Archive for July, 2009
July 31st, 2009 | 
Author: Cover Letters An Important Introduction
Your resume can present your skills education and experience to a possible employer but your cover letter must encourage the perspective employer enough to consider you from hundreds of candidates competing for a particular job opening.
Your cover letter must be a presentation of your qualifications and abilities and must be presented in a professional yet personalized format that says you are serious about getting hired. It is your first chance to make a good impression and makes the hiring manager want to continue to read your enclosed resume.
Do You Really Need a Cover Letter?
You bet that you do! It is the first chance you have to market yourself to a perspective employer. It is the most important way to introduce yourself and give a brief highlight of why you think you are right for the position.
Think about this you would never show up at a perspective employers door uninvited therefore your resume should never just show up on the hiring managers desk without some kind of introduction. Your cover letter is that introduction. Through it you introduce yourself sell your qualifications and show them that you are a strong candidate for the position. You dont put too much information into it just enough to make them interested in learning more about you and what you can offer the company in terms of your abilities and experience.
Cover letters should be created with care. Dont rush it take your time to think through what needs to be mentioned in it and write a draft on paper. Go over it afterwards and edit it for spelling and grammar. You dont want to send a cover letter that is full of errors. Here are some steps to help you create your own cover letter.
Creating a cover letter
1. Get personal
The cover letter should be directed to a specific individual whenever possible. Because many companies recruit for many positions at the same time you should also indicate the position title you are applying for.
2. Why do you want this job?
The cover letter should also say why you are interested in the position. Be clear and get to the point. Cover letters should be specific but concise. The letter should not be more then one page. Perspective employers are not looking for your life history in a cover letter just a brief introduction and overview of your qualifications. Include a few reasons why you think your skills are a good fit for the job and briefly mention the highlights of your career. State your intentions and qualifications. Hiring managers do not want to read a list of skills that have nothing to do with the position you are applying for. They want to see that you have the skills needed to do the job well.
3. Talk about your strengths
Hiring managers want to know why you think you are right for the position. Tell them in a big way by listing some of your major career accomplishments. The point here is to make the best impression that says how much value you can bring to the job. Some examples may include:
Examples:
Increased sales by 93 percent in first quarter.
Renegotiated leases or loans at a reduced interest rate that resulted in a yearly savings of 50000.
Implemented new processes that resulted in savings of 100 manhours.
4. No Negative Information
Never include any negative information or remarks of any kind. Especially about your current or past employers or coworkers. This will turn off the reader and your resume will never get read.
5. Salary and/or Relocation Information
Include this information only if the perspective employer requests it and do not include it on your resume. If requested the cover letter is the place where you should include it or create a separate sheet listing your salary history. Salary is usually negotiated once you become a clear choice for the position. Never ask how much the position pays. The interviewer may ask you what starting salary you are looking for but rarely will tell you how much the position pays until you become a clear choice for the job.
6. Take charge
Make sure that you mention in the cover letter that you are available for a personal interview. Include all your contact information so that the perspective employer has several ways to reach you E.g. email phone cell etc.
A professionally written errorfree cover letter can open the door to your dream job or to a new career and will increase your chances of getting the interview.
About the writer:
Simone Emmons is a human resources professional of 18 years and founder of www.HispanicJobs.com www.AsianJobs.com.
At http://www.hispanicjobs.com http://www.asianjobs.com we provide thousands of job opportunities for bilingual English/Spanish and English/Asianspeaking professionals ranging from entry level to executive level nationwide.
The author has given full permission to publish it either electronically or in print free of charge in its entirety as long as the article content remains unchanged as is published here today and that the authors copyright with resource box are included.
Posted in 
Costing At No Cost
Cost estimation is always a crucial topic in many industries. For converters it may be one of the keys to success or to failure.
The estimation comes into play for several reasons: to prepare production budgets for cost management and to define the prices and to make offers to customers.
Here we want to concentrate our attention on the problem of cost estimation in the cutting business.
We must make distinct considerations according to the material type to be cut.
Materials can be divided into two big categories manmade and natural. It would be possible to make further classifications but these two are enough for our purposes.
The problem with manmade materials
As a first case we deal with manmade materials for which apparently the cost estimate of cutting is easy: the material is usually defectfree and comes in regular shapes typically sheets or rolls of a standard size.
It may be simple to make a rough estimate of the quantity (and therefore the cost) of material needed to fulfil an order but it is important to consider a couple of factors:
- The final products (the cut parts) are hardly differentiated so for a given material the distinguishing points of an offer for a cutting job can only be price and delivery time. Delivery time can be managed since each company has a known average throughput and on the market there are many software products that can manage the production schedule to provide in time the parts to be shipped to the customers.
- Price is a much harder question since it is often the point on which the customers decisions are based. For this reason it is extremely important to have a sound basis to make a price knowing exactly which is the cost of the material needed.
The problem with natural materials
Natural materials such as leather or wood are a completely different story. They come in a wide variety of sizes and shapes and can have defects and holes. Moreover the parts to be cut often have placing constraints (orientation quality and so on) that make much harder to figure out how they can fit on the available piece of material.
There is no way to make a reliable estimate of the quantities to be used on natural materials.
All the available methods are based on mid and longterm statistics that can be helpful only as far as the main features of the material are similar across different batches and the parts to be cut are similar across different articles.
