Day: October 15, 2016

You Are a “Manager,” Not a “Manger”

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Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter encourages you to not be lazy and to spell and grammar check your résumé.

 

[spp-transcript]

I want to talk with you today about not making some of the common mistakes I see in resumes. Here is what I see time and again.

People don’t use the spellchecker with the result being that they describe themselves as “mangers” instead of “managers.” They are the “liason,” instead of the “liaison” for their firm or department. They “lead,” when they should have said “led.” And then there is my personal favorite one. They “asses,” instead of “assess.”

From a grammar perspective, people make a lot of mistakes as well. They use, “your,” instead of, “you’re.”

My point in all of this is not to be obnoxious but to point out that every time that you make a mistake in your resume, there are hairs on people’s next that bristle. You’re trying to make a good impression on someone. They start to asked themselves, “What’s going to happen when this person comes on board and you’re not trying to make a good impression. Where the screw ups going to occur?”

I want to encourage you to use Microsoft Word’s spellchecker and grammar checker. Spellchecker is perfect; grammar checker sometimes depends on the context.

When all is said and done, you want to make sure that the resume that you submit comes across perfectly. And that there are no grammar mistakes. Sometimes you have to make a visual examination of the resume because, in some of the examples that I gave, there were no spelling mistakes. Your usage mistakes as in the example that I gave of, “mangers,” versus “managers.”Manger would probably go through because it’s spelled correctly; managers the word that you intend to use.

So be conscious and you make a visual scan of your resume to make sure that no mistakes go through because certain words are spelled correctly but are being used incorrectly. Definitely, run the grammar checker. There are times that you may use a bullet point, for example, that isn’t the full sentence. Thus, you want to visually check the language to make sure that everything is accurate. This way you will make a great first impression by comparison to the lazy people who don’t do this.

I have to say lazy because what’s the big deal! You are running a spellchecker and a grammar checker. Is this so difficult to do?

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Do you think employers are trying to help you? You already know you can’t trust recruiters—they tell you as much 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 changes 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

You can order a copy of “Diagnosing Your Job Search Problems” for Kindle for $.99 and receive free Kindle versions of “No BS Resume Advice” and “Interview Preparation.”

Stagnant Career But Can’t Find a Job

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[svp]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnJ8vu0XdVY[/svp]
“I hate stagnating in my job, but can’t find a better one. Should I take a career break? I grew rapidly in my company but got stuck in middle management (“Head of…”), mainly due to hard politics. The worst thing is that other companies don’t seem to hire at my level.

I made huge sacrifices to get here and burnt out, so I would only be satisfied with higher pay and/or level of responsibility.”

 

[spp-transcript]

I received a good question from someone that I thought was worthwhile to choose for a variety of reasons.

Let me just read it to you.

“I hate stagnating in my job, but can’t find a better one. Should I take a career break? I grew rapidly in my company but got stuck in middle management (“Head of…”), mainly due to hard politics. The worst thing is that other companies don’t seem to hire at my level.

I made huge sacrifices to get here and burnt out, so I would only be satisfied with higher pay and/or level of responsibility.”

I want to expand the question a little bit to address less experienced workers and then come back to deal with this specific scenario.

For the younger workers finding it difficult to find something, maybe you don’t like your job and are not getting job offers, often the issue is that your interview skills need to improve. Thus, I encourage people to learn and practice and become better a job hunting. After all, the skills needed to find a job are different than those needed to do a job.

However, this is a scenario where we are dealing with a middle management professional who feels stuck. There are two ways of addressing this.

The first is to get “unstuck.” Start defeating the politics and learn where you been typecast in the wrong way and adapt. You to find your problem is being with your current firm and you are stagnating because people see you in one way and value something else.

Thus, the idea is to find what they value and start playing to it. This doesn’t mean you have to change jobs but it also doesn’t mean that you have to quit, go home and watch TV all the time.

That should probably be your first choice.

The second may be similar to the advice that I gave to the young professional but I’m going to emphasize something a little bit different.

