Invaluable, authoritative tipsheet for job candidates.
A seasoned hiring manager shares his advice on the do’s and don’ts of job interviews.
Drawing on nearly two decades of business experience, much of it in banking, Berdiev (Credit Analysis 102, 2012) offers a host of tips to prepare for and behave during a job interview as well as to follow up after it. His book is organized into 105 concise chapters, generally a page and a half each. The first nine chapters focus on what he calls fundamentals, including how to rehearse answers to potential interview questions (and to have someone observe/critique this rehearsal), proof resume and cover letters, and leverage “the power of the notepad”—always bring one to the interview. The next 30 chapters cover important pre-interview issues: don’t use a bizarre email address for communications or make scheduling the interview difficult for the recruiter/hiring manager. Berdiev then spends the bulk of his book on the interview itself, with 51 chapters addressing areas such as body language and asking for the interviewer’s business card (unless it’s not a practice to have one in your industry): “If you do not ask for one or otherwise do not obtain the contact information you need to follow up with a thank-you note, it can deduct a point or two from your candidacy.” He then follows with 10 chapters touching on strategies regarding the follow-up: for instance, avoid “desperado” language, don’t beg, “act subservient,” or come across as standoffish. Berdiev wraps up with a section called “Bonuses,” which offers insights specific to the commercial banking industry as well as general advice on using online networking tools. Berdiev’s guide is easy to read and surprisingly entertaining given its stress-inducing subject. His time as a hiring manager gives this book particular power, and his statement that “hiring managers continue to be exasperated over the fact that so many applicants fail everything, from the very elementary must-haves to more sophisticated expectations” should give readers pause. Indeed, while much of what Berdiev says may seem basic or obvious, job hunters would do well to follow his wealth of advice.
Invaluable, authoritative tipsheet for job candidates.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9774117-3-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: DNB Advisory
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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