How to Conduct a Job Interview

Recruiting new talent and conducting job interviews can be a daunting task for those without experience. The recruitment process takes time, energy, and a lot of administrative work, and conducting the interview itself can feel just as nerve-wracking for you as for your applicants.

But the process doesn’t have to be so daunting or arduous. With the help of the right recruitment software and some interview preparation, you can recruit top-level talent and conduct killer job interviews relatively stress-free.

So if you want to conduct a smooth-sailing job interview, stick with us, as we tell you exactly how to do it.

The Easy Parts of Conducting a Job Interview

Even if you’re not a particularly social person, the easiest part of conducting a job interview is that you have common ground with the applicant–you already work for your company, and they want to. That gives you a good starting point.

You get to share your passion for your line of work, the company’s goals and values, and paint an ideal picture of the job role to new candidates. Furthermore, you get to be a part of shaping the future of the company by choosing which candidate brings the most to the table.

Recruitment can be an arduous process at times, but with the right tools it doesn’t need to be. Breezy HR is an end-to-end recruiting solution designed to help you attract and hire top-level talent efficiently and stress-free. Breezy HR provides you all the tools you need to recruit, organize, and keep in touch with all your candidates.

The Difficult Parts of Conducting a Job Interview

When it comes to conducting a successful job interview, preparation is key, particularly when it comes to formal interviews with a multi-step…

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The Beginners Guide to Exempt vs Non-exempt Employees

There are two types of employees in the US—exempt and non-exempt. Failure to correctly classify employees can lead to serious compliance issues and fines for a business.

If you’re struggling to understand the difference between exempt and non-exempt employees, you’ve come to the right place.

This guide contains everything you need to know about classifying your employees so you can pay them properly and remain compliant.

What Are Exempt and Non-Exempt Employees?

All employers must classify employees as either exempt or non-exempt. The classification typically depends on:

  • How much an employee is paid
  • How an employee is paid (salary vs. hourly wages)
  • The type of work an employee does

The term “exempt” refers to overtime, and it’s the easiest way to understand the difference between these two classifications. Exempt employees are paid a salary and not entitled to overtime. Non-exempt employees are paid hourly wages and entitled to overtime pay.

The Basics of Exempt vs. Non-Exempt Employees

While the basic concepts of exempt and non-exempt employees are straightforward, you need to understand many other factors. The following section will break down the core components of exempt vs. non-exempt employees.

Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA)

The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) is a US labor law originally published in 1938. It defines the federal minimum wage, overtime rules, child labor rules, and other labor standards to protect employees and how they’re paid.

According to FLSA, employees in the United States must be paid a minimum of $7.25 per hour. This is known as the federal minimum wage, and an employee can be paid this or any number above it.

Non-exempt employees who work over 40 hours in a week are entitled to overtime pay at a rate of at least one and a half times their regular pay. FLSA…

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Rocket Lawyer Review of Business Formation Services – 2021

Rocket Lawyer is one of the most popular and reputable online legal services in the U.S.

The platform is best known for its extensive library of legal documents, forms, and contract templates. It’s a quick, easy, and affordable way for anyone to get legal advice from qualified attorneys.

Rocket Lawyer also provides business formation services for LLCs, C-corps, S-corps, and nonprofits in all 50 states.

Since launching in 2008, more than 20 million people have used Rocket Lawyer’s legal services. Is Rocket Lawyer right for you and your business? Continue reading to find out.

Sign up for Rocket Lawyer today.

Rocket Lawyer Business Formation Services

Rocket Lawyer offers a wide range of services for individuals and businesses alike. From estate planning to lease agreements and divorce settlements, they have legal documents and attorney services for basically any category you can think of.

For the purposes of this guide, we’re going to focus on the business formation services offered by Rocket Lawyer. These formation services can be segmented into three main categories—LLC services, incorporation services, and registered agent services.

We’ll take a closer look at each one to help you determine if Rocket Lawyer is right for you.

Rocket Lawyer LLC Services

If you’re starting an LLC and want to avoid the hefty costs associated with hiring a traditional lawyer, Rocket Lawyer is a cost-effective alternative.

Getting started is easy. Just answer a handful of simple questions about your business, and Rocket Lawyer will handle all of the paperwork for you. They’ll also take care of the LLC filing on your behalf.

Once the process is complete, you’ll be able to access the LLC documents from your Rocket Lawyer account. Hard copies will be sent to you as well.

Another benefit of…

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The Beginners Guide to Reference Check Questions

Reference check questions, as mundane as they might seem at first glance, can ultimately help you avoid a terrible contract or a bad hire. Taking the time to follow through by asking the right questions is one step toward a better hiring outcome.

