The Executive Update

Kevin Kermes Interviews Kathy Simmons: Practical Advice to Get Better Results from Networking

I was interviewed recently by career consultant Kevin Kermes for his Executive Interview Services about Networking and How to Get Better Results, offering do’s and don’t for your career networking strategy. I thought you would like to hear the conversation.

Some highlights to consider:

• Networking is not about quid pro quo. It’s not a scorecard where you get exactly what you give. A lot of networking is about karma and helping others without necessarily expecting something in return.
• It’s easier to talk to people about what they need, rather than leading with what you want.
• You have to know what you want from your connections. If you go in thinking you want a job, you will fail. But most people do want to help, so it’s up to you to determine how others can help you. Do they have information or can they make an introduction?
• Understand how you can help others. Know what you offer to your network and ultimately to a potential employer. You have to be able to articulate your value.
• Listen with interest to find points of affinity. If you don’t listen, you can’t establish a connection.

Comments are welcome! What are your biggest networking mistakes?

Ask the Coach: Face to Face Still Promotes the Best Connection

Every week, NETSHARE hosts Ask the Coach, a phone-in career coaching session with leading career management experts. Here is an excerpt from this week’s session with Kristin Speer of Accelerated Search Consulting.

This week, Kris Speer fielded a question that resonated with almost everyone on the Ask the Coach call: “I'm setting up face to face meetings with local recruiters. I'm attending networking events. But the phone just isn't ringing. What else should I be doing?”

Kris congratulated him on reaching out to recruiters and arranging personal meetings. Generally, recruiters will only give you their time if you provide an almost exact match for a search they are conducting, but it’s good to stay on their radar. Recruiters are inundated with hundreds of requests and resumes so it’s easy to get lost in the crowd, and face-to-face meetings are the ultimate in personal networking. There is no better way to tell someone who you are.

Attending networking events also is important, assuming you target the right kinds of events. You want to target active networking events where there is a good mix of employed executives and job seekers at or above your professional level. But don’t stop there. Also target industry conferences and trade shows. They are a great way to stay on the cutting edge of your market and people you reach out to later will have a face to match the name. By broadening the scope of the events you attend, you will expand your network of connections and your knowledge. Remember you are not looking for a job; you are looking for meaningful connections, mentors, and information. And NETSHARE members can search out one another through the NETSHARE site by searching on zip codes to set up face-to-face meetings.

Kris also recommended that you try something new. CFOs are often involved in the hiring process so target them as part of your networking strategy. Don’t show up with your resume. Instead, determine what information they would find useful in your industry. Write an article for an industry newsletter or conduct a survey on the topic and call the CFOs to let them know you are interested in their expertise as part of your research, and offer to share the results when you are done.

And don’t forget your old friend, the telephone. Most people shy away from the telephone, which means you can use it to your advantage. If you can schedule a meeting, great, but a phone call can help you cement the relationship as well.

You Need to See “The Big Picture” and How You Fit

One of the things I always advise NETSHARE members in our weekly welcome calls is that you need to think of the job search process as if you were launching a business or a new product. The product, of course, is you and the business is your career. You can use the same principles you would apply to marketing a new product to see if your “go to market” strategy is in line with your potential market, i.e. the companies that need your talent.

I recently ran across a guest blog entry on Dan McCarthy’s Great Leadership site written by Steve Trautman, author of Teach What You Know: A Practical Leader’s Guide to Knowledge Transfer. Trautman’s post poses the five questions you need to ask to see if you understand the big picture strategy for your company. In reading the blog post, it occurred to me that these same five questions apply well to how you manage your job search. They are an excellent litmus test to determine if you really understand your personal value proposition and how your talents, your “product,” fit in the big picture of your target market. So ask yourself:

1. Who are your customers or customer segment you serve, listed in order of priority? Can you identify those target companies who would best be served by your skills? Can you at least create a profile of the kind of company that could use your talents? This question may not be as easy to answer as you think.
2. What are the services you provide and which ones, if any, may need to change to implement your current strategy? Think of your services as your marketable skills. If you align those skills with the needs of your customer, e.g. your target employers, do they match up? Does what you have to offer fit what those potential employers need?
3. What is your value proposition and how does it set you apart in the marketplace? This is an increasingly important question. Remember that no matter what position you are seeking, there are dozens of other candidates who have the same basic qualifications. You might consider those qualifications the price of admission. To stand out from the crowd, you need to identify what talents and skills make you unique.
4. Which environmental trends or issues are important to your strategy, such as market, economic, societal, political, or environmental? If you are looking at the big picture, you have to consider how your industry is being affected by large-scale change, such as new regulations or new economic factors, and how your skill set can help address those changes. You also can think about this question as “fit.” What environment requirements do you need for you next job, including salary, managerial hierarchy, cultural fit, and anything else that you can identify as a prerequisite for a good job fit?
5. What three things are you doing (or doing differently) to support your strategy? What is your marketing strategy for your product? Have you identified three or more things you can do to align your product (your expertise) with your target market (hiring companies)? Have you expanded your networking strategy? How are you connecting with decision-makers in your target companies?

If you can determine how your expertise fits in the big picture, you will be ahead of the competition when it comes to closing the deal that delivers your next job.

What’s It Worth to You?

The salary question comes up in every job discussion, and it is the toughest question to answer, or really to dodge if you can. If you name a price too early, then you could be out of the running before you can demonstrate your value. If you shoot too low, then you have boxed yourself in or eliminated yourself as being less of an executive than they were seeking. So how do you handle the money question?

There are a number of strategies, but perhaps the most cogent approach I have seen lately was put forward in a blog by Lindsay Olsen of Paradigm Staffing. Here are some of the highlights:

1. Think about timing. We all know that salary is an easy check box that keeps you in or out of the running. Don’t fall into the trap of offering a salary figure up front in a cover letter or screening interview. Instead, keep it vague until you can demonstrate you are the perfect candidate for the job. If you’re perfect, a couple of dollars won’t get in the way.
2. Be prepared. Do your homework and see what the market will bear. Use sites like Glassdoor.com and Salary.com to see what the position is worth based on your experience, and see what others with similar positions earn. Research the employer’s competitors. A recruiter may also be a good source of salary information.
3. The artful dodger. Avoid naming a salary figure, period. Most people don’t want to talk about salary numbers, so if you can avoid the question, they’ll fill in the blanks for you to relieve the discomfort. If the hiring manager asks you about salary expectations, say you don’t know what range they have budgeted and he or she may fill in the blanks. Also remember that you are looking at a compensation package, not just a salary figure.
4. Salary stare-down. If you are the first to name a salary figure, then you lost the stare-down. You want to get a salary figure based on your experience, not your past job or what your predecessor earned. It’s like playing poker. You can’t reveal your hand before you know how high they might go.
5. Offer a range. When your back is to the wall, give them a range. Assume they are paying a fair wage and tell them what your research shows.

Try it. It’s a proven approach. If you can demonstrate yourself to be invaluable, then the sky is the limit, and that’s what they will offer you.

If you are looking for a crash course in salary negotiation, you might check out Barbara Safani’s recent presentation on Experts Connection, “Show Me the Money: Executive Compensation Negotiation in Today’s Marketplace.”

An Amazing Invention – The Telephone

When Alexander Graham Bell first invented the telephone, President Rutherford B. Hayes made one of the first telephone calls from Washington to Philadelphia and is reported to have said, “An amazing invention, but who would ever want to use one?” Well, in the age of the Internet, we seem to have the same attitude. No one picks up the telephone anymore, and that’s clearly a mistake.

In a world now dominated by e-mail, instant messaging, and web comments, we seem to have lost the art of the telephone call. It’s amazing to me how many people refuse to pick up the telephone, thinking it’s more efficient or easier to send an e-mail. Lobbing an e-mail over a firewall is not as efficient as you think, and it’s certainly not as personal. In my experience, it’s too easy to lose a message in your e-mail box among all the spam and other messages, and e-mail certainly doesn’t have the same sense of urgency as a telephone call.

And what about the need for making a personal connection? One of my great frustrations with electronic communications is that it is so impersonal, and so easy to be misread. You can’t know what type of mood or intention the sender of an e-mail may have, and electronic communications are dashed off so fast these days that people don’t usually stop to think about what their fingers are typing, which leaves a lot of room for miscommunication. Too many times e-mail or text messages are misread not because of the intent of the sender, but because of the way the recipient wrongly reads between the lines.

Let’s face it. We all hide behind electronic communications. You can send an e-mail as a follow-up to an interview, or submit an online job application and tell yourself you have done your job. But e-mail and electronic communications are easy to slough off or ignore altogether. And for those of us who work in an office environment, an ignored e-mail usually generates a second or third e-mail, sometimes adding new recipients or changing the tone in an attempt to get attention.

Pick up the phone! A verbal conversation certainly builds the kind of lasting connection you can never get through e-mail. And it provides an opportunity to exchange information in a way that is more efficient as well as more personal. You can forge a relationship through a telephone conversation you could never achieve in a text message or e-mail exchange. That’s why I host a weekly phone call for new NETSHARE members - so we can talk to each other and exchange ideas. And that’s why we host a weekly Ask the Coach call, so people can listen to one another and hear about each other’s cares and concerns, including the tone and inflection in their voice.

Of course, you need to use proper phone etiquette. You need to be respectful of the other party. If you are calling for the first time, be sure to introduce yourself, state the reason for your call, and then ask if the he or she has time to talk. Then you can engage, discussing the reason for your call and maybe even touching on the weather or some other topics to help lighten the conversation and cement the relationship. My rule is to initiate an important contact with a telephone call and follow-up with an e-mail. It helps to build a relationship and create a written agenda for follow-up.

So do yourself a favor and pick up the phone once in a while. Of course, the other party may choose to ignore your voice mail, but at least you can make an effort to forge a real connection.

Ask the Coach: It’s All About You (Until It’s About Them)

Every week, NETSHARE hosts Ask the Coach, a phone-in coaching session with leading career management experts. Here is an excerpt from this week’s session with career transition coach and career management consultant Randy Block.

Everyone forgets that although your job search starts with you, it ends with them.

Of course, it is your career and your future and your happiness, but to ensure that you get what you want, you have to know who you are. You have to be able to take a step back and look at yourself and your skills objectively. What do you do better than anyone else? What makes you excited? What makes you happy? What sets you apart from your peers?

No one can answer these questions for you. And knowing the answers to these questions can really help you. They provide insight into what you have learned, seen, and experienced over time. If you can learn to look through the eyes of a prospective employer and see what they see about you, you will learn even more about yourself. After all, if you don’t know what makes you tick, what gets you out of bed in the morning, and what makes you excited, how are you supposed to explain that to a group of strangers thinking about hiring you? You need to connect the dots for them and help them see where you are a thought leader, where you are a subject matter expert, and how you can help them.

Once you have done your personal due diligence, you can search out companies that really need what you have to offer. You will be able to approach those companies from a position of knowledge, because you will already know about their problems and how you can solve them. And this self-knowledge is what you need to use to create your Personal Brand. This is backed by your Value Proposition, which shows how your personal brand can be applied to specific issues and solve certain problems that a company will face.

You use your personal brand to approach and engage others. You need to come to the attention of your target companies through your network, your digital footprint, and your web presence. You build your digital footprint by contributing to LinkedIn groups and commenting on appropriate blogs and forums. You need to be sought after as the solution to their problem, because no matter what you want, at the end of the process it’s all about them and what they need today.

After You Connect, You Need to Make a Connection

We talk about networking to find the right hiring authority in your target company. But once you find that target contact, what’s your best strategy to make contact? How do you reach out in an appropriate fashion that forges a meaningful connection?

I ran across a blog entry recently from Career Sherpa recently that addressed the question of how to make a connection with someone inside your target company. The Career Sherpa, Hannah Morgan, has some good advice on how to reach out in an appropriate way. As she notes

“I am always dismayed when I hear people focus on the resume and cover letter as a means of creating interest. If we were to apply that “use a resume” logic to the world of marketing a product, what is the success rate of sending spam or direct mail? 0-3%.”

You are marketing a product called “you,” so you need to think like a marketer. As Hannah says, dropping a resume in an envelope or e-mail is futile. Hiring is made by referrals. Do you buy a car or try a restaurant because you receive a flyer in the mail, or because you received a referral from a friend. That’s why online referrals from services like Yelp and LinkedIn have become so popular. You need an introduction to get the right person’s attention.

So how do you meet new people who can help you? You have to connections online and in person. You can research them through LinkedIn, ask your friends, use Twellow to find the right people on Twitter, or do a Google search. You can even pick up the phone and cold call, but what do you do when you connect to the right person?

You ask them to share what they know.

You are not looking for a job at this stage; you are looking for insight. You need to learn more about the company, their objectives, and their challenges. You need to learn about their culture. You need to determine if your talents will be a good fit, and if so, where does the company need help. So you need to ask for more information that can help you, and potentially the target company. Note that this is different from asking for a job. You are being proactive and introducing yourself in a way that you can determine the degree of alignment between your expertise and their needs.

When requesting a meeting with a hiring manager who is not hiring, you want to be inquisitive, a little flattering, and ask for assistance with a project. For example, you can try:

“I understand you have a terrific customer service department. My company is struggling with that and I was hoping we could meet so I could learn more about how you solved the problem…” or;

“I have been studying your strategy because I have been thinking about a transition into a new industry and would like to learn more about your success.

And be sure to drop a name. Using a phrase like “Joe sent me” always opens doors.

Use the Right Words to Write a Powerful Profile

Our last blog entry was about the 10 most overused phrases found in LinkedIn profiles. Buzzword creep is a common problem in every executive’s marketing materials. It’s hard to keep jargon and business-speak out of your resume, but there are some strategies you can adopt to make sure your marketing documents are more powerful, and more accessible to recruiters and hiring managers.

Some good advice comes from Karen Burns, who blogs for the Money section of US News & World Report. She recently posted a blog on the most powerful words you can use on your resume which offers some solid tips on how to craft your resume or online profile:

1. Mind your nouns. Remember that employers search for nouns and not adjectives, so be sure to list your skills, titles, products, companies, certifications, and other things that speak to your personal brand. Think of search terms you would use to find someone like you.
2. Study those job descriptions. You can reverse-engineer your online profile by studying job descriptions for positions that are in line with what you are looking for, then using similar nouns and phrases. You can use the same key words and phrases to make your resume more searchable.
3. Check out the professional associations. See what your peers are talking about at conferences and in newsletters. See what issues are on the minds of your potential employers and think about ways to incorporate those ideas into your profile.
4. Think about your job titles. If you have an off-beat or unusual job title then it is less likely to show up in a search. Either use standardized job titles or find a way to expand on your job function to include more industry-specific titles.
5. Appropriate jargon is a good idea. Remember that hiring managers are looking for industry-specific expertise, so knowing the insider buzz words show you know your stuff. However, if you are looking for a career transition, be sensitive to the fact that a hiring manager may not understand jargon from another industry, so try substituting other keywords.
6. Be careful with your verbs. Use strong verbs like “achieved,” “resolved,” and “increased. “ Verbs that have less impact like “supported” or “aided” don’t promote your expertise.
7. Avoid meaningless adjectives. Overused words like “dynamic” and “experienced” create clutter not credibility. Stick with strong nouns and verbs.