For the inexperienced one, I spoke about getting better at job hunting. For you, I want to encourage you to get better at networking, Often, for people who are stuck in middle management, they worked so hard for so long, keeping their heads down to do a great job that networks outside their current firm are next to nonexistent.

You need to build the network seeking question and build the validity of the statement that you made that “other companies don’t seem to hire at your level.”

Often they don’t have an opening right now but (1) they may create one for the right person, and (2) the opening may come later on as corporate “musical chairs” starts to occur and people move from one vacancy to another.

What I’m getting at is that you are obviously frustrated with your current job but also frustrated with job hunting so you’re looking for permission to give up.

I don’t buy that. For the person who’s worked hard their entire career and for the first time have run into a career obstacle, quitting should not be your choice. Taking a break should not be your choice.

Finding the path to the right situation should be your choice and practicing patience should become part of your repertoire, rather than giving up.

[/spp-transcript]

 

Do you really think employers are trying to help you? You already know you can’t trust recruiters—they tell you as much 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

You can order a copy of “Diagnosing Your Job Search Problems” for Kindle for $.99 and receive free Kindle versions of “No BS Resume Advice” and “Interview Preparation.”

Waking Up From Default Mode

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[svp]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydENsPXh32E[/svp]
Too much of our life is spent living on autopilot. Here, I share some of my own experience and invite you to wake up from your slumber and become conscious again.

 

[spp-transcript]

I’m in a talk about waking up from, “default mode.” Let me first describe what that is. Default mode is that part of your life that I think you recognize pretty quickly as a huge part of your life where you have stopped thinking. You are living on automatic or autopilot and have not taken the time to analyze, maybe for years, whether this really works for you.

Let me give you an example.

There was a time that I lived in Northeastern Pennsylvania and commuted to New York 90 miles away. Every morning, I would get up to be on a 6 AM bus that would deliver all of us to Port Authority a little bit after 8:00 AM. I would walk to my office; do my job. Turn around and commute two hours back to Pennsylvania. I walked in my home tired, as you imagine. I went from waking up at more normal hours to doing this. Yes, I made a choice to move there. Financially it was a great decision because we sold our home on Long Island at the top of the real estate market and bought a place therefore much much less and I was willing to pay that price.

No some would be driven to school by my wife or as part of a carpool. It was a half-hour  to school and 1/2 hour back. After a while you stop thinking about it; I would keep going to my office and do the same things day after day in the same way and I stop thinking about it. I would respond to phone calls and emails, call people back who left voicemail, I would write ads for positions I was advertising, prepare candidates for interviews, tweak resumes … All the same stuff, day in and day out but not really thinking about whether or not I like doing it.

As a job hunter, it can also show up in your search whether somebody tasks that you get involved with where you don’t even think about whether you doing them well. There is a head of steam that starts to build up and never stop they ask yourself whether you could be better than this or continue to fumble around and be hired by accident by a firm. I say by accident because you strong a few sentences together well enough in an interview and someone was going to give you a shot. Had you prepared better, had you actually thought about how to answer certain questions in advance, it could’ve been a great performance but that’s not can happen.

I want to wake you up to the fact that there is a lot in the day that you can deconstruct and break down and say, “what can I do differently?” You can with his firm. Do this better? Do I even want to do this?

I was talking to someone I coach unrelated to job search and he is a manager and wants to get better and move into an executive position with his firm. I start to listen to him and he just has too much to do. Why? Because he refuses to delegate. So now he is taken some first steps toward delegating to people and now there’s more that has to come off his plate and he has to start coaching people. There’s a lot that he can do to motivate people but is out there doing way too much. And it’s at the point where he knows he can’t do it the old way much longer.

So I want to wake you up to deconstructing your day and deconstructing her life. Is this really working for you? Do you like doing what you doing? Are you happy doing it? Does it give you a certain amount of pleasure or is this just habit that has been compounded over years we are one day you’re going to wake up and say to yourself, “Is this all there is?”

[/spp-transcript]

 

Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter has been coaching people to play their professional and personal games BIG for what seems like 100 years.

For more No BS Coaching Advice and encouragement, visit my website,

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