Three accountant positions available.

Steve and I are part Native American. The different Native American organizations we belong to send us help wanted notices periodically. Sealaska, a native organization, sent a notice that there are three staff accountant positions available. They give preference to natives, but do hire non-natives routinely. Go to www.sealaska.com career section to apply.

Notes From the Job Search

"The time has come the walrus said, to speak of many things"  As in the blog is moving and will be evolving into a real web page.  You can find us at NotesFromtheJobSearch.com

Branding

I’ve talked about StrengthsFinder and branding a couple of times before and how they interact and how they can help your career.  Recently, I’ve had a couple of my clients who demonstrated what can happen if you ignore them.

Person "A" is a tech writer whose number one strength is “Connectedness” and number two is “Communication.”  His last few gigs have been contracts with increasing levels of isolation, eventually working for a virtual company.  (You know the deal, a “virtual” company is one that has no office.)   In his personal life, this person is completely plugged into his community.  He volunteers with troubled kids, he’s a Veteran and volunteers at VA, etc, etc.  His personal life also works great.  His professional life has slowly been spiraling down with increasing problems and decreasing effectiveness and no explanations; just random non-directed anger.  When he took Strengths Finder, he looked at his strengths and for the first time started to understand what his real needs were.  He recognized that as much as he loves writing (and he does love writing), he needed more in order to be effective. 

Person “B” is an engineer.  He worked for the same company for 10 years coming out of college.  The first two were doing new projects and he was terrific.  Great reviews, bonuses, etc.  His whole team got re-orged into a test role and his performance slowly spiraled down (along with his morale) until he eventually went on a “performance improvement plan”, then finally he quit; with absolutely no plan and no idea how to get one.  When he took the Strengthsfinder test, his number one strength turned out to be “Harmony”.  So in this case we have someone who is all about peacemaking/peace keeping being required to tell people how badly they did. 

I find myself talking more and more about “brand” in my practice and these are a couple of examples of why.  For humans, our brand is that set of work behaviors we do just because we got up.  Not the stuff we try to do, not the stuff we learned.  It is the stuff we always do.  In the two examples above, Person A will be fabulous if he has the kind of contact he needs with the rest of the team.  His last boss got pretty abusive, but even that could well have worked if they had been in the same office.  Person B demonstrated his value doing new projects, and is terrific if he is in a place to build others up.  Both need to understand their brands and make sure that they put themselves in situations that allow them to exercise that “Brand.”

Now that you got the job

Matt Youngquist just published a "Brag" post on his blog and he said some things that are so spot on.  Career Horizons does a terrific job and it's important to recognize that and thank them.  This post takes a minute to ask the newly employed clients of Career Horizons to say thank you and to use their search as a source of growth.  I am hereby forwarding these thoughts to the folks from NFJS that have recently gone to work as well.  The following thoughts are paraphrased from Matt's post:

·        Say "Thank you" to all of the people who have helped you through an amazingly difficult process and time.  Even if the individual was simply an encouraging informational interview.

·        Follow up on all of the opportunities you were pursuing and let them know you are off of the market.  Say "Thank you." for whatever level of consideration they have given you.  Think about the number of times some employer simply dropped off of the map part way through the process and remember not to be like that.

·        Create a "Lessons Learned" document, maybe just notes, but whatever it is, make it something you can refer to over time and use in the future.

·        Remember all of the bad behavior you experienced and make a very focused effort to not repeat any of it.  If you are a hiring manager, work hard to create a process that is respectful of both the candidates and your company and actually addresses the questions that matter to you, your team and your company.

·        Take a breath.  Take a few minutes to be thankful.  If you can take some time off, do so.

Most importantly, congratulate yourself and give the next person the same respect you were looking for when you were on the market.

BeKnown

Watching the various “social networking” sites as they compete with each other is fascinating.  I don’t understand some of it, but then I’m used to some level of confusion much of the time anyway….

Linkedin is now positioning itself as a place to put your best case resume so you will be miraculously found by the employer of your dreams (and live happily after).  

Facebook has added “BeKnown” as the place to do your business networking and where you can post your resume and then have the employer of your dreams discover you, so you can live happily ever after….

Does anyone actually know someone that got recruited off of Linkedin?  I’m a Career Coach and work with between 150 to 200 people a year and have yet to encounter someone who had that happen.  I know that it does occur, it’s just not all that common. 

The challenge is that all of us bring a lot to the table and it is very unusual for all of it to apply to a particular job we’re interested in.  I’m an old guy, so I’ve had a lot of time to wear different hats, including Teacher, Salesman, Developer, IT Manager and now Career Coach and that doesn’t begin to capture my volunteer work.  Turns out I’m not all that unusual in today’s market.  I was told when I was in college that I would likely have 3 distinct careers, my kids were told to expect 7!  So back to Linkedin, Which of those skill sets do I represent?  Which set of accomplishments?  How do I represent them?  How do I capture 50 years of work history in 400 words or less?  For that matter, how would I capture 4 years of college in 400 words or less? 

Linkedin works great for claiming a set of experiences that demonstrate your brand, your core strengths, those things you always do.   It works really well for connecting to your business friends.  It is truly amazing for allowing us to know what those friends are doing today.  I’m not so sure about how good it does as an advertisement. 

Facebook is fabulous at helping us know what our personal friends are doing.  It also has some semi-serious security issues and it includes a connection to that cousin/friend we all have who has a few “boundary issues” and has been known to post the pics from his last trip to BurningMan…..  My point here is that BeKnown becomes a very hard sell, just because Facebook is so successful at creating/documenting personal and family communities.  Job-Hunt.org had some additional thoughts and took the time to post them here.

An additional consideration is the amount of time spent on the computer.  We have all heard that “networking” is the key to your next job, whatever your profession is.  While Linkedin and Facebook (and Biznik and ….) are fabulous at documenting and tracking our network, the primary source of new connections is getting out and meeting people.  I have certainly heard and read about people getting jobs via connections they have made and only made electronically, it just is not been the case for people I have worked with.  I also have yet to meet someone who has told me about this as something that happened to them, so hoping that it will work seems like a very bad percentage play. 

There are tools that we know work: custom resumes, Linkedin connections, letting your friends know you’re looking, volunteering, researching companies and following what they’re doing, etc.  Focusing on these is a full time job, adding a tool with very uncertain value doesn’t look all that exciting.

Networking revisited

We’ve all heard at least one rant about the importance of “networking” and had at least one friend complain about some “insider” getting a job the friend coveted.  What to make of that?

Matthew Powell shared a great post from Harvard Business School (HBS) on the NFtJS Linkedin group recently and when combined with the number of NFtJS participants going back to work, it got me thinking about this process again.   Both of these demonstrate that networking works.  The challenge is to make it work for us.  The Harvard article does about as good a job as we’re likely to encounter laying out the basic technology of networking and who to network with. 

It’s a business school, so they ignore personal values and ethics, but in our lives these are critical.  Attempting to establish a warm relationship with someone you don’t respect is just plain a bad idea.  The number of problems it generates are very difficult to overstate and normally will drive bad outcomes.  So don’t even attempt. 

They also miss what is the single most important element: How to start the conversation, how to initiate the connection. 

How do we (you) start these conversations?  Obviously, there is no single magic question or line that will always get something useful started, anymore than there is a single line that will initiate great relationships with potential life partners.  What I can suggest is an approach:

·         Make the call.  Waiting for someone else to create relationships that your livelihood is dependent on is risky at best and a disaster at worst.  Nothing happens until you pick up the phone and make the call. 

·         Prepare!  Learn what you can about the person, their role and what they are responsible for, then write out your questions ahead of time

·         Pay it forward.  A bit of a cliché, I know, but it works.  While starting a conversation with, “How can I help?” has gotten pretty tired, there are an infinite number of variations and the more research you do, the more relevant and focused your questions can be. Here’s some examples:

o   How long have you been in this position?

o   What successful events occurred that gained you (the promotion, getting hired)?

o   What do you like best about your job?

o   What are your biggest challenges?

o   Where do you think your job function is going in the future?

·         Practice.  There are people for whom this is natural, but that isn’t most of us.  For most of us, we need a lot of practice.

One of the primary points the HBS post makes is that when networking, not all people are created equal.  Through position or personality, some folks do count more than others.  Some people connect more naturally and more often.  In every case of networking for business, we want the biggest bang for our buck and that starts by recognizing that the CEO has more clout than the receptionist.  Don’t discount the receptionist; they can be great resources for understanding a company and great allies in your career, they just aren't the CEO.

One of my clients is an Urban Planner, who had relocated to Seattle from Colorado about three years ago.  When she got here, she didn’t know anyone.  She was following her husband.  She applied to every job she was qualified for and just got no traction.  Eventually she started working with me and we came up with a networking strategy designed to create the local professional relationships she needed, and she started implementing the plan.  She also connected with her network from Colorado, assuming it might pass something back into the Seattle area.  What happened was that her Colorado network did what networks normally do, what every network normally does--they found an opening with someone they knew well; then they passed a resume to this person along with a recommendation, etc. etc. in Colorado.  Guess what happened next…  She got the job.  She got the interview because she used to work with someone who used to work with someone who was hiring.  She got the job because she was qualified AND she had been vouched for by someone the hiring influence knew and trusted.

The point is that “networks” are personal and local and by far the most important part of your job search.  The more you work on them, the more they will work for you.

Job Search as Competition

I was driving in my car and heard the Police song, “I can’t Stand Losing You”.  I’m sure you remember it, there is a section where Sting repeats the line, “I can’t stand losing” about 20 times, might be 30.  Then talks about he’s going to kill himself because he “lost” his girlfriend. 

It got me thinking of how obsessed we have become as a society with “winning” and “losing”.  Everything we do is described in those terms, we even have TV shows that are contests about who can “win” the heart of another.  (Somebody has to watch The Bachelor). 

I have also long understood job search in terms of creating relationships such that the job seeker can reasonably assess whether this is a good situation for them….  A process that echoes courting our future life partners waayyy too closely;  simultaneously, we tend to think of a job interview in terms of “winning” or “losing”, rather than identifying a good “fit”. 

Two stories come to mind:  1)  One of the folks in NFJS was devastated recently because she didn’t even get an interview at a company she had previously worked with and from whom she had glowing reviews.  2)  A very senior resource who was in an interview at Boeing where she had been given the full “Inquisition” style interview.  There were five interviewers, each had specific questions and for this interview at least, there was no interaction allowed.  Every time the candidate asked a question that was even vaguely job related she was rebuked.   Not only was the question not answered, but she was genuinely scolded.  At the end of the interview, they asked, “Do you have any questions?” then, when she started to ask about the job, she was once again reprimanded!  Wow!

In both of these cases, there was this normal but weird mentality that missed a couple of core parts of what creates a good job:  The attraction has to be mutual and it’s not a contest.  Make no mistake, I’m as likely to compete as anyone.  I see something that looks like a fit on paper and I feel like a failure if I don’t get that job!  Never mind that the job description isn’t (or is) related to the actual job; I read 2 paragraphs on Craig’s List and I now “know” that this is “the” job for me!  In the cold light of day it seems pretty silly, kind of like knowing that your “soul mate” is someone you watched as they walked by the coffee shop you were sitting in.   

In his classic book, What Color is Your Parachute, Richard Bolles states that there are five questions that count for the employer and five questions that count for the employee.  Interestingly, only one question relates to skills and both the employer and the employee have the same five questions. 

Thinking about the two people mentioned earlier, the first person assumed the courtship was over because she had worked with them previously.  The second one has absolutely no idea if she would be successful in this Boeing role – actually, Boeing doesn’t either, no matter how proud of their system they might be.  At the end of their interview, there process will allow them to assess is the candidates technical skill set.  Of the five questions, it is the second and it is an exceptionally poor predictor of success. 

The point is that job search isn’t about winning and losing.  It’s about creating sustainable relationships based on several personal attributes as well as job skills.  Finding a good job is about understanding and evaluating those.  For both sides.