Disorganized Job Search Slows You Down
Posted: May 22, 2013 Filed under: Career Management (General), Job Search, LinkedIn | Tags: career promotion, career success, disorganized job search, job search, job search plan, job seekers, new job, organize your job hunt Leave a comment »Whether you’re currently in a job search or not, you need to be aware that disorganized job search activity can slow down your progress–sometimes considerably. Of course, not everyone is a highly organized, efficient person who dots all the i’s and crosses all the t’s. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t make a real effort in that direction. You owe it to yourself and your ongoing career success.
How Disorganized is Your Job Search?
On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being indescribably disorganized, where would you rank yourself? Be honest! You don’t have to tell anyone else the answer, but don’t try to fool yourself. That’s an exercise in futility.
Normally, I’d say there’s no crime in taking a free-spirited approach to various aspects of your life. Spontaneity can be very productive, if it suits you. Even a highly organized person might benefit from a little “off the cuff stuff” now and then. It only becomes a potentially big problem when it stands in the way of your achieving an important goal–such as landing a much-needed new job or a coveted career promotion.
Organize Your Job Hunt
Recently I read an article on CBS News’ MoneyWatch by Suzanne Lucas, titled “How to organize your job hunt,” that speaks to the point about having an organized job search plan and activity. Lucas interviewed Deanne Kelleher, founder and president of kAos Group, which specializes in organizing a lot of things, not just job searching. It’s worth reading, if you haven’t already seen it.
Among other things, the article talks about some of the key pieces to getting your job search organized, such as bringing all your contacts into one central location, including notes about people you speak to during your job search, and organizing both your hard copy files and your job search emails.
It finishes up with this advice: “As you go throughout your job hunt, it can be tempting to stop keeping track of what you’re doing, trusting yourself to remember, but Kelleher cautions that you need to continue tracking your contacts, and your emails and everything involved in your job hunt. Keeping organized can help make your job hunt easier and more successful, which is something we all want.”
Although there are numerous tools on the market, including something as relatively straightforward as an Excel spreadsheet, one of my favorites is JibberJobber.com. It’s a fairly robust and useful tool. Founder Jason Alba developed it after his own job search proved to be much tougher than he had expected, and it has been used by countless job seekers in the years since then. Jason works hard to keep it useful and relevant, too. (He has also written some books, including I’m on LinkedIn–Now What? and I’m on Facebook–Now What?)
As a popular saying goes, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” You don’t want to make that mistake with regard to your career success, so avoid the perils of a disorganized job search that can slow down your progress!
How Valuable Are You to Employers?
Posted: May 15, 2013 Filed under: Career Management (General), Job Search | Tags: career change, employer needs, new job, value to employers Leave a comment »Whether it’s your current employer or the company(ies) you’ll be targeting in your next job search, the question of your value takes center stage. If you can’t answer the question posed by this post, you’re probably in trouble! Employers flat-out will not take the time and effort to figure it out for you.
Your Needs vs. Employer Needs
You need or want a new job, maybe a new direction involving a career change or an opportunity to advance in your profession. That’s what you’re after, but what about the employers you’re focusing on? More than likely, they don’t particularly care that you want to earn more money or move up the corporate ladder or whatever else your personal goal is.
So what do they care about or need? Probably one of the first items on their list is an employee who can contribute a lot more value than it will cost to hire and keep that person! In other words, someone who can contribute value from day one and quickly make a positive difference to the company’s success. That person might need a number of qualifications and qualities–motivating leader, enthusiastic team player, X number of years of solid experience in a given area, and so on.
The ultimate question still remains: Can you do the job that’s needed, do it well and (probably) quickly, in a way that validates the company’s initial decision to offer you the job?
How to Determine Your Value to Employers
I can’t begin to list here all the factors that could play into your value to employers, but the following is a small sampling:
- You have a realistic grasp of what you can bring to employers and are confident about your abilities in that regard. You don’t over-sell or under-sell yourself in interviews, for example.
- You do your homework ahead of time with regard to your competition and the market for your skills, expertise and knowledge-base. Among other things, that means you take the time to research what’s “out there” and honestly evaluate how you stack up against the competition. What do you have that they don’t?
- You also research the company you’re targeting, as well as its industry and its competitors. Then you assess how your qualifications and strengths fit into that picture. What are likely to be your greatest advantages and how can you make the most of them?
- You understand that value isn’t only about money. Yes, you want to earn as much as you can and the company wants to maximize its profitability, but that’s not all there is to your value. For instance, can you get a team of people who don’t much like each other or are territorial to work together effectively on a critical project? Not everyone can do that, so if you can, you just might have an edge.
- You are willing and able to put out a great effort to help the company achieve its goals, rather than counting the minutes until 5:00 p.m. every day. At the same time, you don’t want to provide that degree of commitment and dedication to an employer that won’t appreciate or reward it appropriately.
Good salespeople know that it’s about benefits (value) versus features (laundry list). When you’re engaged in a job search, the benefits you can bring to your next employer are critically important.
