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Home » Our Blog » Acquiring Job » 6 Signs Your Brand Needs An Upgrade
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6 Signs Your Brand Needs An Upgrade

Published May 19, 2022


The way we need logos to work for us has changed. They no longer only reside on a piece of packaging or storefront. Logos have to be flexible enough to be recognizable in all types of formats including everything from billboards to tiny social icons and mobile ads. Digital use also opens up possibilities that are harder to do in print like using lots of colors or gradients. Overly detailed logos that don't scale down very well become unreadable in smaller formats. Good logos are flexible logos. Flexible logos have options and variations that work harmoniously for any scenario at practically any size.

Is Your Branding Visually Scattered?


Your brand identity is typically the first thing people see when they encounter your business. If it is not consistent across all of your customer touchpoints, it's like sending mixed messages about who you are, what you do, or what you stand for. And that can be confusing for customers.

If customers see widely different styles when they visit your socials versus your website or retail store, there's a good chance that your visual identity needs some work. When every piece of marketing collateral looks like it was designed by a different team, it's difficult for people to remember your brand and connect everything as part of one unified brand image. Help your customers out and be consistent.

Does Your Product Packaging Look Dated?


One of the most effective ways to attract customers is through package design and labeling. Raise your hand if you have bought a product completely based on the package design. I know I am 100% guilty of this. Whether it is vitamins, soup, or wine with a really neat label, great packaging can be a game-changer. A package that looks outdated or boring can put off potential buyers who are looking for something more interesting and unique, like how they see themselves.

Has Your Brand Been Mistaken For A Competitor?


The goal of a brand identity is to help your business be recognizable and stand out from the competition. If people are confusing your business for someone else s or getting mixed up about what you do, then something is wrong with how they perceive you—or how you represent yourself to them through your marketing materials like website and social media profiles, brochures, etcetera.

Has Your Company Grown?


What a great problem to have, right? This is probably the most common reason for a rebranding effort. As time goes by and your company changes, your brand no longer reflects your values or who you are anymore. When you first started out, it may have made sense to use a cookie-cutter Etsy logo instead of custom branding because you were a new company. But now that time has passed and you've become more established, it's time for a change! Update your brand strategy and imagery so that it reflects who you are today and not who you were five years ago when you first started your business.

With growth comes new products or services. If you're launching a new product line—or even just adding something new to an existing one—this is an ideal time for a refresh because it will help people understand how these items fit into their lives or why they should buy them in the first place. Branding evolves along with your customers' needs and expectations. So if something doesn't feel right anymore—whether it's the tagline or the logo or even the name of the company—it might be time for a refresh.

Is Your Brand Messaging No Longer Working?


Has your audience changed significantly or are you no longer attracting new customers? It's always important to make sure that your branding is relevant to the people who matter most—namely, current and prospective clients or customers. If you've had significant growth in recent years and now have an entirely different set of customers or even stakeholders that need to be taken into account (such as employees), then it might be a good time to consider a rebranding effort from top-to-bottom rather than just tweaking your existing logos and messaging slightly.

Is It Time for You To Do A Brand Refresh?


If some of the items above are ringing true for you, a good place to start is with a brand audit. This will help you take stock of what is and is not working for your brand and then allow you to fine-tune or do a full revamp depending on your needs and goals.

A brand audit will help you form a strategy and style guide. The goal of a style guide is to ensure that all of your marketing collateral—whether it's an email newsletter or a website—looks professional, polished, and cohesive. It's not just about aesthetics; it's also about ensuring consistency between different channels so customers can easily identify your brand. When your messaging is consistent across all touchpoints, it won't matter if you're communicating with customers in person or online, they'll know exactly what to expect from your brand. You can create a style guide for yourself or hire someone else to do it for you—just be sure it's easy for everyone on your team (and even outside agencies) to refer back to when creating new content or designing new products or services that will be used by customers.

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Interview Tips: Master Your Nonverbal Communication
Published June 16, 2022

Interview Tips: Master Your Nonverbal Communication

If you are going to an interview, there are many things you will want to consider. Many people think that knowing how to accurately answer the questions is the only thing that needs to be practiced. In reality, you also need to master your nonverbal communication to demonstrate your best attributes to the interviewer.


There are a few things you will need to think about. Your nonverbal communication is one of the most important aspects of an interview. This includes factors such as your gestures, body language, facial expressions, and more. These communication signals are important because they send a multitude of messages to the interviewer. Many times, nonverbal communication is subconscious, but it is still something that people will notice. Just as you will control what you verbally say, you will want to control what you communicate nonverbally, too.

It is a good idea to have your verbal match your nonverbal communication. This means if you say you are confident that you can give the business what it needs because you have years of experience, you do not want to come off as timid, shy, and unsure of yourself. Instead, you want to exude confidence.

