Boring Resumes

I had a fascinating discussion with one of my clients last week. It helped me understand in a new way one of the pieces in the resume selection process. This particular client (he’s a “ C” level guy) had at one point used someone from The Ladder's to evaluate his resume. The feedback he got included a variety of things. The piece that caught my attention was a complaint about using the word “developed” on his resume, as in, “Developed and implemented yada yada yada”.  Apparently this particular reviewer has seen that word more than they want.  Actually, my guy reported that he had received a rant advocating the removal of this word from the English language.  What I got from this wasn't so much that the word doesn't belong on resumes, but that this reviewer had seen it a lot and it had started to bug him.

Remembering that the primary purpose of a resume is getting an interview and how very convoluted the path to that has become, it caused me to add another wrinkle.  Your resume can’t be boring.  Isn’t that just crazy?  How the heck are you supposed to do that?  How can you know that you’ve achieved it?  Of course you know that I wouldn’t be writing a blog post if I didn’t have some ideas. 

Part one is to find a variety of ways to describe your accomplishments and your behavior.  For example, if you are a writer, then you are (of course) paid to write, and the temptation to start most of your bullet points with the word “Wrote” will be substantial.  What this feedback tells us is that we need to find synonyms.  How about, “composed” or “created” or “developed” or “built”?  Each of these has a slightly different meaning than “wrote”, but each would be appropriate in its own situation.   Instead of, “Wrote help documentation for health care related web system.”  Use “Built and deployed help documentation for a health care related web system.”

Part two is building your own semi-formal “style guide” and starting with a rigid requirement to limit the use of any single word to two iterations.  This means when you find yourself using some specific word more than two times, you search out a synonym. 

Part three is recognizing that the highest percentage play in job search is networking, not internet applications.  If a friend passes your resume to a hiring influence, then that bored “screener” never sees it.  It also changes the focus of the whole hiring process from “How can we screen this person out?” to “How well can this person do the job?”

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.

Social Networking Tools

I have to admit I personally have a mixed relationship with these tools.  I am a blogger, have an active presence on Linkedin, at least a minimum presence on Facebook and have had a twitter account for a few years, but haven’t created my own web page, and while I set up a twitter account 3 years ago, I doubt that I’ve posted a dozen tweets.  My Facebook is family facing, not business.  Well, you get the idea I think.  One of the participants in NFJS is a Social Media Coach/Mentor (Cheryl Richmond) and just an incredible resource and talent.  She is starting to get me focused on this and provided some basic guidelines that make a lot of sense.

Let’s start with an inventory:

●      Linkedin – Must have for a job seeker, this is the key location for defining your “Brand”.  It is a hub for business contacts and activities built around that brand.

●      Facebook – Might be very important for a job seeker about half a step down from Linkedin.  Primarily set up to connect people with each other on a personal level.  With that in mind, it still needs to reflect your brand.  Can be a huge time suck and there are privacy and security issues.

●      Twitter – Optional.  It is an “in-real-time” communications tool that can extend your network while making it much more responsive.  It can also be an amazing time suck.

●      Blog – Optional.  Works great if you have ideas that are relevant to your brand, but can kill you if you drift.

●      Biznik – Useful if you are an independent contractor looking at getting some level of b2b stuff going.

●       “MyPersonalDomain”  Whatever you choose this to be, from a web page to a blog to some kind of store.

●      Geolocation sites like Foursquare or Gowalla:  These provide physical location information with the goal of connecting people in a location.  There are specific situations where these can be useful, but they come with additional cautions

●      Etc.  – there are a huge number of other tools that fall under this category from MySpace to Picasa to Yelp to Meetup.    Any one of these can provide value and that value will vary on an almost infinite array of things.  The challenge with some of these (think MySpace) is that you create a permanent presence with them whether you intend it or not.  That Frat Party you went to in the 90s and that you friends posted on MySpace?  It’s still out there.

I’m sure I’m missing a ton of stuff, but even if I knew what they all were, as of May 2011, this is a great list to start with.

 

There are also some principles that need to be implemented across your internet profile:

●      As much as possible, create one consistent brand.  So use the same picture for every profile you own, represent yourself as the same person with the same skills in every profile.

●      Be prudent.  If you are looking for a job as the Pastor of a church, work as hard as you can to eliminate the pictures of you at the Atheist Convention.

●      Be safe, or at least try.  Control your permissions on all of these tools, organize your contacts/friends into relevant groups.  The Rugby Team and the Rose Garden Club will probably not understand each other or how you could belong to both, so keep them separate.