But in a real production environment these conditions are rarely respected and the estimates are always prone to errors and of course the offers based on these estimates are wrong.
The only way to obtain a perfect estimate is to place the parts on the actual material to be cut and then calculate the actual consumption.
The ultimate question
How to make an accurate and reliable estimate quickly and at a reasonable cost?
We propose the ultimate answer to this question: do not estimate the material consumption: get the actual cost before cutting!
And the only way to get the data of the actual placements of parts is to perform the nesting for the whole order on the actual material batch to be cut.
This was almost impossible in the recent past because it was a timeconsuming process and required the availability of a highperformance computer with a (expensive) nesting software. In a few words the automatic nesting for costing purposes was too expensive to be an option.
This is no more true for those companies who use the innovative technology of CUTWEB.
CUTWEB is a webbased application that allows the management and sharing of all the data related to nesting and cutting and provides the access to an online nesting service that uses highperformance nesting strategies finetuned for different scenarios.
A webbased application like Cutweb can be used from any (cheap) internetconnected PC and a nesting server deals with all the calculations getting rid of the need of a inhouse dedicated workstation and of the need to buy a software license for each PC that access to nesting and cutting data.
Costing with CUTWEB becomes a breeze:
- upload the parts and the material data
- upload the order
- start the nesting.
- See the actual material cost
All this can be done quickly and at a negligible cost just a few eurocents for each test so it becomes possible to run as many tests as you need.
In a few minutes the layouts will be calculated and you will see exactly how and where the parts will be eventually cut and get a detailed (and of course customisable) report about the nesting.
You can keep the nesting on CUTWEB as long as you wish and when the order is confirmed by the customer then (and only then) you download it and cut at once since the CUTWEB setup ensures that the downloaded data are compatible with your cutting machine.
The nesting cost is just a few Eurocents you actually pay the nesting service when you download the data needed for the cutting.
There are many benefits that you can achieve organising the work on this way can be summarised in some key points:
- you pay for the nesting service only when the order is confirmed and you download the data for actual cutting
- there is no risk to waste your money on nestings that you will not use in production
- you can prepare precise offers based upon actual material cost not estimations
- you will spend less time and money in the costing and offering process
- higher chance to gain orders owing to the more accurate offerings
- improved overall production efficiency and throughput
The advantages for the control over the material cost
The cost of material plays a capital role in the cutting business and it is crucial to keep it under strict control.
This is especially difficult when dealing with natural and irregular materials because even the basic operations such as the measurement of the area are subject to errors.
The use of an automatic nesting service requires a tool to digitise the materials. These tools are usually a table with one or more digital cameras placed upon it. A specialised software application automatically recognises the contour points and the holes in the material and calculates the actual area and uses the data collected to feed the automatic nesting system.
The advantages of this technology are several:
- It is possible to check if the material billed by the supplier matches the supplied one
- The data of placement yield are accurate
- It is possible to keep under control the material used to cut the orders.
- The advantages for a company with cutting subcontractors.
A company that delegates the cutting to subcontractors can greatly benefit from the CUTWEB technology for many reasons:
- It is possible to have a single interface to manage the communication and data transmission
- The control over the material quantities to be used for cutting is accurate and therefore it is possible to supply to the subcontractors with exactly the materials needed for the parts they must cut and there is no need to rely (or bet) on the efficiency that they can achieve: everything is clear and precise.
Contact information
String Srl
p.za Sraffa 4
20136 Milano Italy
tel: 39 02 58327335
fax: 39 02 58309890
mail: infostring.it
Web: www.string.it
About the writer:
I work for a small and dynamic Italian software house whose mission is to provide innovative and efficient solutions for the nesting and cutting business leveraging the power of the Internet
Cope Up With Financial Urgency With Personal
Personal payday loans are designed in such a manner so that it can give financial support to an individual. And they get mature till his next payday. Generally the term of payday loans varies from 15 days to 20 days but sometimes the lender can extend the term to the subsequent payday at the request of the borrower.
As said personal payday loan is the product of unsecured market fund so there is no need to keep any collateral with the lender. Usually the people not willing to place collateral or who are not in position to place collateral gets attracted towards personal payday loan.
Besides collateral there are certain other factors which make an individual eligible for personal payday loan. They are:
Regular employment
Running bank account
Identity proof
Residence proof
Post dated cheques
In Personal payday loans the lender doesnt ask for collateral but in return of taking such high risk they charge high rate of interest. This is the also reason that why personal payday loans are known as expensive. As personal payday loan is expensive mode to satisfy financial needs so it is suggested that it should be availed when the need is urgent.
Here urgent implies that when there is no other option of finance is left.
Before availing personal payday loan the person must keep his eye open and consider all the clauses and terms of the loan deal. The person should ask the lender for loan quotes which will enable him to compare various offers of personal payday loan deals. Ensure that the loan deal doesnt carry hidden cost because it increases the cost of the loan. The person should always try to avail the loan deal with low annual percentage rate which ease the repayments of loan.
Last but not least take into account whether its repayments suits your pocket or not. Then only go for personal payday loan.
Personal payday loans are available to any person that is whether with good credit score or bad credit score. But it is also sure that the person with good credit score will definitely be offered with competitive rate of interest as compared to the person with poor credit score.
Just to wrap up personal payday loans are the source of fund in emergency need of finance when savings and bank account of person doesnt support him.
About the writer: