If you are starting the interview process as a new employer you will soon find that it is extremely difficult to gauge the suitability of a candidate in the 30minutes or so that you have with them during an interview. Traditional interviews allow you to judge what kind of first impression a person makes. This is especially important if you are recruiting for a sales or heavily customer facing role because the employee will be meeting new people constantly and need to come across well. They also allow you to see how well the candidate can articulate themselves which is very important when you require someone with good communication skills.

However, there will always be a measure of the candidate trying to give the answers that they think you want to hear. Just because someone ticks all the boxes in the interview room it doesn’t necessarily mean that they will make a good personality fit with your business.  Try and think outside of the box when it comes to planning the content of your interview. Here are a couple of tips:

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I consider myself a salesman and as one I suffer greatly from not being able to talk about me all the time. I talk about my clients, the benefits of my services and products to them but not a word about me.

Couple days ago, Mark Bell, a friend of mine and a fellow blogger posted an article revealing some facts about himself, few of my fellow blog pack friends have follwed and I also decided that I will talk about myself once for a change

So here they are, 10 things you probably don’t know about me.

• I learnt to play doublebass and studied classical composition although I never obtained an academic qualification. I worked as a musician for 11 years. I also released 12 albums, two with my band and 10 as a solo artist. I stopped performing live in 2004 and left music altogether in 2009. I have a discogs page and my band has its own myspace fan page.
• I published two books of poetry inspired by Ezra Pound.
• My favorite writer is Dylan Thomas and his Under Milk Wood is a book that always gets me through tough times
• I studied philosophy at the University of Gdansk, Poland. I completed a 5 year course but I left Poland before writing my thesis. I doubt I will ever go back to finish it.

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Corbett Barr is one of the most fascinating people on the internet and I am not alone in this opinion.

He is a guy who has made it in the corporate America but left it to pursue his dreams of freedom. In just 18 months he has built a boosting online business and on top of that, he now shares his experiences and knowledge through his two blogs, Free Pursuits and Think Traffic.

On top of that he has just launched a complete step-by-step ethical course on affiliate marketing for beginners. He actually guarantees that you’ll make your first sale from affiliate marketing if you go through the course, and if you don’t make $1000 with it, well, he hasn’t done his job right.

You can enroll on a course by following this link and for the next two days the price is slashed by half (well worth it!) but before you head off to book in, find out more about Corbett and the way he runs his business from this short interview.

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I truly admire Sharon. Not only she successfully runs her own business, started and writes for one of my favorite blogs, Get Paid to Write Online but also achieved the highest level of self employed freedom – location independence. Her passion is her work and she can do it from wherever she likes to, something I am dreaming of myself.

Sharon is also one of the most succesfful writers I know and I am delighted to present to you a short conversation I had with her about self employment, her career and some secrets of her success.

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Today I am starting a series of posts featuring newly self employed people.

I think it’s sometimes good to see the first steps of others, what problems they encounter, mistakes they made, successes they had and how they try to grow their business.

The first profile is of Craig Lloyd from Cycle Send It.

Less than a year ago Craig started a bicycle courier company in Belfast, Northern Ireland. It may be hard to believe for many of you, living in places filled with such businesses but he is the first and as far as I know still the only bike courier in the city.

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