Structure of a successful job search

Posted on July 24, 2012 by Steve

This post is for Rem, one of the regulars in the North Seattle Group.  At one point, he asked, “What the heck is a successful job search?  What are the various parts?”  Well at the most basic level, it’s getting a job.  I’m not sure that’s a very helpful answer though.   I suppose the real problem here is that this question isn’t specific enough.

So what are the components of a successful job search?  At this level, part 1 is understanding what you are selling, part 2 is assessing the market and identifying what companies are hiring and part 3 is packaging that product in terms the companies can commit to and part 4 is getting a company to hire you in the role.

Part 1  Product knowledge

This one is about you.  What is your “brand”?   What are those things you always do?  What do you do better than almost anyone?   What are your “strengths”?  How do you go about applying those strengths?  What are your skills?  What is it you need to be successful?  What are your past successes?

Part 2  Market Assessment

Or “Who’s hiring and what are they hiring?”  Simply looking on the job boards and web pages to see what roles are being filled.  Also identifying companies that are growing.  If your old role has no openings, then you simply must find a new role.

Part 3  Packaging

What tools do you need to communicate?  How can social networking help?  How do you find the “hidden” job market?  How do you combine your personal stories in ways most likely to attract a new company?  How do you tell these stories in ways that allow a company to understand you as someone who can help them?  What about the weekly requirements from the “unemployment office”?  How do you create a package that gets you first the interview, then the job?

Part 4  Getting a job

How does interviewing work?  How do you negotiate an offer?  How do you prepare for an opportunity?  How do you create expectations that you will normally exceed?

So Rem,  I hope this helps.

Posted in job search, job search as sales, professional development, research, strengths, tools | Comments Off

The value of focus

Posted on July 4, 2012 by Steve

The NFJS groups have been have been working on researching companies and opportunities and this process re-enforced the value of having a specific goal.  There are all sorts of great old clichés for this, “If you don’t know where you want to go, then that’s where you end up.”  “Plan your work, work your plan.” Etc.

A story will help illustrate:  This is the story of a young(ish) single mom who was laid off just as the Great Recession was lurching to it’s bottom… early 2009.  She’d had a terrific career so far, but found herself without any opportunities to even apply for!  At that point she engaged with me and in the course of this process I asked her if she had a “Fantasy” job.  She responded, “Yes, I would give anything to be the Marketing Director for XXXXXX…(we’ll call the company Ajax Widgets).  Of course, they don’t even have a Marketing Department.”

Most of us would withdraw at that point and find another fantasy.  She didn’t.  Start with the fact that she is a single Mom though which means she has the very steady drum beats of her bills and her son.  She does not have the luxury of having a single focus.  She had to get work, and she did.  It took a bit over a year and she got a part time job that mostly slowed down the drainage of her resources, then she got another part time job and between the two, she kept her bills paid.

She also put some processes in place that kept her aware of the what was going on at Ajax, then she followed up every time something interesting occurred.  They hired a new Sales Manager?  She had lunch with him.  They got a new Director? She took them to coffee.  They were in the news? She read the article and consolidated it into her files.  Each time she met someone who might be an “influencer” in the organization, she would gently plant a seed.  In August of 2011 the job was advertised AND she was invited to apply, then in September, she got the job.

So what were her mechanics?  It starts with her having a goal or a focus.  She knew precisely what she wanted.  When she set up an automated search, she knew what to search for.  Knowing this allowed her to evaluate the information she got from her searches.  When they gave back bad info, she could change them until they worked.  Once they were set up, she simply monitored what was going on.  She was able to live her life at the same time she was able to track what was going on with Ajax.  Her bills got paid, her son thrived, heck she even kept the same boy friend! 

There are a bunch of tools that can help, all of them work better with a clear goal before you start.  Cruising a job board is terrific when you know what you’re looking for and depressing when you don’t, so the need for a focus is the same with all of these tools.  Equally, your time investment is all at the beginning.  The more you know about what you want, the easier this works.  My client that wanted to work at Ajax as their Marketing Director could create very specific useful searches.  She wasn’t looking for “any” job, she wanted to be the Marketing Director.  She wasn’t looking for “any” company, she wanted to work at Ajax.

Start with job boards:

There is a category of job board called an “Aggregator”.  These tools are constantly searching other job boards and “aggregating” their results.  www.Indeed.com appears to be the best of these, at least as of June 2012.  My last post was on “Boolean logic” it’s pretty straight forward stuff and the more you play with it the easier it becomes.  With Indeed, when you find a search you like, you can set it up as an RSS feed, a daily or a weekly email.  RSS feeds mean that every time your search is fulfilled you get a new mail into the your designated folder.  With a daily email, it’s just that an email that includes all of the prior day’s posts and Weekly is the same, just a weekly aggregation.  When these come into your mail box, you can then read the ones that mean something to you and discard the rest.

I’ve been pretty clear that I’m no longer a big fan of Google, they simply keep and sell to much of my information, but when it comes to job search, that’s a luxury none of us can afford and they have some really terrific tools!  Go to the basic page; in the upper left hand corner are a series of choices, “Search  Images   Maps….  More” Choose “More” and you will see a drop down menu that has a bunch more choices, the last of which is “Even More”;  click this.  You will be sent to a page with 45 choices and they are truly soup to nuts.  Choose “Blogs” or “Alerts”.  Turns out that Google Blogs is really a specific application of Google Alerts, so when you learn how to set one up, you’ve set up the other as well.  At any rate, start searching.  Do you have a company identified?  Maybe F5 Networks?  How about Swedish Hospital?  Premera Insurance?  What’s the name of a company you are interested in?  See what comes back. 

Now that you’ve started, the challenge is making a search useful.  So, just for grins, I ran a search on Amazon and got 151 million hits!  Yikes!  Not useful.  Clicked on the Advanced Search button, made it Amazon Corporate with the phrase “public relations”, down to 8 million, still not useful. Add Seattle to the search and we’re down to 800,000, better, but we need to be under 200.  Put the word “Contract” in the words that can’t be there, down to 300,000.  “Marketing & Sales” in the exact phrase portion and now at 150,000…

You get the idea;  You need to work on this until it provides results you can actually get through on a normal basis.  At this level, it might be worth setting up your daily report and reviewing it for a couple of days, just to see what comes up.  151,000 is a huge number, but it includes stuff going back years.  If the limit is that last 24 hours, it may be useful.

Set up is the hardest part for all of these tools.  Finding a “useful” search will take time, but once set up, it just keeps on giving! 

All of this takes us back to having a specific focus.  If you want to work “anywhere” at Amazon, there is simply too much information!  If you want to be hired by the PR department, then it may will be easier, and it will definitely be easier to understand how the team works.

Posted in budget, examples, finances, job search, links, Networking, Persistence, proactive job search, reference, tools | Comments Off

Boolean Logic

Posted on June 14, 2012 by Steve

It is really easy to be intimidated by a term like “Boolean Logic”.  What the heck is that?  There all kinds of discussions on the internet about it, but what is it?

It’s actually fairly simple, the hard part is that it did exactly what you told it to do, not what you wanted it to do.

So the three operators are AND, OR & NOT.  Virtually every search engine starts with these three things.  They may add stuff, but this is the base.  Next is the lowly quote (“) mark, if you want a phrase to be searched for as a whole phrase, then put it in quotes. 

Searches are executed left to right, kind of like we read.  If you want something done before something else, or you are trying to get fancy, then you can put it in paratheses (). 

Examples: 

  • If you are searching for information about being a project manager, then enter that and the search engine will give you a gazillion things about it.  Everything from job descriptions to training to Wikipedia and lots of stuff in between.  I just ran the search under Bing and it came back with 640 million entries.  The first group will include the phrase, “project manager”, then will come entries that have both Project and Manager, then entries that only include Project and finally ones that have only Manager.  I’m guessing you can understand why we got 640,000,000 hits.
  • Now I’ll try the phrase “Project Manager”.  The biggest visible difference is that I’m down to 36 million hits. 
  • Perhaps I want “Project Manager” but hate all things Google?  I’ll enter ‘“Project Manager” NOT Google’ and I’m down to 9 million hits
  • Next let’s try ‘”Project Manager” NOT (Google OR Microsoft)’ .  What I want now is entries that include the phrase “Project Manager” and do not have either the word Google or the word Microsoft.  The results are now getting substantially different and we’re down to 7 million.  The advertisements at the top of the page have even changed.

Just for grins, I ran this sequence in Blekko and the results are interesting.  Fist cut had 384 million, add the quotes and I’m down to 28 million; add the ‘NOT google’ my results are 8 million etc.  An anomaly is that when I use parentheses Blekko pops out 500 million again and when I remove them it acts like I expected with the parentheses, down to 5 million.

In all of this, a couple of things jump out.  One is that there is an astonishing amount of information on everything.  J  Some subjects are worse than others, but finding useful information is the trick and that means playing with these Boolean operators.  So remember that there is no “Wrong” way to do any of this, just more and less useful.  You get to determine if something is useful and you get to fuss with your search until you get what YOU want.

One last link:  www.booleanblackbelt.com.  This guy is VP of recruiting at Kforce and really knows his stuff.  He has a lot more than this very brief intro, he is after all, the black belt.  Reading his stuff is also extremely helpful in understanding how recruiters are using the internet.

Posted in Best Practices, examples, job search, key words, links, reference, research, resources, search engines, tools, wikipedia | Comments Off

What a Pain!

Posted on May 23, 2012 by Steve

Being unemployed is a bitch.  Plain and simple.  It undermines your self-worth, puts you at risk of becoming homeless, can cause your car to be re-possessed, makes going out with your friends more difficult, etc, etc.  It will challenge your belief in yourself as a contributing member of society.  It will probably create friction with your life partners, whether that is a spouse or a parent or any other significant relationship.  It will undermine your belief in what you normally do for a living.  If your industry is in the throes of a complete re-invention, it can make you feel pretty completely lost.  “Hope” of any and every kind becomes a premium commodity.

Looking for a new job isn’t the same as being unemployed and while it is frequently accompanies unemployment, it doesn’t need to be as frustrating.  Frankly it requires understanding and embracing your self-worth.  At their most elemental, every job is about solving some problem that a company has and is willing to pay to have solved.  It might be as simple as taking out the garbage or as complicated as inventing a new interface to computer systems, but it is always about solving one or a series of problems.

So what can you do that moves you from that “victim” who was laid off or fired or whatever to the problem solver that get’s hired?  What can you do that helps?  What gets you from “hopeless” to helpful? 

Those are some huge questions and frankly, I don’t feel all that good about trying to address them.  What I understand is much much smaller.  Like, Can I write down one success I had this week?  Heck, maybe I don’t feel like I had one this week, so maybe I’ll remember an old one.  Then tomorrow, I’ll write down one more. 

A long time ago, I had something happen while I was in the Army that messed my back up.  I was 22 at the time.  By the time I was 29, it was causing serious problems, so I went into the VA and they said, “Yup, you back is a mess, we can fuse it together.  It might help.”  I said, “Is there a ‘Plan B’?”  They said, “well, you might try exercise.” 

The next day I tried to do 5 sit-ups… only made it to 3.  A week later I got to 5, then the next week I made it to 10.  By the end of the year I was doing 30 crunch type sit-ups 5 or 6 times a week.  The point is that by starting where I was and continuing to try, I got better.  My back is still a mess, probably worse than when I was 29, but I haven’t had that surgery yet.  The real point is that I started where I was and did what I could, then I did it again, and again and again. 

With job search, we need to find one success, then another and another and another.  We need to write them down, then focus on them.  Then write out another and another.  When we have done enough of these, it becomes pretty easy to find stories of how we help.  We may still be overwhelmed with the whole unemployment thing, but we will also know we can help a company.  We will also be able to tell some hiring manager, very specifically how we can help.  Turns out that is a pretty good place to be.

Posted in Best Practices, branding., fear, finances, health, Interviewing, job search, reference, resilience, strengths attitude, stress, Uncategorized | Comments Off

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