My thought today is to simplify.  With all of the talk, writing etc. it must be complex, right?  I’m actually not so sure.  It is not linear.  So you can do everything right and still struggle.  One of my clients has a terrific skill set in an emerging technical field, experience as good as is possible and still spent most of last year looking for work.  At one point he got what appeared to be a terrific job.  He was introduced by a respected acquaintance, checked out the owners reputation, interviewed the owner and everything lined up.  so he said, “Yes.”  Moved his family, set up new day care, his wife got a new job….  Then two months in found that the whole thing was financed by someone called, “Mr Big”.  (This is too crazy to make up.)  When his boss realized he was keeping detailed records of what they were doing (he is a scientist after all) he was fired.

My point is that he did everything right and it still turned into a disaster.  How did it get so crazy?  Start with the fact that he only controls half of the process.  When he was fired, it kicked him onto his behind.   So all he could do was get back up and continue.

Job seekers and employees only control their half of the process.  The result is that half(?) two-thirds(?) of what happens is explained by stuff not controlled by the job seeker or the employee.  Frequently it’s stuff that the job seeker/employee will never get access to.

The most important part of the job search process turns out to be resilience.  Your ability to continue to work through resistance.

Networking is more efficient than any other process, but if you work hard enough and long enough, then there are lots of effective ways to get that new job.  The key element is continuing through resistance.

One of my clients is helping Boeing with their hiring process and he reports that one of the applicants there applied for more than 250 specific positions.  Someone he had just hired had applied for more than 50.

All of us that blog/write about job search love to tell you that we know the secret sauce that will get you that perfect job, but the truth is, it’s all about you.  If you keep working at it, it will happen.  We can make it easier, but the secret sauce is you.

Groups are the magic of Linkedin. They let you become thoughtfully visible.  As part of setting up your profile you identified several key words that were especially interesting to you and critical to your career.  Those key words turn out to be useful in this section.  Start by searching Linkedin groups using one or two of those words.  As a test, I just ran a search on the word “Sales” in “Groups” and found out that there are (as of today, Feb 10^, 2013) 21,506 groups that include the word “Sales” in their title, of those 8,875 are open.  “Project Manager” (in quotes) gave me 906 results with 318 being open, if I add “NOT Microsoft” to my search it cuts down to 895, so removing the NOT means I came back with 12.  The 12 number is small enough to evaluate the groups and become involved in a useful way. 

You get the idea.  Find some groups that you are interested in and that you can add value to. Consider a couple of groups that are related to you, but not your profession.  For example; I live in Seattle, so I joined Linked:Seattle.  It has 40,000 members which really adds to my list of people I connect with.  In addition, it has something useful in it once in a while.  My degree is from Central Washington University, so I joined its alumni group.  These are groups where the connection is loose, but there is a predisposition to trust and share.  Look for groups with active memberships that don’t get sidetracked by politics. Linkedin is about work; career.  Other stuff doesn’t belong here.  If that’s what a group does, then bail.

The goal of your involvement with groups is building relationships based on common interests.  In this case those interests are career based, so focus on that.  When you find a person that makes interesting comments in one of your groups, try to “intensify” that relationship.   “Intensify” means pretty much what you expect:  It’s Linkedin, so there is an assumed predisposition to connect, as in establishing a Linkedin Connection.  Do that first, when you are connected, and see another interesting comment, then see if you can have coffee.  When you send the Linkedin request, preface by referencing what you found interesting.  For example Jane Doe makes an insightful comment on a discussion of Scrum techniques, so your connection invite might read, “Jane, I was very impressed by your comment on Scrum in the PMI group and would like to add you as one of my Linkedin Connections.  Thanks, Steve Paul.”  If she connects, then makes another insightful comment on some subsequent discussion, send an “inmail”, “Jane, this is at least the second time you have made a comment that captured my attention in our Linkedin PMI group.  Do you have time for coffee X morning or Y morning?  I would love to put a face to ….” 

You get the idea.  The point here is that Linkedin allows you to thoughtfully grow your network and this is how. 

The other thing that is happening simultaneously is that you are making the most relevant useful comments you can onto the group, thereby creating a portrait of yourself as a trustworthy, insightful, effective member of your profession.  What about your profession do you care about?  What has helped you become effective?  Linkedin groups is a way to share this.  It is way too easy to assume that everyone will consider you a bit of a poser, I mean, here you are offering advice?  Think about how you react to useful posts.  Someone identifies an article in a trade magazine or a blog post or one of a million other places, then shares it with you.  What is your reaction?  For me, when I am interested in the subject, my reaction is curiosity and all about the content.  If the content is useful, or insightful; my reaction to the poster is good.  If the content is off the mark; what the heck I didn’t finish reading it anyway.

Linkedin is the critical networking tool on the internet for career stuff.  It is also a very rich set of tools.  What I’ve covered in these last two posts simply is a starting place.  The more time you play with it, the more you can learn and frankly the silly stuff on Linkedin matters more that the best stuff on Monster.com or Dice.com.  So explore.  What is the role of “Answers”?  How can you use “Companies”? 

Good luck.

I’m sure that there are an infinite number of ways to approach/use Linkedin, of which I recommend two.  Part one is setting up a profile that is likely to capture appropriate attention and part two is using Linkedin as part of your suite of research tools.

Setting up Linkedin to capture appropriate attention is much easier said than done, so I’ll start by suggesting a simple feedback loop.

Start by building your best idea of what your profile should look like.  If you have read much of this blog, you will have noticed some discussion of “brand” and that should be the core of what you represent.  That said, you also need to be clear about the tools you use for the implementation of the brand.  For example, having the brand of being an “analytical team builder” is terrific, but does not address what you do for a living.  Being an “Analytical team builder and project manager, using scrum and the Microsoft framework to deliver custom software” makes it a lot more interesting.  If you have your PMP and your CSM it is even more interesting.

Once you have your profile built, test yourself.  Find a job description for something that you are really interested in, then go to “Advanced Search” for “People”.  It’s in the upper right hand corner.  When you click on it, a screen with any number of options shows up.  You can play with these, but start by taking your sample job description and highlighting the “key words”: those words that they are most likely to be actually interested in.  For the profile above, “project manager” is a likely fit as would be “program manager”.  Put in your zip code and consider anything else that might matter.  If you are focused on Hospitals and Health Care for example, you can choose that industry.  When you finish, hit the Search button and see what happens.

You will get a list of people/profiles that fulfill your search to a greater of lesser degree and you need to be on the first page.  In all likelihood you won’t be.  J   Look at the people that are there and see what they have done to their profiles, then take that information and use it to modify your own.

Note that some of what you read won’t apply to you.  You can’t make up certifications.  You can’t make up experience you don’t have.  What you can do is use their language to describe your experience.  You can edit your accomplishments to focus on those elements you want people to hire you for.  For example; Today, I’m a Career Coach, but I spent 25 years in IT previous to this career.  I cannot pretend that I did something else through that 25 years, but I can emphasis the time I spent “coaching” my staff.

When you are done editing your profile, re-run your search.  Are you on the first page?  If not, then once again, look at the people on that page and use what they have to edit what you have.  Repeat this process until you are on that first page.

When we talk about editing our profile, it is pretty easy to react emotionally to the whole process and that emotional response gets in the way.  Your Linkedin Profile is the tool used by many, many companies to recruit off of.  You can edit it and optimize it, so for heaven’s sake, do so.  Think of this as a chance to work directly on the internal recruiting database for some company you are interested in.  What about your experience matters to them?  With Linkedin, you get to work on that directly.

To be honest, I actually recommend that my clients turn off the news.  The hyperbole the media brings to every discussion makes it almost impossible to avoid responding emotionally and there is no greater enemy to your job search than that emotional response.  Newspapers are better than television, but that is kind of like saying water-boarding is better than Chinese water torture. 

What we as job-seekers need to do is simply continue forward.  Companies have been hiring throughout this recession/depression and they will continue to going forward.  The key to a successful job search has always been identifying a real problem you can solve that some business needs to solve and for which they do not have someone on board that can.  That will continue. 

There are a bunch of people writing an amazing amount of stuff on how to identify the business problems we can individually solve, and most of us provide useful tools and information.  Heck, sometimes we have really insightful, helpful tools and information.  None of them have any utility at all if you don’t use them.  Using the emotional energy you have to go through this process is what will get that next job.  Listening to the purveyors of doom and fear will not.

So find a reason to celebrate this new year!

Before I introduce them, a quick note about what they do and why it matters to a job seeker.  A “word-cloud” is just that, a bunch of words that are in some shape; could be a cloud shape or an airplane, or pretty much anything in-between.  The words that make up the cloud come from some source document.  It could be your Linkedin Profile or your resume or your favorite poem.  It needs to be something you can copy, but I think that is the only limit.  The size of an individual word in your cloud is determined by the number of times it’s repeated in your source document.  If it is only used once it will be pretty small, used twice, it’s a bit bigger, then 3 is bigger yet, etc.  The result of this is a terrific visual of what matters to the writer. 

The reason all of the resume experts recommend a custom resume every time is the “job application process” (as in the online process used to submit your name for consideration to some advertised job) is mostly a jigsaw puzzle.  Your application is the missing puzzle piece and getting that all important interview is all about making your application (your resume) look like the puzzle piece described in the published job description. 

The hardest part of this is separating yourself from your resume while still reflecting both your qualifications and your work style.  Assuming that you have a good base resume, transforming it into this “puzzle piece” is next.  Step one is reading the job description and thinking through what it says, even outlining what appear to be the most important parts.  The following is an ad from Amazon.com:

This is a reasonably well written job description.  My guess is that they are looking for a solid business operations based Program Manager who is tech savvy and who has a history of working with a computer system development staff.  Assuming that this is your back ground you decide to apply, you proof your resume and you have identified where you did what they’re asking for and verified you included it. 

Now is when one of these word-cloud sites is useful.  This is a word cloud done with www.tagxedo.com of Amazon’s ad:

I made the guitar shape because it’s fun and part of the NFJS Logo, but there are lots of choices and you can add more if it matters.  What we really care about is the size of the words.  The two biggest are “Program” and “Management”.  Are you using those words in your resume?  Those should be the most often repeated.  “Responsible” is next in size, but a lousy word on a resume.  The solution to this is to write bullet points that demonstrate how responsible you were.  They also love the words “Technology” and “Business” so get those in, then see if “Functionality” fits, etc. 

What the cloud gives you is a visual snapshot of what you should submit.  If you want, you can do another cloud that is your resume.  How big is Program Manager?  How big is Technology, Business?  In other words, are you matching the job description they gave you?

So two sites in particular: www.wordle.com and www.tagxedo.com are the current champs with this device.  It will simply make it easier to really prepare your resume.

Pretty much all of my success is built on two elements:  My need to understand stuff and my habit of creating teams.  I spent close to 25 years in IT, 14 in development and 11 in some part of management, and I don’t do details.  At least I don’t do them without understanding how they fit into a whole, so I did lots of details when I was working on new systems, and I really struggled when I needed to apply details out of context.  Eventually, I came to understand that it was critical for me to think about this and integrate it into my job search when I was looking for new positions.  Similar with the team thing, and it took me roughly as long.  I did not understand how defining it is to my management style until I had done it several times, but it occurred every time I was in a position that allowed this, so it became clear that this had to be considered a good thing by my managers.   What I eventually learned was that there are certain things I will do.  If they are part of why I’m hired, Excellent; if not, then there will be very significant misunderstandings.  My personal passions tend to family, service, music and wooden boats, none of which I was paid for prior to becoming a Career Coach.  Heck, even in this iteration, the only one I’m paid for is the service part.

My client Dana came to Notes From the Job Search completely befuddled.  He had had 6 or 7 jobs in the previous 10 years and been fired or laid off of every one.  He had not made it to the two year mark, even once!  He had done amazing things for companies, as in really amazing and gotten laid off.  The most dramatic was a large video game company where he was hired as a Data Entry Clerk, re-invented the process he was part of, saving the company $15,000,000.00 annually then got laid off.  In this case, his boss got laid off as well and his boss’s boss got fired.! How did something like that happen?

Well, what Dana does is process analysis and design.  That isn’t a job description for him, certainly not a description of his passions and has nothing to do with his college degree.  It is a description of how he thinks and interacts with the world.  He is also sweet enough and charismatic enough so he is able to implement the solutions he designs.  This is a truly amazing guy, but because he wasn’t being hired to analyze processes, he kept getting shown the door.  Because he had not yet done the work required to understand how he looked at the world, he also had no idea what he was doing wrong.

Dana started at Boeing about a year ago as Process Analyst, is getting rave reviews and looks to be in a terrific spot for a while.

My point with all of this is that your “passions” are there and terrific and all that, but their relationship with work is pretty random.  Your “strengths” or your “brand” are absolutely required understandings and required for you to be at your most successful.  You will use your strengths and your Brand is a description of what you normally do, so neither of those is negotiable.  Building on them is as close as anyone can come to guaranteeing your success.

They have gone through significant trauma over these last several years and have flourished throughout!  Starting with being burned to the ground 3 years ago, their actual location has been more than slightly fluid.  Which brings us to today:  On September 24, 2012 they are moving and changing once again and Notes From the Job Search will continue to move with them.  This time the move is temporary and as is normal, very short in distance.  The distance is just two doors South.  For a variety of reasons, we will also change time to 1:00 and still on Mondays.

So starting September 24^th, 2012, the Monday Meeting of Notes From the Job Search will be from 1 to 2:30 at 8515 Greenwood Ave N.

I look forward to seeing current and new friends!

I started looking for a job in January of that year, a couple months before I graduated from IT school.  I asked everyone I knew if they knew someone in computers.  I asked my friends, I asked my family, I asked people I did volunteer work with.  I asked everyone!  Some people I asked more than once.  We needed the money and emotionally, I really needed to start working! 

One of the folks my Father put me in touch with was the Manager of IT at Simpson Timber; George (and forgive me George, I do not remember your last name).  The first time I spoke with him was in January of ’82.  We had a great conversation.  I started by telling him I was not applying at Simpson, but was looking for information.  I remember that we talked for all of an hour, and that he gave me an additional name, but little else.  I was able to get about one informational interview a week through the winter and spring.  Honestly I don’t think I had two job interviews during that time, so the informational interviews were something of a lifeline.  I had chances to find out what companies were doing and what they wanted, etc.  I met with George again in June and it was once again very cordial.  I got another name and was off.  That summer, even the informational interviews got very hard to get, so by September I was struggling.  In October I met with George for a third time and at one point, said something like, “Heck, I would gladly volunteer to write someone a program if it meant that they might pay me for the second one!” 

George mumbled under his breath, “I’d go for that.”  Which I heard and pounced on, asking if we could meet in a week’s time so I could make a proposal.

It actually took a bit more than a month, but I wrote my fist program for Simpson Timber in November of 82 and my last one in March of 85. 

The point is that this wasn’t even a job when I started.  George did not have head count, he did have a need.  I had demonstrated I was “qualified”, even though I didn’t have the “qualifications” for the position. 

I have found myself using a variation of that phrase quite a bit lately as people talk about their “Ideal” job and as I talk about the value of networking.  It turns out that this phrase is pretty much it.  All of us are qualified to do things we haven’t done or haven’t been paid to do previously and companies are pretty much stuck evaluating what we have been paid to do.  In today’s market we have all read a job description that describes someone who walks on water while coding a new mobile ap. 

Companies are both cocky about and frightened by hiring.  There are lots of people applying, so companies assume they must be able to get all of the stuff they want.  Simultaneously, turnover rates are horrendous and companies aren’t really understanding what they’re doing wrong.  So they ask for perfect, when they don’t really know what perfect is.  The way around this for both the company and the employee is networking.  By the time I got an offer from Simpson Timber, I was a known entity.  They were not taking a risk. 

The most important part of this story is that it is common.  It does take patience.  It does take time.  It also works.  It is something you can do.

If you are serious about job search, then you have run into some significant problems with how challenging it is.  I had one person brag about having sent out 1000 resumes!  Wow!!  She had not gotten a single interview yet either!  That is more than $400 in stamps!  Microsoft gets something in excess of 1300 resumes a day!  For Boeing that number is 1700, for Amazon it’s 1000. 

So how the heck do you get out of that rat race?  (All together now) “Networking.”  Obviously, we all know this answer, but it is soo much easier said than done; which brings us back to Informational Interviews. 

The most important goal of an informational interview is increasing your network by one specific individual; the person you are talking with.  There are a bunch of other good outcomes that you can have, but none occur without the first.  The process is simple, sit down with someone and get them to tell you their story.  That’s it, the whole thing.    Of course, it’s a lot easier for me to say this, than any of us to do.  I mean who is trained in something like “active listening”?

Again, this is a pretty simple process on paper.  Active listening is having a set of questions that are used to begin a conversation, then clarifying every time you don’t understand and agreeing every time you do, or simply repeating back when something new comes along. This is a helpful description, but still probably not detailed enough to execute. 

To effectively do an informational interview, start with a list of questions you really want to know someone’s answers to.  Are you a developer?  Do you want to work at Microsoft?  Then asking someone who is a developer at Microsoft what MS uses for a development methodology is a decent question.  Asking them about commercial fishing probably won’t be all that useful.  The point is to start with a list of specific, relevant questions. 

For these interviews there are two questions you should always ask:  “May I come back to you in a few months and check in again?” And, “Who else should I talk to?”  Beyond that, do research.  Check them out on Linkedin.  Google their company.  Look at their web site.  Hang out in their parking lot!  Informational interviews are very, very important.  They can allow you to completely avoid the whole HR thing.  They can allow you to help someone identify and solve a real problem they are having with their business.  Your success is also directly related to your level of preparation.

This is not a quick fix.  Networking into a company will take a long time.  The advantage is it works, plain and simple.  There is no more reliable strategy.    It will also allow you to come up with a better job than you can find any other way.  It helps if you know what you are good at, but that’s another blog post.  By the way, this is the process I used to get into I.T.  I’ll post that story next.