blueskyresumesblog

Self-Defeating Job Search Behaviors

Excellent post from Sital over on Career Hub. He makes great points about how we can set ourselves up for job search failure.

It's an especially good read for anyone feeling knocked down by economic news and I found many of his points just as applicable to small business owners as to job seekers. Food for thought!

There Are Still Some Decent Employers Left

This story is lovely:

Dave Tiderman wondered if the decimal point was in the wrong place when he opened his $35,000 company bonus. Jose Rojas saw his $10,000 check and thought, "That can't be right."

Valentin Dima watched co-workers breaking down in tears over their bonus checks and didn't trust his emotions. He drove home first, then opened his envelope: $33,000.

Year-end bonuses are rare these days. Rarer still is what the Spungen family, owners of a ball bearings company in Waukegan, Ill., about 40 miles north of Chicago, did as they sold the business.

They gave out whopping thank-you bonuses.

A total of $6.6 million is being shared by just 230 employees of Waukegan-based Peer Bearing Co., with facilities in England and the United States. Amounts varied and were based on years of service.

Read the whole thing here

People Who Love Their Jobs

Now this is a woman who is doing what she was born to do.

Don't Embarass the President-Elect!

I just posted on Career Hub about the application process for the new Obama-Biden administration. They're being pretty comprehensive:

The questionnaire includes 63 requests for personal and professional records, some covering applicants’ spouses and grown children as well, that are forcing job-seekers to rummage from basements to attics, in shoe boxes, diaries and computer archives to document both their achievements and missteps.

Only the smallest details are excluded; traffic tickets carrying fines of less than $50 need not be reported, the application says. Applicants are asked whether they or anyone in their family owns a gun. They must include any e-mail that might embarrass the president-elect, along with any blog posts and links to their Facebook pages.

The application also asks applicants to “please list all aliases or ‘handles’ you have used to communicate on the Internet.” 

But what does that mean for those of us who don't plan to apply for a government job? I have some thoughts.

The Value-Added Resume

Last week I wrote about my concerns with the idea of "personal branding" - my feeling that it focuses people on the wrong things - having them look inward rather than outward. So this week I wanted to talk a little bit more about my preferred approach - what I call the value-based approach to job search.

The idea is to determine what unique value you have to offer that the market needs. The important concept here is the second part of that statement. You have lots of things to offer - you might make a mean vegan curry and be able to raise one eyebrow but not the other - but if the market doesn't need those particular skills, you won't get a great response when highlighting them on your resume ;-)

This means you have to decide exactly what you want to do before writing an effective resume. You simply can't write a resume that grabs attention if you don't understand the concerns of the person reading your resume. And you can't understand their concerns if you don't know who they are. So targeting a position clearly is step one.

I love it when my clients can tell me exactly which position they want because I know I can push all the right buttons to get them there. But usually, you won't know the exact job - you just have to know what it would look like (for example "I want to be a marketing manager in a company that sells youth-oriented products. It has to be fast-paced and small to medium sized as I don't work well in big corporations.")

This type of targeting helps you address every word of your resume to appeal to the type of hiring managers who work in companies like this.

But it's not enough to throw a bunch of generic buzz words at the wall and hope that will open doors. You have to show how your unique combination of skills, experiences and personality traits mean that you will add value to that type of company.

This means you need to think back over all the times you have added value in the past. (Ask yourself 'what would be different at XYZ if they had never hired me?') Then determine the common theme that runs through those experiences.

In my past life as an HR executive, the theme that ran through my career was aligning HR with business goals. I was always the person who came in and turned HR from a "no" function to a "yes" function - one that supported the business goals and helped move the business forward. This usually meant replacing some people, changing a lot of policies and developing an entire new strategy for the HR function, and it was this that was my value-added.

Knowing your value-add abilities allows you to decide on a resume structure and on what to include (and what to leave out). You've done a lot of different stuff in your career but you don't have to include it all. Just focus on the stuff that communicates your value-added.

How to Write About Unpaid Experience

This question came from a reader who purchased my book on resume writing.

I'm in the process of updating my resume and I would like to know your recommendation for including non-paid/non-professional working experience.

For example, I love travel planning & research and have planned several multi-week/multi-country trips as well as other event planning experience such as wedding & party planning. How & where do you suggest including this type of information that might be beneficial in showing experience?

I purchased your book online and it has been very helpful but this is not something I remember being covered. I hope you can take some time to answer my question.

This is a great question. Too often, people feel that unpaid experience doesn't belong on a resume but this is completely wrong and also self-defeating. Why does it matter whether or not you were paid to do something? Do you learn more when you're being paid? Is the experience any less valuable when you work for free?

No, unpaid experience belongs on your resume as long as it relates to what you want to do next. There are different ways to do this. You can list these experiences as 'freelance event planner' or even 'volunteer event planner.'  Then show the dates just as you would with a normal position, describe the work (you can say that it was unpaid if this makes you feel more comfortable) and highlight a couple of key accomplishments.

I do this all the time for my clients and it's very effective. Good luck!

Do They Care About Your Personal Brand?

An interesting post at The Buzz Bin touched on some issues I've been thinking about for a while. In "I Don't Care About Your Personal Brand,' Geoff Livingston outlines why he opposes the idea of developing a personal brand. His post is aimed at people working in the online space, but his points apply to anyone. You should read the whole thing, but this is the part that caught my eye:

3) While personal brands are concerned with themselves, the market is also concerned about itself.

4) The market doesn’t care about the persona, only what value the persona contributes to the larger community.

This gets to the core of why I have never jumped on the personal branding bandwagon, despite having flirted with the idea for a while. In the end, I'm much less interested in having my clients focus on their 'brand' than on the value they can add to potential employers. Value-added is simple, direct and focused on the employer. Personal branding is something broader (to be sure value-added is a part of it, but not the only part) and seems to me much more focused on the individual.

In order to pinpoint a client's value proposition (exactly how he or she will help the company succeed) I  use many of the same approaches as a personal branding consultant, but the focus is different - not the self-indulgence of me (the candidate) but the outward focus of they (the employer).

For a long time, I attributed my reluctance to jump on the personal branding train as something related to my background. As a Brit, I'm always a little uncomfortable with anything that smacks of taking oneself too seriously. But after reading Geoff's post, I see that it's not just that.

It's this:

24) A personality oriented brand does not necessarily equate to successful results.

It's the fact that results (and actions) matter. Results and actions tell me what you will do for me. Results and actions tell me whether or not you will add value to my organization. Results and actions show me who you are much more effectively than any carefully crafted public image.

I know that many of my colleagues disagree, but for me, a focus on results will always be more effective than a focus on brand. After all, all products and services have brands, but how many of them deliver what they promise?

My personal favorite is my bank Chase, who tell me that 'the right relationship is everything' and then constantly leave me on hold for hours while they try to figure out why my online banking has gone awry one more time, leaving me yelling "THIS ISN'T THE RIGHT RELATIONSHIP!!!" as my blood pressure soars once again.  (But they do send me the occasional Starbucks gift certificate, with a very nice message about how much they value my custom, so I guess that makes it all OK).

I can't help wondering how much better they would be if they stopped spending money on branding experts and fancy loyalty programs and instead invested that money in actually adding value to my life.

And in the end, that's my point. Instead of worrying about personal brands, I think people need to think about results and value-added. In some cases, with the right candidate and the right personal branding coach, maybe the two things converge anyway - but if you have delivered great results and made a big impact on prior employers, you really don't need to worry about packaging it in a nice brand message. It will be obvious to everyone.

And if you haven't, well a nice brand message isn't going to help you for very long.

Start Building Your e-Presence Now

This post is part of Job Action Day, a day for all job-seekers and workers to take stock of their situations and make plans and/or take action steps to improve their careers.

When I finish a resume for a client, I always google their name to see what comes up. 

This isn't prurient curiosity - I do this because I know that what comes up in a Google search is almost as important as what's on the resume - maybe more in some cases.

Think about it - when you buy an expensive product, do you make your decision based on the manufacturers' descriptions of how wonderful their products are? I'm guessing that you don't - that instead you base your decision on reviews from friends, family, books, magazines and online websites.

In the past, employers had very few chances to get beyond what you told them in your resume. They could ask for references, but chances are you wouldn't give them names of people who would say bad things. They could ask probing questions at interviews, but this really depended on how good they were at probing and how good you were at answering. They could try calling former employers without your knowledge, but none of them would speak based on fear of lawsuits. So hiring a new employee was a leap into the unknown.

The Internet has changed that at least to some extent. Now employers can google your name and see what comes up. If they find lots of good stuff, obviously that works in your favor. If they find less flattering personal information, obviously that will work against you. But what about if they don't find anything?

This is increasingly the problem I find with my professional and executive-level clients. It's not that Google makes them look bad - it's that Google makes them look invisible.

And so this is my advice for Job Action Day: Take steps now to make sure that you have a strong e-presence.

1) Create profiles on sites like LinkedIn, Plaxo, Visual CV, Facebook and ZoomInfo. Make these profiles as impressive as your resume. Fill out every section and include links to your websites or blogs within the profiles.

2) Build your own site or hire someone to do it for you. Whether you start a blog or create a static website, you must have a place that offers all the important information about you in one place.

Once you have built these profiles, they may take a few weeks to show up in search engine results, but when they do, you will be able to add this powerful sentence to your cover letters, emails and interview answers: "Feel free to google me for more information."

See how confident that makes you sound?

There are many more ways to build a strong e-presence and I'll cover more of them in future posts, but for Job Action Day, here is one thing you can do to immediately improve your job search success rate.

Going Beyond the Call of Duty

I guess I lead a sheltered life because I had no idea that there was such a thing as naked sushi model.

But apparently there is a restaurant in New York where a semi-naked woman lies on your table covered in sushi. 'kay then!

Melanie Berliot tried it out for one night and wrote about her experiences for Vanity Fair.

For an hour and a half I laid there, while the men surrounding me drank and ate and stared, and sometimes poked at my bare body. Toward the end, I had to dart my eyes across the ceiling to avoid falling asleep. I was that comfortable, or that wishful for escape. When Koko tapped my shoulder and told me the dinner was over, I was partly relieved, and partly amazed so much time had elapsed. I managed to dismount the table far more elegantly than I’d climbed onto it, and I left the room, smiling.

Should I ever find myself in need of a job, I think this is one I will pass on.

What Do I Owe My Clients?

Most of our clients make almost no changes to the resumes we write. They may correct a fact here or tweak a word there, but almost always they love the resume and are eager to get started on a search.

But every now and then we have a client who needs to make more changes.

The reasons vary - some clients just have a very strong idea of what a resume should be and need the resume to look or sound the way they imagined when they purchased it. Others can't stop tinkering - they go through 7,8,9 rounds of revisions, changing different things each time until the resume bears no relation to the one I originally wrote. (Let me just stress, the clients I am describing are not unhappy with our service or angry in any way - they just feel the process is a team effort and they want to be intimately involved with every word).

And that's the problem ... when this many changes are made, I wonder what to do. The resume is no longer the one I wrote and, in my professional opinion, it's nowhere near as good as the one I wrote.

The clients who insist on these changes have usually shown their resume to friends and colleagues who have made numerous suggestions - many of which contradict each other and none of which are based on anything other than personal preference. With all due respect to your friends, dear readers, unless they have written hundreds of successful resumes, unless they follow recruitment trends, unless they have taken training in the field, they don't know what they're talking about!

As an example, I have a couple of doctor's appointments planned for next week. If the doctor recommends a test or medication, should I ask my friends whether they think it's a good idea before going ahead with it? Probably not ;-)

So do I let these changes stand? Or do I walk away from the project because I can't stand behind the product anymore?

I usually try to determine if I think the changes have destroyed the product to the point where it's no longer going to be at all effective. In these cases, I offer a refund and explain that I just can't accept money for something I can't stand behind. Surprisingly this sometimes angers the client, although I can't imagine what could be more ethical.

But if I think the resume will still be generally effective, if a little less so than when I originally wrote it, then I polish it up and send the client on his or her way. It seems churlish to refuse to work on the project just because I don't like some of the choices the client has made.

What do you think? If you pay a professional for a service, how would you want them to handle this situation?