Jeff

Are You The Target for a Job Layoff?

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If a disaster devastated your home, would you sit and complain about it or would you be making new plans?

Too often, the first thing people do when their firm is experiencing problems is to sit and mope, complain, do anything other than fit for their jobs or hit the exits. After all, complaining does nothing. Action does.

So if you learn your firm is experiencing financial problems severe enough to put layoffs in the cards or your job in jeopardy, here are a few things to do.

If you run a business unit or a company and the numbers disappoint, don’t just take it; make your case to the board, to the president, to anyone who should hear it. Don’t let the numbers stand unchallenged. Make sure people know that it is not unique to your firm and that you have a plan to change things.

If you’re the Average Joe or Josephine, be the “backbone of the organization.” Come in early and leave late. Care about what you do and document everything. Make sure people know how much effort you put in without seeming like a martyr.

If you’re fairly new to the firm when problems occur, become “the eager beaver” by becoming a sponge for knowledge. Ask lots of questions and get advice from everyone important. Get going!

If you’re an “old timer” become a work machine. let everyone see you as important so that they don’t believe that you and your high salary are disposable.

And while all of this is going on, prepare your resume and start connecting with people inside of your organization to see if you can transfer to a division where layoffs are unlikely or outside of your organization so that you can start interviewing before you are fired.

 

 

 

© 2008. 2011 all rights reserved.

Gray Hair, Black Prospects

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If you’re reading this article, I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that discrimination has become much more sneaky than in the past. No one comes out and say, “We’re not hiring you because you’re too old.” Instead, discrimination is subtle and equally damaging.

“She seems set in her ways.”

“I’m not sure he can work for a 37 year old.”

“What would she have in common with a group of 20 somethings.”

“Why would we want someone who would be taking a step backward in their career? When the market picks up won’t they be looking for greener pastures?”

And, I know the speech about how federal law requires that firm’s use bona fide occupational qualifications (BFOQ) as their criteria for evaluating people, yet, in the trenches of the interview, how can you actually ever prove that you were discriminated against? After all, who is your competition and who’s to say that their skills and experience don’t better fit an employer’s needs?

The four examples I’ve offered are actually pretty easy to defuse if you remember that no one is ever going to ask you, “So I’m 37 and you’re 58 is it? How do you feel about working for a younger manager?” You just have to pace yourself in their seat for a moment and think like they do.

Did you submit a resume that shows you as a Director or manager of a function when they were looking for a staff person? Why would you accept a lesser job is left unanswered unless you do so in the email you send with the resume (or cover letter if you use another submittal medium)? For example, a director has not been asked to execute the functionality of one of his managers for many years. How do you actually meet the needs of the employer? Why are you qualified? Answer that with the resume; don’t expect to get that opportunity at the interview-you may not get that far.

Can you work for someone (much) younger than you? The question implied in the question is whether you would have authority issues with a younger manager. Answer: After you’ve had an opportunity to demonstrate mastery of the role being interviewed for, proactively, comment something along the lines of, “This may not be a question in your mind, but I would like to dispel it if it is. You may look at me and wonder whether I can take direction from someone who is younger than me. Let me say that I’ve worked in organizations where younger workers had trouble taking direction from their manager who was older so I understand how destructive a bad attitude can be. I want to assure you that if I ever have a question about a decision you make that I’ll ask you about it personally.

Are you flexible or rigid in your thinking? Some workers, young or old, are inflexible. Yet older workers carry that label because we associate older people with inflexibility in the culture at large. Again, being proactive is the key to diffusing the bias. “Joining a new company is like moving to a new country. Everyone is different; the ways things are done or responded to are often different. There’s a new language to learn. I’ve stepped into new jobs and new roles on several previous occasions and been able to learn the lay of the land and meet or surpass objectives.”

What would you have in common with a bunch of 20-somethings? They are suggesting to you that they are afraid that there might be a cultural mismatch between you, the mother or father figure and the rebellious children. “What is the group like? (your eyes light up as they tell you about the team). “Wow, sounds terrific! Who are the natural leaders of the group? Are you concerned that I’m going to act like a no-it-all, act like they’re father (or mother) and try to put out their creativity or just not be willing to go for drinks with them?” By putting everything on the table for discussion in a non-confrontational way you have an opportunity to get the interviewer to share concerns and respond to them with a smile and an answer.

Success on any interview involves placing yourself in the employer’s chair and addressing the tangible and intangible concerns they might have about you and your experience better than anyone else. If you take the time to prepare for questions related to your age and your ability to fit as well as you do questions about your experience I am confident that you will get better results on your interviews.

© 2007, 2011 all rights reserved.

6 Dumb Things People Do When Submitting Their Resume

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There are a thousand and one dumb things people do to sabotage themselves and their job search. Here a few of the most egregious mistakes people make.

1. Stupid file names for their resume .  I received a resume this week from a technology executive who should have known better. He has a good background but named his resume file some like, “His Name cut and paste August 2009.”

Why would you ever include the expression, “cut and paste” as part of the file name for any document, even if it is true?  It just tells the reader that you threw something together quickly. Is that the message you want to convey to an employer or recruiter you want to be impressed by you?

2. Including a cover letter as a separate attachment. No one opens a cover letter file because it is a waste of time. Why? Because most people don’t know how to write a good cover letter so why bother?

It is far better to write what you might consider a cover letter in the message are of your email, instead of doing that. Don’t do the kind of addressing and salutation you might if you were writing a formal business letter. Use the space to make the case for how your experience fits what they are looking for.

3. Embedding your name, address and contact information as an embedded header at the top of your resume. This one is a subtle one and would require you to understand how corporations and recruiters work.

When organizations and recruiters import data about you into their systems, they don’t manually type your information into their systems, they use parsing software to read it and populate fields. With many types of this software, embedded headers will interfere with the software doing that and your information having to be manually imported.

Who has time for that? The result is you will miss out on opportunities.

4. Mass emailing your resume in the “TO:” field of your email. Why would you want to tell people that you’ve emailed your resume to 165 employers and recruiting firms?

5. Not spell checking your resume. I understand that certain words will go through a spelling checker even though they might be misused.

For example, for years, the words, “NOVEL” would pass through a spell checker even though the intended word was, “Novell.”in particular, visually check any professional term carefully to insure that your resume does not have misusages or misspellings.

6. Submitting the Same Resume Over and Over Again to Every Job as though your one resume will make the case for every job you apply for.   Everyone knows the expression, “The broken watch is right twice a day yet people violate that simple true statement by emailing the same resume over and over again to every job they apply for as though every job is identical.

Tailored resumes help people receive good results. Flipping the same resume over and over again like burgers at a fast food restaurant will give you poor results.

Isn’t showing care when you submit your resume worthwhile?

 

 

 

© 2008 all rights reserved.

Everyone Should Know You Are Looking

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I sat with John Sampson last week for an hour and talked with him about the importance of networking. If you don’t know John, he is a technology manager in New Jersey who rums a large networking group called MIS Network Associates as an act of giving back (I know, I suggested ways he could make it more profitable and he rebuffed the ideas, saying it was an act of love for all the help he has received.

Beyond helping people develop their elevator pitch (you know, the 30 second commercial about your work), John encourages members to tell everyone that they are looking for work and what kind of job they do.

Can your wife explain what you do in 30 seconds or less? Make sure they can!

He told a wonderful story about how one of his members has being pushed by their cleaning person for a resume. Eventually, the man’s wife told him, “Give her the resume so I can get her off my back!”

It seems that the woman’s husband managed a function at a large employer in the area and hired him for a terrific job.

Have you told your mechanic, doctor, hairdresser, accountant, lawyer, best friend, pastor, rabbi, monk, priest, nun, shoemaker, former boss (gasping for air) that you’re looking for a job?

Tell everyone and tell them what you do!

© 2009 all rights reserved.

Be Careful With Your Privacy Settings on Facebook While Job Hunting

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Early in the week, I was on Facebook and noticed an old friend online who I had not spoken with in more than a year so I thought I would contact him through Messenger and get caught up.

I heard a terrible story from him that I think should be shared with you.

It seems he was up for a consulting assignment with a firm and received a call from the party that trying to use his services.

It seems that he was connected with a number of people on Facebook at the potential client who then decided to dig a little deeper to get a feel for him prior to using it services.

One of the things they found was a photo that they judged inappropriate (I won’t go into details because what is inappropriate to some is fine with others) and it was causing them to have second thoughts about his judgement and using his services.

Imagine being in a job search, interviewing for weeks, feeling like you’re about to receive a job offer when someone goes to Facebook, Twitter, Xing, Google or LinkedIn and with very little effort finds something questionable about you?

Firms ARE looking at all sorts of publicly available information when deciding to hire someone.

Don’t make it easy for them to disqualify you.

© 2010 all rights reserved.

Self-Promoting Yourself Into a Job

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If you’re like most people, you’ve never written a press release to call attention to a success you’ve had.

And rightly so.

But some of you should be sending out press releases or encouraging your company to promote things that you and your group are doing because they are significant.

And most of you can be doing the next best thing to a press release:

The periodic note

An old friend of mine would mail a note to all of her friends bring them up-to-date on the things that were going on in her life, her professional successes, accomplishments and, occasionally, the frustrations. It allowed her to stay in contact with lot of people who would offer her advice, suggestions and jobs.

Today, with email, it is much easier than before.

Every 6 months, send an email to all of your friends, acquaintances and former colleagues to bring them up-to-date. Skip the complaints about your boss. Former colleagues may be in contact with them and you don’t want to generate problems.

It’s easy to add people to Outlook and other products like it; you can also use services like Tempo or any other schedule/calendar app on your phone to schedule the calls.

Any way you look at it, since only 22% of positions are filled by recruiters and fewer than 6% via job boards, your connects and their ability to think of you will go a long way to helping jobs land in your lap.

©2006, 2010, 2015 all rights reserved.

The Easiest Time of the Year to Network

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Many people I speak with do very poor or limited networking. They think sending out LinkedIn connection requests to strangers is networking even though they do nothing to take advantage of the connection or even offer to help out the person they have connected with.

