The Executive Update

Ask the Coach: Less is More When it Comes to Job Boards

Every week, NETSHARE hosts Ask the Coach, a phone-in coaching session with leading career management experts. Here is an excerpt from the most recent session with CFO coach Cindy Kraft.

A question came in from one job seeker who is using his personal network of board members and networking contacts to land a new position. He asked Cindy about the value of spreading your resume across as many job boards as possible.

Cindy’s advice, be exclusive! Using a few smaller job boards, like NETSHARE, and smaller, professional networking sites, like LinkedIn, Zoom Info, and Ziggs, is perfectly acceptable, even expected and desired. But recruiters and HR professionals get suspicious when they start seeing the same candidates show up on multiple job boards.  If you show some discretion as to where you choose to post your credentials, it shows you are discriminating, and therefore a better candidate.

Career Planning or Crisis Management?

I recently saw an interesting post on PsyBlog, a British blog site maintained by freelance writer Jeremy Dean, about out the futility of career planning, “Why Career Planning is Time Wasted.” The basic premise is that the future is uncertain, which makes plotting a career strategy a tricky proposition:

“Our culture worships planning. Everything must be planned in advance. Our days, week, years, our entire lives. We have diaries, schedules, checklists, targets, goals, aims, strategies, visions even. Career planning is the most insidious of these cults precisely because it encourages a feeling of control over your reactions to future events. As that interview question goes: where do you see yourself in five years time? This invites the beginning of what starts as a little game and finishes as a belief built on sand. You guess what employers want to hear, and then you give it to them. Sometimes this batting back and forth of imagined futures becomes a necessary little game you play in order to 'get ahead'.”

This post offers some interesting insight, especially for the hiring manager who poses that trickiest of all questions, “Where do you see yourself in five years time?” The answer is that there is no right answer. Even at 18, it’s hard to choose a career direction – you will recall The Graduate and Mr. Maguire’s advice to Benjamin Braddock about plastics; well it doesn’t get easier, or smarter, as you progress in your career. Frankly, most people don’t know what they want, which makes it impossible to plan your career.

Buy the Numbers?

There is an old maxim attributed to Benjamin Disraeli and popularized by Mark Twain, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” I want to offer some statistics from my recent appearance on the Insight on Coaching radio program that might prove insightful:

• Four out of 10 employers face recruiting problems according to the March 30^th issue of Business Industry Magazine Management Issues
• According to a survey of 37,000 employers from 27 countries conducted by Manpower 41 percent are having trouble finding qualified candidates for specific roles.
• According to a Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) poll, employee referral programs are the number one source of hires.
• A recent Gallup poll shows tht 80 percent of workers find their jobs through networking. (Note that number is up substantially due to the Internet; in 2004, 61 percent of hires were attributed to employee referrals and the Internet.)

Ask the Coach: Known by the Company You Keep

Every week, NETSHARE hosts Ask the Coach, a phone-in coaching session with leading career management experts. Here is an excerpt from the most recent session with career coach Don Orlando.

One NETSHARE member asked Don about getting back into the corporate world after spending years running her own business. She was seeking a vice president of sales or director of corporate sales position and was wondering whether she should contact her the recruiters directly or try another tack? What’s the first step?

Don’s advice, retain control of your own career destiny and tightly manage your job search. Hiring companies and recruiters like to see an executive take proactive control of their careers.

Finding the Right Pond to Fish In

In my last post, I was postulating on how the phenomenon of the Web has actually made job search harder, not easier. How can we stop screening out the best and the brightest? How do we find those who are best qualified for a job?

It’s like that old vaudeville routine where the patient turns to the physician and says, “Doctor, it hurts when I do this,” and the doctor replies, “Well, don’t do that!” It’s time to get back to basics, and for both recruiters and job seekers to think differently about how to use the Internet as an effective recruiting tool. We need to think about new recruiting approaches that put people before process.

Ask the Coach: Technology May Be Our Friend, But Companies Still Hire People, Not Files

Every week, NETSHARE hosts Ask the Coach, a phone-in coaching session with leading career management experts. This week’s career coach is Don Orlando, who contributed this post.

By Donald P. Orlando

I often get more out of these “Ask the Coach” sessions than those who attend because they help me to take the pulse of executive job seekers. Based on what I heard on Monday’s call, my unscientific and limited “survey,” makes me suspect some believe posting a résumé on a job board defines an active search. That’s only part of the story.

Companies still hire people, not computer files. Today more than ever, companies are searching diligently for talent, which hiring officials often define as passion harnessed to knowledge and skills. As someone who makes his living helping clients’ passion “come alive,” I know there is no substitute for people speaking with people.

“I’m Not A Number, I Am A Qualified Professional!”

I recently was asked to participate as a panelist in a weekly radio program, Insight on Coaching, hosted by Tom Floyd on Voice America Radio. I found the experience frustrating, and I have expounded on my frustration on my personal blog, Barefoot in the Boardroom. Here, I would like to offer some additional thoughts on what is wrong with current recruiting methods, and offer some alternative strategies that are more effective.

In my Barefoot blog post, I noted that four out of 10 companies can’t seem to find enough qualified employees. From my experience working with NETSHARE members, this statistic proves that 40 percent of corporate America is looking in the wrong place.

Old School Vs. New School: MBAs and the Leadership Gap

A question that I often run into with NETSHARE members is how do quantify the value of experience. Accreditation and degrees are great, but how do you show a prospective employer you know your stuff even if you can’t list MBA or PhD after your name? Do you really need that MBA to qualify for a job? Many recruiters use the MBA as a filter to cut down on their applicant volume: no degree, no interview. But is that sufficient reason to get a Master’s degree?

That’s why I was gratified to see Jim Stroup post an online review on his blog, Managing Leadership, of a book Henry Mintzberg, professor of management at McGill University. His book, Managers Not MBAs, debunks the myth of the MBA and highlights the shortcomings of business education in America.

“We simply cannot afford to have a society of elitist leaders trained in analysis and promoted on “fast tracks” beside the daily work of making products and providing services. All of this undermines our organizations and our social fabric as well as our educational institutions.”

Ask the Coach: A Bio is a Better Icebreaker

Every week, NETSHARE hosts Ask the Coach, a phone-in career coaching session with leading job placement experts. This service is free to NETSHARE members, and archives are available to subscribers. Here we offer an excerpt from this week’s Ask the Coach.

This week, career specialist Peter Engler shared his insights with NETSHARE members. Peter offers some great insight into how to gain a foothold with a company you are interested in. He recommends researching the company and matching to your personal network. Find out who you know who knows people associated with that company. Find out who is on the Board of Directors. (Just because management is happy with the staff doesn’t mean the Board is content.) Line up your contacts and then introduce yourself with a soft sell.

Don’t go in swinging, asking for a job. Express interest and use tact. Approach with a biography, not a resume. A professional bio says, “I want to work,” where a resume says, “I want a job.”

Fighting Inertia: 8 Steps to Promote Career Productivity

There’s nothing more satisfying than finding your ideas independently validated by other sources. I recently read a blog post at lifehack.org, the personal productivity blog, on 8 Ways to Take It to the Next Level.  The eight steps outlined are exactly in line with many of the things I have been advocating in Executive Update for some time. To build your career, you have to start by overcoming inertia:

"Getting started with anything can be a struggle, but once you reach a certain level of success, it can be hard to figure out how to make whatever it is you do truly remarkable. The things we do have a way of developing their own inertia, and if we’re not careful, we get carried along in the routine without ever realizing the full potential of what we and our lives can be."

As the lifehack blog and Emeril Lagasse both advocate, it’s time to “kick it up a notch.” Here’s my take on some of the insights offered by lifehack: