Entrepreneurs Replacing People with Tablets

Entrepreneurs Replacing People with Tablets

 

One of the hardest parts of getting a new business off of the ground is to have enough funding.  Many entrepreneurs use family members as personnel in order to avoid paying wages.  It may be quite expensive to hire people to take orders or process requests.  The Wall Street Journal article Can the Tablet Please Take Your Order Now included some examples of how some small businesses have begun to use tablets instead of people in the customer-ordering process.

If customers can order through a digital device, it may not only be cheaper but faster.  There are app-building tools that entrepreneurs can use to create a way for customers to input their orders.  Some companies have used QR codes to speed up the order process. Using apps is another logical alternative. With talk of increasing the minimum wage, some small businesses are looking for ways to remain profitable.  If tablets become a popular way to order, it may impact many minimum-wage workers.  “In all, one-third of low-wage workers are employed by businesses with fewer than 100 employees, according to the National employment Law Project, an organized-labor-backed advocacy group for low-wage workers.”

Not only may entrepreneurs experience some cost savings by utilizing tablets and apps, there may be some other entrepreneurial opportunities for the app designers.  According to the Wall Street Journal article, “Some entrepreneurs see a promising market in selling technologies to small businesses that might help them to streamline operations.”  While this may cost some minimum wage-earners jobs, it may also be opportunities to train them for higher-skilled positions.

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Are Employers Trying to Trick You In the Interview? Helpful Answer to a Popular Difficult Question

 

There is a lot of advice about how to ace the job interview.  The book, How to Reinvent Your Career, lists many helpful tools, site links and examples to help with this.

One of the main things that employers want to find out is if you are a positive person that has the ability to overcome challenges.  Jobs.AOL.com had an interesting article about how to answer questions about your greatest weakness.  Some may look at these questions as tricks in order to get you to say something negative about yourself.  Others may look at these types of questions and answers as a sort of game.

Jobs.AOL did give some good advice about how to handle these types of questions. They suggested that it might not be a good idea to say your greatest weakness is that you work too hard.  They also thought it is not a good idea to say you don’t have any weaknesses.  So how do you answer this without looking weak?  They suggest, “Pick a real weakness from your occupational tool set that you know has no bearing on the job you are interviewing for. The interviewer will acknowledge that you were honest with them, and will likely consider your “greatest weakness” to be meaningless to him. You should also mention that you are studying or taking a class to improve in this area. For example, a computer programmer might say that she wishes to improve her public speaking skills and is attending Toastmasters for training. By including your plan for overcoming this “weakness,” you have actually turned your answer into a pseudo-strength: You recognize your faults and set a plan for self-improvement. A very good quality.”

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Have you Googled Yourself Lately? Why LinkedIn and Google are Important for Your Job Search

If you are looking for a job, you probably have looked at getting on LinkedIn and some other social networking sites.  If you have created a LinkedIn profile, it should show up on Google’s search engine. 

In some recent talks I gave to job-seekers, I asked my audience if they had Googled themselves.  Surprisingly, not as many people as you may think have done this.   In my book, How to Reinvent Your Career, I discuss the importance of Googling your name to see what it displays.   You can be sure that employers will do this.

It is nice that search engines like Google can help people find you.  One way to help improve being found is to be on LinkedIn.  There are other benefits to being on LinkedIn. According to a recent article in WSJ.com, “One of the least recognized aspects of LinkedIn, says founder Reid Hoffman, is the fact that it allows people to help other people.” I personally like the Q&A feature of LinkedIn for this reason.  Not only can you ask a question, but you can offer your expertise and help others. 

According to Hoffman, Linkedin is an important part of the career search.  I agree.  He also asked an important question: “There are millions of other people out there. What do you do to put yourself in the right place for people to find you?”

I often give advice for things you can do to be found.  LinkedIn is high on my list.  However, if you are interested in finding out more ways to be found, check out some of my career videos. 

How to Get a Job by Understanding  Emotional Intelligence

How to Get a Job by Utilizing a SWOT Analysis

How to Get a Job by Utilizing Camtasia and Powerpoint

How to Market Yourself by Using Social Media

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How to Ace the Job Interview by Understanding Introverts and Extroverts

For those of you who have taken a Myers-Briggs MBTI personality assessment, you may already know if you are an introvert or extrovert.  It gets confusing to some as many say extrovert.  Myers-Briggs uses the term extravert.  What is important is that you understand the differences between how introverts and extroverts/extraverts prefer to process information.  Why is this important to acing the job inteview?  Watch the video below for more answers.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WUsPftGVEM&fs=1&hl=en_US]
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Marlo Thomas Asks What Would You Do Differently – My Answer is Nothing

I was just watching a video by Marlo Thomas where she was asking people what they would do differently knowing what they know now.  In my book, How to Reinvent Your Career, I included a chapter about this very subject.  The following is an excerpt from that chapter where I discuss why I don’t think that many things we choose are really mistakes because they have led us to where we need to be now.

Think about the choices you made when you were young. Would you choose the same things now? Maybe not. Maybe you weren’t ready to take on the things you can now do. I doubt I would have been as good a professor if I hadn’t had the 25-plus years of experience in the working world to help me add to my lectures and discussions. 

Perhaps that degree you got in Sociology or Education or some other field no longer interests you. Perhaps you need to go back and get more education in a new area of interest. People change and interests change. It’s OK to say that what you were interested in when you were 20 is not the same thing that interests you now.

One of the reasons we change is through the life lessons we learn. We may take a job that leads to another job that we had no intention of doing in the first place, but makes us much happier than we thought it would. You have to factor life experiences into the equation of what brought you to the place you are right now.