Here are a few interview tips for nonverbal communication in an interview:

Get Plenty Of Practice

One of the best things you can do is to practice your interview ahead of time. You can do this by yourself, though you will want to have a mirror or video recording so you can evaluate your communication signals, or with a friend via a mock interview. When practicing for a job interview, you should think about the things you appear to be saying nonverbally and think about how you can change them to give the impression you are looking for.

Be Mindful During Your Interview

Man smiles during a job interview

You should be aware of how you are communicating during the interview, but be sure not to overthink and become distracted from the interview questions. For example, if you want to demonstrate your confidence, then you need to think about having excellent posture, keeping eye contact with your interviewer, and making sure to keep a calm demeanor.

Be Aware Of Your Hands

Man listens to a question during a job interview

A big issue many people face when they are in an interview is that they do not know what to do with their hands. Individuals should avoid fidgeting and touching their hair and face because the interviewer can read these communication signals negatively. These nervous movements and fidgets may be a sign of anything from uncertainty in your qualifications to lying about something.

It is also important to give the interviewer an open body position without crossing your arms, which shows that you are comfortable and open to discussion. By crossing your arms, you are sending the message that you are closed off, which makes an interviewer think you may have something to hide or feel negatively about the interview. You can keep your arms at your side or on your lap. Using your hands when you explain something is fine as well, and it is seen as a very open gesture to show your palms to the other individual while explaining.

Pay Attention To The Interviewer’s Nonverbal Communication

Man shakes the hiring manager's hand before a job interview

While thinking about the right thing to say both verbally and nonverbally, you need to think about the message you are getting from the interviewer. For instance, if you see them lean back or look uncomfortable, you may be in their personal space. If the interviewer seems impatient or uncomfortable, you may want to try to explain yourself better or offer shorter and more concise answers.

There are many different aspects to think about with nonverbal communication and what it means in the business world. If you are finding that you are not having the success you want with an interview, you may find it helpful to take a class on nonverbal communication so you can achieve the results you are looking for.

Or you could join our FREE community. It’s a private, online platform where workers, just like you, are coming together to learn and grow into powerful Workplace Renegades. More importantly, we have tons of resources inside our community that can help you prepare for your next job interview.

It’s time to find work that makes you feel happy, satisfied, and fulfilled. Join our FREE community today to finally become an empowered business-of-one!

This article was originally published at an earlier date.

The Importance of Pre-employment Tests in The Hiring Process
Published May 27, 2022

The Importance of Pre-employment Tests in The Hiring Process

The employees you choose to work at your company can make or break its success. Their work, time, and talent all cost money, not to mention what you need to spend on onboarding, benefits, and training.  According to an SHRM report, hiring one employee costs a company an average of $4,129. This sum doesn’t even […]

The post The Importance of Pre-employment Tests in The Hiring Process appeared first on Jobacle.com.

Dealing With Uncertainty: 3 Stand-Out Capabilities You Need In Every Team
Published November 11, 2022

Dealing With Uncertainty: 3 Stand-Out Capabilities You Need In Every Team

One of the biggest issues in managing large, complex, or high-profile pieces of work including change and transformation projects is that you have to continually be on the lookout for, what I will call, half-baked problems or early warning signals that indicate challenges may be on their way—this while simultaneously leading, building, and delivering what is in your remit right now.


If you are a change project leader or tasked with leading and delivering big change in all or a part of your organisation, while balancing your many (read many!) day-to-day activities, you must also balance monitoring for early warning signals.

What do I mean by early warning signals?

As an example, any activity, new piece of information, or behaviour from a senior stakeholder that catches your attention because the information is at odds, surprising, or inconsistent with your current understanding of the context (and details) of your transformation work.

For instance, if there is a sudden change in senior leadership in the organization, pay momentary attention and ask yourself, ‘What does this mean for the transformation work in my remit?’ The answer decides if there is impact, no impact, or a need for action by you, such as continuing to monitor closely.

Early warning signals are one of the best sources of information on potential problems, risks and threats to your work’s success. Signals are indications of potential, unexpected change that might hit your work, project or complex activities. You need to monitor the horizon continuously to know what might be coming ‘down the barrel at you.’

What To Do?

Team meets at work

So, what to do when you are so busy with your day job to also fit in this extra layer of horizon scanning or monitoring?

If you are able to and your budget allows, surrounding yourself with a team of capable colleagues will help you build additional capacity to get the work done and to help monitor these half-baked problems and early warning signs.

It’s important to work out how to monitor what might be coming at you and your project because being prepared will mean you will likely nail anywhere up to 9/10 problems and mean you will rarely be caught off guard.

While not 100% fail-safe, monitoring the horizon for early warning signs of what might be coming means you stay more in control of your project overall and are able to reassure your stakeholders and sponsor of the same as well.

Stand-Out Capabilities You Want In Your Team

Team members discuss a problem during a work meeting

In my experiences in the trenches working on distressed or big complex projects in multiple industries, where uncertainty rules, there are three recurring stand-out capabilities in people I have worked with that can make a difference to your success including pre-empting half-baked problems. You may want to read more about distressed projects and teams by reading my blog post “6-Point Checklist For Taking Over A ‘Distressed’ Project & Team” here.

The stand-out people are those with the motivation to do a good job, are able to join the dots in the project without full information, and are great at pivoting in uncertainty.

You might be surprised that I don’t mention, out of the gate, stand-out skills like knowledge or experience. In truth and in my own experience these are not the most important, at least initially. Skills and experiences can often be acquired including during high-pressure, big, complex, project work. I know because I had a brand new team start with me as part of the Brexit Transfer—choosing people who were not the most experienced but were motivated, could join the dots, and were able to pivot quickly and regularly.

So, let’s go through each of the three stand-out capabilities in a bit more detail:

Stand-Out Capability #1 – Motivated

stay motivated, motivation concept

What I am talking about here is what drives the person in their day job. Some are driven to do their day job and others are driven by doing more than their day job without being asked. These people are what I would call natural-born problem solvers who are driven beyond just doing their day-to-day activities.

Nothing is externally imposed on creating this person’s motivation; rather the motivation comes from a place deep within the individual. They are driven beyond usual incentives rather they are driven by a higher-order goal that is beyond a paycheck (although this is important). I would best describe these people as going the extra mile without being asked to.
This is not necessarily about asking people to constantly go the extra mile. Your job as a leader is to make sure things remain as balanced as possible within the team and effort, but having the attitude tells you something about the sort of person you could potentially have as a colleague and on your team. And when you are restricted by size of the team, you have a small, tight-knit team, and in truth, there is little room for people who are not prepared to go the extra mile.

Stand-Out Capability #2 – Able To Join Dots

connect the dots geometric concept

People who join dots (connect information that doesn’t look like it connects but eventually you see it does) are able to join together information from different sources to build a clearer picture of something that is yet to reveal itself completely (like a half-baked problem or material risk that is yet to gain momentum).

This skill is invaluable in helping to pre-empt and deal with problems that are yet to ‘grow legs,’ that is problems that could become much bigger.

Colleagues with the ability to join the dots are able to see what may be almost invisible to most others. These are people who can work comfortably even without full information and yet have a sense of what to scan, what to ask ‘why’ about, what to watch out for, and how to act if things change, that is more or pivot quickly. They are able to see the small silver balls of mercury and are able to look and sometimes find the energy that may push each individual silver ball into a larger pool of silver mercury—that is a problem with legs in our analogy.

So, this capability to join the dots will always surpass knowledge and experience in my book. Of course, it would be ideal to have both types of colleagues in your team—those that are new, with fresh eyes on a problem, and those who might be more experienced and knowledgeable. This would then, however, require all to get on as a team to build trust to share information freely otherwise having all this knowledge and ability won’t bring out a great result. This bit, managing a team well, is up to you as manager or leader. By the way, skills can be trained but attitudes like motivation and an inner drive to understand and do a great job are not so easily trained or found.

Hence why I would always go with motivation over skills when selecting a team.

Stand-Out Capability #3 – Able To Pivot

pivot, strategy change concept

I define pivoting as an ability to turn or rotate fast. Pivoting is like watching velvet that moves. The feel of velvet is soft and sophisticated for some, and this is what I mean by pivoting in this context. People who can pivot are essentially able to effortlessly move from one task to another, from one piece of work to another, without any angst or stress. Velvety. Rather they appear as soon as they are needed even though they may have been very busy already.

Final word

As motivation is the hardest to recruit for and identify in your colleagues, the best way to find out what motivates a person is to ask them: ‘What are the top five things that motivate you?’ You will find that while money or financial reward is in the top five, it is not necessarily number one of the top five. Interesting, right?

Another important success factor is to make sure you select people who are naturally comfortable with change. Make sure you spend time understanding if your potential team member does not like or deal well with uncertainty in the workplace or in their day job; rather they prefer stability—nothing wrong with this by the way—but this means they may not necessarily be suited to the energetic demands of pressure and uncertainty coming out of a big project.

So, keep this in mind when building or assessing your potential team members. Make sure you match a person’s personal environment preferences (busy, stable, chaotic, calm) with their preferences. These are important factors in successfully embedding someone in your team and an important factor in the project’s ultimate success.

Summary

Team members shake hands after a work meeting

As a leader or manager of large pieces of work that are surrounded by uncertainty, it is important to continually scan the horizon for emerging risks and impending problems. This is a vital capability that needs to sit alongside your many other responsibilities and skills.

It is in your best interest to surround yourself with a capable team that can provide additional capacity to you either to scan the horizon with you or for you to delegate some of your other work so you can dedicate more time to scanning, assessing, and mitigating problems that might be coming your way.

I would love to hear what you think and how you handle scanning for early warning signals in your change work and projects.


Job hunters: Never Do This On Mondays
Published November 19, 2021

Job hunters: Never Do This On Mondays

There is one rule I always tell job seekers to follow in regards to their job search activities. Do not ever should […]

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