That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Does it make any sense to you?

As I write this, we have entered the “Thanksgiving to New Year’s End of Year Bonanza” period when the biggest jerk in your former professional life will be open to networking and offering some help.

It’s easy . . . send a holiday card to re-connect. Do it early in December to open the door to recognition and a smile. The card can be sent as an ecard to save on cost (use www.Greetings123.com, one of the few remaining free sites) to send out holiday greetings and best wishes.

A week or two later, place a call to the person to check in on life, the universe, everything . . .you know . . . chit chat. Tell them about family and re-kindle the connection. In this call or in one more, you open the door to asking for help with your job search.

Most people will be friendly enough and well-mannered enough to listen and re-kindle the relationship. Nothing may come of the networking effort but networking will never work without the personal contact of a connection like this, especially with people you already know.

© 2010 all rights reserved.

Using Informational Interviews in Your Job Search

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When people join social networks, it seems like all they do is try to add lots of people. They never consider there are actual ways to use the social networks to help meet employers and make USEFUL connections.

Informational interviews were very popular many years ago as a way to learn about an employer, industry, career change or something you wanted to learn. They are a way to pick someone’s brain, create a favorable impression, learn, ask for a referral and a host of other things that can facilitate being hired.

When you target an employer, go to the firm’s page on LinkedIn and see whether there is someone you are already connected with who works there or if one of your university alumni works there or has worked there.

Search Twitter for mentions or Twellow for people who list the employer in their profile

On Facebook, try BranchOut as a way to hook up with people.

If the person is not local, see if you can arrange to call or skype them for a few minutes of time.

How should you reach out to them?

Give some thought as to what you might want to learn from them. If you are someone reaching out for advice about a career change, your questions might be pretty obvious– How did you start out? Did you have a plan to get to where you are and what was it? What training did you receive and how did you get it? There a million possible questions you can ask but distill them to the important ones for you.

If you are job hunting, you might want to speak with them about the function they perform, how the department is structured, the nature of the work, who runs the function . . . again, a million possible questions.

See if you can find out about the entry point to the firm. Everyone will send you to HR or a website but that is often useless. See if they can point you to the person who manages or is the Director of the function.

Just get to the point quickly and don’t waste their time.

Remember to follow up and let them know the result of using their advice or referral.

Social networking isn’t about “the scoreboard of connections.” It’s about using your connections and helping your connections.

Informational interviews are a great way of doing that.

© 2012 all rights reserved.

Google+ and Your Job Search

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Are you one of the millions of people who have signed up for Google+?

If you are, you have seen what has the potential for being a power communications platform that can be incorporated into a job search.

G+ can already be incorporated into your search.

1. Create Circles

Circles are one of G+’s additions to social networking. It is the idea of creating small; (or eventually) large groups of people who you want to tell about certain aspects of your lilfe, work or share information with. Google offers Friends, Acquaintances, Family and a few others.

Create them for colleagues at work because, you kinow, they will eventually change jobs and this will let you stay in contact with them easily (even if they are not on G+, Google emails them).

2. Huddles

Huddles is a video chat service that lets you create adhoc chats. I think of this is a great collaboration tool for job hunters to support one another. Imagine there are four of you who meet at a networking event who want to stay in contact and support one another. Create a huddle for these four, meet online regularly and create a mini networking/support group with one another between meetings of your bigger group.

3. Sparks

Although Google+ initially offers Sparks around a few categories, you can create Sparks around different topics of interest for you. Sparks will deliver information on those topics to you. It’s like having a mini RSS feed or mini news service available to you.

Tools like G+, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are tools to help you, not just during your current job search for the next one and the one after that. Like investing money, it can become a long term asset that can support you for years to come if you take the time to make regular deposits.

© 2011 all rights reserved.

Who Do You Work For? The Affects of Branding

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We are all influenced by brands and I can prove it to you.

When you by detergent to do your laundry, I bet you don’t read the list of chemicals from one brand, compare it with three others and say, “Hmm. The combination of these in this brand will probably be far superior to the combination in these other three.” You never say that, do you?

Instead you assume they’ll all do the same job and buy one as opposed to another because it’s on sale, you have a coupon, or has no scent or maybe your wife, husband or mother specified what they wanted. You do anything other than figure out which will actually make your laundry cleaner.

When companies hire and when recruiters screen resumes, we’re also influenced by brands. We see names we know like a large company or a “hot” company or a recognized leaders in our market area and we believe this person is better than someone at a company we’ve never heard of. Right or wrong, that’s human nature.

What can you do if you work for a small company or a “no-name company?” What can you do to create a better impression?

The answer is to define it for the recipient.

For example, a person works for Jillie Jack Jay Consultants (I made that up), what do you write? You might write something like 32 person regional strategy and operations consulting firm focused on the hospitality industry.

If you work for Benoit Fashion (again made up. Any similarity between this name and a real one is accidental), you might say that they are a $50 million dollar swimwear firm. Get the idea?

Leaving a company that few have heard of to stand on its own does little to create a positive impression. Defining it gives people a better opportunity to understand it, understand your experience and be interested.

© 2006, 2011 All rights reserved Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter