15 Minute Job Search Tips

Final Interview Checklist

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[svp]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QyLEnHu6PA[/svp]
These are a few things you need to do and organize in order to be prepared for final interview.

 

[spp-transcript]

I have done many videos and podcasts about 2nd interviews but this one is about a final interview whether is the 3rd, the 5th, or the 19th interview. This is about your final interview.

So you know it is the final interview that you are coming in for… Here are several things I want you to check off in your mind  as being important for you to execute during the interview.

  1.  Don’t walk in thinking and acting like you have the job locked up. You don’t.  I can tell you from experience so many instances of people who thought they had the job and blew it in the last round.There are a million ways that people make the mistake, but I just want you to arrive NOT thinking that this is all locked up. Unintentionally, 1 of the famous people wind up doing when they think they have it is that they emotionally sit back as though they have their arms folded and appear disinterested. Knowing that you don’t have the job locked up, you always want to be selling yourself, looking out for situations where you can continue to promote who you are and what you can do for the firm.
  2. Be friendly. Look for opportunities to laugh. If someone makes a remark, it’s okay to chuckle about it an add on to it as long it is not as it is not racist, sexist, homophobic… You get the idea. You also want to be professional, too.  You don’t want to convey the message that all you do is laugh and joke Like a “good old boy.” You want them to be sure that you can be serious minded and professional.
  3. Prepare questions to ask. .  You may have heard slightly different things from people who have interviewed you so far that you can clarify here about the nature of the role and what the expectations are. You want to clarify these at the final interview. “I just want to clear up one thing in my mind. When I spoke to one person, they mentioned this. When I spoke to another, they said something slightly different. I just want to make sure I get your input about what this is.”
  4. Check out your proximity to power and authority and how important the work is. This 1 is for more senior professionals. The kind of work they can be easily eliminated during tough times is work that you don’t want to be associated with. You always want to be associated with work it’s going to be seen by leadership that runs the business.

[/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 http://bit.ly/thebiggamehunter

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.”

Job Search Lessons from the Presidential Election of 2016

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[svp]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3-ASGxxvbg[/svp]
I believe there are lessons that can be learned from the first presidential debate between Donald Trump and Sec. Clinton that you can apply to your job search. Both made mistakes that you can learn from.

[spp-transcript]

Today, I want to point out another one of those lessons that’s coming from this year’s presidential election. The lesson I want to point out comes from the debate that took place this week with Donald Trump and Sec. Clinton and entering “the deathmatch.” One on one. “Manno a Femmo.” I want to offer a less biased opinion of what I saw and what the media seems to be providing.

Universally they seem to say Trump was awful. When I saw was that in the first 30 or 40 minutes of the debate he matched up well. They obviously disagreed on items and you would expect that. I thought he was accurate and some of his statements on the impact of trade policy and matched up well with her there.

There was a point after the 30 or 40 minute mark where the tide clearly turned. At this juncture, Sec. Clinton’s preparation served her very well. For you as a job hunter, I believe there are lessons that you can learn from both candidates. Critiquing both of them I think there are things that you can take away.

He was not as well prepared as he could have been. Yes, we all read these stories about how he wasn’t going to be doing debate prep and a variety of other things. It’s kind of like going to an interview without preparation and deciding to “wing it.” Presidential debates on job interviews and were seeing the two people in making decisions about them.

Trump didn’t do well he did well in the first part of the interview but in the next hour of time, I thought he did poorly and revealed his lack of preparation. The words didn’t come out well. Even his snarky comments where he whispers into the microphone to disagree with her, he hadn’t done them with an audience before and appeared to be snarky.

I think Clinton made mistakes, too, and the biggest one was that she was smug. She appeared to bask in her own magnificence and missed opportunities to connect with the audience. Yes, she had punches to the ribs and kidneys throughout. Here is one example. Talking about how Trump and his businesses didn’t pay bills to small businesses like her father’s. Her father’s business never did business with Trump. she used it to illustrate that a lot of small business owners who were stiffed by Trump.

She would have a smile on her face that was arrogant, smug and not likable.

To me, that was a missed opportunity. Yes, the intelligence is there but part of what you try to do as a job hunter is connect with the audience, the interviewer, the panel. You can’t sit back and be so cocky that you turn people of.

So, I want to point out that there are lessons we can take from their mistakes that you can apply to job hunting. I’ve done shws about dumb interviewing mistakes that candidates make involving lack of preparation and being so full of yourself that  \\you are sitting there with a big smile on your face, enjoying yourself, instead of focusing on the audience.

[/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

Where Fear Lives

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[svp]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OCA50mXn_k[/svp]
Too often, people keep yielding ground to their fears until their universe becomes tiny. What we do you to give into fear?

[spp-transcript]

What’s scaring you? What’s keeping you from having the life that you want?

How did you find yourself in your current circumstances where you know you could be doing things differently, know you could be more effective and know you could have a happier career/relationship/life … Whatever it is. What’s keeping you playing smaller. Let’s see where your fear is?

Fear often shows up in very subtle ways. I was in class last night and we were talking about fear. I kept feeling this knot in my body as I was consciously thinking about being afraid.

I could see how, at times, it is kept me from being effective. At times, it has kept me from being successful and encouraged me to play safe, like staying in the comfort zone.

The comfort zone is OK but, frankly, in my mind, I want to be expanding mine.  Don’t you? Don’t you want to start moving up against your fear and moving outward so you not as confined in a small place as you might currently be?

There was a story I heard many years ago in my early involvement with the mankind project that involves lions hunting gazelle. The story starts off with the fact that Giselle are much faster than lions have created a system to hunt them. Even old lions are involved in the hunt.

As the story goes, old lions hide in the place where they cannot be seen and the young lions chase the gazelle in the direction of the old lions. Just at the point that the gazelle are right up on top of the old lions, they stand up and roar powerfully. The gazelle are terrified and turn around and run right back into the teeth of the young lions who kill them and eat them. If the gazelle and run in the direction of the roar, they would easily outrun the old lions and lived. Instead their fear because there death.

Where are you turning around and running away from your fear and into the teeth of mediocrity, being ordinary and settling for less in your life?

Often the best way to get through this is with coaching. I’d love to coaching but if you prefer, there are wonderful people out there who, I’m sure, can help you as well.

If you’re interested in my coaching you, Reach out to me by email at TheBigGameHunter@gmail.com

[/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.

Ready to schedule your first coaching call? 

Originally recorded as a Facebook Livestream

I’m Seen As a Job Hopper. What Do I Do ?

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[svp]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RaKnedcKHI[/svp]
Sometimes, job hunters can be seen as job hoppers– changing jobs with too much frequency for the taste of the potential employer. What do you do? How do you explain why you change jobs with such frequency? It depends on your circumstances and here I talk about three possibilities.

[spp-transcript]

Sometimes, people are seen as job hoppers. They’ve changed jobs every year or two; sometimes, it looks like they’ve jumped into completely different fields; sometimes, economic circumstances of cause them to need to change from job to job. Let me address the job hopping question and try to put a lid on the list of your worries and fears.

If you are someone who has changed jobs every year or two and you are at the interview phase, it would have been better had you dealt with it in your cover email. The notion that I have is that you want to take on things head on and proactively because you know it can be seen as an issue, right? In your cover email, you might write something to the effect of, “I have changed jobs with some frequency but part of the reason I have is with an eye toward finding the field or career or the type of work that makes the most sense for me. I haven’t quite found it yet, but no one of these organizations will complain about my work ethic or my effort. I just didn’t find the job satisfying. As I understand this position, it’s far more appealing than anything I have done before. This is something that really excites me.”

In writing this in your cover letter what you’re doing is being proactive. Then, at the interview, you can again take it on because you know firms are going to raise it is an issue. If you are early in your career (like 30 years of age or less) and have had to deal with these  circumstances, you can deal with this in this way and it is creditable.

The next scenario is for someone who has been a consultant and, as a consultant, you are changing assignments with some regularity. What can you do? Sometimes the issue is your resume because you are listing these assignments in a way that suggests to employers that these are individual jobs and not consulting assignments. It’s best if you have an aggregated category on top of your consulting work such as, “CONSULTANT”  October 2013 to present. Even if it appears in your past, do the same thing. By doing it this way, you are demonstrating to firms that these were not full-time jobs, but consulting assignments.

Lastly, he if you are victimized by economic circumstances and forced to job hop like many people were there in the last economic slowdown when people took temp assignments and/or full-time positions from which they were cut back on because of economic circumstances, I don’t believe in lying but I do believe in telling the story in useful ways that an organization can understand.

Whatever the circumstances were in your life, you can say something like,” at that time, I went from organization to organization, not because I wanted to but because economic circumstances kept causing firms to restructure themselves, Lay off thousands of individuals, and, as a relative newcomer who hadn’t had a chance to prove myself with them, I was an easy target for layoffs. After all, I had only been there for eight or nine months; it was easy for them to chop me up.”

“I’ve since found places where I have been able to stay longer,” or, “I’m looking for a place where I can stay longer.”

[/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

Is It Worth Using Paid Job Boards or Can I Stick with The Free Ones?

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[svp]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QugE5lzfFE[/svp]
Are PAID job sites worth the investment or should we just stick to the various FREE sites (i.e.Indeed, Careerbuilder, etc.)?

 

[spp-transcript]

Are paid sites worth the money Indeed, Careerbuilder and the like?

As always, it depends.

One paid site I know of used to be a great site but has lost a lot of its luster. It has become an aggregator of jobs from other sites. Should you pay for that? No! You get that from indeed.

Indeed and SimplyHired aggregate jobs from many places. Same as GlassDoor.com. You don’t need to pay for most of the jobs.

So the simple answer was, “No. It isn’t worth paying for job board.”

However, it can be worth paying for LinkedIn.If your network is small or average sized and you want to be reaching out to people (as you should),Here’s what I think you should do.Join as many as 100 groups in your area of specialization (LinkedIn lets you join as many as 100 groups).

If you join 100 groups,  starting with the largest ones in your area of specialization, then,If you discover you not able to connect with enough people, if you network is still not large enough to provide you with entrée to the firms that you want to apply to or join, then become a paid member of LinkedIn.Start with the least expensive one and work your way up from there.

The most extensive service available through LinkedIn, I think, is $99 per month (I could be wrong.  It might be $119) And allows you 30 InMails during that month. If you’re not bumping up against inMail limitations, let me suggest a workaround for you.

You can get a lot of the data you want from Google Chrome extensions.  The chrome extensions include Prophet, Connect6 People Discovery, Connectifier Sociallinks, Discoverly for Gmail, Linkedin and more, EmailHunter, and Lusha.

What they do is when you visit a page where you have a 2nd level connection, 1 of these services will be good about providing you with a work email for them even if you’re not a connection with the person.

Here are a few more:

ContactOut

Intelligence Search

Klenty

LeadFinch

MakeLinx

Mon.ki

PeopleDiscovery

Download and install these connections for Chrome and you will get most of the contacts that you need with these extensions. If you’re still not successful getting email addresses for everyone that you want to connect with, then go to the paid service for LinkedIn.

[/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.”

Why Do Some Companies Say the Position Requires US Citizenship or Permanent Residents?

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

[spp-transcript]

Why do some Companies say a position requires US citizenship or permanent residence if the job doesn’t require a security clearance?

Firms use that language or language like it such as, “Position requires that you be able to work for any employer without sponsorship,” to indicate they are not willing to do an H1B transfer. It doesn’t mean that they are not willing to consider someone who has EAD status but they don’t want to incur the time or expense involved with doing a transfer.

Why? There are a number of reasons. I don’t want to give short shrift to anything so let me do my best to outline some of the reasons.

There was an expense that they incur.

This administration (Obama) has been hostile to both visa transfers and to  sponsorship in general. They make it extremely difficult for organizations to transfer one. Even with expedited visa transfer requests, it can take longer than many employers are willing to wait.

In addition, there was a provision in the bank bailout law called TARP that restricted firms that accepted money under the law from hiring individuals who required sponsorship as either an employee or as a consultant.

As a result, although the blame goes to the employer, is actually government policy that is made it exceedingly difficult to hire people who require visa transfers.

Again, this is not about whether or not you can do the job. I’m sure you can. This is about a situation where a firm is incurring an expense, time that their in-house counsel has to incur to do the transfer. In addition, there is a hostile environment toward visa transfers by the US government. Finally, there is legislation the requires firms to hire people who have US citizenship or green card status.

[/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 http://bit.ly/thebiggamehunter

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.”

Do More People Get Jobs From Networking or Job Ads (VIDEO)

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[svp]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MvZVSpv8tQ[/svp]

[spp-transcript]

The question I received was, “to most people get jobs from networking or from job ads?” Let me give you the statistics.

Recruiters fill about 6% of all positions; job is filled about 15 to 20%. I combined the two numbers because recruiters sometimes use job ads to find people so it is just easier to combine them both. 26% are filled by job he has and recruiters.

How do the rest get filled? They get filled by networking. Here is an interesting addendum.

Most of you think of networking as the people you already know. However, there are folks your network knows that you don’t know. Statistics show that 70% of the positions the filled through networking , as a result of introductions to people that you did not know at the beginning of your job search.

Catch that one! Of the privately 70% of positions are filled by networking, 70% of them are filled by introductions the people that the job hunter did not know at the beginning of the search! Almost 50%!

Your goal is to network because that is really where most of the jobs are filled – – by creating relationships with people that you don’t currently know and by expanding the relationship with people that you do know.

Job ads are fine. I encourage people to work with recruiters and answer job ads. However, recruiters are not out there to help you. They are not going to be the source of the lead where they are not compensated. After all, who is a recruiter work for? There working for a company that is going to pay them.

My job is to create a venue for people to want to help you. That comes through networking.

[/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

Why Is It So Difficult for an Unemployed Person to Get a Job?

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[svp]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5dPGDNqaS0[/svp]
The answer is simple and, no, it is not that all employers have entered into a conspiracy against unemployed people.

[spp-transcript]

The question is, “Why is it so difficult for an unemployed person to get a job?”

To me, the answer involves confronting a belief that a lot of people have about all the bias that companies have about hiring unemployed people. That’s the easy answer; the honest answer, the one that you don’t want to hear is that (#1) you don’t have the skills that the market wants or (#2) you don’t know how to job hunt. Let me break it down for you.

In terms of job hunting, if you’re not getting interviews, your resume stinks. If you getting interviews but not being invited back, you don’t interview as well as you should. If you are being invited back and nothing is happening further, you are connecting with people as well as the need to.

See where I’m going with this? There are clear skills deficiencies that you have that can be corrected.

There are lots of different ways to learn how to do things better. Yes, you can hire a professional resume writer to write your resume for you. You can also join the site like mine, JobSearchCoachingHQ.com, where I have curated information that can pick you up all along the line and help you dissect the problems plus you can ask me questions so I can help you dissect it.

After all, as Malcolm Gladwell points out so well in, “Outliers,” an expert would be someone with 10,000 hours of job search experience. You have how much? You are by no means an expert and you have about no idea what firms look for. You are guessing at it.

Get some help. That’s the thing you really need at this point. It’s not that firms go out of their way to discriminate (although some firms do for chronic long-term unemployed people). They do it because they believe that in a good job market, as they believe it is now, there is a reason why someone is unable to get a job for a long period of time. For those people, they use the fact that you been unemployed for a long period of time as code for, “Other people have screened he or she. They found you deficient. We’re not gonna find anything different.”

That’s the problem – – you know how to do the search right. You’re an amateur and you think you know how to do the search better than you do.

Tough message but one that needs to be heard.

[/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..

What Do I Do If I Feel Burned Out?

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[svp]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RCCxQ2Fxg0[/svp]

A common feeling about job hunters is feeling burned out . . . but is that really the right word? I explore that in this video and offer another term for it and suggestions for how to deal with it.

[spp-transcript]

What do I do if I feel burned out? Man this is such a common question. The follow-up part to the question is that the person is one more interview schedule and the individual he is going to meet with has been rude to him up until this point so, obviously, the question was feeling it degree of pessimism about this interview and feeling burnt out.

I’m thinking burned out may not be the right term here. I think frustrated is the right term. It seems he’s feeling frustrated because he hasn’t gotten the results that he thinks he deserves.

So, if you are feeling burned out, if you’re feeling frustrated, if you are doing a lot of stuff and not getting the results that you hoped for, I invite you to put aside these expectations that you deserve a certain type of result in slow things down a little bit.

Often “burn out” is frustration that “if I do these things, I expect certain results NOW.” Unfortunately, life doesn’t work that way.

Would you need to do is reevaluate how your search has been conducted, what are you doing right and what could you be doing differently. Maybe you are in a field that operates differently than your expectation. Maybe you need to adjust to remain in that field.

I hear that someone is feeling frustrated, I encourage people to take a couple of hours to sit back and asked themselves what’s been going on in the search so far? Have you been going “great guns” to launch your search? Have you done anything since to market yourself? Maybe what you need to do is arrange for a few more interviews because, to use this person’s example, they only have one more interview schedule is not feeling particularly optimistic about it.

To get the results that you want, you can’t just simply charge out “great guns.” You need to exert effort that sustains itself over the course of time. You have to be patient until you get the opportunity to kiss the right frog that turns into a prince or princess, you’re going to be kissing a lot of dirty frogs, right?

So, think in terms of you get the right outcome. How do you do that? Generate more interviews. Improve your interviewing, if that’s the issue. If the issue is your field requires you to do certain things that up until this point you have wanted to do, then you have to sit back and say, “okay, what’s the price I’m willing to pay?” After all, is a choice that you have to make in order to remain in your chosen industry.

[/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

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.

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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