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.

Thanks

Thank you 2009! yeah, right. Well, this is either a half full or half empty choice. On the half empty side, 2009 was very frustrating when it came to job search. The number of incredibly well qualified people out of work is very disheartening. Some companies have become incredibly disrespectful of potential employees. etc. etc.

On the half full side, I started Notes From the Job Search. I've met some amazing people! I have my first paying customer as a career coach, roughly 90 people on my mailing list, many of whom choose to remain on the list after going back to work. This blog is up and running! (Thank you to my 23 stalkers! :)

I've also been given some amazing help. Col Bob Jackson (USAF Ret) has been instrumental. He has a resume building process that is extraordinary and that he has shared with NFJS. Using his system as a key component, we now know how to help people create custom resumes very quickly and directly connected to opportunities. Kevin McClintic has been the unofficial sales manager for NFJS and been tireless in letting people know about the groups and the blog and how we can support each other. Shari Fox was an enormous help early in this process keeping us grounded in the realities of the hiring process and focused on how people can negotiate that. Gayle Rose has been terrific in sharing leads and ideas. When she's gone to trainings, she has been most gracious in sharing. Monica Cavagnaro for her eagerness to share. Stacia Polhonka and her willingness to be an example. Mike Montgomery for his the same reasons. Kerrie Schurr shared her training in "Dependable Strengths" which strongly reinforced where we are going with resume's. My brother Mike Paul, who has now joined me as part of the NFJS team. He has been incredibly generous with his time and ideas. His experience with Networking is a paradigm in how to make this work.

Matt Youngquist for his encouragement -- and one of the best blogs out there on job search and career success!

So we could surely look at the problems and declare the glass half empty, but there is just too much good that is going on to get stuck there. So goodbye to 2009, it's been a very good year, 2010 is looking even better!

Resume path part 2

In my last post, I discussed how a job posting showed up on an advertisement/job board etc. and that by the time it reached a job board, it had been worked into a set of criteria. What happens next is why we spend so much time on resumes.

The result of posting an opportunity is that the recruiter will be bombarded with resumes. It has become common for me to be told that as many as 1,000 resumes can be submitted to a single posting. So when I say that a recruiter can be bombarded, that is really close to what they experience. And honestly, no one can review 1,000 resumes and no company wants them to.

For smaller companies that do things manually, the person will start at the top of the pile and go through resume’s until they find some pre-determined number of resumes that might be good fits, then files the rest and deals with the selected ones. Maybe it’s 50, maybe as much as 100, it’s just very hard to imagine the number getting much bigger than that. So lots of resumes aren’t even reviewed. Frequently not even logged in.

Larger organizations use some kind of software that allows them to do “key word” searches. A key word that is popular currently in IT is “Scrum”. It’s a development project management methodology. So the recruiter has all of the resumes entered into a database then scans them for “Scrum”. If your resume doesn’t use that word, then it is eliminated. If the number of resume’s left after this is too large, then the recruiter will add some other word, perhaps it will be C#. Still too many? Check to see if Scrum appears two or more times, check if C# appears more than two times, then three, etc.

There is almost no chance a human will look at more than 50 resumes for an opening. Even then, the first human scan will probably take less than 10 seconds, probably closer to 3. The recruiter will now have 20 to 25 resumes that are read in any kind of depth at all. Their job is to deliver between 3 and 10 resumes to a hiring influence. Worst case scenario, has 10 screening interviews extracted from 1000 resumes submitted. That is a 1% chance of a screening interview, let alone an interview for a job.

The result of this maze, from the applicant’s point of view is that resume needs to be built specifically for the opportunity. What are the key words? What is the emphasis? What is the required experience? Assuming you have them, then they have to be on the resume the way the job description describes them.

I am painting a couple of worst case scenarios here, that’s true and there certainly are exceptions. There are companies that commit to reviewing every resume, and there are recruiters that commit to that as well. Unfortunately, it is way too common for the scenario's I'm describing to be real, so even if your resume isn’t going through half of these hoops, and even if the number of resumes submitted is only 100, the resume itself must be prepared.

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.

Branding redux

I’ve been thinking about “Branding” a lot the last couple of weeks. What is a core skill set? What is a “core strength”? How do I (or anyone else) use those to stay relevant in a world that is changing at the speed of light?

As near as I can tell, all of us have lots of strengths. I have certainly met people who didn’t recognize theirs, but they still had strengths. Equally, pretty much all of us have a wide variety of skills, unfortunately, these have a habit of becoming outdated, so it’s easy to feel like we don’t have much to offer, or what we have to offer isn’t what people are willing to pay for. So how do we build from current to future, using our strengths as a guide? How do we avoid being sidetracked, yet continue to move in a direction that keeps us employable?

The premise here is that in order to identify the ongoing strengths that we want to depend on, that we want to be hired to use, we need to look at our work history and our successes. As we identify those successes and identify the patterns of success, we also identify our “brand”. This allows us to recreate our resumes, profiles etc to emphasize what we are passionate about. This allows us to look at jobs where we will be able to build on our strengths. It also helps us understand the idea that we are creating a partnership with a potential employer.

Let’s face it, we all want a job where we can pretty much guarantee success, where we normally create high expectations that we then exceed. It’s just fun to do. The key is knowing enough about our own strengths and skills so we apply for work that fits that profile. Understanding and documenting a brand that allows us to focus our search and get the job we want.

Opportunities

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” or so wrote Charles Dickens 150 years ago, although I’ve certainly heard people quoting one half or the other recently. There was an article in the Seattle Times recently about how tough the market is and how current job descriptions include everything and then throw in “personal assistant tasks” whatever the heck that means. If we include “discouraged” workers along with people still looking for work, unemployment pencils out as 15% or more. We’ve all been impacted by an economy that is the worst since the Great Depression. At the same time, people are going to work. Some of the folks working with NFJS are getting their dream jobs. Some are looking at their careers and saying, “I need to do what I love!”

One woman who has been a participant started out completely desperate for work. While coming to NFJS we helped her articulate what her dream job was and how to accomplish it: Creating an Art School. Eventually her desperation won out (or so we thought) and she took an admin job for the Feds. Within one month, she quit, rented some space and started her school. It’s been about a month since I’ve heard from her, but at that point, she had four classes going and was paying herself enough to stay afloat. It took her about four months to create her dream job at a level that supports her minimum requirements. She won’t buy a BMW this year, but then she doesn’t want one. What she wants is to teach art, and what she’s doing is teaching art. For her this is the “best of times”.

Another member of NFJS came to us looking for manual testing contract at Microsoft, testing hardware or software and complaining about how Microsoft has cut the compensation for contractors. This man did his homework while with us and developed a much better understanding of his own experience, his capabilities and his passions. What he got was an FTE position for AT&T at about 1/5th more than he thought he would be able to ask for as a contractor and doing precisely what he wanted: Leading a team doing automated hardware and software testing of devices.

The point of these two stories is to recognize that we have opportunities in spite of what we might read or hear. It always requires work to become what we want to become, but if we can articulate it and the steps necessary completely, if we can imagine it and the steps to get there completely, then we can do it. For most purposes, we get to choose if this is “the best of times” or “the worst of times”. Creating “the best of times” is hard work, but so is creating “the worst of times”.

Amazingly, the Green Bean Coffee house has been resurrected! Wayward Coffee House has been a great answer for the last month, Thank you, thank you Wayward Coffee House!
The Green Bean is now housed in the “Sip N Ship” on Greenwood Ave. 8560 Greenwood Ave N. Being back at the Bean will be great.