●      Set up your public profile to reinforce itself from every window.  If you claim to be a “Team Builder” in Linkedin, then your Facebook should feature people beyond yourself.

In very general terms each has a primary purpose (in the context of job search), so what are they?

●      Linkedin is central.  Define your brand here, get a good picture that you recognize, fill out a complete profile.  Focus of your contacts is business connections, but the line is not rigid.

●      Facebook, this is almost as important, but the focus is more towards family and friends.  Use the same picture as Linkedin and consider your brand as you build out your network and fill out your profile.  Be respectful of your contacts when playing the various games.  Don’t spam; accidentally or on purpose!

●      Twitter, use the same consideration when creating your profile, but then remember that this is a real time communication tool.  While Linkedin and Facebook are fundamentally static, there is nothing static about Twitter.  This provides extraordinary resources for researching companies, opportunities and people in real time. 

A key to understanding these resources is understanding that we really have only one network, and while we categorize it for a variety of reasons and in a variety of ways, there is far more overlap than separation, so we need to treat it with that in mind.  The tools we have today for the organizing our network and mining information about it are truly amazing.  So far beyond what we’ve ever had, but the central fact remains that “Network” is still just a fancy word describing our circle of friends. 

By the way, Consumer Reports published a terrific article on how to effectively stay safe in their June 2011 issue.  It should be read by pretty much everyone that spends time online.

Value Proposition Part 2

At this point, you have written out your value proposition, outlined a “target” market or company profile and you have identified specific companies you are interested in. I’m assuming your list has more than 10 entries when you start. Remember that while you will need something like a hundred to guarantee success, you can start with as few as one.
Your next step is to choose one to start with. Don’t over think your choice, you have done your primary screening, so any one of them will work. In order to make this effective, your research really starts now. Let’s assume you got your info from D&B (Dunn & Bradstreet), it will probably include the name of one contact at least, research the individual, then research the company.

• On the company side try to create a mini “org chart”.
• Who is the CEO, CTO, CFO, COO, etc? How long have they been at the company?
• What has been the company’s history?
• Is the company profitable?
• How many locations?
• Where would you fit?
• What does the company do?
• Everything else you can think of.

 

Your goal is to identify an individual that has hiring authority, budget authority and is likely to benefit from the services you provide. When in doubt, move up. If you are technical project manager and you can’t find an identified CTO, look for the COO. If they don’t exist, then it’s the CEO.

Dig out as much info as possible on each. Your initial letter will be stock, but when you call, you will need to know who to ask for and as much as possible about them and their company.

When you call, you will be asking for an appointment, but you need to be prepared for anything. Write out your questions and have them in front of you. Script your open, literally. Write it out word for word and read it when you call. Rehearse it before hand so it doesn’t sound like you’re reading it, but read it.

Your expectations need to be appropriate for the process as well. Unfortunately, most of the time, you’ll get some variation of “don’t call me, I’ll call you.” If they send you to HR, it’s the same thing. You may want to follow up with HR, but that will be the exception. Your goal is having a personal conversation with someone with both budget and hiring authority, anything else and move to the next one.

Part of the reason for starting with 10 or so companies is because of how often “No” will be your outcome and you’ll need to have that next one to focus on.

What will happen at this point is you will genuinely be in a numbers game. If you can do this 100 times, then you will get at least one offer. You could get as many as 10. You should get 30 to 40 interviews.

A possible script might go:
“Hi Bob, my name is Steve Paul, I sent you a note a week ago introducing myself. I build extremely resilient, high performance IT teams. The reason for my call is to follow up on the letter and ask you if there is a time we could talk about how I might be able to help. Is now a good time or should we set an appointment for later?”

 

The reason for having your questions written out now is that the success of the interview will be directly related to the quality of your questions and if “Bob” says, “Actually I do have a couple minutes, what are you thinking?” you need to be able to ask a good question. Something that relates to your value prop. In the example above, I would start asking about how complicated there IT needs are. I would start by citing something I had found through my research, then turn it into a question. “I see you have 13 offices in Western Washington, how many IT people does it currently take to support them?   How effective do you think the team is?"

The point is to be ready. Really ready. This is a way to create opportunity, and when that opportunity is developed, turning it into something that you can grow with over time.

Lessons Learned from Charlie Sheen

First, I have to say thank you to Christopher Poreda for a great post by the same name.  I’ll also steal his lessons:

"1) Be an original. Copies can be replicated and as such are cheaper the more you make.

"2) Be honest, regardless of the ramifications. You'll sleep better and be more respected.

"3) Having the best product will always supersede having the best service. Think Soup Nazi!

"4) The squeaky wheel gets the grease. These sayings were made up for a reason.

"5) Any press is good press. See #4

"6) Focus on "Winning".  It appears that CBS is courting Charlie to bring him back." 

Make no mistake, Charlie has some issues as well, but he does have these six things right.  When thinking about job search, let’s see how they apply.

“Be an original”  Your combination of strengths and skills and talents are unique.  If someone hires you for these, you have an amazingly good chance of success and for that success to be ongoing.  If you are trying to copy someone or be the person you imagine some person or company wants,  sooner or later, you’ll falter.  It won’t be pretty.

“Be honest”  The ability to deliver what you promise is very closely related to how honest you are.  If you tell people honestly what you have done and what can do, doing it again will be easy; heck, exceeding expectations will be easy.

“Having the best product will always supersede the having the best service”  See item 1.  If you are the best “you” there simply isn’t any competition.

“The squeaky wheel gets the grease”.  You won’t get a job if no one knows you’re looking.  Your friends, neighbors etc. need to know you're looking.  When you identify something you want, you need to make absolutely certain the hiring influence knows who you are and that you want this job and you will be the best answer.

“Any press is good press”  All is fair in love, war and job search!

“Focus on winning”  When you find a job you want, focus, focus, focus. 

Caveat Emptor

Seize the Day. Amazing how important that is and how often we don’t. Fundamentally, job search is about researching the world around us until we find a problem we can help with.  At every step of this process, caveat emptor applies. When we are introduced to someone, do we hide or do we ask them about themselves and their work? When we find that this is someone we could genuinely connect with, do we meet once and then bail? Or do we actively find ways to increase the connection? When a connection offers a new opportunity or an introduction, what do we do? Follow up?

When we hear about an opportunity, do we get intimidated by a title, or dig in to find out if we can actually help?

So Caveat Emptor. Seize the day. If there is an opportunity, follow up, find out. Trust yourself to evaluate honestly whether this is something you can help with.

Top Ten Job Search Tools

Bruce’s Top Ten List got me thinking along similar lines, so here are the 10 things I think are the best tools in job search.

1. Friends; Kind of weird to put our friends in the category of tools, but they are the single most important piece of your job search. Study after study and anecdote after anecdote tell us the same thing, The precise numbers vary, but they all say, “More than 80% of all jobs come with some level of personal introduction.” In other words, a friend introducing you to someone who introduces you to ….. So your friends are your most important tool in job search.

2. Pay-it-forward networking. This is a direct corollary to 1. We make friends by helping people we genuinely like and the people we like are those very friends reviewed in 1. Look at the book “I’m at a Networking Event, Now What” by Sandy Jones-Kaminsky, it provides simple clear tools for effective networking. Its all based on the idea of helping first. Useful networking starts with relationships that go beyond a simple business card and elevator pitch. That comes from trust and common values etc. There simply isn’t a better, faster way of doing this then helping.

3. Linkedin. Speaking of our friends or “network”, Linkedin is the best tool for documenting and mining that network. It’s work related social networking and allows us to understand how to help our friends and allow our friends to help us.

4. Internet “aggregators” . Tools that allow us to set up one search that covers a bunch of web pages on a regular basis. For example, Indeed.com covers several hundred job boards, so we can set up a single search that routinely sends the results to your email, or on an RSS feed. Another one is Linkup.com, it searches company pages with opportunities. Google Alerts does the same thing with information, so if you are focused on a particular company or job title, virtually anything, it will give you a daily list of updates

5. Work-Life DB™. This is a tool we created (and trademarked) and I haven’t found anything as effective or as complete in helping a person document their success and their history. We all know and pay at least lip service to the idea that job search is a sales position. The first step in effective, ethical sales is product knowledge, in this case that translates to the history of our success.

6. Strengths Finder. A corollary to 6. This is an outstanding test/process that helps us refocus our heads on our strengths, those things we naturally do very well… which is the same list of the things we do in a non-voluntary way. Check out my earlier post on this, it’s very cools stuff.

7. Public Libraries. Given that research is one of the crucial steps in job search, there simply isn’t a better place to do research. Locally, King County Library has this amazing list of research tools for job search and researching companies.

8. GIST. If research is one of the keys to success in the job search, then this add-in to either Gmail or Outlook is an amazing shortcut in that process. It automatically collects basic info, actually more than basic, about our contact list. Once someone is set up as a contact, Gist will provide you with an ongoing way of staying current. Is someone on Twitter? It will give you their last 5 tweets each week, Blogger? Their last posting. Linkedin? Any changes.