Poor Speaking Skills Versus Job Search Success and Career Advancement
Posted: April 30, 2013 Filed under: Career Management (General), Interviewing, Job Search | Tags: advance in your career, career management, career success, interviews, job search, land a job, presentation skills, speaking skills Leave a comment »Have you ever had to listen for long to someone whose voice seemed in imminent danger of fading out completely or was annoyingly laced with “umms” or “you know” or other meaningless verbal fillers? If so, you can probably relate to an article I just read, ““Is This How You Really Talk?”” (in The Wall Street Journal online). Author Sue Shellenbarger states that “new research shows the sound of a person’s voice strongly influences how he or she is seen. The sound of a speaker’s voice matters twice as much as the content of the message….”
Poor Speaking Skills can Hurt Your Career
That’s right. Your weak speaking skills could hurt you. You might ask: Could my voice quality and/or other elements of my oral presentation really be throwing a huge speed-bump in the path of my career? According to Shellenbarger’s article, the answer is very possibly yes. For example, if you need to be perceived as assertive, a strong leader and so on, a quiet vocal delivery of your messages might undermine the impression you need to make on your audience. If that audience consists of people who can decide whether or not to offer you a job or a promotion, you definitely want to consider what you can do to improve the situation!
This is also true in other aspects of a job search or ongoing career management, including interviewing. When you obscure the delivery of your message through poor speaking skills, you could fail to gain the support of colleagues for critical initiatives, lose the respect of the team you are expected to manage or discourage an interviewer from giving you a chance at second-round/multiple interviews. The potential repercussions of poor speaking skills could add up to a long list by the time you’re done!
Do You Know If You Have a Speaking “Problem”?
You might think you have reasonably good speaking skills and can’t imagine how anything about your vocal delivery could negatively affect your ability to land a job or advance in your career. However, it’s not necessarily safe to assume you don’t have an issue with it just because no one has told you that you do. Friends, family, colleagues–many people hesitate to raise such a sensitive subject with someone they know. They might be afraid of hurting your feelings or making you angry at them if they do. What can you do to ensure that how you speak isn’t standing in the way of your career success?
Here are just a few tips you can try:
- Record yourself speaking and listen to it with your eyes closed, so you’re not distracted by visual elements around you. As much as possible, eliminate auditory distractions as well (find a quiet place).
- Ask someone whose judgment you trust to listen to you delivering a short presentation and provide candid feedback. Then remember not to “shoot the messenger”!
- Consider finding and working with a speech coach/consultant, especially if you have an important interview or on-the-job presentation scheduled down the road, to make sure you’re delivering the message effectively. (Don’t wait too long to do this, however; it can take time and practice.)
Importance of Non-Vocal Presentation Skills
In college, I had an instructor who frequently stroked his goatee while he was speaking to the class. This mannerism was so distracting that I had to avoid looking at him if I wanted to absorb the information he was presenting! I never had the nerve to mention it to him, and I don’t know if anyone else ever did, but I hope so.
Visual gestures can be a bad habit you’re unaware of. Try recording a video of yourself doing a presentation and watch it as objectively as you can to see if you’re using distracting gestures. You might just be glad you did!
Career Success: Sharpen Your Focus
Posted: April 25, 2013 Filed under: Career Management (General), Job Search | Tags: career success, focus, productive time, sharpen your focus Leave a comment »Few people can do a zillion things at once, and even fewer can do them well. Career success and the actions that achieve it are just one example of that fact. You might consider yourself a super-multitasker, but I’m betting you don’t do it as well as you think. You only have a certain amount of energy (although some of you have more than others), not to mention a limited amount of time. Even the best of you can’t get more than 24 hours into a day.
To quote a well-known celebrity: “Energy is the essence of life. Every day you decide how you’re going to use it by knowing what you want and what it takes to reach that goal, and by maintaining focus.” (Oprah Winfrey, O Magazine, July 2003)
Career Success: Choose One Thing
A recent post on Quartz by Vickie Elmer, titled “Forget the long to-do lists and choose one thing to be good at,” indicates that focus is critical to success. She mentions a new book called The One Thing, by Gary Keller (of Keller Williams Real Estate) and Jay Papasan, and cites three principles contained in the book:
- Success is sequential, not simultaneous. [Keller] would ask [people] the focusing question: “What’s the one thing I can do such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”
- Nail your “one thing” by lunch. Make the most of your best productive time. Then you can look back at what you’ve accomplished and feel happy about it.
- Everyone blows it. The authors started out with a 400-page manuscript and whittled it down to about half–after being put on the spot by their publisher to “walk their talk.”
How Do You Sharpen Your Focus?
The above list gives a few clues. Here are a few more tips for job search and career success:
- Identify possible or probable interruptions, time-sucks, etc., and plan to avoid or postpone them as long as possible. If the likely culprit is a person, you might need to get creative about how you do this!
- Be realistic. If you’re at all like me, you start out with a list that you know (if you’re being honest with yourself), you’ll never get done in one day. That’s not only likely to be nonproductive (as Keller’s work indicates) but also to set you up for failure, which is a demotivating factor.
- Work on better prioritizing. If you know you can’t do it all, take a few minutes to decide what’s most critical. Move along to the less critical only when you’ve accomplished the highest-priority item.
Then reward yourself by acknowledging your successes and avoid beating yourself up for the times when you fall short of the target.
Plans Can Change
Posted: April 22, 2013 Filed under: Career Management (General), Job Search | Tags: career management, career management planning, dream job, job opportunity, job search Leave a comment »As much as I’m a fan of plans and planning in general–and nowhere more than in job search and career management–I have to admit that plans aren’t perfect or cast in stone. Sometimes they have to change, either because we see a need or because a change is forced on us.
When I started publishing this blog (which I think was in late 2011), I “planned” to do a blog post three times a week. I’d been reading that daily posts were even better, and some people were publishing multiple times in one day, but I knew I’d never hit that target! I figured three posts a week should be do-able–and so it was…some of the time.
Unfortunately, sometimes life got in the way, and there were entire weeks when I didn’t publish ONE post (last week being one of them). Gasp! Ah, well, super-blogger I’m obviously not.
Plan Job Searches with Some Slack
My take from all of this is that it’s not only okay but actually desirable to cut yourself some slack now and then in your job search and career management planning. You’ll probably run into days or even weeks when you’re up to your eyes in problems, unexpected demands on your time and energy, and so on.
Instead of kicking yourself because you fell down on the job and didn’t put things in motion that you’d planned to, take a step back and gain a longer-term perspective. Did you miss out on a dream job because you failed to do whatever it was? Unless your inaction cost you a desirable job opportunity, it probably wasn’t the crime of the century.
It Could Be Worse!
If the worst that happened was that you felt guilty about not staying 100% on track, relax. After all, things could be worse. As Scottish poet Robert Burns once said:
The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men,
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!
(Translation: The best laid schemes of Mice and Men
oft go awry,
And leave us nothing but grief and pain,
For promised joy!)
At least it’s not likely that your off-plan action (or inaction) will cause you “grief and pain”!
Job Search Trends–Something New?
Posted: April 8, 2013 Filed under: Career Management (General), Job Search, Trends--New and Changing | Tags: career planning, employment index, job candidates, job market, job opening, job search trend, job search trends, reasons you're underpaid, talent recruiters 2 Comments »At the rate websites proliferate today, you might have missed this new entry in the category of job search trends: Bright.com. I did! Until now, anyway. I actually started out reading an article on Fast Company, titled “5 Stupid Reasons You’re Underpaid–And How To Fix Them,” and the author said, ” Check out Glassdoor and Bright for background and talk to friends and colleagues in the field–knowing your worth is key to career planning.”
I’d heard of Glassdoor, but Bright? Not in terms of job search or anything else along those lines. I followed the link to the Bright.com website. While I have to say I don’t yet know anyone personally who has used Bright.com in his or her job search, I thought it would be worthwhile to share some of what I found.
Bright Labs–New Job Search Trend?
It seems that in 2012, Bright.com launched something called Bright Labs. Here’s an excerpt from their press release:
“Bright Labs is a bi-weekly updated set of interactive tools, infographics, and analyses on the current employment landscape. Bright’s team of data scientists utilizes data from social networks, stock prices and volumes, real estate and construction, the Bureau of Labor and Statistics and a variety of other sources to create a holistic assessment of the employment market and to reveal trends and scientific findings. One of the cornerstones of Bright Labs is the Bright Employment Index, which tracks the overall job market and provides a monthly snapshot of fluctuations within any given industry.”
As if that didn’t sound impressive enough, here’s what the press release also says about a concept called The Bright Score, which the company came up with:
The company “has processed over 15 million job descriptions and more than two million resumes, all of which gives the site one of the most insightful and up-to-date perspectives on the jobs landscape. Bright.com has generated more than 20 million Bright Scores, used by job candidates to assess whether or not a job opening is the right fit and by talent recruiters and HR professionals to efficiently evaluate thousands of job applicants and find the most qualified candidates.”
Technology Taking Over Your Job Search?
I’m full of questions today and not much in the way of answers so far. But enough about Bright.com! What does this say about job search trends?
Some people would consider it just more evidence that technology is taking over job searching, and they might have a point. The Internet, social media and other technology trends have had a huge impact on the way many of you conduct your job search–not to mention how you perform your job once you actually land one. It has certainly become important–if not essential–that you develop a reasonable level of competency in using technology tools to manage your career and the various job changes you either have gone through or will go through during that career.
At the moment, however, one critical point about technology and your job search comes to my mind: Technical tools don’t hire other technical tools–people are what need to be hired, and once hired, they have to work with other people. So somewhere, at some point, people need to connect with people. Technology can’t do it all–and I suspect that some of what it can do is not as hugely superior to human interactions as its proponents would like to claim.
As I’ve said before, I’m definitely not anti-technology. I’d just like to see a better balance between it and the people it’s supposed to serve–especially when situations such as your job search are involved.
