Jesse's Do's and Don'ts About Interviewing

So as some of you may know, Jesse has been majoring in Human Resources. We have been greatly blessed in Jesse finding a job with Kinross Gold Corporation where he is doing an internship and working as a Human Resource Generalist. Basically that means that he does a ton of recruiting and interviewing A LOT of people. It's interesting to hear the interviewer's side of the story. So I decided to get Jesse to take notes of the Do's and Don'ts about interviewing. Basically what he notices what people do that are either annoying, impressive, good or bad. So here it is. Hopefully for those who are looking for jobs, you can put this to good use and that it helps.

• Tell me about yourself really means why should we hire you in relation to the position you applied for, not a biography. Focus on your specific competencies that you
have used or gained in past work experiences for this position.

• Give specific answers with details to back up what you say.
Never stray and beat around for an answer. Ask them to
repeat the question to fully answer what they have asked you.

• Employees are looking for a fit, both technically and
personality. Use emotional intelligence to gain an advantage
to match the company culture.

• Every question should be answered in the STAR format:
Situation
Task
Action
Result

• Show up 15 min and walk in 3 min till: Going in too early
puts stress on your potential employer of where to put you
until they are ready.

• Have a positive attitude. Carry humble confidence.

• Don't babble. Recruiters have ADD. They look at resumes
and interview all day long. Try to wow them with a good
relevant work experience that gets their attention.

• Always, always, always have good questions to ask at the end
of the interview. I always ask candidates to tell me
something about the company not found on the Internet;
Wikipedia and Google.

• By all means have fun and WOW them. Remember when
you walk out the door they will judge you for 5 min, and
you want that judgement to be a positive one

If you have any questions about any of these points or would like further explanation you can email me at akn263@gmail.com. I will then forward your questions to Jesse. You can also email me if you want more pointers!

Projects, projects, and more projects...

So since I've been watching too much HGTV I decided to make my own headboard. I've been dying to do it for a long time so I sat down and finally looked it up. It's actually a lot simpler than you would think. I seriously think it took us a total of thirty minutes to complete. The hardest part was picking out the fabric. What you need is...

a designated size of length and width of board. We chose 6' x 2.5' particle board ($8, Lowes). We have a king and wanted to make it the same width as the bed. The 2.5' width is because that was the width that we could fit through the hole to the trunk where we tilted the seats down in our car.

Designated fabric. We went a little more expensive and

got this really nice leather type of fabric ($17 per yard, Hobby Lobby)...

(Update Aug. 25) Batting ($13, Hobby Lobby) we used a Full size quilt batting for this. We just folded it in half and stapled it. Staple gun & staples ($15, Lowes)...

Honestly, the pictures don't do it justice but, Tada!

For no more than $65 (approximately) our bed looks

like a million bucks!!! Minus the new bedspread.

(I tried to brighten the picture so you can see

the pattern of the fabric better. Hope it worked.

Try clicking on it to get a better look)

Obviously Snickers thinks the bed belongs to him. lol

Weather Update

So I realize that I haven't posted anything really since we moved to Washington other than pictures of my cat, Snickers. Sooo, here is the weather update. Life is great. Republic is tiny (I'm pretty sure I've said that multiple times by now) but I am actually doing a lot better with it than I thought. I have lived in an area like this before so it did feel similar if not worse when we finally pulled up to our new house. But ever since we got cable, life could not be better. (ok so it could but I'm good for now). I seriously think that HGTV is on non-stop whenever I wake up. Even when I'm in our office "working" I still have an unobstructed view of the TV. However I mainly have it on for background noise to cover Snickers' snoring (no joke).

Other than TV and working we like to go to Spokane every other weekend. According to Jesse it's about the same size or bigger than Salt Lake City and has a really nice AMC theatre there. It has 20 theatre rooms and we always go there. We also like to go to the malls and there is a temple close by that we were lucky to go visit on our last trip. But here is something really exciting! I finally got my passport in the mail! We can now go to Grand Forks, British Columbia, Canada! They have an A&W there and Jesse has been dying to go ever since we got here. It's a good thing it's only about thirty minutes away. So that will be a trip for sometime next week.

Other really fun stuff is we have begun to paint some of the rooms in our house. It is a rental so we made sure to ask if the landlord wanted to pay for it. Which she did! Woohoo! Can't get much better than that! We just finished the office and boy can I tell you I'm so happy with the new paint color. Here are some before and after pictures.

I don't know if you can tell in the pictures but the walls (including the side boards and ceiling) were a light turquoise-ish, kind of a baby blue and the closet/window sill was a lavender purple. Plus on the right wall in the picture above, someone tried to sponge paint the purple over the blue. Not only did it look like a five year old's room, but I kept expecting a unicorn to pop out of the closet any minute. That, plus it looked like the unicorn barfed on the wall too. This is what it looks like now.

We painted the walls pebble gray and repainted the side boards, ceiling, closet, and window white. It looks so much better. It's clean, looks bigger and is now a more pleasing color. Our next painting project will be the kitchen. That one will take us a little more time as it consists of taking wallpaper down. If you know of some easy or simple ways to take wallpaper down, please let me know. I'm pretty sure that it wasn't applied directly to the drywall, or at least here's hoping.

