear at your lobster like an animal and you can stop worrying about getting a raise and start worrying about keeping your job. Dining etiquette matters. Whether you are a new intern at your first formal business dinner, or a seasoned professional out for a power lunch, business meals are big business. A lack of manners is just plain bad business. Organized in five easy, enjoyable lessons, the Etiquette Scholar Dining Etiquette CD includes all the practical information you need to make a great impression at your next business meal or social engagement. It is simply the best dining etiquette reference available. Don’t eat another important meal without listening to this CD first!

Quick and easy learning. Etiquette Scholar has made its dining etiquette lessons available in audio format for your convenience. Listen on CD or download the lessons to your MP3 player and learn at the gym, on the plane or in your car on the way to a client meeting, job interview, or other important dining event.

A valuable tool for any professional. If you entertain clients or dine with colleagues, your table manners reflect on your overall level of professionalism. Etiquette Scholar’s comprehensive, thoroughly researched dining etiquette CD quickly teaches you every dining etiquette rule you need to correctly handle any dining situation.

Vital job interview information. Your resume may get you the interview, but it’s how you handle the interview that gets you the job. Conversation, handling the utensils — it’s the little things that matter. Employers conduct interviews during meals to evaluate how applicants handle themselves in a social setting. Polish your dining etiquette skills by listening to the Etiquette Scholar dining etiquette lesson. After completing the Etiquette Scholar dining etiquette lessons you will learn how to be seated, correctly identify tableware, handle silverware, properly order your meal, handle hard-to-eat foods, gracefully pay the check, and much more!

Great gift for students or any professional.

The Etiquette Scholar Dining Etiquette lesson includes five informative units:

Unit One: The Restaurant and Your Table (including arriving at the restaurant and being seated, understanding who is who in the dining room, and identifying silverware, plates & glassware)

Unit Two: Ordering and Enjoying the Meal (including ordering, using your napkin, handling silverware, using finger bowls & hot towels, and handling difficult-to-eat foods)

Unit Three: Handling the Check (covering paying the check and tipping the restaurant staff)

Unit Four: Special Topics (including managing business meals and handling awkward & unexpected situations)

Dining Etiquette Essentials Unit (a convenient summary of all units that can be reviewed en route to a restaurant for quick & easy reference).

Essential Etiquette Fundamentals, Vol. 1: Dining Etiquette

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You will be surprised at the number of teaching job interviews you will be invited to attend at an international recruitment job fair. You may be worried because you have sent out your resume to all the recruiters on the job fair organizer’s list of schools that have vacancies in your teaching area and yet you have received no responses, or only automated responses.

Trust me, this is not a problem!

You will probably find that when you arrive for the orientation session and check your mailbox that you have received a number of interview invitations from those very same recruiters that have not sent you a personal response to your initial attempts to make contact.

One colleague of mine said she received interview invitations from 26 schools at the last job fair she attended. Another reported that she’d spent hours sending out her resume to different international school recruiters and received a very disappointing response pre-job fair; however she also received an astounding number of interview requests at the job fair.

So, what does this mean to you? You will need to be prepared with a mechanism to quickly and easily turn down interview requests because the chances are you will be invited to interview with schools that you have no interest in teaching for.

One way to prepare for this contingency is to prepare ‘thanks but no thanks’ notes ahead of the job fair. You can then fill in the blanks on the refusal letter and either pass it on to the recruiters at the sign up session on the first morning of the fair, put it in the recruiter’s mailbox, or slip it under the door of their hotel room.

When you are preparing your application packs to take with you to the teaching job fair you simply prepare and print some copies of your refusal letter and take them with you to the fair.

A major problem with this plan occurs if you have not prepared enough of the notes, as my colleague experienced when she received interview invitations from 26 schools, of which she was only interested in two! What do you do then? You will have to resort to hand-written notes.

Another option is to take along a pad of Post-It notes. Post-It notes can be stuck to hotel room doors or on to the recruiter’s table at the sign-up session. A bonus to using this method is that your note will not be accidentally mixed in among other papers because it is both sticky and colourful.

Before you turn down interview requests you need to consider how much practice you have had recently with job interviews. Do you feel confident? Going to job interviews with schools you are not very interested in teaching for will give you an opportunity to practise rusty interview technique in preparation for the schools you really are interested in. Additionally, through interviewing with these recruiters you may discover that an international school you were not very interested in is actually the perfect place for you to move to.

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