It can be hard to know what questions to ask because a lot of it depends on context and experience. In this guide, we walk through the basics of asking good reference questions, the tools you can use to improve your reference checks, and ways to ask better questions regardless of who you’re talking to. Let’s start with the basics.

What Are Reference Check Questions?

Put simply, once a job-seeking candidate hands you a list of professional or personal contacts, you can reach out to those people to ask questions that’ll give you less biased information about that candidate. The better reference questions you ask, the better insight you’re able to gather about your job candidate. This way, you’re able to make the right choice when you’re trying to decide who is the best fit for the job.

The Basics of Reference Check Questions

Once you break down reference questions into a few key components, you’ll be able to run a successful reference check for any potential hire. Here are some considerations to note as you prepare to run reference checks:

Clear Consent

Before you pick up the phone and start contacting anyone, it’s good practice to ensure your potential hire knows you are reaching out to their references.

You can do this in a variety of ways. You can contact the candidate directly by phone or email to let them know you’ll be reaching out to their references within the next few days. Or you can include a spot in your job…

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The Beginners Guide to PTO Policies

Regardless of your business type or industry, everyone needs a break. If employees are working around the clock 52 weeks per year, they’ll suffer from burnout, and the work will suffer along with them.

That’s why companies need to create good paid time off (PTO) policies.

The best PTO policies attract and retain top-level talent while ensuring your staff has an outstanding work-life balance. This keeps everyone happier and more focused when they’re on the job.

What Are PTO Policies?

PTO stands for paid time off.

Rather than having separate categories for vacation, sick time, and other personal needs, PTO groups all time away from work into a single category.

PTO policies offer more flexibility and privacy to employees as well. Instead of accrued sick time going to waste, employees can use that time for a long weekend or personal day at any point throughout the year—as long as it falls within the policy rules.

In short, a company PTO policy defines the rules for how employees can take time off of work.

The Basics of PTO Policies

Before you implement a PTO policy, it’s essential to have a firm grasp of your options. We’ll take a closer look at the core components of PTO policies below.

Types of PTO Policies

Every business is different, so PTO policies will vary across the board. With that said, most PTO policies fall into one of three categories:

  • PTO Banks — PTO banks offer employees a certain amount of paid time off per year that employees can use for any purpose. There’s no difference between a sick day, vacation day, or personal day.
  • Traditional Time Off — Traditional time off policies separate work leave reasons into different categories. For example, companies might offer ten vacation days, six sick days, and four personal…

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How to Create a Job Ad

Creating job ads is a necessary part of running a business, and some owners and managers find the process tricky.

Knowing how to summarize your position and hook in the right talent can be challenging.

Our guide will show you how to create an outstanding job advertisement that will inspire suitable candidates to apply.

The Easy Parts of Creating a Job Ad

At first, creating a job ad might seem like you have a mountain to climb.

You have to focus on the critical parts of the position and compete for top talent in an increasingly competitive job market.

How do you even begin?

The good news is that creating a job ad doesn’t have to be as trying as you think. For instance, you may worry about where you’ll post your job ad in the first place.

There are so many ways to reach potential candidates these days. It becomes far more manageable if you know what you’re doing. Using sites like LinkedIn and Indeed helps you reach a vast pool of talent, and there are others, too.

Not to mention dedicated recruiting software. Recruiting software is an up-to-date and easy way to hire top-level talent. For example, the software helps you post open positions across multiple job boards with the click of a button.

Tools also help schedule interviews for every applicant and take a lot of manual work out of the process.

Whether you’re a small team or a larger company, recruiting software can help. Some of the best software, such as Breezy HR, offers unlimited job listings.

Pricing for Breezy HR starts at $143 per month and goes up to $399 per month on the highest plan. Annual pricing includes two months for free.

We…

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The Complete Guide to Project Management Process

At its core, project management is all about execution. From small projects to large, complex, and everything in between, proper execution comes down to following the right process.

Project managers need to do much more than just remind their teams about deadlines and upcoming meetings—they must have a firm grasp of the entire project life cycle.

This guide will dive into the different phases and processes of a project. It will ultimately help beginners and experienced project managers alike improve their management skills and deliver better results.

What is the Project Management Process?

There are lots of different project management methodologies. But regardless of the method in place, all projects have two things in common—projects are completed in phases and follow an established process through each stage.

According to the Project Management Institute (PMI), there are five project management processes:

  1. Project Initiation
  2. Project Planning
  3. Project Execution
  4. Project Monitoring and Controlling
  5. Project Closing

Understanding these systematic elements as a whole will help project managers determine what must be accomplished before moving to the next stage in the process.

4 Tools to Improve Your Project Management Process

The best project managers rely on tools to ensure the project management process runs smoothly. Whether you’re a complete beginner or experienced manager, these are the top tools that you should take into consideration:

#1 — Zoho Projects

Zoho Projects is one of the most powerful and flexible project management tools on the market today. It’s used throughout projects for construction, marketing, software development, education, consulting, testing, real estate, and a wide range of other industries. The software has everything you could possibly need to manage the project life cycle and collaborate with your team, regardless of…

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The Complete Guide to Project Management Resumes – 2021

Creating a resume can be a pain. How can you possibly highlight your entire career and all your skills, experience, qualifications, credentials, and potential on a sheet or two of paper?

According to Glassdoor, the average hiring manager or recruiter spends just six seconds reviewing a resume. That’s right—six seconds!

That’s why learning how to craft the perfect project management resume is an invaluable skill. If you’re having trouble getting interviews or callbacks based on your resume alone, you’ve come to the right place. Whether you’re a project management beginner or have decades of experience, I’ll teach you how to write a resume that fast-tracks you through the hiring process.

Why You Need a Strong Project Management Resume

The average corporate job listing attracts 250 resumes. But just four to six of those applicants will be called in for an interview, and only one person will land the job.

Your project management resume needs to stand out from the crowd to increase your chances of being within the 2% of applicants who get an interview.

Even if your skills and experience are unmatched and you’re the best possible candidate for the position, it won’t matter if you can’t convey that information properly on a resume. On the flip side, you might be underqualified for certain project management roles. But with the right resume, you’ll stand out against other project managers with more experience than you.

5 Ways to Improve Your Project Management Resume

Whether you’re starting from scratch or just want to touch up your existing resume, these are some of the best ways to stand out to hiring managers and recruiters. These five strategies will take your project management resume to the next level.

#1 — Add Relevant Keywords

In the modern business environment, most…

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WordPress Errors Beginner’s Guide – 2021 Update

In a perfect world, your WordPress site will always run smoothly and never have any problems. But like every webmaster, you’ll quickly discover that the world we live in is far from perfect—WordPress errors are inevitable.

Fortunately, these issues don’t need to be a significant setback or area of concern. There are plenty of WordPress debugging tools and solutions to help with WordPress errors.

As someone who has been operating multiple WordPress sites for years, I’ve had my fair share of experiences with bugs and errors. I created this guide to help you address those issues and solve common WordPress problems as quickly as possible.

What are WordPress Errors?

There are countless potential WordPress errors that any website might experience at one point or another. Generally speaking, these errors can be segmented into three main categories—notices, warnings, and fatal errors.

Notices typically indicate an area for improvement but don’t necessarily mean that something is wrong. Warnings are a bit more serious, and fatal errors indicate that something much more significant and harmful is happening.

Themes, plugins, custom codes, and updates are just a few of the potentially dozens of causes associated with WordPress errors.

5 Tools to Improve WordPress Errors

WordPress has some built-in debugging tools and ways to identify errors. But beyond that, it’s helpful to use other tools and resources to fix WordPress errors. These are the five that I recommend:

#1 — Liquid Web

Liquid Web is an industry leader in the managed web hosting category. They provide VPS hosting, dedicated servers, and cloud servers for websites seeking premium services. With Liquid Web, you’ll get enterprise-grade managed WordPress hosting that’s been modified to accommodate small and mid-sized businesses.

What makes Liquid Web so great compared to…

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The 9 Best Customer Service Software Solutions – 2021 Review

Want to jump straight to the answer? The best customer service software for most people is Hubspot and LiveAgent

Customer service software makes sure your customers are happy and satisfied with your business.

And customers make or break your success.

Happy customers keep coming back and spending more money, while unsatisfied customers will cause significant damage to your reputation.

That’s why customer service must be a priority for every business.

Fortunately, the right customer service software can make this possible. Customer service solutions help ensure fast response times, positive interactions, and happy customers.

The 9 Best Customer Service Software of 2021

  1. HubSpot — Best free customer service software and product bundles
  2. LiveAgent — Best customer service software for live chat support
  3. Monday.com — Best for continually supporting accounts
  4. Freshdesk — Best customer service software if you’re switching from another platform
  5. Gorgias — Best integration with ecommerce platforms
  6. Zoho Desk — Best customer service software for ticketing
  7. Zendesk — Best customer service software with support suite options available
  8. Groove — Best customer service software for small teams and startups
  9. Help Scout — Best customer service software for nonprofits

It’s tough to find a good customer service software. There’s many options available on the market. But some of these tools are significantly better than others.

After researching and testing dozens of customer service solutions, I’ve narrowed down the top eight for you to consider.

As we continue you through this guide, I’ll give you an in-depth review of each one below. You’ll learn about the top features, benefits, use cases, pricing, and more.

Best Customer Service Software Reviews

#1 – HubSpot – The Best Free Customer…

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