Bad Professional Habits that Can Harm Your Career, and What To Do About Them

When I have a pause in my day, I slump. Literally. I lean forward in my chair, rest my chin in my hand, and ponder what I’m reading and writing about. It’s a posture that feels right to me. It requires no thought or effort. It’s the pose I used for my online picture. You might even call it my comfort zone. As it turns out though, my slump is not working for me, and has actually been doing me some harm.

I got my wake up call last week when I went to the chiropractor for a pinched nerve in my neck. By slumping in that particular position, I have managed, over time, to knock my neck, jaw and shoulder out of alignment. So now, in addition to enduring some sounds-like-gun-shots chiropractic adjustments, I am having to do ‘sit up straight’ exercises so that I don’t fall back into my slumping habits. I can tell you, it isn’t easy.

Our careers can be prone to slumps – professional bad habits that become our comfort zone, but are highly detrimental to our long term career health.

Ten Signs You May Be Career Slumping

1. Your answer to ‘How was your day?’ usually involves gossip or complaints about your colleagues and clients.
2. The last workshop you took was a company-mandated workplace safety course two years ago, and you can’t remember anything except the chocolate-chip cookies that were served.
3. You haven’t added any new people to your network of contacts in the last month, and some of the contacts you do have won’t take your calls anymore.
4. You used to belong to an industry association, but you dropped out because FILL YOUR OWN EXCUSE IN HERE.
5. Your response to people’s suggestions automatically starts with ‘Yes, but…’
6. When asked to get involved in a special project at work, your first thought is ‘oh no’, ‘why me?’, or ‘does this mean I have to stay late?’
7. Your boss’s boss has no idea what you do. Or worse: Your boss has no idea what you do.
8. You are under 45, and are already day-dreaming about your retirement.
9. The only person you’ve thanked in the last week was the person who handed you your change and cup of coffee.
10. Your reputation at works has started to include the preface, ‘Oh. He’s an interesting guy’.

If your answer is ‘Yes’ to any or all of the above, you are either in or headed for a career slump. The longer you let it go, the more painful will be the adjustment when you get the ‘sit up straight or else’ wake up call. The good news is that there are simple steps you can take immediately to de-slump yourself.

‘Sit Up Straight’ Exercises to De-Slump Your Career

• Hop off the gossip-train. The power trip you feel when you have ‘the dirt’ on somebody is nothing like the strength you feel when you really get to know them.
• Make learning a priority. If you can’t afford to enrol in a course, then look for free webinars and downloadable courses. Learning isn’t just about acquiring new skills and knowledge, it’s also about shaking up our stale assumptions and misguided preconceptions.
• Talk to somebody new each week. Ask them about their interests, their challenges, their families. Business may be powered by money, but it is nurtured by personal connections.
• Join an industry association – and not just so you have something to put under Professional Affiliations on your resume. The payoff in terms of networking opportunities, early insights on industry developments, and heads-up on emerging opportunities will be invaluable.
• Pay attention when people make suggestions. Fine, some of them will be just plain dumb or impractical, but some of them will contain a grain of truth or even brilliance, and you won’t know which is which if you haven’t taken the time to listen.
• Take advantage of the opportunity to do things that are outside of your job description or comfort zone. Not only can this be a chance to acquire new knowledge and skills, but it can be a great way to de-slump other people’s understanding of who you are and what you have to offer.
• Make sure your higher-ups understand how you are contributing to the big picture. Make sure YOU understand how you are contributing to the big picture. There is no employee easier for a decision-maker to cut when it comes to downsizing than the one whose job is a mystery to everybody else.
• Find something right now that turns your crank and energizes your day. Make at least one personal and one professional goal that is realizable in the near future, and put the action plan in place to achieve it.
• Adopt an attitude of gratitude. I’m not talking about being relentlessly and annoyingly chirpy, I’m talking about taking the time to recognize and acknowledge the people to whom you owe a thank you.
• If you are being described as ‘interesting’ in quotation marks, chances are you’ve slipped over the line of chronic sarcasm, cynicism or bitterness (acknowledgements to Dave Howlett for this insight). Bitter, sarcastic cynics may have funny and repeatable one-liners, but that’s just about all they are good for. They don’t make good team members, they can’t be trusted with referrals, and they don’t get promoted or recommended for new opportunities. Except in the ‘we’ll make him available to industry’ kind of way.

Tags: bad habits, Career, career management, job, networking, professional, reputation, Resume
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Win-win tips for hiring managers and job seekers

(Originally published CareerBulletin, CareerEdge Organization’s Quarterly e-Newsletter)

If you’ve monitored the social network over the past nine months, you may have noticed a litany of complaints from both candidates and recruiters about the challenges of the recruitment process in today’s job market. Recruiters complain that a single advertised opening is attracting hundreds of candidates, many of whom are unsuitable for the role. Job seekers, on the other hand, describe the experience of applying to advertised openings as “tossing my resume into a big, black hole”, and complain about never hearing back from employers.

Having reviewed the most common complaints from both sides of the hiring table, I can offer the following suggestions to reduce the tension and disconnect in the recruitment process.

Tips for hiring managers:

• Create job descriptions that clearly spell out your expectations. Too many job ads have vague descriptions or lack keywords that can help a candidate assess whether they fit the bill. This encourages “spray and hope” job searches from applicants who are ready to apply for anything and everything.
• Be realistic about the necessary qualifications to do the job. The opposite of the “too-vague” job description is the one that could be simplified to “Wanted – Superhero.” Rather than narrowing down the candidate pool, a lengthy list of over-the-top expectations can actually dilute the pool, as candidates say “Nobody can meet all these expectations, I may as well toss my hat in the ring and see what happens.”
• Provide the name & title of a contact person. Nobody wants to write a “dear sir” or a “to whom it may concern” cover letter.
• Get over the “passive candidate” versus “active candidate” mind-think. The talent pool of active job seekers has never been as rich as it is today, and there are many highly qualified, experienced and motivated candidates who have the flexibility and willingness to start immediately.
• Don’t make the recruitment process “a big black hole”. Let candidates know you’ve received their application and are seriously considering their candidacy. Special note to users of talent management software: A “form rejection” email less than 10 minutes after the resume has been submitted is still “big black hole” behaviour, it just has the finality of a thud as the candidate hits bottom.

Tips for job seekers:

• Read the job description. Too many applicants ignore the job description and focus instead on the Job Title. Titles can mean different things in different companies. “Operations Manager” can mean plant management in one company, sales management in another, logistics management in a third, and administrative oversight in a fourth. Use the description to figure out whether this is really a job you are interested in.
• Be realistic about your qualifications. Just because you think you can do it, does not give you the right to claim it as one of your core skills. Being part of a project team does not necessarily make you a Project Manager, for example.
• Don’t apply for jobs for which you are clearly unsuitable. It was this strategy that led to the wide spread adoption of impersonal software to screen hundreds of resumes in order to find those few candidates who actually matched the search criteria.
• Customize the resume to the specific job. Don’t apply for a Bookkeeper job with a resume that says your career target is marketing.
• Don’t submit “Resume.doc”. Make the hiring manager’s job easier by distinguishing your resume from the 100+ other applications he receives each day. At a minimum, use your name (JohnDoe.doc). Even better, use your name and the target title John_Doe_Operations_Manager.doc).

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Helping Johnny Find a Job – Career Advice for Johnny’s Parents

Over the past five years, I have helped more than two hundred new graduates prepare to market themselves for their first job, and I can tell you that some of them are woefully unprepared for the job search. It isn’t just that they don’t know how to write a resume or how to behave in an interview. It’s that they lack basic work skills and life experiences, and this puts them at a huge disadvantage over others in their peer group, especially in today’s job market.

Before I go on, I want to set the record straight. I’m not normally one for ’shoulding’ on parents. Child rearing is hard enough without having a whole lot of experts tell us everything we are doing wrong. I know from personal experience that we are doing the best we can while mostly flying by the seat of our pants.

But several incidents over the past two months have put me into full-blown “what were your parents thinking” mode:

• The following question was posted on Careerealism’s Twitter Advice Project: “Q# 367 I’ve taken all the tests and can’t find a single job I’m excited about. I can’t imagine a job I would find interesting and no amount of money will drive me to do work that I hate. How does one turn around their complete distaste for work?” (My response: Try going hungry for a while. It can turn around your complete distaste for work pretty fast. )
• I had a consultation with a soon-to-be university graduate who has absolutely no work experience. I mean zero. Never worked a day in his life, either for pay or in a volunteer capacity. “My parents told me getting an education was my job.” He (and they) can’t understand why recruiters aren’t beating a path to his door.
• I came to the startling realization that by the age of twelve I was riding the Toronto subway system on my own, while my soon-to-be-twelve year old son is still not allowed off our street alone (granted, our street is a dead-end country lane that connects to an 80 k/ph road with no sidewalks, and the nearest town is 5 kms away, but still).
• I witnessed the completely avoidable failure of a business venture that was launched by a young woman who, at the age of 32, has been rescued by her father from every single roadblock in her life, and has never discovered the need to negotiate, compromise, or develop a business plan.
• I read an article about the negative impact that helicopter parents are having on their children’s job prospects, which included an anecdote about a father who hired a PR firm to complete his child’s grade school project.

Motivated by these incidents and my experience as a career coach, psychotherapist and parent, I have created my very own
Top-ten ’should’ list for parents who want to prepare their children for career success.

1. Networking & Communicating: By the time your child is 3, stop answering on their behalf in social situations. Too many mothers (and fathers) are tempted to jump in when an adult asks their child a question. Don’t. Good communication skills – the ability to hold a conversation, respond intelligently to questions, ask for customer service, stand up for one’s thoughts and ideas, actively listen while others are speaking – are invaluable life skills that should be learned almost as soon as we can talk. They are the foundations of good networking, and are essential to landing a job.
2. Dreaming & Planning: Don’t squash every enthusiastic but impractical idea that your child comes up with. Encourage them to think it through, and help them work out solutions to potential obstacles. As in the adult world, much of the fun is in the dreaming rather than the doing, and in the process of exploring an idea your child will learn for themselves what is practical, what is improbable, and what is possible if you have the right tools, information and attitude.
3. Money & Financial Management: It is never too early to start teaching children the basics of money management and the power of delayed gratification over impulse spending. Understanding how money works is essential no matter which career path you choose.
4. Fail. Learn. Grow: Don’t try to shelter your child from every painful experience, or rescue them from every mistake. One of the most valuable gifts you can give your child is the knowledge that there are consequences for their decisions, and that from our failures we are given the chance to learn, develop inner fortitude, and survive, overcome, move on.
5. Contribute to the Community: By the age of 13, your child should be volunteering somewhere. Whether its in an animal shelter, a church, or a service organization, your child needs to have the awareness that “it’s not all about me.”
6. Start Early to Develop Work Skills: Nobody should hit the double digits without knowing how to prepare a basic meal or do a load of laundry. By the age of 15, your child should have a part-time job. If they can’t find a job with somebody else, they can start their own business – babysitting services, tutoring, yardwork, dog walking. Yes, your child’s priority is their education, but some of the most important lessons in life can only be learned outside of the classroom (the correlation between hard work and income ranking high among them). Your child is less than enthusiastic about the idea? Think about cutting them off financially. At a minimum they should be paying for all or part of their entertainment costs, their cell phone fees, their gonna-die-if-I-don’t-get-it-right-now toys and accessories. Ideally, they should be saving for the future.
7. Experience Sweat-Inducing Hard Work: At some point between grade 9 and university graduation, steer your child (and especially your daughter) toward a summer job that requires physical stamina – planting trees in backwoods Canada, swilling manure out of barns, painting houses. Why? They will discover that they are stronger than they think, and they will learn why tenacity matters. They will acquire personal stories that are the stuff of legends. And (from my personal experience), every job they get after that will seem like a breeze by comparison.
8. Take a High School Victory Lap: If your high school graduate is vague about their university/college goals, don’t push them. One in six university students will drop out before they start their second year. With tuition fees of $10k+ annually, you both can afford to give them an extra year so that they can get clear on their goals. But make sure the year is spent productively. Use it to work, contribute in the community, learn a new skill, travel.
9. Study Business Fundamentals: Regardless of one’s major or ultimate career objective, every student will benefit from taking at least one business-related course. Ideally, it should involve a practical project that requires team work and is based on a real-world case study. Even artists and writers need to understand business fundamentals, if they don’t want to be at the mercy of unscrupulous agents.
10. Learn Another Language: We live in a multicultural world, and jobs in the future will require the agility to navigate a multicultural business environment. Those who can think in more than one language will have a distinct advantage. Notice that I say think, not speak. Ask anybody who speaks more than one language, and they will tell you that they think differently, depending on which language they use. There are some thoughts, some ideas, some concepts, that can’t be expressed as well in English as in, say, French, or Spanish. Even if English continues to predominate as the language of business, learning how to think from another cultural perspective will be critical for building bridges to international clients and developing global business partnerships.