9. Bing/Google. Our old friends the basic search engines. What can I say that hasn’t been said? I include both because Bing has become a very useful tool and isn’t a clone of Google, so running searches in both tools provides additional information and both are very helpful.

10. Job Clubs. Groups like Notes From the Job Search (check out our schedule in the right column) provide support as we go through job search. So much of job search is incredibly difficult simply because of the isolation inherent in spending time looking for opportunities. Even the most qualified candidates can spend weeks and months sending off 10’s, 20’s even 100s of resumes without any response, so how the dickens can we remember that much of the craziness isn’t personal. Heck, it’s not even related to the quality of your applications. Finding a peer group going through this makes it much much easier.

Stories from NFJS

My desperate hunting for blog ideas has been solved!


I mentioned that I joined a “support group for reluctant bloggers” in an earlier blog and this week I was able to get to there for the second time. While participating, I had an epiphany as another member talked about the stories of her clients and their success, I realized that I haven't written a single story about the participants from NFJS and what's happened to them. Once that penetrated my thick skull, the hard part is choosing. While I’ve been doing Notes from the Job Search for a little more than a year and a half, the principles I use evolved over 30 years, so the stories end up going back a long time.

Here’s a story about a young soldier reentering the civilian world

Somewhere along the line I learned the value of separating the activity a candidate does from the product they work on. About 3 years ago a young friend of mine sent me an email asking for help. This young man (I’ll call him “Jim”) went to college majoring in Computer Science on an ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corp) scholarship, graduating in 2002. Well surprise, surprise, he was immediately activated and spent the next four years on active duty with the last two being in Iraq as a transportation officer. He mustered out in 2006, took a year off and had been looking for work for six months prior to reaching out to me. In those months, he had received nothing more than an automated response while submitting more than 100 resumes for various jobs in the IT industry. His goal company was Microsoft and he hadn’t even gotten an automated response from them.

I asked him to send me a copy of his resume and upon reading it understood the problem immediately. His resume was completely built around his experience in Iraq and he was applying for jobs as a project manager in IT.

We got on the phone together and I had him describe what he was responsible for. As he was doing this I kept asking him to avoid talking about trucks or transportation and spend more time focusing on his personal responsibilities. So when he said something like, “I had to get trucks filled with medical supplies from town A to town B on a weekly basis while making sure that we had supplies coming in from the States that would allow us to meet our schedules.” I helped him transform that into “developed schedules for multiple teams, coordinating multiple interdependent projects to deliver requirements on time and on budget.” Which is in fact a description of what he did, minus the references to Iraq and the Army and trucks. It is also describing his behavior in IT terms rather than Army terms.

One of the many great things Jim brought to this was an openness and ability to learn very quickly so the time necessary for him to completely re-write his resume was less than a week. When he submitted this new resume he started getting personal responses within the first week, interviews within a month and he received a Microsoft offer (that he took) within 3 months.

The principle Jim implemented was simply describing his experience in terms of what he personally did, not what he did it on, using terms his target audience understood. He did not drive or load trucks, he did plan, develop “critical path analysis”, and coordinate multiple interdependent projects. When put in terms that automated systems expect and that IT recruiters understand, the quality of his experience became obvious, as did Jim’s desirability as an employee. It also helped him understand how to communicate his experience during interviews in terms understood by the people interviewing him.

Most important, it got him the job!

NFJS; North Seattle

The Green Bean Coffeehouse has been through an interesting year, but has definitely come out the other side looking very good.  They moved again, hopefully for the last time, into the old McDonalds location across the street.  The new address is 8533Greenwood Ave N.  This matters to NFJS because we are restarting the group that was meeting there with some changes.  It will now be Monday's at 11:00 AM.  They have an actual room that is large enough to hold us and they are making that available!  Starting next Monday Sep 20, 2010!

Sustaining your job search

What does it take to continue something when you get no feedback? No complaints, no compliments, no objections, no heckling, nothing. I ask this because that’s what happens with 90% of your job search. It is also true if you are a blogger. So while I’m not looking for a job, the thing I’m most responsible for (this blog) has at least one element that is the same. I have to admit that I struggle with it. I want someone to comment and tell me how effective and smart I am and how my blog is the very best on the whole web. Having a PBS crew show up to do a special on my blog writing would be pretty cool, too. And it makes no difference at all that intellectually and emotionally I know my wish is both based on false assumptions and impossible.


