Month: September 2016

Executives–Be Careful With Those Metrics!

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Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter points out how executives need to be careful when discussing metrics on the resume and in an interview.

[spp-transcript]

I picked up a great job search tip from Perry Newman (www.perrynewman.com) when I interviewed him for Job Search Radio recently.

Perry pointed at something that I’d forgotten and that I had not been emphasizing when speaking with people– if you’re a veteran professional, if you are an executive or at a C level for an organization, you have to be careful with the metrics that you reveal if you work for a public corporation.

If you provide real numbers, sometimes those metrics are way too revealing you are disclosing information that may not be public yet.

However, if you speak in terms of percentages instead of real numbers, they are not at risk of an employer looking at you and thinking, “Gee, that was confidential information I was just told.”

That information might give them a competitive advantage to your firm and reveal too much about your current employer and cause them to have an advantage in certain negotiations and in certain situations.

Again, for use in executive, you have a fiduciary responsibility to your current organization. You cannot cross that line. Firms will listen to you and wonder whether you will do that to them, too. You don’t ever want to be in those circumstances.

[/spp-transcript]

 

Do you think employers are trying to help you? You already know you can’t trust recruiters—they tell as they think you need to know to take the job they after representing so they collect their payday.

The skills needed to find a job are different yet complement the skills needed to do a job.

Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter has been a career coach and recruiter for what seems like one hundred years.

JobSearchCoachingHQ.com is there to change that with great advice for job hunters—videos, my books and guides to job hunting, podcasts, articles, PLUS a community for you to ask questions of PLUS the ability to ask me questions where I function as your ally with no conflict of interest answering your questions.

Connect with me on LinkedIn

Keep Your Résumé Up-To-Date

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Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter discusses the importance of keeping your resume up to date even after you start a new job.

[spp-transcript]

Right now, you are aggressively looking for work but I want to plant a seed with you. You’re going to find a job; it may not happen as soon as you like but you are gonna find a job.

Normally, in human nature seems to suggest that you exhale deeply and relax and you stop being open to other things.

If the recession has taught you anything it is that you need to be prepared at all times because you never know when you’ll need to look for work again.

Even if you’re happy, you never know when you’ll find the right opportunity land in your lap with someone calling up and saying, “I’ve got this great opportunity; we talked for a few minutes.”

My encouragement for you is to maintain an up-to-date resume. Every three or four months, sit down with yourself, take about 30 to 40 minutes, and jot down some notes about what you’ve accomplished during the previous three months.

This serves a couple of purposes. First, if you remained with your organization for years, great! During that time, you will get reviewed. Sometimes people are reviewed by new hiring managers or new managers have just taken over a group and don’t really know what the person has done over the year.

Some people freak out under those circumstances and panic. They are ill prepared for the review meeting and this will allow you to be prepared. Again, it’s a habit. Set an alarm in your phone or in Outlook. Set it up in a way that every few months you sit down with yourself, write down what you’ve done and update your resume.

Next, if you get that proverbial knock on the door on the shoulder that says, “I’ve got a great opportunity,” you aren’t starting at that point trying to construct a resume you might be busy or anxious.

Again, someone’s knocking on your door or tap you on the shoulder; you don’t want to stand be writing the resume because love other things on your plate. Better to be ready at that point because you’ve been doing your homework assignment and have treated yourself like a business of one, looking out for your interests, just like your employer is looking out for their interests.

You always want to be ready for that tap on the shoulder so that you are not then taking a few days to write your resume and risk losing out on an opportunity.

The fact of the matter is, if you say you’re going to take a day or two to write that resume, the next person who is called may not be taking a day or two. They may be getting in the door ahead of you, creating a great impression and locking you out of an opportunity.

Do yourself a favor. When you lay on this job, set up an alarm in your phone, in Outlook, or whatever system you use to remind you that every 3 to 4 months you take the time to update your resume so that it is no big production when you need one.

[/spp-transcript]

 

Do you think employers are trying to help you? You already know you can’t trust recruiters—they tell as they think you need to know to take the job they after representing so they collect their payday.

The skills needed to find a job are different yet complement the skills needed to do a job.

Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter has been a career coach and recruiter for what seems like one hundred years.

JobSearchCoachingHQ.com is there to change that with great advice for job hunters—videos, my books and guides to job hunting, podcasts, articles, PLUS a community for you to ask questions of PLUS the ability to ask me questions where I function as your ally with no conflict of interest answering your questions.

Connect with me on LinkedIn

How Do I Avoid Self Sabotage and Get a Job? | No BS Job Search Advice Radio

How Do I Avoid Self Sabotage and Get a Job

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[svp]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rND6sO9pDxU[/svp]

Self-sabotage is an interesting thing for a job hunter to identify as their issue. Here, I address it head on and offer a strategy I’ve seen work many many times.

[spp-transcript]

 

Do you think employers are trying to help you? You already know you can’t trust recruiters—they tell as they think you need to know to take the job they after representing so they collect their payday.

The skills needed to find a job are different yet complement the skills needed to do a job.

Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter has been a career coach and recruiter for what seems like one hundred years.

JobSearchCoachingHQ.com is there to change that with great advice for job hunters—videos, my books and guides to job hunting, podcasts, articles, PLUS a community for you to ask questions of PLUS the ability to ask me questions where I function as your ally with no conflict of interest answering your questions.

Connect with me on LinkedIn

Bring Your Tablet

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Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter suggests bringing your tablet to an interview especially if you are in a creative field.

[spp-transcript]

 

Do you think employers are trying to help you? You already know you can’t trust recruiters—they tell as they think you need to know to take the job they after representing so they collect their payday.

The skills needed to find a job are different yet complement the skills needed to do a job.

Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter has been a career coach and recruiter for what seems like one hundred years.

JobSearchCoachingHQ.com is there to change that with great advice for job hunters—videos, my books and guides to job hunting, podcasts, articles, PLUS a community for you to ask questions of PLUS the ability to ask me questions where I function as your ally with no conflict of interest answering your questions.

Connect with me on LinkedIn

Finding Job Leads Through Twitter

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[svp]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQPeZ5b7s_g[/svp]
What’s the best tool for finding job leads on Twitter? The answer may surprise you.

 

[spp-transcript]

For years, I’ve been telling people to visit TweetMyJobs.com to get an idea of jobs that were available through Twitter.TweetMyJobs is no longer around; there’s a new name for it–CareerArc.com. I just ran a search using it, knowing that I have a position in Madison, Wisconsin and the site is not finding the job or anyone else’s posting about the job.

As a matter of fact, the site is pulling up relatively few jobs at the right level in Madison Wisconsin. In general, what I’m finding is the site is in not doing a great job of finding positions that I know are available, not simply my own, but others, too.

It begs the question, “What can you use instead?”

The answer is–Twitter. Twitter is now pretty good. I would use it to look at broad categories. Is that you’re not going to get positions near the city like you might on other sites. What you can do is enter a search term (keyword), the word “job” and the abbreviation for the state the position might be located in.

For example,”accountant” “job” “NY”.That will turn things up for you.

If you are looking for something in Long Island City or on Long Island, unless the tweet went out as Long Island City or with the specific town on Long Island, you are not going to find it. That makes Twitter less desirable than other search tools you might use.

However, if you are looking for something in a large urban city (New York, Dallas, Chicago, Boston, for example), it’s not a bad way to search. You’re going to turn up a lot jobs pretty easily.

Again, don’t forget Twitter itself

[/spp-transcript]

 

Do you think employers are trying to help you? You already know you can’t trust recruiters—they tell as they think you need to know to take the job they after representing so they collect their payday.

The skills needed to find a job are different yet complement the skills needed to do a job.
Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter has been a career coach and recruiter for what seems like one hundred years.

JobSearchCoachingHQ.com is there to change that with great advice for job hunters—videos, my books and guides to job hunting, podcasts, articles, PLUS a community for you to ask questions of PLUS the ability to ask me questions where I function as your ally with no conflict of interest answering your questions.

Connect with me on LinkedIn

Want to Convey More Information? Here’s How.

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Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter explains how to give more texture and information in your resume without making it too long.

 

[spp-transcript]

I want to give you some no BS resume advice to help your resume stand out, particularly if you are veteran professional, a person with a lot of experience and want to talk about some of the things that you’ve accomplished in greater detail than what resume would normally afford you.

Convention (and I think it’s a smart one) is that resumes to go longer than two MAYBE 2 1/2 pages under special circumstances. I don’t believe in one page resumes you are a novice or looking for an entry-level position.

I want to help you get more texture into your resume if you are someone with more experience.

Let’s say your manager, a director, a VP or a C level professional, and you are submitting your resume for possession. You want to talk about what you’ve done but you also understand that you need to keep your resume to particular length what do you do?

Hyperlinks.

Since you are submitting your resume through an electronic medium anyway (it’s not like you sending a piece of paper anymore), what you can do, for example, to use an example from IT, his let’s say you work on a project and want to go into more detail in your resume will allow space for, underneath the project name that you work for, including hyperlink that can go to the video that you created for you too, a more detailed description of what it is that you stepped into we took over the project and the things that you accomplished,.

You can tell stories and video. You can tell stories and text.

Obviously, this needs to be well written and/or well acted. You may need to do these a couple of times and have people look at it before submitting it to organizations.

But why not use the power of the web? Why not use the power of mobile to connect the document with more detail about the work that you’ve done?

As I’ve said before, stories are extremely powerful. Think of how you describe this project or this task that you’ve been did in an interview. You would share a lot of texture about it. You would describe what it is that you stepped into, what you accomplished, the money you saved for your firm, the money you earned your firm, the technology utilized, the numbers of people who report to you… All the story for this project would be told.

It will be a lot of space to use an individual document but if you’re using video, if you’re using a podcast, you can use a service like freeconferencecalling.com or freeconferencecall.com to record an audio to share with the firm, to talk about what you stepped into. A printed version of this would work as well.

So, again, it has to be well-prepared and well-rehearsed, as well as well-executed for it to work.

[/spp-transcript]

 

Do you think employers are trying to help you? You already know you can’t trust recruiters—they tell as they think you need to know to take the job they after representing so they collect their payday.

The skills needed to find a job are different yet complement the skills needed to do a job.

Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter has been a career coach and recruiter for what seems like one hundred years.

JobSearchCoachingHQ.com is there to change that with great advice for job hunters—videos, my books and guides to job hunting, podcasts, articles, PLUS a community for you to ask questions of PLUS the ability to ask me questions where I function as your ally with no conflict of interest answering your questions.

Connect with me on LinkedIn

Should I Accept a LinkedIn Connection Request from a Recruiter?

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[svp]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyNPfuCzqXs[/svp]
Recently a recruiter from a big software company showed interest in hiring me on LinkedIn. He also sent me a connection request. It means if I don’t connect he might not move forward, and if I do, he might just get my contacts and move away!

 

[spp-transcript]

I just got back from the gym so excuse me if I appear sweaty. I am sweaty!

I received a message for someone I think is a really good question: Should I accept a LinkedIn connection request from a recruiter? Recently, a recruiter for a big software for show interest in hiring me on LinkedIn. He also said the connection request. It means if I don’t connect, he might not move for and, if I do, you might just get my contacts and move away!

The fear that so many people have is incredible to me.

Start by saying that LinkedIn is selling the entire database to recruiters for about $400 per month, $450, something like that. Big software company? These guys have all that data are available to them. Don’t sweat that aspect of it.

The real question is if you are concerned about the impact of not accepting, then accept. However, if you are concerned that this recruiter is going to take your contacts from you, let me let you in on a secret. If you go your privacy settings on LinkedIn (you’ll find it in the upper right-hand corner of your homepage, behind that pretty little picture of you, click on it and one of the choices offered to you involves privacy for your account).
Click on the privacy option and you’ll see that you can block individual people and you are able to not share data with others. If you have any concerns about this individual, block them it’s really that simple. They will be able to see your updates; do not to be able to see your connection requests; they will be able to see any of the people in the network. You just going to block them. So this is a non-issue.

For you as a job hunter, I want to remind you of something. Your network is your net worth. Unlike days of all, where people were afraid of everything, we’ve all opened ourselves up. We’re trying to do more things to become known and noticed.

This recruiter may be trying to get a sense of you over time, maybe not for this job search but with the next one in mind. I will tell you that if he doesn’t hire you or she doesn’t hire you because you didn’t accept the connection request from them, they are idiots!

First of all, as a recruiter, they don’t hire anyone; hiring manager makes that decision. Maybe you don’t get in the door, but it’s unlikely. They have metrics on them about filling jobs. If you are the right talent, the hiring managers interested in hiring you, don’t sweat the decision not to connect with the recruiter.

The real important thing is that you need to connect with more recruiters, not less. More people need to know more about you. You can’t hide in the corner of the closet until such time as you’re looking for something else.

After all, the data is already out there about you. Let me show you. If you go to this little search tool, www.li-usa.info, do a search and what you’ll find is a Google search tool that searches every US LinkedIn profile that is available publicly.

You’re there. People can find you easily. I don’t know if it will let you see the connected with but, thanks for that is a possibility. As I’ve said, all the data is out there already. LinkedIn is selling it in droves. Don’t sweat this.

If anything, you should be going in the opposite direction by connecting with more people. I’ll tell you why.

A person who gets ahead isn’t always the smartest or work the hardest, although those are great qualities to have. The person who gets ahead is the one who remains open to opportunities. Sometimes, those are internal to organization. Most of the time, they are external to it.

If you’re hired by this big software firm, and a year from now, five years from now, 10 years from now, you decide to change jobs again. Do you want to be operating from that corner of the closet again or do you want more people to know about you? If you are smart, the latter is the right answer.

So, can it with this person and, if you have any concerns about them, block them using privacy settings.

[/spp-transcript]

 

Do you really think employers are trying to help you? You already know you can’t trust recruiters—they tell as they think you need to know to take the job they after representing so they collect their payday.

The skills needed to find a job are different yet complement the skills needed to do a job.

Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter has been a career coach and recruiter for what seems like one hundred years.

JobSearchCoachingHQ.com is there to change that with great advice for job hunters—videos, my books and guides to job hunting, podcasts, articles, PLUS a community for you to ask questions of PLUS the ability to ask me questions where I function as your ally with no conflict of interest answering your questions.

Connect with me on LinkedIn http://bit.ly/thebiggamehunter