The Executive Update

Managing Your Online Job Search: Part 3 – Deliver Your Value Proposition

Don Orlando, a regular contributor to our Ask the Coach series, had a lot to say about job-seeker John’s question about allocating time and resources for his job search. I’m posting his comments here, but his basic point is: “Professional networking sites are wonderful tools—but nothing replaces an offer of real value.”

Job seeker John finds himself in a dilemma facing too many job seekers: he’s been told professional networking sites are exceptional tools for uncovering opportunities, but the time required to maintain all those professional profiles and work those sites quickly becomes “…a full time job; and not the one he was looking for!”

The operative word here is “tool,” or more precisely, one tool of many. Let’s return to basics. A well-run organization will hire you—whether they have an advertised opening or not—if you provide the hiring decision maker with compelling proof that you will make his or her company much more money than it costs to bring you on board. But where is that value offer really extended? Only two places: 1) through your very powerful résumé and 2) during a proper interview. Without solid preparation in those two areas, the other important tools (like professional networking sites) might actually work against you. Let me explain further.

Professional networking sites discourage actual promotion— the outright “selling” of one’s self. These sites want to build communities of people seeking others with specific backgrounds, who can share information, ask important questions, and the like. For most participants, there is frequently the desire to find a new position just below the surface. If you fail to build the proper foundation (a strong résumé), the whole thing may backfire.

Ask the Coach: Narrow Your Target and Hit the Bull’s-eye

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

Finding the right company to hire you is critical to any job search. How do you determine which is the right company, let alone who is the hiring authority? Don offered some simple steps to help you zero in on the right target.

First, look at the companies in the industry you are targeting. Determine which are the best companies by talking to their employees, their customers, and their partners. Reach out and ask for information; for help. Poll the buyers in that market to find out who is the best company in that sector. Ask which companies they recommend, and which they don’t.

Now you can catalog the company candidates in three basic categories:

1. Those where the customers and employees feel they have been poorly served.

2. Those that are the middle of the road.

3. Those where the customers and employees feel they have been well served. This is the group to focus on.

Ask the Coach: Start With Your Master Resume

Every week, NETSHARE hosts Ask the Coach, a phone-in coaching session with leading career management experts. Here is an excerpt from a recent session with a new addition to our coaching team, Randy Block.

Career coach Randy Block shared an interesting tip in this week’s call. He believes every job seeker should create a Master Resume. This document is not for distribution to anyone but it is an organizational tool; a single catalog to capture all of your positions, promotions, accomplishments, awards, etc. Once you have a Master Resume built out, you can use it as source material to create a document for the immediate job opportunity at hand.

Relevancy is extremely important. When creating a resume for someone to review, make sure that everything listed in that resume is relevant to the position for which you are applying.

Relating to relevancy, a lot of the discussion in the call revolved around how you promote relevancy and demonstrate your value to a hiring manager? Randy’s advice, particularly for workers over 50, is that there are only two reasons to hire you: 1) you will help drive revenue or 2) you can increase productivity, which translates into cutting costs. It’s all about the money!

Randy also emphasized that it is extremely important to establish a relationship with your target company. Begin to network into the company, even if there isn’t a specific assignment or opening available. You need to establish a beachhead so when an opportunity does arise, or you can identify a gap in the company’s revenue strategy that you can help fill, you will be ready to take advantage of it.

Managing Your Online Job Search: Part 2 – How Much Time Online?

In trying to assist our new member, John, with his passive job search, I polled a number of our career coaches about how to think about online resources as part of the mix. How much time and effort should you expend building online profiles and portfolios, versus building your personal network and contacting professionals who can help you?

One of our new career coaches, Randy Block, says, “Clients in my private practice spend up to 80 percent of their time networking and about 20 percent with online tools.  For example, they work the network (former colleagues, friends, luncheons, meetings, seminars etc.) Monday through Thursday and on Friday, they play the ‘cyberspace game.’  It’s as though they are politicians running for office; they are out pressing the flesh.”

Career coach Wendy Terwelp also recommends that clients spend most of their time networking. “My personal recommendation is to spend the majority of job search time on networking. Depending on the survey, anywhere from 61 to 85 percent of people land jobs through networking. However, it’s essential to network the right way; asking ‘Do you know anyone who’s hiring,’ is not the right way.”

Wendy also notes in her blog, Rock Your Career, that you should be building your network, not begging for help. She sees less than 10 percent of candidates landing jobs through online job boards, while the majority land their jobs through their connections. Of course, you can make connections online as well as in person.

And Don Orlando also offers our career candidate John some advice: promote your value. Don feels that online tools are great, but they are only tools. What you really need is a solid foundation for promoting your worth to a potential employer, and then you need to find a way to engage with at hiring manager to show you know your stuff.

Don had some detailed insight which I will share our next future post.

Managing Your Online Job Search: Part 1 – Online Tools

As CEO of NETSHARE, I like to work closely with members to help them focus their job search. I received a query from a new member last week asking about how to allocate his time and resources in his job search – a question that we have all been wrestling with. Considering the growing number of online resources, the demands of building your network, following up on job leads, interacting with recruiters, and other demands on your time, how do you effectively manage your job search strategy, especially if you are working full time? So I decided to use this query as a challenge to our career coaches to try to get a better understanding of how to effectively manage your job search.

Most of the experts I polled said that you should spend no more than 20 percent of your time with online resources. The rest of the time should be dedicated to building your face-to-face network and making contact with people and companies that can help you. This metric applies for full-time job seekers, but for passive job candidates, like our new member, the amount of time an energy you spend online “depends.”

First, let me give you a brief profile of our job-seeking executive. I’ll call him John for the sake of anonymity. John is currently employed, so his job search is in addition to his day-to-day responsibilities. John has been toying with various online and offline tools, such as developing a resume, creating a LinkedIn profile, using Facebook, experimenting with VisualCV, and posting to multiple regional resume portals. What John realized was that managing all these job resources was becoming a full time job in itself. What is the best way to manage it all? Where does he focus his efforts?

In a call with John, we reviewed his online resource options:

To Blog, or Not To Blog – The Benefits Outweigh the Risks

It’s common knowledge that once the mainstream media pick up on a new trend, it’s old news to those of us “in the know.” That’s why I was gratified to see a posting on Web Guild Silicon Valley touting a recent story broadcast on The Today Show about how to “De-Age Your Resume With a Web Presence.” What a novel idea! What’s interesting is that the blog notes that The Today Show segment was targeting job seekers over 40 who are, supposedly, new to the social networking scene. The recommendations should be familiar to you: set up an online profile, use LinkedIn and Facebook, set up a professional blog if you have the time, and basically build out your presence online:

In the story, an out-of-work reporter featured was finding it hard to get call-backs and went onto Craigslist and hired a “young, hip, web designer” who designed a blog for her. She listed the blog at the top of her resume and got two jobs offers. As one expert in the piece put it, the “workplace has been completely transformed by the internet”.

All of this should be common sense if you have been reading The Executive Update regularly. But how many of you have had the time and energy to build your online presence? There are tools you can use, like the LinkedIn Profile, to help you start an online resume, but most of those are fairly stiff and static. Some more innovative online tools are evolving for personal marketing. One I have been toying with recently is VisualCV, which lets you set up a comprehensive professional profile, including work samples and a career portfolio. You can even set up different profiles for different target audiences.

These are the Times That Try Men’s Souls, And Could Get You Hired

The economy is like the weather – we complain but can’t do anything about it. Which is why I  was interested in a recent report I received from the McKinsey Quarterly on the Economic and Hiring Outlook, Second Quarter 2008. This was from a global survey that McKinsey conducts on a regular basis, but the findings were interesting. Quoting from the abstract:

·         Despite high inflationary prospects around the world, most executives don’t expect their companies to raise prices in the near term.

·         More than 70 percent say that input costs have risen. According to manufacturers, the increase in energy costs is the global problem that’s had the greatest impact on the overall economic condition of their companies.

·         A significant proportion of the executives—especially those representing public companies and large ones—aren’t sure that their companies can raise prices.

Overall, 43 percent of the executives surveyed expect things to get worse in the coming months, and only 22 percent expect things to get better.

Of course, hiring practices are affected by the economic downturn as well. About 39 percent of executive surveyed indicated that hiring will remain steady, while 35 percent said they expected an increase. These figures have dropped 10 percent from six months ago.

Some sectors seem to be harder hit than others. Manufacturing seems to be taking the biggest hit according to the survey, citing energy costs as a major factor. And on the hiring front, high-technology and telecommunications seem to be less affected by the economic downturn.

So with more economic gloom on the horizon, should you consider suspending your job search and hunkering down in your current job? Absolutely not! In the words of Thomas Paine, “these are the times that try men’s souls.” Which means if you can solve someone else’s problems, then you can prove your value as a new hire. Use these tough economic times to show potential employers what you can bring to the table. Translate your professional value into dollars and cents, and hiring managers will stand up and listen.

Are You Really Employable?

One of the things I love about my job is that I get to talk to a lot of people and exchange ideas. Last week I had two very interesting conversations about the nature of executive search, and why C-level executives can often be viewed as unemployable.

Mark Jaffe of Wyatt & Jaffe, an executive search firm based in

Minneapolis

, had some interesting insights into why some recruiters dislike working with unemployed C-level candidates, especially those maverick CEOs who have built their reputations by doing things their way. Mark has worked with Fortune 50 CEOs, and he finds that if you have a marquis name that is recognized in the industry, then you will still be sought out as an industry expert even if you are unemployed. But when I asked him about placing unemployed entrepreneurs, Mark replied, “Oh my God, they are the worst because they are not willing to make anyone else look good.”

To prove Mark’s point, I had another conversation with a senior-level candidate last week who was bemoaning the fact that he couldn’t find work. He admitted that he was opinionated, too forceful, and scary to some people, and he demanded a very high salary, but he couldn’t understand why he couldn’t find a solid offer of employment. Instead, he suggested that he might be better off finding a partner and starting a company.

Ask the Coach: Understanding the Role of the Recruiter

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 Peter Engler, president of the Engler Career Group.

One of the topics Peter touched on in this week’s call is the role of the recruiter. Many job seekers are under the misapprehension that a recruiter’s role is to help you find a job. That’s wrong. The recruiter doesn’t work for you; they work for the hiring company. However, recruiters are still an important part of the job search process, and you should be proactive and introduce yourself to people who are in a position to assist you, including recruiters.

You should introduce yourself to recruiters who work in the areas that interest you. Peter noted that there are a number of ways to find recruiters who may be in a position to help you. Search online for retained recruiters in your geographic area. A web search will often uncover very large recruiting firms; identify those partners who work in your market area. Once you have identified them, introduce yourself with a friendly e-mail:

Learning from the School of Hard Knocks

We often talk about how important it is to catalogue your successes in a resume or executive   bio, but what about learning from your failures? Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor at the Yale School of Management and founder of the Chief Executive Leadership Institute, has written a book about failure, Firing Back: Great Leaders Rebound After Career Disasters. As he notes in an interview in Fortune, failure builds professional character:

“It makes a hero. Joseph Campbell wrote about this. The hero has certain consistent qualities in every culture: a common touch, a call to greatness, a critical trial and a setback. Failure punctuates truly great leaders. They aren't great until they've failed. Failure is the crucible, the test. They deal with it, and their confidence and capabilities are enhanced.”

As Sonnenfeld notes in the interview, we tend to live in an avoidance society, where failure is often overlooked or ignored and we only focus on successes. That’s a mistake. Leadership comes from learning lessons taught by failure. People rebound from failure because they choose to learn from their mistakes. He cites success stories of high-profile executives like Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase who rose after being fired from Citigroup, and Jack Bogle who founded Vanguard after being fired from Wellington Management. Look how Martha Steward has rebounded after serving time in jail.

Failure is liberating, and something you can use to guide future decisions. Understand not only where you failed, but why and use that knowledge to guide future career decisions. Embrace your failure and catalog what you did wrong, and how you can correct or avoid those mistakes in the future.

To paraphrase Nietzsche, if failure doesn’t kill you, it only makes you stronger.