When you are looking for a job, the problem is really similar. You send out one or two or three applications a week, you set up one or two informational interviews a week, you go to the “networking” events, but no job offer ever seems to appear. Heck, it’s like there is no reaction at all. Most weeks you don’t even get an automated response from the applications. And then the “informationals” feel mostly like you’re just talking to people and the “networking” feels more like a middle school mixer than anything else you can remember!...

How to sustain? What I finally did was join a group of reluctant bloggers. We meet once a week and exchange ideas and support each other’s efforts. It’s a way to get feedback. A little skepticism would be fine to go with this, I get better faster when people tell me what isn’t working as well as what is, but at least I get feedback.

If you are in the Seattle area, there are a variety of groups around. We have the two NFJS groups, look up Job Club at http://www.meetup.com/ etc. The point is to find some support.  I really don't know of a tougher job than Job Search, so allow youself to find that support.  Allow yourself to learn how to get better. 

Internet Tools

The longer I work in the area of job search and the more I learn about the various tools available to a job seeker, the more I realize how confusing it is.

Perhaps the biggest challenge is figuring out an appropriate balance. At NFJS, everything we’ve learned strongly reinforces that networking is the key to a successful job search. So it should be obvious, we think networking sites are much more important than any others, heck more important than all of the others combined.

There are really four kinds of web sites that we care about in job search.

Social Networking
The most useful type of web page is a social networking site: Linkedin or Facebook. Each of these provides tools to connect with your existing network. Linkedin is really optimized for your career and is almost required for an effective job search. There is lots to love here, but my favorite is what Linkedin does for allowing you to create intelligence around your network. As in, when you are interested in a particular company, a simple search in of “people” for the company will return how you are connected to the company. Linkedin is a place worth checking every day. Even here though it’s important not to get carried away. The focus of Facebook is your social network, but given that it is still your network, there are lots of ways to use this effectively. Spending time each day on these tools helps. Linkedin will get more results in job search than Facebook, but given that your network is your greatest resource, anything that nurtures your network is a good thing.

Be careful with your posts…. Everywhere. Remember that all of this stuff is permanent and the vast majority of what is posted is visible to a potential employer. You may have been at a great party over the weekend, heck it may have been your wedding, but don’t post a picture of you or any of your friends that got a little bit too happy. What has context with you and your friends doesn’t have context to a stranger.

Job Boards and listing aggregators.
One type not on the list, but very tempting and not very rewarding is job boards. You know their names. Monster.com, Dice.com, Careerbuilder.com etc. Each portrays itself as your one necessary stop on your career search, and frankly they mostly suck time without a return. Of course they actually do have real jobs being advertised…. The solution to this is the next type I do recommend: An “aggregator”. What they do is search through other pages to save you the time. The first of these that I recommend is Indeed.com. What Indeed does is search a large number (200? 300?) of job boards and report the findings back to the searcher. In addition it can be set up to redo a particular search daily then drop the findings into your email. Another one in this group is Linkup.com. It is similar to Indeed, but searches corporate boards instead. Lots of companies are less than excited to advertise on job boards, for lots of reasons, starting with cost. Linkup finds those jobs.

About Companies (as the company sees it)
The third are pages that describe a company. So it starts with the company web page, but also include things like Dunn and Bradstreet. For publicly traded companies, the web page will almost certainly have the most recent annual report and these truly are a gold mine of information. The “President’s report?” (or whatever passes for that) is usually quite accessible and will provide some great information about where the company is going and how it’s dealing with publicly known adversity. Dunn and Bradstreet is the tool companies use to check on each other, so pretty much every company that purchases anything is in here. It may be a little out of date, but never more than a few months, so it’s a resource that can be very useful.

About Companies (as others see it)
Start with Glass Door. It’s sort of rumor central, but take away the flames and the PR and you can get a pretty good idea of what a company is about. Then check stock analysts, business reporters, etc. Go to the library and ask a librarian. These people are amazing researchers and they love to help.

Networking Workshop

After reading Sandy Jones-Kaminski's book, I had an opportunity to meet her recently and became even more impressed. The result is that along with Career Horizons and Bella Domain, we will be hosting a PIF Networking workshop on March 2 and I couldn't be more excited. One of my earlier posts characterizes "Job Socials" as wayyy to similar to a Jr High School Dance, just swap the boys and girls with recruiters and job seekers and the picture is complete. What we will be doing at this event is teaching a way skip that whole thing and providing an opportunity to networks with a variety of folks.

Pay it Forward Networking Workshop, March 2. RSVP at the Meetup group Notes From the Job Search.

More to follow.

Changes

Changes

I started Notes from the Job Search (NFJS) last winter in response to my need to support my job search and it has evolved into a full-service career-coaching organization focusing on re-employment. The part of this is that our participants are going back to work and they are going to jobs they want. The number of stories about people identifying what their passions are, then getting those jobs just keeps growing and makes NFJS very rewarding.

We currently host two free weekly support groups and are adding a third this week. The new group will meet at Jitters Cafe in Overlake (15010 NE 20th Bellevue) Thursday's at 1:00. This blog has been reasonably successful, and more importantly, the number of people following it continues to grow.

My last post was on Sandy Jones-Kaminski's book I'm at a Networking Event, Now What? and this book is inspiring us to co-host something called a "Pay it Forward" (PIF) event as a way of putting into practice some of what we are learning about networking. We are preparing classes that focus on individual skills within the job search process.

My brother Mike Paul joined me in this endeavor last summer and has become a full partner in developing and presenting solutions to the job search challenge. His help and support are critical and amazing!

My background (as many of you know) is Information Systems/Technology: First as a developer, then as several kinds of manager, including a stint as Director of IT for a large non-profit. The most important consequence of that for NFJS is that it is normal for me to analyze problems, break them down into component parts, and then develop solutions that included all of the necessary steps. I also spent four years as a Resource Manager at Excell Data managing 75+ contract employees. They worked at a variety of locations from Microsoft to the City of Seattle to Boeing, to two-person “ma & pa” startups. While I spent a lot of time mentoring people in technology in this role, the real value was mentoring/coaching them to success within complex political environments. So this change in careers isn't nearly as large as it mightn seem on the surface.

My brother’s career is in writing first as a newspaper reporter, then as technical writer. In this role he’s developed trainings, written countless documents translating the complex into the understandable and has become something of a “networking maven” within the tech-writing community. He has also been an adjunct instructor at Bellevue College in tech writing for more than five years.

While we have learned an amazing amount from the participants and volunteers with Notes From the Job Search, the learning has refined our core concepts rather than replaced them. What are those?

• Focus on what works, rather than what doesn’t, and build on that.
• Networking will normally find you a better job than anything published on the Internet, and find it quicker.
• Custom resumes work better than a generic resume, but custom resumes are also extremely hard to do without a lot of preparation.
• You know more about yourself than any consultant/coach can ever know… although it may be very hard for you to articulate it.
• The Internet is now a key and required component of job search.
• The Internet is a great way to avoid real job search while convincing yourself that you’re trying.
• Networking is an ongoing part of life. It’s just another name for what occurs when you talk with someone. And if you only do it between jobs it means you misunderstand what it is. This is like trying to harvest wheat without planting any.
• Interviewing works better when you practice.

Our offerings are evolving and growing. We started with the support groups, have added individual coaching and are in the process of putting together classes that take the components of job search and address them individually.

So 2010 is an exciting year, I'm looking forward to it.

Pay it Forward

One of the members of our Tuesday group brought a book to our group last week that brought a bunch of ideas together for me and added some new ones that fundamentally change how I think networking should be done. It’s stuff that I’ve vaguely thought, and haphazardly tried, but have always thought was what I shouldn’t do.

Networking events have always felt like middle school dances. You know the ones, the boys are on one side and the girls are on the other, (substitute recruiters and job seekers) and each side spends pretty much the entire night talking about how much success they always have with the other side, just not venturing forth and testing those waters. ;)

I'm starting to follow a new blog, it's on my list: Bella Domain. This is by the person who wrote I’m at a Networking Event, Now What? -- Sandy Jones-Kaminski. In the book, she postulates that the focus of networking events should not be “What can you do for me?” She proposes that every networking event be approached as an opportunity to ask, “What can I do for you?” Things like passing out business cards aggressively are strongly discouraged, instead, listen to the answers people provide and only share your card with people you actually might be able to help. She suggests an attitude of “Pay it Forward” for the event. For those that missed the book and movie, pay it forward is the idea of doing something for someone else as a way of saying thank you for things that others have already done for you. Instead of paying back what you owe, pay it forward to the next person. Turns out there is even research suggesting that this is a more effective strategy when approaching others in a networking mode. Immediately, it allows for a focus on what others are doing, rather than prattling on about how great we are when we probably aren’t all that convinced of our value to begin with. Most of us can get very convinced of our ability to solve problems within our area, so when someone says, “I need help with…. And describes what we know about, we can get into problem solving mode in a heartbeat, and then we don’t need to tell people we’re super, we just demonstrate it. Way more fun!

