Accounting and Finance Blog

Are you about to graduate from college? Congrats! Now get to work on fine-tuning your resume. The resume remains the centerpiece of your job-search toolkit, and a carefully crafted one can help you stand out among your many fellow recent grads.

By the time you come face to face with potential hires, you’ve already reviewed their resumes and maybe even finished conducting interviews by phone.

But the in-person interview is pivotal. It’s when you separate the wheat from the chaff, or the good hires from the not-so-good hires. This is crucial because hiring someone who doesn’t work out can cost your business in a number of ways.

Before he became famous for “The Simpsons,” cartoonist Matt Groening penned a comic strip called “Life in Hell.” His delightfully subversive cartoon often took aim at the conformity-enforcing, creativity-squashing corporate life of the 1980s and ’90s.

Sure, we now live and work in an era of typo-ridden texts and tweets, but that’s no excuse to submit a sloppy resume. In fact, being careless with your application materials can still prove costly.

Phone interviews are common for first-round screening of job candidates. They allow an employer to quickly get a feel for who you are and how you communicate.

Since a phone call will likely be your first chance to make a killer impression, you have to take it seriously and do the prep work. Here’s how: