Working a Room Part 2

Posted on May 3, 2012 by Steve

I’m still working my way through How to Work a Room by Susan RoAne.  The next thing to capture my attention is her discussion of introductions.  I spend a lot of time working with people on their personal “elevator pitch” and how to use that as an introduction without killing conversations.  RoAne takes this a couple of steps further.  She suggests preparing a self introduction that’s unique to each situation and appropriate for that venue and work to optimize them to build conversations. 

My focus and statement has consistently been that the most important person in your network is someone you already know and that growing a network should be done thoughtfully and in a focused way.  This has specific implications for the intro.  Specifically, you can assume that the folks you are talking with in this process know you and are pre-disposed to helping you, what they need is direction.  Her approach is more flexible.  Some of it is very similar; a key element in both is being short.  She suggests 5 to 10 seconds, I suggest less than 15.  Both of us strongly recommend preparation and practicing.  What captured my imagination is her idea of approaching every event where other people will be as a networking event and one where you can appropriately build your circle of friends/your network.   

The implication of this is that you approach everything you do as a series of opportunities to make friends.  Friends you can help.  Whether this is PTA or a bluegrass music jam session or a technical user group meeting or a church meeting, approaching all of these with an honest desire to make new friends and helping them will have terrific value to you.  Of course that means you need to be as open to having others help you as you are to help others, but starting with this base has amazing return.

Posted in Best Practices, elevator pitch, job socials, Networking, Persistence, Personal Value Proposition, tools | Comments Off

Working a Room

Posted on April 26, 2012 by Steve

One of my favorite people and a former client, George Gibbs turned me on to a really terrific book on networking that I simply must pass on.  The title is, How to Work a Room by Susan RuAne. 

As I think most of my regular readers have figured out, I love practical.  I love ideas and books and strategies that can be directly implemented, that give you the basis for getting better at some skill.  This book falls into that category.  It starts by naming five common roadblocks:  For example, something we all were taught as children is that we should never talk to “strangers”.  Well, what is a networking event but a room full of strangers?  And let’s face it, mother always knew best….  Right? 

At least as important as identifying the challenges we all struggle with is coming up with useful tools for dealing with them.  Ms RoAne’s solution to the “don’t talk to strangers” thing includes changing roles.  Normally when we go to some event, we approach it in something of a “guest” role.  You know the drill, we’re a bit tentative, we’re not sure if we should introduce ourselves to people, we tend to look for someone who is providing “Leadership”.  Personally, I tend to tell myself, that, “I’m really good at playing a role, if only I knew what the role was….”  So she suggests assuming the role of “Host”.  We all know what the job of the host is, that’s the person who makes sure everyone in the room is comfortable, everyone in the room gets introduced around.  When things get slow, the host makes sure that there is some way to pick them up.  When people have questions, the host connects them to answers.  All in all, it sounds like an amazing description of a great networking “working” a room.  Ms RoAne also takes a points out that this can’t be some fake thing, each of those mini-problems you solve needs to be an expression of the authentic “you”. 

Her approach is actually more nuanced than this and she provides more tools as well, I do need to acknowledge that I really loved this suggestion in particular.

 When I think about the people I know who are amazing “natural networkers” and then the role of “host”, it fits.  There is no aspect of these people that’s phony, and that totally describes Selena Rushton.  She genuinely loves helping and loves seeing people connecting.  Perfect host material. 

At any rate, find a copy of the book.  More important, don’t be afraid to start a conversation with a “stranger”.  Remember that at some point, your best friend was a ‘stranger”.

Posted in links, Networking, peer support, Persistence, proactive job search, resilience, resources, tools | Comments Off

Humility

Posted on April 10, 2012 by Steve

This past week had a bunch of things going on that got me thinking about the nature of “humility”.  Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated April 4th, Passover started April 6th and Easter was April 7th.  All of them center on the stories of people of extraordinary achievement, each of whom understood their role in those achievements and each of whom had a truly humble heart. 

As a career coach, I frequently work with people who doubt themselves.  One of my clients will break into tears if I complement him.  Especially dangerous is the earned complement.  To risk stating the obvious, getting a job when you break into tears every time someone complements you is difficult.  Sooner or later, someone will ask you what you intend to contribute to the company and you need to have a genuine, credible answer.

Which leads me back to the nature of humility.  King, Moses and Christ are true heroes.  People who went beyond every expectation we might have.  People who led us, inspired us, challenged us and left the world a much better place than they found it.  Mahatma Gandhi fits this pattern as well.  Each of them understood at their very core the value they brought.  Each of them was also profoundly humble.  My point is that it’s “OK” to understand that you bring value, provided you actually bring value. 

I grew up thinking, I guess I was taught, that claiming my strengths was inappropriate; people would see me as a “braggart”.  I was privileged to be a witness (if only from a distance) to Martin Luther King Jr as he led all of us into a greater understanding of our shared humanity.  There is absolutely no question he understood what he brought to the table.  Yet somehow, he was not a “braggart”.  When reading the Bible, Jesus clearly and specifically states that he is “perfect” and that he is the “Son of God”, yet for him that statement was not a “sin”.  Moses grew up as the grandson of the Pharaoh! 

My point is that claiming and building on the things we do well is a genuine requirement for true humility.  Humility is about accepting ourselves for both good and ill.  Real success in job search is about building on the good, while remembering that we will always and genuinely need the good others bring as well.

Posted in branding., fear, Persistence, strengths, strengths attitude | Comments Off

Storytelling, SPAR and LOTS

Posted on March 20, 2012 by Steve

Michael Murray shared a link with me last week that really got my attention.

As a Career Coach, I’m always looking for tools that make it easier for people under stress to stay organized and on track.  One of the stress events in job search that can make all of us especially crazy is the “Job Interview”.  We have all gone through this and we 98% of us have been in a situation where we sat down and our brains didn’t.  I’m not all sure where mine used to go, but it sure wasn’t anywhere that I was able to access it; which means that tools for interviewing tend to be very high on my list.

Let’s think this through a bit.  You have an interview coming up and the more research you do the more excited you are.  For example:  I once interviewed for a job to be the Director of IT at the Woodland Park Zoo.  For me this was just perfect, a company I could believe in, a location that was convenient, a size that fit my sweet spot, problems that were similar to ones I had previously solved, yet different enough to get my brain fully engaged, etc.  It was a three interview process and I had done great on the first two.  I had gone in prepared, organized my stories to emphasis my strengths and tie those strengths to benefits for the company etc.  By the third interview, the job was mine to lose.  When I got to that interview, there were 13 people in the room other than me and my mind went blank.  Needless to say, I didn’t get the job. 

What could I have done?  I needed to create my own agenda.  What did I need to know from them?  What were the important questions to them?  What was their decision making process?  etc.  Then I needed to have outlined the stories most likely to address their concerns.  I use the acronym SPAR:  Situation, Problem, Action, Result.  Each of my stories should have been outlined very specifically in this framework.

The article Michael points to would add a new acronym to my process:  LOTS; Language Of The Senses.  Combining them pretty much guarantees a set of clear compelling stories that would provide both understanding and allow for people to remember the value I could provide.  I’ll try to create an example:

Before:

I was hired at Children’s Home Society of Washington(CHSW) to fix their systems and install an electronic client record.  Over a three year period, I was able to upgrade all of their systems, help them identify a satisfactory ECR and install that as well.  During that time I also wrote out new job descriptions for the IT Department and hired people to fill those positions.  We were also able to upgrade their network so that Corporate Email became available for everyone.

This isn’t terrible, but it is helped by the fact that we really did get an amazing amount done, still let’s try again using the combination of SPAR and LOTS:

Situation:  When I started at CHSW they had a genuinely failed electronic infrastructure.  Of 350 employees only 67 had working email; of 20 locations, only 5 were part of the Wide Area Network (WAN) and people normally had to restart their computers at least once a day.  They had lots of programs, one of which was mental health for children and families.  As part of surveying the organization, I was in the Walla Walla office after hours.  As I walked through the building, I found computers that didn’t have any logon password set up and did have confidential notes on the desktop classified by name.  If one of the janitors bothered to look they could have opened and read them with the simple click of the mouse. 

Problem:  The more I looked, the more I came to understand how many different problems there were.  The WAN didn’t cover everyone, Email only covered a quarter of the company, we didn’t have trained people in the department, etc.  Heck our shared network storage had approximately 10 Mb available, causing the system to crash no less than once a week. 

Action:  Rather than detailing what all of these various problems were, I chose to start by creating a vision of what we could do and what that would allow CHSW to do and have.  My vision started with an ECR that provided a single database to store information from all of the various programs, then detailed the kind of network required and the team needed to support this.

Result:  The result was an integrated WAN that reached every location and program in the company.  If someone started mental health treatment in Vancouver then moved to Spokane, the transfer was seamless.  Perhaps this person had set a goal of walking so many miles a day, or of getting a particular grade in a Middle School English class, or be awarded a part in a school play, those goals travelled with them and were evaluated in the normal process of therapy.  Email communication between the two therapists became private and secure, allowing for both compliance with HIPPA and effective collaboration.

Which one are you likely to remember?  Which one creates the clearer image of what I am likely to do when hired?

SPAR is a way of organizing the story and LOTS gives you an idea of how to help others visualize what occurred.  A couple of terrific tools.

 

Posted in Best Practices, examples | Tagged , | Comments Off

Networking Brief

Posted on March 5, 2012 by Steve

Perhaps the coolest part of my job is watching the various people I work with support each other.  Margaret Nichols is a Career Coach at Bellevue College and she is one of those who helps.  In particular she introduced something called a “Networking Brief” to one of my clients. 

This Networking Brief is a genuine sales document that the job seeker gets to create about him or herself. 

  •         Who do you want to work for?
  •         What do you want to do?
  •         Why would they want to hire you?
  •         Proof that you can do what is promised.
  •         What title do you want?

It’s only one page long, doesn’t include any of the historic stuff of resumes.  The goal is to tell a friend how to help.

Understanding how this works is easier if we put it in context with resumes.  The current rage for one page resumes stems from comments Guy Kawasaki made several years ago.  The gist of the comment was that, “Anyone who couldn’t sell either their business or themselves to him in one page wasn’t going to be hired.”  This has been misinterpreted to mean that you had to have a one page resume.  The problem with that interpretation is confusing a resume with a sales document.  They aren’t.  A resume is a puzzle piece designed to navigate the application process and avoid elimination.  As a result, a resume is only marginally about the person whose name is on the top of it.

The networking brief is about the person whose name is on it.  Have you ever had someone ask for your resume when they don’t have a specific job to fill?  Anyone ever given you theirs when you weren’t hiring?  I spent a lot of years hiring people and during that time was given a bunch of resumes that I didn’t have jobs for, actually people started giving me resumes before then.  I now have a file at least an inch thick of resumes that fall in this category and they will likely get recycled when I retire, without seeing the light of day.  What those people should have given me was a Networking Brief.  Something that would get me thinking about who they would be good at helping. 

  •        On top:  Name and contact info
  •        Goal:  What you want to do (aka, a one or two sentence version of your elevator pitch)
  •       Job Titles:  2, 3 or 4 job titles you are targeting
  •        Profile:  A description of the things you normally do that demonstrate why you will excel in the roles you are seeking
  •        A couple of instances of you doing what you promise in 4)
  •        Names of companies that you are interested in

All on one page!

I’ll be glad to share samples with you (and you can certainly hire me to help), but only one on one.  :)

Posted in Best Practices, branding., elevator pitch, job search as sales, Networking Brief, resumes | Comments Off

Twitter Part 2: Research

Posted on February 7, 2012 by Steve

In my last post, I stated the following as part of my description of Twitter, “It is also the best research tool I have found so far. Part of this is due to the amazing amounts of rudeness we have come to accept, but independent of why, it is amazing!”

Much of what I recommend regarding job search revolves around the five questions Richard Bolles postulates as the “Five Questions that Count” and for the job seeker to take ownership of answering those questions.  They are:

  1. Why are you here? (What about us do you find interesting/special?)
  2. What can you do for us? (Are you going to be able to solve our problem?)
  3. What kind of person are you? (Do you fit with us?)
  4. What makes you special?( what distinguishes you from the other xxxx people applying for this job?)
  5. Can I afford you?

All five of these are critical to your success.  I restate 4 as, “Will your strengths function as strengths here?”

Which leads us back to Twitter.  When we approach an opportunity, no matter where it came from, we start with some information.  If it’s over the internet, then it’s a job description and the name of the company.  If it’s Craigslist, then we may not have the company name.  If it’s a referral, then we know the name of the company, the name of someone in the hiring process, and a job description.  In other words, we can reasonably assume the only question we know much about is 2; and we’re not entirely sure about that.

Based on that smidgen of information we send in a resume, fill out an application, find some way to let them know we exist, we’re interested and at least on first blush, we should be able to help.  In other words, we give them a one or two page synopsis of why we should explore each other further and pretty much all of the evidence we use to build that relates to skills.

The real point is, so far, neither side has enough information to make an informed decision.  How can you get enough information to make this informed choice?  In a word:  Twitter.

Assume that your first time through this will take some time.  Start by “following” the company.  Then search for people tweeting about it.  Search using the @.  So if you are interested in Concur Technologies, then it ‘s “@Concur” or “@f5networks” for F5 Networks.  Then “follow” the company and pay attention.  The “@” sign means “referencing” so an @Concur means a tweet that references Concur.  It will give you the most relevant results.

What this will give you is data.  In IT we used to call “data” th piles of unprocessed stuff organizations gather and “information” as what data becomes after it is processed.  You need to be the processor in this case.  As always when we are sorting through data, much of it is simply advertising and much of it is people whining.  Your job is to read enough of it to pick up the trends and pull out the nuggets.

What you will get is amazing. Not the least of which is opportunities to connect with current employees.  It does require you pay attention.  You will see more stuff that doesn’t matter than stuff that does.  The trick is to be ready when you see something that might be useful.  People tweet when they tweet and your job is identifying the one that are interesting.  Is it during a meeting?  Finishing up some task?  What ever, when you see it, respond; make your self visible and available, then the possibilities start to emerge.

Posted in Interviewing, Networking, reference, research, Richard Bolles, Social Networks, tools, Twitter, visibility | Comments Off

Craigslist

Posted on January 31, 2012 by Steve

Every once in a while, someone points me to a web post that is especially relevant and useful.  Michael Casey just did this, so I am passing it on.

I’ve talked about the value of Craigslist off and on since I started coaching full time.  Matt Youngquist of Career Horizons blogged about it a couple of weeks ago, and included some tools to make it easier. Check it out here.

Posted in Career Horizons, Craigslist, links, reference, research | Comments Off

Twitter and Job Search: Part 1

Posted on January 24, 2012 by Steve

I’m old school.  I am.  I love the idea of sitting and chatting with my friends one on one.  My idea of a great job search is calling some friends, and then calling a few more then maybe some people my friends suggest.    The whole process is intensely personal.  I also happen to live in the twenty-first century.  The result is that I need to constantly adjust what I want based on this terrible thing known as, “Reality”!  Well, maybe not entirely terrible, but it does not fit with my fantasy.

Which leads me to Twitter.  The more I learn about Twitter, the more I think it’s integral to job search.  It also forces me to add an additional aspect to all of the profiles we build.  One of the foundation elements in what I recommend is the idea for your job search to be driven by you, and not spending much time trying to be “found”.  For the most part, I still like that, but…

Twitter should be done with active awareness of your potential audience.  Who do you want to find you?  Who do you want to follow you?  Who do you want to be able to search you out and identify you?

It is also the best research tool I have found so far.  Part of this is due to the amazing amounts of rudeness we have come to accept, but independent of why, it is amazing!

Let’s start with setup.  I’m assuming you know what you are looking for before you set up your Twitter profile.  That knowledge will allow you to turn your “Bio” into a short ad that is found when someone is looking for your skills.  A couple of examples:

I’m a Career Coach, so my Bio is:  Resumes, Elevator Pitches, Linkedin Profiles, Interview Training, Career Growth, Career Direction, strengths based Career Coach and Bluegrass musician

My friend Michael Casey is a Project Manager/Sales Professional with a strong focus on resource conservation, his Bio is:  Career sales leadership managing projects reducing costs energy and resource conservation. Visual literacy photography bilingual Spanish Peace Corps Eagle Scout

What we have done is tune our Bio fields to attract the attention we want.  This is “key word” loading at its most elemental.  When someone is looking for a “career coach”, I want to be found, so I claim my expertise.  When someone is looking for “sales leadership”, Michael wants to be found, so he claims his expertise.

I’ll talk about using Twitter for research in another post.  Start by creating an account.  Use your bio to claim your expertise.  Use the same picture you use on Linkedin.  You are in the process of extending your “brand”…. In 140 characters or less.

Posted in branding., examples, job search, key words, Linkedin, Networking | Comments Off

Linkedin as a Brand Statement

Posted on January 4, 2012 by Steve

We study Linkedin a lot as we build our careers, and normally struggle to understand how our page should be set up. We all know the basic rule:  “For the purpose of building our careers, the only required electronic networking tool is Linkedin, and that has to be done very well.”  The challenge is defining “very well.”

Honestly, I’m not a lot different than anyone else in this.  I attend trainings, read trainings, view online trainings and while I’m not having a lot revelations any more, my  understanding does continue to evolve. Recently I was working with a client on Linkedin  and I heard myself tell her that her “Linkedin profile needed to be her Brand Statement.”  As an extrovert, it’s not unusual for me to hear myself say something and go, “Wow! That’s interesting!”  (lol)  Silly as it sounds, it’s true and this was one of those.

Linkedin needs to be your ultimate brand statement, optimized to attract opportunities in your chosen profession.  I know; easy for me to say, but what the heck does that mean?

If you look elsewhere on the blog you’ll find a lot of info on each of these topics.  For the sake of this post, let’s say your brand is, “That set of behaviors you normally engage
in, independent of what you are paid to do.”  The second part is optimizing it for employment.  In other words, who hires this role and what do they call it?

Given those criteria, what are the work successes you have achieved?  I don’t know you of course, so that becomes a primary question for you to answer.  Select a small number from your resume, or if you have some other record select those. No more than 4 bullet points per company you worked for.  They also need to represent the kind of things you are certain you will do.  For example, as an IT Manager, I always created powerful persistent teams and those teams delivered a lot of stuff, so my bullets would be about the teams and what they delivered.  As a Career Coach, my brand uses the same bullets, rewritten to highlight my work mentoring people into the roles they eventually moved into. It’s the stuff I always do, aka my “brand”.

Going this route also gives us criteria for choosing groups to join, belong to etc. At any rate, Linkedin needs to be allow you to pursue  all of the various opportunities you are interested in.  It can’t be an application, so make it your brand statement.

Posted in Best Practices, branding., job search, Linkedin | Comments Off

Preparation

Posted on December 6, 2011 by Steve

This blog has been focused on job search (it is after all “Notes From the Job Search”), but key to successful job search is being successful when you are working, then recognizing it and recording it.  I get it that my statement is obvious, the problem is we don’t normally do it.

After doing being a career coach for a while, I have found that the inhibitors fall in the following areas:

  • We assume our current job is the last job we’ll ever have or need.
  • Our successes tend to be somewhat repetitive, so we assume we’ll just “remember” them
  • We see ourselves as “just doing our job” rather than developing a personal history of success

Let’s look at these in more detail.

Emotionally, we actively want this to be the last job we need to get.  Start with the fact that job search isn’t fun!  Most of us do not want to do this.  If you were a kid through the 50’s, 60s or 70s, then the likelihood is that your parents didn’t change jobs very often, if at all.  The result is our expectations and our desires match perfectly.  “Yahoo!!!! I will have this job until I retire!”  Unfortunately, there is very little chance that we are right.  The most recent information I’ve seen (2009) documents current job tenure as 4.5 years, when we subtract government, schools and utilities, then that number falls to approximately 3.5 years.  When I graduated from college (1970s), we were  told to expect 3 separate careers in our lifetimes, when my kids graduated (2000s), they were told it would be 7.  The implication is that we should all expect to be looking for our next job about 2 years after we start our current one.

For most people, their job includes much that is repetitive.  If you are a bookkeeper, for example, then it can be very repetitive, yet as repetitive as it is, each time books are balanced, there are differences.  Capturing and recording what is done in order to accurately process those differences is frequently difficult, and everything a potential employer is going to care about when they are hiring.  It is also very common to prefer not to think of ourselves as doing something all that special.

It’s pretty easy to avoid special recognition by declaring that we’re, “just doing our job.” And lots of times it is also a very appropriate political tactic.  So recognizing your own work, at the same time being appropriate within a group can be a challenge.

At any rate, you add it all up and emotionally we try pretty hard to assume we won’t be looking for another job, unfortunately, in this case, the academic stuff wins.  Like it or not, we’ll all need to go looking sooner or later.

Which leads us back to preparing for that process and preparing is all about keeping records of our success.  So how do you record these small successes?  It’s pretty simple, but not always easy.  If you have the Work-Life DB™ then great; open it up, document your current job and start typing.  If you don’t, then open a word document, title it something like:  Company, Position.  In my current role it would be “Notes From the Job Search, Career Coach”.  Then just type what you did today into the doc.  That last sentence is very important, type in today’s success today.  If you miss a day, don’t worry about “Catching up.” Write in today’s success today, then if you have time, add yesterday’s success.

I’ve blogged before about how to construct the bullets in a resume and that’s the format to use here.   Literally, one from column A, one from Column B and one from Column C.

  1. Column A is one or two past tense, action verbs describing what you did
  2. Column B is one or two phrases describing how you did it and what tools were used
  3. Column C is the outcome.  In this case it is also the more numbers the better

This format has some very high reward elements to it and frankly is almost impossible to overdo. It is exceptionally efficient.  You convey all of the relevant information in a very short space.  It creates a picture of exceptional energy and efficacy.

The result of your diligence is tough to overstate.  It means that you will be ready when you need to be.

Posted in Best Practices, job search, Persistence, professional development, resumes, Work-Life DB™ | Comments Off