Brilliant Job Search

Twitter to a Job

When Warren Sukernek lost his job last December, he didn't spend a single second perusing internet job boards looking for work. He didn't shell out a single dollar to have his resume blasted all over the web, and he didn't consult a single career coach.

Instead Sukernek logged on to Twitter and sent out direct messages to a few trusted friends telling each of them, individually, that he'd just been laid off.

Why tell just me, why don't you tell everyone? Alison Byrne Fields, one of Sukernek's Twitter confidants, asked him when she got his private tweet. Twitter is, after all, a public forum on which Sukernek had built a strong following. Sukernek considered his friend's suggestion for a moment, took a deep breath, then composed a tweet that would reach his nearly 3000 Twitter-based  followers:

  “Friends, I have just been laid off. As a digital strategist, I would appreciate any leads or opportunities.”

Soon after Sukernek hit SEND his cronies leapt into action. They began searching their workplaces and networks for job leads in his behalf. They wrote blog posts that urging their readers to help their very talented friend find a job.

Blogger Peter Kim was the first to write a post, “Is your community prepared to help?”

Twitter follower Rick Murray answered that post with a blog post of his own, Happy to Help, was its title. In that post Murray indicated that he had already referred Sukernek to his employer and mentioned that he had access to 1300 of his company’s clients to whom he could also spread the word.

Tweeters Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell wrote a post of their own, ^How to prepare for being laid off, the Warren Sukernek way” 

Web 2.0 celebrity Saul Colt aka "Smartest Man in the World", chimed in with a post of his own.  A few things to try if you happen to get fired/laid off this holiday season.

Twitter-friend Jeff Shuey, who was also unemployed at the time, wrote still another post Twitter for the Gainfully Available and Actively Under-Employed.

Each time one of these blog posts was written, a link was sent out via Twitter. Thousands of  people were quickly learning that Sukernek’s influential friends were referring him for a job.

What did all that attention win for Sukernek? "I had ten well-qualified interviews scheduled by the end of that first day," says Sukernek. "I also became the rock star of the unemployed ," he adds,  noting that that's a title noone wants to hold for long (because joblessness is requirement.) And,  perhaps, most importantly, it helped Sukernek find and land a job he wanted and needed.

Could Sukernek have gotten the same results as quickly by any other means? "Probably not," says Dan Schawbel, author of Me 2.0,  Build A Personal Brand to Achieve Career Success. "Twitter allows people to connect in a way that was never before possible. It's quick; you can accomplish a lot in a very short period of time."

"But," Schwabel adds, "It's important to note that personal branding and social networking are long-tem strategies.. You can't expect to sign up for Twitter today and to get quality job referrals tomorrow. You have to build a network first. You have to pay it forward."

Get a spot bonus if you can't get a raise

ant a raise? Get real. It's not that you don't deserve one -- but in these uncertain economic times, it's probably not going to happen, especially at this time of year.

According to nationally recognized compensation expert Bill Coleman, raises are most commonly handed out at the end of the year, shortly after your annual review. The second most common time is June. But unless you're working for an over-performing company like Apple or Amazon, chances are that there will be no funds available in the budget to bump up your base (at least) until the end of the year.

That's the bad news.

The good news is that you still might be able to get some extra cash or some additional paid time-off in the form of a "spot bonus." Many companies are handing these out to top performers according to both Ravin Jesuthasan, a Managing Principal at workforce consulting firm Towers Perrin and Margaret-Ann Cole, Organization Effectiveness Consultant at Watson Wyatt.

The tricky thing about a spot bonuses is that, under most circumstances, you can't just walk up to your boss, ask for one and expect that your wish will be granted. Instead, you have to be recognized by your manager for doing something meaningful.

And it's important to note that, in this case, the word "meaningful" is defined by your boss and not by you.

How do you know what his definition is? "Ask," says career strategist and best-selling author Cynthia Shapiro. (Without mentioning that you're after a spot bonus, of course.) There may be an important  project that no one else wants to do or a committee that he needs you to sit on. In the short term, this may require you to work overtime. In the long term (whether you get a spot bonus,or not) it will single you at as someone who steps up to the plate when necessary. 

There's another way to get a spot bonus too, but, before you attempt it, make sure that your company considers you to be a strategic commodity and that your skill set is in short supply and high demand. A researcher who develops drugs for a pharmaceutical firm might fit this profile, an accountant who works for the same firm would not. 

Assuming that you're in a position to do so, ask your boss to sit down for a heart to heart. Start by telling him how much you like working at the firm, sell yourself by reviewing your recent accomplishments, then finally express your frustration at not being able to progress monetarily. Ask him to help you reconcile the fact that you're doing great work, but that you're not being recognized (because economic conditions are preventing the company from making pay raises). See what he comes back with.

What are your chances? Sources we consulted indicated that 1% of the payroll budget is normally set aside for spot bonuses and that, at this time of year, there's a pretty good chance that the kitty is not yet spent. We also learned that, in most cases, managers don't require additional authorization (signatures from management, human resources and accounting) to hand them out, so that the only person you have to convince to give up the green is your boss.

My Advice to Job-seekers- Keep Your Money in Your Wallet

There are way too many people looking for jobs. Manpower, one of the world's largest staffing companies, says that they're now receiving over 200,000 resumes each week- that translates to 200 candidates for every available job.

Where do stats like these leave job-seekers? Frustrated, desperate, and willing to do whatever it takes to get in front of a hiring manager, even if it means shelling-out a few bucks.

And there are legitimate businesses who understand the distressed job-seeker's mind set at so well  that they've developed products and services geared specifically toward helping them part with some cash.

Technical job board Dice.com is one of them. They've introduced a program called Dice Advantage. For just under $30/month, individuals can find out which specific employers have viewed their resumes, have their resumes highlighted in search results, and increase their relevance.

CareerBuilder.com offers similar services, only theirs cost from $100-150/month

Should you spend the money? Not according to the posts on the message board of Dice's own site. A review on Epinions.com about CareerBuilder's premium service offers similar sentiments.

And from a recruiter's point of view, I find the entire idea problematic for several reasons:

1. What does it matter if you (a job-seeker) finds out that company x viewed your resume? Chances are that it was one of several hundred that came up in a recruiter's search results.
2. What are you going to do with the information? Call the hiring company's switchboard or human resources department saying, "I happen to know that you viewed my resume, do you have any questions about my background?" While the action may be well-intended, the chances of you actually making contact with the person who double-clicked on your name are miniscule. Besides, if a recruiter thinks you're a good fit for a job, they will seek you out; after all, recruiters don't make much money unless they fill jobs.
3. As a recruiter, I know that when someone's name appears highlighted in my search results it means that they spent money to get attention. It sends a signal that you don't feel like you can stand out in the crowd using your only your qualifications.
4. If your relevance (meaning that the search results make you look like a better match for a job than you actually are) is artificially increased, it establishes unrealistic expectations. You'd be setting yourself up to lose.

So, I say, keep your money in your wallet. Be mindful of the fact that when the economy loses jobs, the number of jobs being posted on Internet job boards goes down, which causes them to make less money, unless they get it from some other source. Think hard before you let that source be you.

Your Salary Visible to All?

Believe it, or not, there's a rich man you don't want to be right now. More specifically, it would suck to be one of the AIG derivative traders who received  big bonuses. 

It was reported that at least one of them received a death threat.

But that's not all. It seems like everyone, especially Congress, wants to know who got paid how much. They want the identities of the recipients to be made public.

Now, I'm going to  leave it to my fellows to discuss how the whole AIG mess happened and whether or not the bonuses should or should not have been paid out in the first place. I will say this much; after listening to explanations as to why AIG's CEO scrambled to retain certain employees, I'm more open-minded on the matter.

What troubles me more is the idea that what you make (your salary and bonus) may be a matter of public record, that is unless your employer takes great care in making employee compensation records a trade secret.

Here's what a New York state judge decided yesterday in reference to disclosing the bonus pay-outs to Merrill employees before the Bank of America takeover:

The record does not support the intervenors' claim that the employee compensation information is a trade secret," New York State Supreme Court Justice Bernard Fried wrote.

At a time like this, I'm sure many of us are in favor of full-disclosure; we think that it's OK for the compensation packages of people we see as greedy to be made a matter of public record.

But what about you? Would it be OK if your take home pay was published on the Internet? (Public records will live in the cloud pretty soon). Do you care if a nosy neighbor or coworker could do a web search and get the skinny on your earnings? Relax, I don't think that can happen quite yet, but recent events cause me to wonder whether that might not become the case in the future. After all, Merrill and AIG execs will soon be exposed, if they aren't already.

That leaves me wondering  if I have the right to keep my earnings private (aside for the IRS, of course.)

Job Search Frustration? The Antidote

I think we're all familiar with the rant, If you don't have a job, your new job is to get a job.You need to do it full time.

And while the advice is meant to be constructive; it may be time to question it, especially when there are so few job openings available.

Take, for example, Jim's situation; he's  been looking for a job for the past 37 days. "There are no new jobs  that I qualify for that I haven't already applied to," he says. "I bugged all my buddies and old bosses for leads last week, like I do every week," he goes on, adding that though they're still being nice, "I think they're getting sick of taking my calls."

And Jim doesn't stop there. "There are no user group or professional association meetings on my schedule for this week," he says. "I've answered questions on God forsaken Linkedin. What else am I supposed to do with all this job search time? What am I supposed to tell my wife when she calls from the office and asks what I've accomplished today? Am I supposed to say nothing, unless you count achieving a new level of frustration?"

Relax, Jim, I say, and tell your wife to back off. Doing the same things over and over again expecting different results makes you one thing; crazy. That's hardly the result you're looking for.

What you should do instead is set up an automated job search strategy.

Go to the job portals where positions in your profession are advertised and set up a few automated job search agents; that way new job postings for which you qualify will be e-mailed to you once a day. It should take you no more than 30 minutes a day to apply to those for which you qualify.

Next see if you can meet your old colleagues for lunch once in a while. If you can join the company softball team on which you used to play. Keep it friendly, everyone already knows you need a job.

Finally use the time you have left for some kind of service work. There are opportunities listed all over the web at places like Architecture for Humanity, Habitat for Humanity, Volunteer Match, One Brick, the Network for Good and countless others.

What will volunteering do for you?

• It will keep you productive and active in your profession
• It will give you something exciting to talk about when you do land an interview
• It will give you a reason to wake up in the morning
• It might keep you from feeling depressed
• It might teach you that your value may be what you give Vs. what you take home

Let Good Works Help You Get Your Next Job

One of the challenges workers face while they're beached between jobs is keeping their portfolios, skills, and passion for their profession current. Hiring managers tend to lean toward folks who are engaged in, and excited about, something that they're currently working on.

So, what do you do if you're unemployed? Should you create a project for the heck of it?

That's certainly one option; but there's a better one.

You can offer your talent to a not-for-profit organization pro bono.

Why would you do this when you could be sleeping-in and hanging out on the couch playing with your Wii?

Please don't tell me that you don't know.

But just in case, I'll clue you in.

1. Your skill set can be fresh, or it can be stale. Fresh is better, and a little volunteer work can give you that.
2. When you go to an interview and you're asked what you're working on, you'll have something other than unemployment to talk about.
3. You'll appear as a generous human being, the kind who pitches-in when the need arises.
4. You'll make new connections. Most not-for-profits have powerful, influential executives on their Boards of Directors and chances are good that your gratis gesture will be made known to them. Who knows, if they can't use you at their own companies,  they might just tell their friends about you or something you did.
5. Karma, or at least you'll sleep better knowing that you did something to better the world today.

If you need help finding a place to volunteer, Idealist.org can lead you to 83,761 not-for-profits. Find the ones near your home, or those that you care about, and give them a call.

You're already branded- How to take some control

Seth Godin wrote an interesting post about personal branding in the age of Google. If you haven't read it, you probably should.

The gist of it is this: Act as if everything everything you do, say, write, buy, post, participate in, and/or subscribe to is public information because if it isn't already, it will be, and soon.

Want an example?

I lost the final of a table tennis tournament (Girls under 15) in 1975. It's not a memorable moment in my life; in fact, I had forgotten all about it, but there it is on the web. On a web that didn't even exist at that time; a decade before the WINDOWS operating system would even be introduced to the world.

But things are different today.

Today I know that Google will lead you to pages and pages of information about me.

If you summarize my "google hits" you'll get a somewhat skewed picture of who I am and how I spend my time; but it's one that I can live with.

However, if I were looking for a job, I'd have some work to do. And I would do it now.

I'd start with my Linkedin profile.

Why?

Because Linkedin engineers are search engine optimization geniuses and,in most cases, when you enter a name into Google, you'll get the LinkedIn result first.

Second because I'm the one in control of the content in my Linkedin profile; in a sense, I get to to paint my face as I want the world to see it.

Third, I can fill my Linkedin profile with so many links,that I've hand selected, that the googler probably won't have the time, or attention span, to go back to my Google results.

So, if you're looking for a job (and even if you're not), go put a fresh coat of paint on your Linkedin face. It's one of the few things in today's job-seeking landscape that you can control.

Need a resume writer? Check the mirror!

Resume writers and career coaches must be raking in the bucks, I'm half thinking I should become one. It's a good honest way to make a living while helping people in need. There's just one thing; I think people need to be able to write their own resumes.

And, yes, I know I'll be catching a bunch of flack from those who make a hard earned living doing this kind of work; and, no, I'm not trying to put them out of business. But, if predictions are right, you're not only going to change jobs many, many times in your lifetime, but you'll have 5 or 6 different careers as well. Putting a resume together is a skill that you're going to need.

Wikipedia says that a resume is "a document that contains a summary or listing of relevant job experience and education. " I think the word RELEVANT is key. I get piles of resumes every day, and I have no idea why half of them were sent to me.

Imagine if you were looking to hire a surgeon and a sushi chef applied for the job  because he saw words like "precise" and "sharp instrument" in the job description. I laughed about this with the VP of Staffing of a Global 50 firm the other day; he said that the resumes that come in through his company's portal don't  even come that close to being "hit", and that his staff doesn't have time to sort through the misses.

"Don't people get it," he said, "that it's up to a job candidate to make it obvious to me that they have the experience, skills, and training to do the job they're applying for?"

And it's with this thought in mind, that I say that a single version of a resume probably won't serve you in today's marketplace. Two or three versions probably won't be enough either, unless you're applying for only two or three jobs.

I say that for each position you apply for, you should create a different resume. Though its contents won't vary much (your education, training and skill sets don't fundamentally change from day to day), the presentation of those contents should.

And it's not too much to ask; after all, we live in a cut-and-paste, soft-copy world. There are tools like Microsoft Office Online and Emurse available to us, at little or no cost, 24/7. There's no excuse for failing to present yourself as the perfect (or at least 80%) fit for a job; unless, of course, you aren't. If that's the case, don't waste your own, or anyone else's time; go find a job you do fit instead.

Your resume SPAMMED!

People often ask me if they should post their resumes on the web on supposedly secure Career sites like Monster, DICE, Career Builder and HotJobs.

On the surface, it seems like a great way to help employers find you; and, in a perfect world, where everyone is on his/her best behavior, that may be the case. But. the world's not perfect, and people, especially at times like this, too often behave opportunitistically.

What am I talking about? Take for example, that the security of Monster's database was breached for the second time last month. Here, according to Monster, is what the intruders took, "certain contact and account data were taken, including Monster user IDs and passwords, email addresses, names, phone numbers, and some basic demographic data."

Almost enough to apply for a credit card in your name. And certainly enough to bundle up and sell to a criminally shrewd third party who can then find ways to wreak havoc in ways that lie well beyond our imaginations.

But the hacking is only one problem.

There are things that people who are authorized to use the database can do as well. For example, they can sell your resume(complete with your employer's name, your e-mail address, street address and phone number) as part of a bulk package of resumes to anyone who's willing to pay for it.

Third party recruiters can also grab it, slap their agency's name on it, and enter it into employer portals without your permission. Why would they do this? Because it gives them the right to represent you at any company that shows an interest in you at almost anytime. Don't you get any say in the matter? Quite possibly not. Companies tend to give the "right of representation" to the first party who entered the resume.

"But it's my resume!" the victims of such a scam always say. Most employers find it easier to dismiss your candidacy, thereby avoiding controversy, than to venture into a conversation. And in a job-seeker rich marketplace, this a lousy ay to separate yourself out of a crowd.

Finally, well-intended, but misguided, recruiters, might take your resume and SPAM it out to as many as 87 job portals using tools like Resume Rabbit , it barely takes more than the click of a mouse. Staffing and human resource professionals can easily tell when your resume has come to them via such means (because of the way it's formatted and labeled) and your resume will get trashed much more often than it gets read. Why? Because it appears as though  you haven't taken the time to research a company, a specific opportunity, or even if the position is located within a commutable distance. In a corporate recruiter's mind, if you haven't shown thought and respect toward them  when applying for job, why would they do the same for you?

So what should you do instead? Use a headhunter you trust. Network with your coworkers (past and present), and members of your industry and alumni associations. Ask your friends to introduce you to their friends who may have connections into places you might like to work, BUT make sure they know you well enough before you ask them to take action. Why? Because if you ask someone to be your "pitch man" and you've given him nothing substantive to pitch , you've set him up to fail.

Remember, people hire people not resumes. In a crowded market, it's gong to take a person to separate you out of the crowd.

It's getting kinda crowded

This afternoon I interviewed the CEO of a mid-sized (500 person) company for a newspaper article I'm writing; he told me that he got 25,000 resume submittals last year. How many folks did his company interview? Three hundred and eight. How many did they actually hire? Eighty. Getting a job there seems like a pretty long shot, right?

I say, not necessarily. Because if you're one of the eighty they hired, getting the job might have seemed like slam-dunk. What would have separated you out from the crowd? Actually meeting the specifications for the position is a pretty good start. Having an advocate (READ: headhunter, former colleague, employee referral) who will pitch for you is another.

You have to be able to interview well too. It's unfortunate (or not) but a turkey monitor can't be used to assess your value-adding potential.  One quick suggestion I have is that you spend your (in person) time  listening to what your would-be boss has to say instead of thinking about what you might say to impress him/her. It's an easy way to stand out. Your boss-to-be, at the very least, will come away thinking that you'd be a respectful worker, a team player, and not too much of a headache. He/she will likely come away from the interview with a "feel good" vibe without actually knowing why.

And after the interview, write a thank you e-mail or note. Follow-through matters.

Do all this and you'll stand out from the crowd. You're likely to be one of the visible ones in the pile of 25,000!