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Job search & career branding – How to stand out from the crowd

One of the many things I appreciate about the web is the opportunity to connect with a really interesting and diverse group of people. Typically, we stay in the realm of cyber-networking, but occasionally we transcend the limits of the computer to connect in person. Last week I had the chance to talk with one of my favourite bloggers, a finance executive who writes meaty articles on leadership, governance, risk management, staffing, finance – the nuts and bolts of what it takes to be in business. He isn’t afraid to challenge conventional wisdom, to ask the tough questions, to point out the nakedness of the emperor, and he isn’t afraid to create content that requires readers to exercise their scroll-down finger.

Eventually, as I always do, I turned our conversation to my favorite question. “What is your biggest challenge?” His answer, to use my son’s vernacular, left me gob-smacked. “My biggest challenge is convincing CEOs that, as a Certified General Accountant, I am just as good as a Chartered Accountant.” To understand my reaction, I need to provide some background details that perhaps verge into TMI territory.

When I was pregnant with our youngest child, my husband went through an archetypal mid-career crisis. Unhappy with his job, not seeing a lot of opportunity for growth, he decided he needed a change. Personally, I love change. Thrive on it, in fact. So I was ecstatic, and encouraged him to figure out what his passion is, and go for it. Over the next few weeks, while he considered his options, I was already mentally making plans to sell our house and backpack with our kids around Europe. It came as a bit of an anticlimax, therefore, when he finally announced his life-changing plan. “I’m going to become an accountant.” For the next seven years DH balanced a full-time career with 30 hours a week of brutal and sweat-intensive study in order to earn his Certified General Accounting accreditation. All of which is to say, I have some inkling about what it takes to become a CGA, and have a tremendous amount of respect for the designation.

As a career consultant and resume writer, I have worked with 4,000+ clients over the past five years, including more than 200 accountants of various stripes. This gives me a unique perspective on how CAs and CGAs differ. The typical CA I have met has been an accountant, through and through. Accounting is all they’ve done since graduating university. It is a rare CA who has ever run a company other than an accounting practice, or even a department that wasn’t strictly accounting & administration. CGAs, on the other hand, typically have five years or more of professional experience under their belt before they even start the program, and typically earn their accreditation while working full time. This means that a newly accredited CGA probably has more than 15 years of business experience, both accounting-specific (a prerequisite to earn their accreditation), and more broadly based in operations, strategic planning, supply chain management, production management, human resources.

So now, back to my Finance Executive. Unfortunately, he allowed himself to get dragged into a suckers game. I’m not talking about the territorial shoving contest that competing accounting bodies are currently engaged in for the right to be called Public Accountants in Canada. I’m talking about a no-win branding strategy that starts with the phrase “I’m just as good as.”

Any good marketing expert will tell you that there is no credible way to end the statement “just as good as” except with the phrase “at a fraction of the cost.” Knowing what I do about typical career profile of CAs versus CGAs, I could see half a dozen stories that my Finance Executive could use to distinguish his career brand, without ever having to resort to “just as good as.”

He could recount his superb track record for bringing companies back from the brink of bankruptcy, not only through good accounting practices, although they were definitely part of the picture, but through good financial and business practices. He could talk about cashflow optimization and cost management strategies that make good business sense, and how he used them to drive successful turnarounds. He could also discuss the company that called on his services too late to be saved, and what he can teach other companies from this experience. He could describe his understanding of the language of money – not merely from an accounting perspective, although he has that in spades – but from a business perspective: what it takes to attract investors, build confidence among creditors, safeguard shareholder interests. He could emphasize his approach to ensuring that a company doesn’t just look profitable, but is profitable, and stays profitable, both in the short term and for the long haul.

In professional branding, as in product branding, its all about differentiation – finding a way to make yourself stand out from the crowd. I’m a firm believer in the power of a good story for creating a distinctive brand. What do you have to bring to the table that is unique, one-of-a-kind? What stories can you tell to back it up? How can you make those stories relevant and interesting to your target employer, so that they recognize you as the perfect solution for their challenges?

If you can do this in your resume, your cover letter, your interview, your networking meetings, your blogs, your LinkedIn profile, your web presence – you’ve got it made. If you can’t, you may be left in the unwinnable position of trying to justify why you are “just as good as” the other guy.

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The Art of a Good Resume: Everything I Know About Storytelling, I Learned in a Canoe

I have yet to meet a client who doesn’t have at least one fascinating story to tell. Whether it’s the Administrative Assistant who pulled her boss’s ass out of the fire through some exceptional behind-the-scenes public relations work, or the Operations Executive who orchestrated a pre-dawn helicopter evacuation of his expat employees, it’s the stories that make each of my clients “one of a kind”. And it’s the stories that energize my days and keep me passionate about my work.

Uncovering the stories isn’t always easy however, and it can be a mind-altering experience for clients who are not used to talking about or even thinking much about themselves. I liken it the “third day” phenomenon of canoe tripping.  Anybody who has gone wilderness canoing with a group of strangers will know exactly what I mean.

On the first day, we are all on our best behaviour, our conversations are polite, the topics of discussion all fact based and superficial. By day three, all pretences are gone, and each of us has been revealed for who we are, in all our glorious colour and complexity. We will each have had at least one FGE**, perhaps involving a misjudged river rock, a portage from hell, a close encounter with wildlife, or a dispute with a canoe partner (typical conversation: “Go left… Left…. NO OTHER LEFT!!!”).

These FGEs are character building. They cause us to confront our foibles and take ownership of our strengths. They create the emotional space for self examination and questioning. Why am I here? Where am I going? Who do I want to be with? What do I want next? A five day canoe trip can do more for a couple’s relationship than six months of marriage counselling.

A kind of quietude descends at the end of the third day as each tripper sits in introspection. Any traces of the rat race have been shed, and when eyes connect there is a glow of authenticity that comes with self-awakening and a new sense of self assurance. It is usually around the campfire on the third day that the “good” stories come out, the ones that will ultimately transform a group of strangers into life-long friends and trusted allies.

My goal as a Resume Strategist is to fast-track this process of self discovery, and I love it. I love getting people to open up about themselves and reach a place of personal authenticity from which truly unique and distinctive career stories can emerge. I love asking the probing questions that create “aha” moments. I love working with my clients to find exactly the right words to tell their stories. Any good marketing professional will tell you that stories sell. Ask any recruiter about a memorable candidate, and chances are that it will be some element of their story that stands out.

I sometimes read career columns advising people that they shouldn’t pay for a professional resume writer, but do it themselves with the help of  a “reverse chronology” formula or template.

Resume strategy isn’t just laying out a reverse chronology of your career path. It’s about telling a clear, succinct story about who you are and why you are the perfect solution to some company’s problem. It stirs interest and invites connection. It creates the opening for an interview, and lays the groundwork for you to be able to expand on your talents, strengths and insights.

A recent client summed it up well after landing an interview with his new resume. “Karen, I know we got it right. This is the first time that I didn’t spend the whole interview defending my resume. We jumped straight into my story – what I can do, what I can offer, how I will fit. It didn’t even feel like an interview.”

And that, as the saying goes, is why you pay me the big bucks

** FGE: (Expletive Removed) Growth Experience

Tags: Canoe, Career, Resume, Storytelling
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Unpaid Intern: To Be or Not to Be?

Over coffee recently, I listened as a soon-to-be new graduate lamented the fact that there were few job prospects for somebody in her field. She was asking for advice on whether or not to accept an unpaid internship in order to get her foot in the door. To help with her decision, I laid out my personal experience as a soon-to-be graduate.

By fourth year university, I had a diverse and storied portfolio of part time and seasonal positions under my belt:

• Sorted Christmas overflow mail for Canada Post; learned the meaning of the phrase “go postal”.
• Took messages in a call answering centre whose clients ranged from restaurants to call girls (yes, really); learned that you have to pay really close attention to whose line you pick up before you answer the question “what’s on the menu.”
• Sold encyclopaedias door-to-door; learned that some people will buy anything.
• Solicited participants for market research studies; learned that some people will say anything.
• Flipped burgers and pushed French fries; learned that some people will eat anything.
• Painted house exteriors with College Pro Painters; learned that the top of a 45-foot ladder is not the place to be when the wind picks up from Lake Ontario.

While my “career” path thus far proved that I was willing to tackle anything, it did not give me a whole lot of marketable skills for a Mass Communications and Computer Science graduate who would soon be launched unceremoniously into a job market that was recovering from 9.6% unemployment rates.

In my final year of university, my fortunes turned. I was offered an unpaid internship with a university-based research group. Through this internship, I learned how to design research studies; how to prepare grant submissions; how to source hard-to-find information & resources that aren’t available in the college library; how to edit research papers for publication; how to collaborate with a team of professionals who had conflicting interests and perspectives; and how to think critically about complex issues and prepare cohesive arguments so that I could be heard above the voices of 15 intellectuals. I also developed a network of connections who were able to help me when it was time to land my first full-time job as a Policy Analyst with the Ontario government.

Many successful CEO’s started their careers as interns (see the Forbes article “From Intern to CEO” ). One of my favourite stories involves Robert Herjavec, who waited tables while working for free for six months in order to get practical experience in the computer industry. As he described it in an interview with TVO’s Paula Todd, “I realized that nobody was going to pay me to learn the skills that I needed in order to get ahead.” He went on to earn millions from the sale of his internet security software, and is best known as one of the venture capitalists on the Dragon’s Den.

I have often heard the argument that unpaid internships are exploitative, that they take advantage of students. I tend to disagree. (I say tend, because I am completely against the pay-to-work model offered by Dream University, in which wealthy off-spring pay thousands of dollars for the chance to attach a corporate name to their resume).

Some internships are better than others, and the deciding factor is not the money, but the kind of experience that is offered. A well-designed internship can provide invaluable professional growth opportunities. In an interview in Fortune online, Christi Pedra, President and CEO of Siemens Hearing describes what I would consider an ideal internship model:

“First… we make a big deal for our managers to get interns. Department managers submit a proposal for a project that can be completed in 10 weeks. It must have a measurable outcome and benefit to the business. The best proposals are granted interns…. Second, we make it challenging. We give interns assignments that matter to them and to us…. Third, we make it real…for example, our interns simplified manufacturing tool kits, audited and redefined work instructions, developed internal communication campaigns and validated software.”

I recommended to my young friend that she seriously consider the internship offer. Yes it would mean a few more months as a part-time waitress to pay the bills, but it could also represent the turning point in her career. As Pedra describes it, “Ten weeks ago, they entered as students, and now they will be leaving us as professionals.”

There are hundreds of links to sites that offer advice and listings for both paid and unpaid internships. Here are some of my favourites:

Career Edge: Internships for New Graduates (Canada)
Ability Edge: Internships for People with Disabilities (Canada)
Career Bridge: Internships for Internationally Trained Professionals (Canada)
Campus Access: Directory of Internship Programs (Canada)
International Youth Program Internships
United Nations Internships
USA Internships for International Students
CollegeRecruiter Internship Listings (USA)
Interns Over 40 (USA)
USAID Volunteer Internships (USA)

Tags: Career, Internship, Resume
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Considering a Job Change Once the Economy Picks Up? Be Proactive

I had lunch last week with a senior HR Manager who was contemplating leaving her job after more than 20 years with a large corporation. “I’m having trouble living with the disconnect between what the company claims are its core values, and how it is handling staff relations during this recession.” She went on to describe a litany of incidents, from a service agent who was terminated after revealing she had cancer, to an entire team that was being laid off so that the division director could meet his cost-cutting targets for his performance bonus.

In a recent LinkedIn Q&A, Jeff Lefevre, Managing Partner and Founder, JTL Services, posed the question: “Over the past 6 months employees have seen a drastic attitude change from their managers. This attitude of ‘well be happy you have a job’ is wearing thin. Have you noticed this change?”

I responded that, based on what I’m hearing from my clients and contacts, there is going to be a tsunami of job searching once the economy picks up, and some of the most active job hoppers are likely to be HR personnel who are disgusted with how companies have chosen to treat their staff.

More than a few people, from both HR and non-HR backgrounds, contacted me directly to applaud my answer and reiterate my observations. In one contact’s words, “a huge changeover in staff is coming, and I don’t think management understands exactly how deep into the organization this discontent has spread.”

If you are considering making a career change once the economy picks up, be proactive.

Don’t wait for a “tipping point” incident. Take control now by mapping out your career plans for the next six months to two years and equipping your job search arsenal.

1. Take some time to think about your personal and professional values. I can’t emphasize the importance of this enough. It is much easier to figure out whether a new company or position is going to be a good fit for you if you are really clear about what is important to you.
2. Go through your files and start collecting the material for your resume: projects, positive feedback, performance reviews, KPI reports, anything that you can use to support your success stories.
3. Define your value proposition – what are the key strengths, expertise and experience that you have to offer.
4. Investigate companies that you would like to work for. Go beyond the financials. Listen to what current employees are saying. A good source for getting the inside scoop on how employees feel about their company is the anonymous reviews in the www.glassdoor.com.
5. Look at who is hiring in your target job market, and what qualifications they are looking for. Determine whether you need training or credential upgrades in order to be more marketable.
6. Create at least two versions of your resume. I recommend having a detailed resume that can be easily customized to apply for specific job openings, as well as a one-page high-impact synopsis that is better suited for networking.
7. Get a non-business email account, if you don’t already have one.
8. Bring your LinkedIn profile up to date, and claim your web identity on Naymz and ZoomInfo.
9. Identify and join the LinkedIn groups and industry associations that will best support you in your career transition. Start following the discussions. Stay current on the key issues, news, and trends in the industry. Find out who the “people to know” are.
10. Make networking a priority. Find time in your calendar to make at least one new contact per week. Focus not on what they can do for you, but what you can do for them.
11. Reconnect with colleagues from the past. It is much easier to network and reconnect when you don’t have the pressure of “need a job right now” hanging over you like an invisible sign.
12. Not comfortable with networking? Learn how. Consider seminars such as Breaking Down Silos, where you can get some practical tools and strategies for successful networking without feeling like a snake oil salesman.

Taking control of your career plans has two positive benefits. One, it can help to minimize the sense of powerlessness that comes with being stuck in an unfulfilling job. Two, it will ensure that, when the right opportunity comes along, you have the tools in your arsenal to land your next great job.

Tags: Career change, job, networking, Resume
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Recruiters Have Attention Deficit Disorder, and Other Truths About Job Search Strategy

The web is flooded with conflicting advice about how to write a resume: Gotta be one page. Gotta be two pages. More than two is okay. Keep it brief. Keep it detailed. Use keywords multiple times. Don’t repeat yourself. Get creative in formatting, so that you stand out. Don’t get creative in formatting, or it won’t work. And the list goes on.

The problem is this. There are two different kinds of “gatekeepers” who will read a resume and make a decision about the candidate’s suitability for the job. They each have very different information needs, and the each use very different reading styles. A resume that is designed for one kind of gatekeeper won’t necessarily work for the other.

Recruiters & Hiring Managers Have Attention Deficit Disorder

ADD: “Easily distracted, miss details, frequently switch from one activity to another, become bored with a task after only a few minutes, unless they are doing something enjoyable, have difficulty processing information”

Recruiters and Hiring Managers often don’t have the time or inclination to read a resume in detail – at least on the first go round. Faced with a two inch pile of resumes, they need to be able to look at your document and tell within a few seconds whether you fit the bill. They may suffer from resume fatigue – after 30 or 40 resumes, all candidates start to look the same, and anything that creates visual distinction is a welcome relief. They don’t want to flip pages, and they don’t want to work too hard to understand what you are trying to say. When resume strategists advise using a one pager with short bullets, and a creative layout that can be easily scanned by the eye, this is the gatekeeper they have in mind.

Resume Screening Applications Have Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder

OCPD: “a preoccupation with details, rules, lists, order, organization, and schedules; very rigid and inflexible in their beliefs”

Resume extraction and screening software – the kind that gets used to pull resumes from job boards – is the opposite. These applications use fairly rigid algorithms to read your resume and decide whether or not you make the grade. Much like Search Engine tools, the more detail, the better. Miss a keyword, and you may get screened out. Try to get too fancy with your formatting, you may not get parsed properly. Try to use graphics, and you just create confusion. When resume strategists advise using keyword-rich content and standard resume layout, this is the gatekeeper they have in mind.

So What’s a Jobseeker To Do?

Tailor your resume to your job search strategy.

Most job seekers are already aware that “one size fits all” doesn’t work if you have multiple career objectives, and tailor different versions of their resume to different kinds of jobs. But they don’t always realize the importance of tailoring their resume to the job search tactic they intend to use.

The Cold Job Search, or “black hole” as it is aptly nick-named, involves applying for advertised job openings online, and posting your resume on job boards. The most likely gatekeeper is going to be some sort of Resume Screening Application, and your resume needs to be optimized to work with the software.

An optimized resume for a cold job search has keyword rich content about both your duties and your accomplishments, with “the balance of power” tilted toward accomplishments. You still need to be concise, no run on sentences, no long paragraphs, because eventually your resume is going to be read by a “live body”. There are occasions when three or more pages are okay, but as a general rule, stick to two pages.

There are many different kinds of  Extraction & Screening software in use today. With older versions, you may be required to cut and paste from your original resume to fit pre-defined boxes. More up-to-date software will accept your MS Word or .pdf version, but can still be finicky about how you format, so stick with tried and true layouts.

The Warm Job Search, or “networking and relationship building”, involves developing and reaching out to warm contacts. You can be reasonably sure that you’re resume is going to be looked at by a live human being, and your goal is to get them to sit up and take notice. Anything that you can do to demonstrate that you value this person’s time will be welcome.

The ideal resume for a warm job search is a one pager with enough details to layout the facts and tweak the reader’s interest – this is no place for information overload. Select a half dozen of your top accomplishments to showcase who you are and what you have to offer.

You can get creative with formatting and layout on your “warm search” resume, but be aware, one person’s “wow, great resume, love the creativity” is another person’s “oh my gosh, what were you thinking”.

The response on your Warm Job Search is going to be one of three things:

• Sorry not interested. Okay, on to the next contact.
• Let’s meet or talk: Great, resume worked!
• Can you send me a copy of your detailed resume. Note, this is not a sign that your Warm Job Search resume didn’t work, it’s a sign that it did. You got somebody’s interest, now they want to know more.

The “Come Find Me” Job Search, or passive job search, involves establishing a strong web presence so recruiters and hiring managers will seek you out. The goal of the “Come Find Me” resume is to create a distinctive personal brand identity, elevate your name in search engines, and make the recruiter’s job of getting to know you as effortless as possible.

Whether you set up your own website or use online tools such as VisualCV, you have a great deal of latitude in terms of content and design. Using well thought out layout and menus, you can include much more detail than you could with a traditional resume.

Think about including links to articles and blogs. Provide video clips and PowerPoint presentations. Crosslink with your LinkedIn and ZoomInfo profile. Use Twitter to share insights and information, and establish your reputation as an expert who gets followed.

A word of caution about using Facebook for your “Come Find Me” resume. Once its published, Facebook owns the content. Forever. A resume you post today may still be accessible 5 years from now. Do you really want to give up that kind of long term control over your brand identity?

Be Smart About Your Job Search Strategy

Today’s job seekers are facing one of the most complex job markets in recent history, not just because of the huge competition for a limited number of openings, but because the very nature of what constitutes a smart job search has changed. Gone are the days when you sent out a thousand resumes and waited for the phone to ring (I have to wonder if there ever was a day when that strategy worked).

Savvy job seekers today know that they need to launch a multi-pronged attack if they want to edge out the competition. They use “cold”, “warm” and “come find me” tactics, and they keep multiple versions of their resume in their job search arsenal so that they can use the “weapon of choice” to land their next great job.

Tags: Recruiter, Resume, Resume Screening, Talent Management
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The Dreaded Interview Question: What Do You Consider Your Greatest Weakness?

Before I start this story, I need to make a confession. I never wear watches. Not because I don’t find the correct time an incredibly useful piece of information, but because I keep losing them. Watches are a distraction when I’m working, and so I take them off and they disappear. Or worse, I forget to take them off, launch into my latest DIY project, and they get ruined.

So, now the story. Fifteen years ago I attended a week-long intensive on Strategic Planning, hosted by the Executive Development Program at Queen’s University. One hundred plus senior managers and business leaders from a wide range of industries came together to learn about best practices in strategic analysis, competitive positioning, and corporate visioning. In preparation for the seminar, we each completed a 20 page psychometric test to evaluate our individual teamwork style, the premise being that a strong team has a balance of styles.

My Cool Watch

The weekend before the intensive, I made a deliberate effort to buy and wear a watch. I was meeting with executives, we would be on a tight schedule, my Administrative Assistant would not be there, I needed a watch. And I found one. It was a beautiful piece of art, dark blue face with planets and meteors, hand-tooled leather band, the kind of watch that, when you see somebody wearing it, you can say “hey, that’s a cool watch.” Unfortunately, it had no numbers, a serious defect in watches as it turns out, and so an unreliable indicator of time. But still, a really cool watch.

On the first day of the Strategic Planning intensive, I was late (see above, about the watch), and walked in as the seminar leader was describing the four quadrants of teamwork style: Visionary; Analyst; People Person; Routine Keeper (actually, in truth, I can’t even remember the proper title of the last category, but it was along these lines).

He was using pictures of watches to make a point about the personality differences of the various styles:

• The Routine Keeper: straightforward watch, no nonsense, no embellishments – black band, exactly 12 numbers in the appropriate places, three hands, precision set.
• The People Person: colourful watch, guy with big ears and white-gloved hands pointing out the passing minutes and hours.
• The Analyst: digital watch with all the bells and whistles – built in calculator, multiple time zone indicators, (today it probably would include a GPS).
• The Visionary: If they even wear a watch, which is unlikely, artistic, out-of-this-world embellishments, probably no numbers.

This is where I walked in – the seminar leader was showing a picture of my brand new watch. Well, not exactly my watch but enough like my watch that I felt compelled to pull down my blazer sleeve as I slipped into the vacant seat between two clear Routine Keepers: six pencils each lined up at exact half inch intervals, no nonsense watches.

The seminar leader handed out the results of our psychometric tests, and we each received a circular seismic graph with readouts of our scores in all four quadrants. I was literally off-the-chart on visionary, my score recorded outside the boundary of the graph. I also came in very strong on People Person and Analyst.

It turns out, though, that I had zero natural capacity for routine. I mean zero – it didn’t even register on the chart – not even a blip. Now, I can’t say that the results came as a complete surprise. One week sorting Christmas mail for Canada Post when I was sixteen was enough to convince me that I would need a career with a lot of variety. And without my detail-oriented Administrative Assistant, my daily schedule would all-to-easily go off track. But it did provide me with an aha moment. I now had the answer to the dreaded interview question, “What do you consider your greatest weakness?”

Later that evening, while the Analysts sat in one corner discussing the latest gadgets, and the People Persons organized the social calendar for the balance of the week (I believe the Routine Keepers had all gone to bed early because ‘we have a busy day tomorrow’), the Visionaries in the group pondered the implications of our test results. Almost uniformly, we all turned out to be routine-challenged, and it was reflected in how we managed our day-to-day lives. We had filing systems that could best be described as archaeological digs (most recent layer on top). We were procrastinators with our taxes (yecchh, paperwork!). And we kept losing our watches.

Visionaries don’t sweat the small stuff, so we quickly turned the conversation to more interesting things. Our projects. Each of us had at least half a dozen personal and professional projects on the go, and we quickly came up with at least a dozen other great ideas for new products, marketing strategies, fix-its, and anything else that crossed our conversational path.  Unfortunately, without the benefit of a good Routine Keeper in our midst, there was nobody taking notes, and so our great ideas stayed as vapourware.

And that was the point of the psychometric exercise. A good team needs a balance of skills and aptitudes:

• Routine Keepers who track the details, monitor the deadlines, organize the paperwork, and keep minutes of the meetings.
• People Persons who can communicate on multiple levels of language, build relationships, and broker solutions for stakeholder conflicts.
• Analysts who can evaluate the costs, risks and ROI of various options.
• Visionaries who can see the art of the possible, create compelling business visions, anticipate what’s coming down the road, and come up with various outside-the-box ideas to tackle issues and capitalize on new opportunities.

Any group – whether a project team, a corporation, or a marriage – that is short-skilled in one of these quadrants is likely to run into problems.

When I got back to the office I took a renewed look at our team to see if we were balanced across the four quadrants. I became much more aware of recruiting strategies to keep team balance, and I made a point of checking out people’s watches.  I also made every effort to build bridges with the Routine Keepers in my midst, who were both my bane and my safeguard.

On a personal level, I took a good look at how my “greatest weakness” was affecting my productivity, and developed strategies to close the gap. To Do lists became my greatest friend, as did notebooks in which I could write down the great ideas that popped into my head in the middle of the night.

My electronic calendar became my lifeline to the scheduled world, because it meant that I could commit myself with abandon to the person or project at hand, and know that an alarm would ring when it was time to be somewhere else. I made sure that all the clocks, dashboards, computers and cellphones in my range of influence were set to the correct time.

I married an accountant (well technically, I married somebody who later became an accountant), so there was the tax issue addressed.  And I made a concerted effort to start listening more attentively to the details, the dotted i’s, the crossed t’s, so that I wouldn’t be blind-sided by them.

As a career coach and resume strategist, I enjoy the process of helping my clients map out their strengths, but I also commit time to exploring the dark side. Your greatest weakness is only a liability to the extent to which it goes unacknowledged and unaddressed.

A little self-awareness can be immeasurably valuable when assessing whether a new career opportunity is right for you, and it can help you understand exactly how you can be of value to a new organization.

Moreover the exercise of self-discovery can give you a really interesting and authentic story to tell when the interviewer asks about your greatest weakness. Because really, they won’t believe you when you say “I work too hard.”

Tags: Executive Development, Interview, Teamwork, Weakness
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Resume Integrity – The Truth and Consequences of Dumbing Down Your Resume

I remember cringing when I first read the Wall Street Journal article that talked about job seekers dumbing down their resumes in order to land a job. As a Certified Resume Strategist who has worked with thousands of clients at all stages of their career, I knew that there were alternatives to selling oneself short, and I found the whole notion of “dumbing down” a tragic waste of talent.

The issue came up for me again when I came across a recent advice column in which the president of a large Canadian resume writing and career coaching firm provided advice on how to dumb down one’s resume. Wow, I thought, has it really come to this, that even the professionals in our industry are offering recommendations on this approach? So I decided to dig a little deeper to determine whether job seekers were finding success with their “dumbed down” resumes. I posted a discussion on LinkedIn, issued a “Help a Reporter” request, and scanned the internet for anecdotal evidence. Not surprisingly, given the state of the economy and rising unemployment rates, there has been a lot of cyber-ink dedicated to the issue. Here’s what I found.

Dumbing Down Your Resume – The Job Seeker’s Perspective

The vast majority of job seekers that I talked to who tried using a dumbed-down resume did get more interviews, but still weren’t landing the job. One HARO respondent told me, “I nearly always dumb down the resume but I haven’t had much luck– rarely the interviewer would like to have more info so I end up sending more. But I haven’t been hired one way or the other.” Another said, “I wasn’t getting any calls for interviews before, and now I am, but so far, I’m still looking.” A consistent pattern seems to be that these job seekers are coming in as second or third candidate of choice, but they can’t hide their knowledge, experience or age when it comes time for the interview.

Of the job seekers who were successful in getting work with a dumbed-down resume, many expressed, “off the record”, that they hated their new job. A former Marketing Manager who re-branded herself to Marketing Coordinator in order to find gainful employment told me, “It’s a balancing act, I have to tell you. I really thought I could do it. I was sure that I could step back, do my job with dignity and professionalism. But I have to admit, it’s harder than I thought. It’s hard to be enthusiastic about your work when you are reporting to somebody in flip flops who is comfortable using ‘icky’ in her business  conversations. And frankly, I’m BORED!!!! All those advice columns were true. I try to keep my energy up, to find ways of making the job more interesting, but… I guess the worse thing is, now that I’m working full time, I don’t have as much time to look for the job I really want. But at least I have a paycheque, right?”

Another contact who dumbed down his resume during the last recession said that his career never recovered. “I didn’t really think about it at the time, because I really, really needed to start earning some money, but I wasn’t just dumbing down my resume, I was dumbing down my career. When the economy recovered, I couldn’t get back into my old career stream, because now I was trying to market myself with a lower level job on my resume.”

I did come across people who were both successful and happy that they opted to undersell themselves. “I was having trouble getting a job and so began leaving off my MA thinking that employers would think I’m too young to have one (I was 23). Long story short, after doing so I received 5 offers for interviews and got a job. Few months later I told my boss about that casually and he laughed and told me I never would have been hired if he knew because he would have thought I’d want too much money. Unfortunately our society punishes very educated individuals sometimes.”

Dumbing Down Your Resume – Recruiters’ Perspectives

Hiring managers who discover that candidates are dumbing down their resumes told me that they are instantly suspicious. As one recruiter described it, “I have access to tens of thousands of resumes through job boards, and I occasionally come across alternative versions for the same candidate. If they have Director in one version, Manager in a second, and Analyst in a third, I have to wonder what the heck is going on. Same thing if the titles on their resume don’t match what comes up on their LinkedIn profile. I can’t afford to recommend a candidate to a client unless I have complete confidence in their integrity – I can’t afford to let them make me look bad. And somebody who is prepared to be less than truthful on their resume is a high risk for making me look bad.”

In our LinkedIn debate, Mike Muyal, Director of Marketing at Levelor, had similar sentiments, “If ‘dumbing down’ means making one’s achievements seem less important, or eliminating some of them entirely…hmm..not too sure about that. If it means making an over-qualified candidate look more appropriate for a junior job so they can ‘get their foot in the door’…well, I wouldn’t like that either. Especially since I could have a star performer in a lower-level job, who in turn becomes more difficult to keep motivated and engaged…and I’ve got nothing to offer her.”

Mike’s concerns are not unfounded. I talked to one business owner who discovered during the interview that a candidate for a mid-level operations position was presenting himself as less qualified than he really was. “He admitted it in the interview that he had an MBA, and used to be a Director in a different industry. I was worried that he would be bored. Our company is small, so I knew that I couldn’t provide him with a lot of variety. But he was very persuasive, and I thought what the heck, I’m getting really good value for my money. I was wrong. He started with oomph, but within two months he was questioning every decision I made and trying to completely rebuild my company. Some of his ideas were good, I’ll admit, but I don’t have time to implement every new-ass MBA idea, I have a business to run. I could see that he was frustrated, and it started showing in his attitude. In less than a year, he quit for something better, and I had to start all over again.”

Dumbing Down Your Resume – Perspectives from Career Services Professionals

Many of the career services experts who have waded in on the issue come down on side of “don’t dumb down”. In fact Sharon Graham, founder of Graham Management and Executive Director of Career Professionals of Canada, was stimulated by our LinkedIn discussion to devote a podcast on the matter.

Others, such as Megan Pittsley, Job Center Manager at City of Livermore, are more pragmatic. “I personally have always found job titles flexible (both as a resume writer and a recruiter), since they vary so greatly from organization to organization. A Director at a small company is similar to a Manager at a large one, government job titles are terribly unfocused, etc. As long as a point is made during an interview to state why you chose to use a functional title versus an in-house formal title no one really cares (if you can sell it). Instead of putting “Director of Marketing”, just put “Marketing” and allow them to see what you accomplished without a discriminating title attached to it.

I don’t feel it shows a lack of integrity whatsoever; just being smart on how you mold your professional image so that people clearly understand what you did.  Sometimes people do actually need to tone down or dumb down their resumes if they genuinely seek a lower position because there aren’t any at their level available and they need a paycheck (I love to be idealistic but now is a time for reality), or because of personal reasons (want less responsibility, job is close to home, etc.) Recruiters can and will toss out resumes for overly experienced or educated applicants before even speaking to them.”

Dumbing Down Your Resume – Some Final Thoughts from a Certified Resume Strategist

I have empathy for job seekers who are desperate to find a job, any job, and think that dumbing down their resume is their only chance. However, I think it is short-sighted, and further, I think that in the very near future it won’t even be an option. With new tools like Applicant Explorer, recruiters are going to be able to build a comprehensive picture of you based on your tweets, your Facebook content, your contributions to discussion forums, your blog posts, and any other web source in which your name appears.

In today’s internet-driven job market, jobseekers are going to find it very hard to try and market themselves under multiple “brands” with conflicting data. Many job boards already sell their candidate lists, and some corporations have agreements to pool candidate submissions (after, of course, they have already on-boarded their top candidate). Jobseekers will no longer be able to assume that a resume submitted for a position with one company won’t end up on the desk of a totally different firm or recruiter, which means that discrepancies between resumes are going to turn up.

If the basic facts of your resume aren’t consistent from one version to the next – the dates, the company names, the job titles, and the academic credentials – then, as the Cuban band leader liked to say, “Lucy, you’ve got some ‘splaining to do.” And chances are that a recruiter or hiring manager is never going to give you the chance to do that.

In the face of touch-of-the-button convergence of web data about you, it will be career wise to ensure that you are presenting a consistent and compelling personal brand across your entire web footprint. This doesn’t mean that you should use the exact same resume for every position you apply to. That isn’t strategic, and it won’t work. It is strategic to tailor your profile and selected accomplishments to the target job – recruiters expect this, and welcome it. As Mike Muyal said, “As a hiring manager, the easier it is for me to focus and get to the gist of a candidate’s qualifications, the better.”  It is strategic to focus on your past ten years – five if you are in IT.

Finally, it is strategic to use your resume as part of a well-thought out job search plan, rather than in scatter-gun approach. This means making the extra effort to thoroughly understand the motivating factors of the target company so that you know how to pitch your qualifications. I’ll close my contributions to the discussion with a terrific example of a strategic resume in action, brought to me by Edward Chance: “The best resume I ever read began like this: ‘My father was in charge of the men’s lavatory at the Ritz Hotel. My mother was a chambermaid at the same hotel. I was educated at the London School of Economics.’ Ray Taylor got the job as a copywriter at Ogilvy and Mather. He had a glorious career. Taylor knew who scrutinized resumes at O&M – agency founder David Ogilvy, who took great pride in raising himself to fame and fortune from the genteel poverty of his English childhood.”

Tags: Dumbing down, how to write a resume, Resume
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