At any rate, Sandy’s book is outstanding. It’s one of those books that brings together a bunch of well known information and comes up with a new conclusion that feels much better than what I thought previously and completely demystifies what was a very intimidating event.

Why do resume's matter?

At Notes from the Job Search, we spend a lot of time teaching that the perfect resume is the one you drop off after your first day of work and that the job you want is one that you get through a referral from a friend. We also spend a lot of time working on making our resumes the very best possible; which seems like a contradiction. Why spend time perfecting something you shouldn’t be letting anybody see? Unfortunately, we normally need to work both ends of a job identification/recruitment process in order to get the job we want.

What makes writing a resume such a tough problem? Heck, there is a whole industry built up around writing them and it’s easy to spend 2 or 3 thousand dollars on one. Is that a good use of money?

The answer is tied up in the other end of the process, specifically the recruitment process. What does the hiring company go through in order to hire a new employee?

The hiring process works best for the potential employer at the same time it works best for the potential employee: When a potential opening and a potential employee meet up before HR gets involved. Sorry HR folks, but it does. The hiring influence and the job seeker talk about the problems that need to be solved, the job seeker is identified as compatible through mutual experience and common friends and interests, the quality of the work can be reviewed based on relevant criteria.

Bringing HR into the process requires that a fundamentally subjective process become objective. Step one is a “job description”. My background is IT and in IT terms, that is a “solution” or a “specification”. Solutions that are separated from problems probably represent the largest number of failed projects in IT and that is what’s required when hiring is turned over to HR. HR has a specification and then does it’s level best to fill it. They interview the hiring influence, get that person’s best guess as to what they need, translate into a series of questions, etc. etc. In the end they have a rigid set of criteria, questions with a rigid set of answers.

The reason for all of the time worked on resume’s is to negotiate that rigid path… In competition with some ridiculous number of other people doing the same thing. The resume is the first step down that path.

Networking

Early on in my blogging, I wrote a piece on "Resilience". Actually I copied something my wife wrote. That's important, because her expertise is mental health, while mine is mostly IT management, and lately I've learned a lot about job search. At any rate, I mention this because of how much networking supports resilience and resilience supports networking. If you go back to that article, you find a key component is building and maintaining relationships, and that pretty much is networking. With that intro:

Networking:

• Definition: Targeted (around career) making of friends.
• When: Throughout our careers. While we are working may be more important than when looking. That's when the foundation is laid.
• Where: Pretty much everywhere. Sometimes it's about handing out a business card, sometimes not, it is pretty much always about getting names and following up
---- Note that the purpose of a business card is at least as much about getting theirs as it is giving ours. It allows us to initiate the follow up. -----
• Who: People connected with our profession and the businesses that might employ people like us.

In simple terms, we network pretty much everywhere and all the time. It's not about becoming somehow different, but about being ourselves. The hard part is emotional, not skill or technique, it requires that we start things and we follow up. Someone compared it to being a high school boy asking for a 1st date and it's apt. The risk though is pretty much all in our heads and somehow, we still need to drive through. We need to remember that as hard as it was for the boy who did ask, he had a date that weekend, the boy who didn't ask, didn't.

Elevator Pitch

My brother suggested that the various bits of information that we use in our job search are really part of "branding" our work. It's a great concept and a great way to think of the parts. It suggests that the message is consistent and that while the format changes, and the words change and even the examples used, we understand our work as a product and that we understand that getting a job is really selling that product. So our elevator pitch is the first and shortest description of our brand

Elevator pitches:

Basics
o Short 30 seconds
o Part A, what are you looking for
o Part B, What makes you special (with specifics)

Key is to focus on your audience and to think out expectations before starting
o The neighborhood block party has one presentation
o A corporate CEO has a different presentation
o Core elements need to remain -- the brand is still the brand

When describing your history, describe what you did, not what you did it on.

Example:
o Your job in the Army was "Supply Officer". What you did your work on would be scheduling trucks and truck drivers and munitions and rations.
o What you did was work task breakdown, schedule coordination, critical path analysis...

Summary:
Be specific about your role (thinking of what you did, not what you did it on) the example above might include:
o Trained and Managed crew of 24 working round the clock under adverse conditions
o Designed, wrote and implemented policies that provided for the safety of full crew

It needs to be developed with the audience in mind and it changes based on the audience
It does not answer all questions, better if it generates questions/discussion

In other words, our "brand" is always our "brand" but it can be expressed lots of ways.

Curricula

It’s been a while since I posted, and I apologize to my reader(s?). I’ve been thinking about how to approach this whole process and how to add value to people’s job search. To do that, I’m going to formalize the curricula used by NFJS. Also will be organizing it around a standard point of view, so all of the parts fit together.

The point of view is pretty easy to state: All of our job search materials will be informed by the statement, “How does this appear from the point of view of a hiring manager?”

The curricula will include work on:
· Elevator pitch
· Resume
· Networking sites
· Networking
· Interviewing

Next post will be Elevator Pitch

Networking

There is little question that the surest method for finding a new job is networking. I'm guessing most of us know that, at least at some level. So what is it? How do you do it?

Simply stated, it's engaging others in your job search: Getting other people (your friends, family and associates) to be your eyes and ears, to be your advertising campaign. We all understand the definition, unfortunately, "understanding" is different than actually doing it.

What are the tools of networking? There is no definitive list, and there is no limit. One friend of mine moved the needle a lot. When she found out she was going to be laid off, before she left work for the last time, she found all of the people she had shared the elevator with over the previous 10 years and let them know her change in status and engaged them in her search.

A partial list of networking tools includes:
· An elevator pitch – 30 second description of what you are looking for and what you bring that is special, what you bring that adds value to a prospective employer.
· Interviews for Information
· Social Networking sites
o LinkedIn – this is probably the most important tool in this category.
o Plaxo, Biznik, Spoke, etc. These are also business oriented internet networking sites. Each has value and is worth considering
o Facebook
o Twitter
· Affinity groups (professional organizations, church groups, soccer team, workout locations, etc). This is any group you spend time with that you aren’t being paid for. Your best ones are the ones you spent time with before you started looking for a new job.
· Volunteer work

In other words, your primary network is everyone you know. Your secondary network is everyone they know.

Social Networking sites are ways to document your network, mine your network for opportunities and facilitate ongoing communication.

Your “elevator pitch” is your intro to new people and a way to update people you know. An “Interview for Information” is a tool to find deep knowledge about a profession or a company or a particular stage in a profession or maybe just more about an individual; it can have the consequence of moving someone from your secondary network to your primary network, and that is normally one of the goals.

Given the simple number of places to spend time (including the myriad of job boards etc.) one of the great challenges in job search is spending time efficiently and effectively. So while every contact is networking, it is necessary to evaluate your networking time for usefulness. I’m not suggesting that you stop spending time with your in-laws, or that you only spend time with them as it relates to job search, I am suggesting you are honest with them regarding your situation (update them with your elevator pitch) and that you make time for the former boss you haven’t seen in the last few years, but that you enjoyed when you worked for him/her.
There is an especially important question to ask with every contact, “Who else should I talk to?” Write down the name and contact info you are given, then follow up. If you get the opportunity to meet, the meeting is an Interview for Information and at the end, you should have an additional member of your primary network.

One last thought: Always thank the people that help.

Linkedin

NJFS keeps coming back to internet tools. It’s pretty clear that the tool of choice for job search is Linkedin. While it has some competitors (Plaxo, Biznik, Spoke. Etc) and they all have reasonable value propositions, Linkedin is the one that has market penetration. It’s the one that recruiters scan first, the one that hiring influences check and the one your business contacts are most likely to be part of. There are also some great resources on the net to help us optimize our use of it. Check out Rita Ashley’s free white paper here.

Some things that seem sure:
· Be complete. Fill out the whole thing, including a good picture. If you need to have a pro take the photo, do it.
· In the “current” field, be honest. If what you are doing is volunteer work, put it down. If you left your last gig 4 months ago, be honest. It will be noted and you are not fooling anyone.
· Connect with everyone that seems appropriate. Becoming a Linkedin ”lion” is great for the Marketing Manager, but if you are a developer, then 1000 plus connections is probably not a good idea. Everyone does have more than 25 real connections and most of us can break over 100 while including only people we really do know.
· Recommend folks that you believe in and ask them for recommendations in return. Recommending others extends your visibility and being recommended provides you with credibility. Both need to be honest and both are important.
· Your connections are your network. If you have connected with people that you are comfortable forwarding an introduction for, then you can assume they feel the same. Understanding that you can’t recommend everyone on the list, you are not asking that of them. You are asking what you are willing to give.

A couple of great sites for volunteering: WWW.idealist.org and www.volunteermatch.org.