Two Computers of the Same Size. Same Cat of Two Very Different Sizes

Sept 2010 (9 months old, 4 lbs)


Aug 2011 (1 year 9 month, 20 lbs)

Moving

WE MADE IT!!! We have moved to Washington! To be exact? The middle of nowhere. Like seriously. But it is BEAUTIFUL country up here. I mean, coming from Utah, I'm used to mountains. But here, they are green mountains and they are breath taking. Hopefully I can find my camera amongst all the boxes and take pictures to make you all jealous. It was a pretty fun trip. Snickers was amazing. He slept the whole way here. Unpacking the UHaul wasn't bad at all. We had it all unloaded in about an hour and a half. And that was just Jesse and I. The only time we had an issue was when we were trecking up the side of a mountain and about to run out of gas. lol. It was actually the last leg of the trip. If the last 15 miles hadn't been down hill, I don't think we would have made it into town.

One super fun thing about where we are living is we are 30 min away from the Canadian border which also means that is where the closes town is. lol. I'm currently waiting for my passport to come in the mail. The sooner the better. We're already planning a trip to Vancouver! It's gonna be so much fun. Jesse's dad has always wanted to come to Washington as well as Canada, so we're hoping he might want to join us on our trip.

Another fun thing about moving here is we are renting a house!!! It was a little bit on the smaller side so it was a bit of a shock but we are getting used to it. It's so nice being able to watch a movie and not have to worry about annoying our neighbors! In fact, we just watched all of the Twilight movies. Yes, yes, I know. But I mean, come on. We just moved to a little town in Washington. I think I understand what Bella was going through a little better. lol Something that is nice about living in a smaller community is that you can walk everywhere. Today I walked to sign up for all of our Utilities.

Doctor Update

So I guess I should let you all know what happened at my doctor visit. Not too much. We talked to one of the mini doctors. You know, the ones who aren't the actual specialist but works with the specialist hoping to become a specialist themselves. Anyway, we talked to him after they checked me out a little and explained that they wanted to do more tests. I was like yeah ok that sounds good. That is until I learned exactly what they were going to do.

Now I guess I can let you know the exact type of problem I have. I get way too many bladder infections. If you want to stop reading, be my guest. You can skip to my post about our move. If you've already read that, well go read it again. So anyway, what exactly they wanted to do was a Cystoscopy. Yeah it's hard for me to pronounce too. Basically it's where they stick a camera in a not very nice place and take a look around at things. That happened this last Monday (which was supposed to happen the Friday before but schedules kept getting mixed up.) So I went and did that on Monday. Don't let anyone tell you it doesn't hurt. Cause it does. Really, really badly.
Results from the procedure showed that there was nothing weird hiding in there. I didn't have a weird African fungus lurking about. But apparently my Urethra is shorter than normal and it is set back. I don't really know what that means either. Let's just say it made it very difficult for the doctor to find it. They also did an ultrasound of my kidneys and they checked out fine. So apparently I'm just extremely unlucky when it comes to getting these infections.

But here is the kicker about all of this. After the Cystoscopy, multiple ultrasounds, paying bookue bucks and other stuff, what the doctor "prescribes" me is water. Drink more water. Apparently I should start going to the bathroom about six times a day and once at night. Isn't that ridiculous? Is there anyone who even does that on a normal basis? Now however stupid this all seems and dumb that we had to pay a doctor so much just to tell me drink more water, at least that's all he had to tell me.

Someone really did say Washington...

Guess what, guess what, guess what! Jesse got a job!!! WOOOHHOOOOOO!!!! And believe it or not but it's in Washington! lol, it's not the same job that he interviewed for earlier in the year. The company is Kinross, and is one of the top gold mining companies in the world. Jesse will be working in the HR Department (Human Resources, like Toby on "The Office"). We're super, super excited about it. One downside is we have to be there in two weeks. lol. We still haven't found housing yet. Part of that issue is, it's a very small community (950 people) so it's hard to find a place that is for rent instead of sale. But I'm sure we'll find something. Jesse is super excited for it. Mainly because we're finally beginning to transition out of the student life and finally starting a career. Now, technically the job is only an internship but we are really hoping that it'll translate into a Full time job.

In other news, some of you may know that I have some serious issues with a certain type of infection that I'll keep unknown. They just never seem to leave me alone and go away! But I'm finally going to a specialist! We've been greatly blessed by finding out that I'm still on my dad's insurance. Apparently it's something to do with the changes Obama made with his Obama Care. I'll just say, Obama you finally did something right. But, in the words of my brother, it's more like he's finally done something that's to my benefit. lol. The appointment is today and quite frankly, I'm a bit terrified. I've never been to the doctor for something serious. It's just been for the general check up and all of that. Hopefully there's nothing wrong with me. Jesse tries to make me feel better as well as tease me by saying I have a rare African fungus that just needs a special medication. I hope it's just that I need a certain medication, I don't think I want the rare African fungus. But keep us in your thoughts while we move and pray I don't have a rare African fungus!