Here are your rules if you have the guts to declare war on your job search. They are not for cowards. This is how a real proactive job search can be done.
Check it out here. It is on LinkedIn. If you aren’t on LinkedIn yet, then link to me bryan @ dilts.us
Posted in Finding jobs, Perseverance, Time management
Tagged proactive job search, your job search
It is impossible for an orange tiger with black stripes to hide in green grass, yet it does. You can’t fill a job unless you let people know about it, yet it happens all the time.
I walked 50 miles in a wilderness area. I found lots of elk, fox, coyote, deer and bear. I didn’t see any of them. Not one. But, I found them. I heard them and saw their tracks and scat. They were there. If I wanted to go hunting, I would know right where to go to find them.
There are also jobs you can’t see. At times it is as obvious as tracks in the mud even if there are no job ads. There is an announcement of a new division moving to your area. A newspaper mentions the company is expanding. You may see a new building being built. These things should alert you that a company needs to hire people.
More subtle indicators are that you hear of someone being fired, or that they are looking for a new job. In all likelihood, someone will replace them. That is a job opening.
Every city has at least one business newspaper. Little old Harrisburg, PA has 3 or 4. In that business news they highlight the expansion plans of businesses. There is a section about appointments and promotions. When someone is promoted, they had to come out of another job. Call them up and congratulate them. Ask them how they got the promotion and wait for them to tell you what job they left behind.
75% of all jobs are filled without ever placing an ad or posting an internal job notice. Keep your eyes open for where an opening will be. If you get the job before the ad appears, there is no competition.
Something to do today
Go to your biggest local library and to the local college or university library. Ask to see all the business daily, weekly and monthly newspapers and magazines for your area. See if you can find job tracks in them.
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Humility and job suicide, there is a difference
What’s wrong with the box?
How to wait for the next interview
Posted in Finding jobs, Networking
Tagged Finding jobs, hidden jobs, unadvertised jobs
People call me and ask, “What is the hottest job in my field? What is the next BIG thing?” I tell them how to find out for themselves.
The trouble with your career may be that you are stuck in a backwater position with no chance to see what is new. You might say:
An excellent way to know where you want to be is to read the job ads once a week. You’ll get a great feel for where the center, front edge and dying edge of your field is at.
Think about it. Job ads tell you where people are hiring, not where they are just blue sky bragging. Job ads tell you how hot the employment market is by how many ads are out there. They also tell you who is doing well enough to hire or who is losing people right and left.
Job ads are public business intelligence. Use them.
Something to do today
Set up an appointment with yourself to read the online or newspaper job ads each week.
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Free career intelligence
How to turn your dishwasher into a snowplow
The cheating husband
Yes and no.
Human Resource people are phenomenal. They are almost always honest. However, they are human. An HR recruiter who is sorting through 100 resumes each day, scheduling 30 appointments for herself this week, and 50 appointments for managers, may cut corners. You call and ask, “Why won’t you interview me?” She has no clue who you are and merely pops your name into the database to be sure you are a reject, then replies, “You just didn’t match what we were looking for.”
In reality you may have been a perfect match but the receptionist rejected your resume. The HR person never saw it. She needs to get back to work and you are an interruption. If you can get your resume into the manager’s hands some other way, you might be interviewed.
At another company where you have been through three interviews, you eventually get a reject letter. You call up HR and ask, “Why?” She may have been told the real reason. She may remember. In all likelihood she pops your name into the database and sees the box checked, “Other hired.” She racks her brain, remembers that the winning candidate had two certifications and tells you, “You weren’t as qualified as the person we hired.” No revelations there, really. She never talked to the manager about you, only about when the winner starts.
Even when the HR person remembers you personally she often does not have good feedback. I always pump HR for information. I trust the best to know exactly what is going on. I always ask myself if this HR person really had the time to get involved with my candidate.
HR people rarely lie. They are honest and hardworking. Often they just don’t know the details you may want to hear from them.
Something to do today
Ask HR for feedback, but don’t put too much emphasis on what they say unless they give you a lot of details relevant only to you.
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Later: Should I trust an agency recruiter?
You can learn from spammers, but don’t spam
The rubber band solution for nervousness
Posted in Finding jobs, Focus, Interviews, Perseverance
Tagged ask HR, believe HR, HR people
Dogs will dance when there is no music. Better said: they dance when there is no music that we can hear. They are able to hear different levels of sound than we can. One man teaches dogs to dance to music that is beyond the range of human hearing. Since the dogs turn, jump and “dance” at the same time, it looks like magic.
Managers and CEO’s also dance to music other people cannot always hear. When hiring they have a good idea what they want, but sometimes don’t know how to express it. Sometimes they are embarrassed to admit what they want. Occasionally they can’t admit it because of laws against discrimination.
I find any discrimination offensive. The point is not that people discriminate. People have hidden agendas. They sometimes discriminate based on sex, age and race. More commonly they discriminate based on education, certifications, accent, tattoos, jewelry, cut of clothes, and haircut. I’ve seen handwriting and typing skills torpedo several executive jobs. Changing jobs every two years is too much in some industries, and switching every six months can be as bad as felony theft. Weight can be a killer at some companies.
What you consider unfair judgment is important, but it is not what keeps you from getting a job. It is what the hiring manager considers excellent judgment that keeps you unemployed. Whining won’t help. If there is something about you that doesn’t fit with an environment, you won’t get hired.
If a man is offered a fact that goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. (Bertrand Russell)
If you are having a particularly tough time getting a job, it is time for some tough love. You need to find someone who will really tell you the way you appear to hiring managers. What is there about you that turns off employers? We try to be very clear at AGI if someone is not a fit for a job. We may not give all the reasons for failure, but we will tell the biggest reasons if the person is listening to us. Unfortunately our honesty has occasionally meant that a candidate left in tears. More often we helped people change what they needed to change to get a great job.
I’m in trouble when I say, “Managers are like dancing dogs.” But it is true. They sometimes dance to music we cannot hear.
Something to do today
Having real trouble finding a job? Is it you or is it just luck? It could be either. Find a few people who can be brutally honest to help you find out. And also remember, it may just be bad luck.
Posted in Finding jobs, Interviews
Tagged CEOs, hidden agendas, hiring managers, managers
I have been around a lot of big bears in Pennsylvania. It is exciting. Still, I have only seen one bear in Pennsylvania. Bears leave behind footprints, scratched trees and scat (the polite way of referring to bear excrement). As a matter of fact, some bears try to impress other bears by showing how high on a tree they can scratch the bark away. They may never see each other, but bears know who is the “big bear”.
In job hunting you need to let people know you are the “big bear”. Don’t tell them everything you did at your last job.. Show them signs of your size and impact. In your resume do not give every detail of your jobs. Show the things that prove you are the “big bear” now.
Are you a Controller or CFO? How much money did you save your company? How much new revenue did you personally drive to the bottom line?
If your title is manager, assume that people know you hire, make budgets, and write reports. Increased revenue, how much money you saved, and faster execution are things that show how high you reached.
As a programmer you need to have a list of languages you know somewhere on the resume. That’s necessary but it doesn’t make you stand out. The fact that your last five projects came in on time and under budget will show you are a big bear.
Don’t hide what you accomplished in a forest of petty details. Make the things that prove you are a big bear unmissable. If you have ten bullet points about one job, get rid of half of them. A five line paragraph will hide a lot of accomplishments. Make three short bullets instead or put a couple of keywords in bold font.
Show you are the big bear. Stretch up high and scratch that tree where the other bears can’t miss it.
Something to do today
Hand you resume to some friends. Give them 45 seconds to read it, then ask them what your biggest accomplishments are. 45 seconds is a very thorough read for resumes, most only get 10 seconds. If you can’t get your point across in 45 seconds, getting hired will be pure luck.
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Later: Get references on the company
Get references on yourself
Boys will be boys, and so will a lot of middle-aged men. (Kin Hubbard)
Boys on a 50 mile hike
2 1/2 pounds of trail mix per boy each day for a total of 90 pounds. 3 packages of hamburger helper for one meal for 6 boys. Oatmeal every day for breakfast for 6 days on the trail. Coyotes, raccoons, elk and a 20 acre meadow of ripe blueberries. It was a great adventure. By the end the boys learned they had taken way too much trail mix and hamburger helper. They also stopped liking banana flavored oatmeal. They planned, saw, did and learned things they would never have known about without that 50 mile hike. Later most of the boys did 70 and 100 mile hikes. On the later hikes they carried less weight and had even more fun.
Job hunting
If you want to constantly move up you have to stop looking at your job search as an occasional sprint. It has to become a planned excursion. It may become a safari.
Job hunting does not get any easier at the next level up. When you get better at what you do, it takes longer. The number of jobs decrease and the number of good people looking for the great jobs increases as you move up. Moving laterally isn’t hard. Moving up is hard. Getting a promotion is tough. Beating the 20 other people who want to be raised to Executive Vice President or be the highest paid technician in the company is very hard.
It takes one month of job searching for every $15,000 of salary in today’s market. That’s how hard it is to advance. That is how much harder it gets later.
If you start now and decide to LEARN while you search for a job, you’ll do better next time. You need to study and try different ideas. Find out what works for you and what flops. Everyone is different. There is no reason for you to do things exactly the same as someone else.
My boys started out with 2 mile, 10 mile and then 20 mile hikes. They got better, but kept learning. The 50 and 100 mile hikes were a lot of work, but not as painful as the 20 mile hikes. Your job searches may get longer, but they don’t have to be as difficult as your current one if you keep on learning.
Something to do today
Go to your job journal. List your employment dates so far. Also list your promotions. You will probably see a pattern. If the new jobs or promotions stopped, was it really your idea or did you just stop advancing? Write down how quickly you really can earn that next 3 raises, promotions or jobs. You may want to set up a personal progress program.
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Later: Was that bear scat?
Posted in Finding jobs, Networking, Perseverance, Promotions
Tagged career advancement, move up
As the Steelers were marching on their way to the Super Bowl a few years ago, I had a candidate from Pittsburgh with the email address of “steelman”. The manager in charge chuckled after the final interview and asked me, “Did you see his email address. I’m pretty sure who he wants to win the game.” That email address made the candidate memorable in a good way.
If your email address is anything but your name, make sure it is memorable in a good way. Put yourself in the hiring manager’s shoes. The success of the person you hire will be directly linked to you and your career as a manager. There are three strong candidates and you can’t decide which one to hire. Your eyes stray to the email addresses. One is “ironwillsmith”, next is “bryandilts” and the third is “womanhaterjones”. I guarantee “womanhaterjones” will be eliminated. The other two will have a positive or neutral effect.
Be careful how your email address looks. It is hard to believe, but people actually try to find a job with obscene and hateful email addresses. If you have any doubt about the appropriateness of your address, sign up at gmail or yahoo for an address to use only for the job search.
Vanilla is fine. Positively memorable is fine. Offensive may keep you from getting hired.
Something to do today
It is probably not your problem, just check your email address anyway.
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Later: Killer Email again
Dinosaur Jim was a professor of dinosaurs at BYU and he only earned a high school diploma. He discovered more earth shattering fossils than any other man alive. He published unbelievable finds. Finally he was awarded an honorary PhD. They built a large building just for his incredible fossil collection.
You can get ahead without a college degree. To do it in the university or corporate world you have to be twice as good as the best guy with his university papers.
Let’s see, there is Michael Dell and Bill Gates. They dropped out of college. The guy who founded Wendy’s dropped out of high school. Everyone knows those three. You can probably name a few more very successful people who did not finish their education but became rich. With luck you will name one person, who did not start the company himself, who rose to lead a major company without a college degree. Many who started into their careers without a degree went back and got their degrees at night or dropped out for a few years to get an MBA.
Education is a foundation for people climbing the corporate ladder
I’m not saying you have to get a college degree. However, you have to be twice as good as the college graduate in order to compete in upper management job hunting. That is just a fact of life. And a Bachelor’s 4 year degree is worth a whole lot more than an Associate’s 2 year degree. Banks love MBA’s. Technical companies love Masters Degrees and PhD’s.
It may be hard to get your college degree now. Part time education for years is not appealing to many people. And you don’t have to do it. But building the foundation at this point in your career will be easier than building it 5 years from now. Here’s why: you are being evaluated every day at work for a move up the career ladder. Like it or not, you are the guy without a degree, MBA or engineering degree. People say it and know it. It can be positive if you are the best guy in the company and everyone knows it. Otherwise, it is already killing your career. Every time managers compare you to another employee they mention it.
Think about it. If you want to climb the corporate ladder, a degree will help.
Something to do today
Unless you have a PhD, check out how you can get another degree part-time. What can it hurt to just find out?
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Later: Crow is best served…