Neil Wadhwa | FreshGigs.ca

Author Archives: Neil Wadhwa

Avoid these 3 Common Freelancing Mistakes

Avoid these 3 Common Freelancing Mistakes

The traditional workplace is gone. All hail the era of freelancers.

People are making the jump from traditional office settings to freelancing full-time in droves. The appeal of breaking away from the shackles of your desk, limited vacation time, and management, to becoming your own boss and having all the freedom freelancing provides is certainly appealing. But it’s not all flowers and sunshine—working as a freelancer full-time does come with challenges.

If you don’t freelance at the moment, or freelance part-time and are thinking of making the leap to freelancing full-time, there are a few things you need to be prepared for that new freelancers often overlook. Here are three common mistakes made by those new to freelancing, with a little help from Brennan Dunn, author of The 5 Most Common Mistakes New Freelancers Make.

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4 Ways to Eliminate Workday Stress

4 Ways to Eliminate Workday Stress

Feeling frazzled on a Friday? Workplace stress is a real thing—your inbox being flooded with emails, the constant deadlines, pop-up projects, meetings, and even your commute to-and-from the office all add to weight on your shoulders. It’s easy to see why your workplace might just be the perfect stress-creating environment.

In order to stay sane, and to enjoy the work you’re doing, you need to be able to flick the stress on/off switch to “off.” Here are four ways to eliminate stress at your workplace, with insights from Minda Zetlin, author of 6 Surefire Ways to Eliminate Stress During the Workday.

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4 Words You Need to Drop from Your Vocabulary

4 Words You Need to Drop from Your Vocabulary

At a time when written and verbal conversation has taken a tumble, it’s important that you know how to tighten up your vocabulary when it matters: on your resume, in presentations, in interviews, and in client meetings.

Eliminating certain words from your vocabulary—words that are vague, repetitive, unnecessary, or “fluffy”—helps your writing become clearer and improves your conversational skills. With that in mind, here are 4 words you need to immediately drop from your vocabulary, with a little help from Jennie Haskamp, author of 15 Words You Need to Eliminate From Your Vocabulary to Sound Smarter.

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Make the Most Out of Your Day With These 5 Time Management Tips

FG Time Management

We all have those friends. You know, the ones that work a full-time job, have side-gigs, blog constantly, volunteer, and have a booming social life. How do these people find the time to do so much?

Here’s the thing: everyone has 24 hours in a day to work with. The difference between someone who can fit in a lot, and be productive while doing so, versus someone who struggles to complete only a handful of things, is proper time management.

Proper time management lets you be more organized, efficient, and calm—amongst many other benefits. Best of all, you’ll find yourself with a full and productive day, crossing things off of your “to-do” checklist with no problems. Here are five time management tips that you can take to the bank as outlined in Tikva Morrow’s article 7 Time Management Tricks That Keep Expert Multi-Taskers Sane.

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5 Tips to Writing a Resume That Will Land You a Job

5 Tips to Writing a Resume That Will Land You a Job

We’ve covered five tips to writing a killer cover letter, now it’s time to switch gears and discuss five tips to writing a killer resume that’ll land you a job.

Writing a resume involves fitting your entire work experience onto a one-page piece of paper. As you’re well aware, it’s not easy. What makes writing a resume even harder isn’t the simple act of what to include on the resume, but rather how you should phrase and organize your inclusions in a manner that will appeal to hiring managers to ultimately land you an interview and get you a job.

With that in mind, there are five tips to writing a killer resume:

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Take These 4 Things Off Your Resume Immediately

Get These 4 Things off of Your Resume Immediately

Struggling to find space on your resume to fit some key details and accomplishments? It might be time for a resume cleanup.

There may be a lot of items on your resume that were relevant six years ago, but are no longer relevant for what jobs you’re applying for in 2015 that can simply be removed. There are also items that need to be refreshed in order to make you look more professional.

Here are a few things you need to clean up or take off your resume immediately:

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5 Tips to Writing a Killer Cover Letter

How to Write a Cover Letter FreshGigs

It’s Resume Month! Check back every week to see how you can increase your chances of landing a job by improving your resume and cover letter—it’s resumes, and resumes only, for this month!

The cover letter: a source of misery and confusion for job seekers everywhere.

It’s not easy writing cover letters. No matter how many times you write a cover letter, there’s really never any certainty what you’ve written is what the hiring manager is looking for—or that the hiring manager is even taking the time to read your cover letter to begin with.

With that in mind, let’s keep it simple (the first point of this post) and dive right into it. Here are five tips to writing a killer cover letter:

1. Keep It Simple, Stupid (K.I.S.S.)

Think about how many applications a hiring manager has to sort through for each posted job opening. It’s a never-ending wave, and this means each resume might have only a few seconds to make a real impact with a hiring manager before it gets tossed aside. Knowing this, you need to make sure your cover letter is simple and straight to the point. Don’t write too much, otherwise your cover letter will look like a daunting wall of text to the hiring manager and won’t get the attention it deserves.

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Everything You Need to Know About Styling Your Resume

Styling a Resume FreshGigs

It’s Resume Month! Check back every week to see how you can increase your chances of landing a job by improving your resume and cover letter—it’s resumes, and resumes only, for this month!

Noticed a job posting that you’re thinking of applying to? Chances are that the job posting has been noticed by hundreds of other curious candidates too, and the process for each candidate is the same: apply through email, or apply through a website. Unless you know the hiring manager personally, the only way to stand out from the crowd is through a well-designed resume.

If you’re a graphic designer, chances are you already have a resume that’s well designed, but for all other professions, a traditional resume (designed in Word or InDesign) is what you’re working with. And while resumes for other professions can have elements of graphic design associated with them (e.g. a resume geared for the advertising industry might lean towards the creative side), normally the customization is limited to bolding, underling, and italicizing.

Your resume serves a specific purpose, and that’s to get noticed by the hiring manager. As a result, you need to strategically customize your resume with the limited number of tools you have available in order grab the hiring manager’s attention—too much customization and your key points will all blend into one another, too little customization and your resume will be flat and boring.

Here’s everything you need to know about styling your resume:

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The 9 to 5: Milton Kiang, Professional Resume Writer

Milton Kiang for FreshGigs

Welcome to The 9 To 5, our ongoing series where we highlight and interview creative professionals doing great things. Today’s profile is on Milton Kiang, Professional Resume Writer.

It’s also Resume Month! Check back every week to see how you can increase your chances of landing a job by improving your resume and cover letter—it’s resumes, and resumes only, for this month!

Milton Kiang for FreshGigs1. How did you end up focusing on professional resume writing after attaining a law degree?

I practiced as a lawyer right after obtaining my law degree. I articled and practiced with a downtown Vancouver law firm, then traveled overseas to work in Hong Kong.

While in Hong Kong, I obtained qualifications as a Hong Kong solicitor, and worked at Intel’s Asia legal department. After practicing for about 10 years, I wanted to do something different, so I became a legal recruiter (i.e. a headhunter) specializing in recruiting lawyers for in-house, law firm associate and partner positions.

As a legal recruiter, I reviewed and screened hundreds of resumes. Often times, I would correct or update applicant resumes. I knew what my clients (i.e. employers) were looking for in job candidates, but I found that many of the resumes did not emphasize the applicants’ biggest selling points. So with the candidates’ permission, I would make “tweaks” to their resumes. After making these adjustments, candidates would get calls from the employers for interviews. This is when I knew I had a knack for helping job candidates write good resumes.

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10 Beautifully Designed Resumes For Your Inspiration

FreshGigs Resume Design

It’s Resume Month! Check back every week to see how you can increase your chances of landing a job by improving your resume and cover letter—it’s resumes, and resumes only, for this month!

Putting together your resume, but tired of the drab and traditional Microsoft Word layout you’ve been using? We’ve scoured the internet to find 10 of the best looking resumes that you can use for inspiration to help with your own resume design and layout. Keep in mind that you don’t have to stick to Microsoft Word when building your resume—use Photoshop or InDesign and save your file as a PDF!

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