Posts Tagged ‘Karen Siwak’
FreshTransition – Project Management Software For Your Job Search
One of the many benefits of networking is the opportunity to find out about new products and services before they become mainstream. In October 2011, I got a personal demonstration of FreshTransition, a software program designed for career services companies to help their clients manage a full-cycle job search.
“Wow” doesn’t begin to describe my reaction. With its intuitive design based on a thorough understanding of what it takes to plan and executive a Strategic Job Search in today’s job market, this is exactly the tool I have been seeking for my clients.
FreshTransition - project managing your job search just got easier
So I am thrilled to announced that, starting January 2012, a subscription to FreshTransition is included in Resume Confidential’s Strategic Job Search Coaching Programs. With this tool, our coaching clients will be able to set targets and milestones for active and passive streams of their job search, track contacts and company information, get alerts from job boards, organize job applications, resumes, cover letters and calendars, and more. And the analytics that FreshTransition provides will enable Resume Confidential to tweak our one-on-one coaching sessions to address “problem areas” in the search process before they have a chance to derail the strategic job search plan.
Sound terrific? You better believe it. Want to find out more or have a demonstration? Let me know.
Be Volunteer-Savvy for Your Career
Some of my favorite business entrepreneurs worked pro bono for many months in order to acquire the skills and knowledge they needed to make their next career move. Others felt deeply committed to give back to the community – locally or globally – in some capacity, or were driven by a passion for a cause. Whether you are motivated by altruism, professional development, or both, volunteerism can be a great tool to boost your value in the job market.
A LinkedIn survey found that 41% of professionals considered volunteer work equally as valuable as paid work experience when evaluating job candidates, and 20% of the hiring managers made a hiring decision based on a candidate’s volunteer work experience.
Drawing on the success stories of my clients, some kinds of volunteer work are more valued by potential employers than than others, particular in terms of demonstrating transferable skills and experience. Some things that you can do to maximize the “market value” of your volunteer efforts when it comes time to find paid work:
- Choose volunteer opportunities that align with your career objectives, and allow you to develop and showcase your professional skills.
- Have a clearly defined and documented deliverable (ideally with metrics or evaluation criteria that can be verified), or a specific problem to solve, and know how you are contributing to the big picture goals and mandate of the organization.
- Look for opportunities to lead a team. As challenging as it can be to build and motivate a paid team, overseeing a group of volunteers can be ten times harder, and many employers know it.
- Ask your team leader or supervisor if they would be willing to give you a performance review, which can be particularly valuable if you don’t have a lot of professional experience under your belt yet.
- Cultivate your network. Volunteer organizations bring together people from a wide range of industries and backgrounds, and you will never have a better chance to broaden and diversify your network of first degree contacts.
- When it comes time to write your resume, describe your contributions using the terms and keywords of your career target – if your goal is to be a project manager for example, speak in terms of project management; if your goal is marketing manager, speak in terms of marketing and marketing communications.
Ready to become a volunteer but not sure where or how? Check out the website of your favorite cause for information on how to volunteer, or visit sites such as http://www.volunteermatch.org/ (USA) or http://www.charityvillage.com/ (Canada) or http://www.do-it.org.uk/ (UK)** to see who may be able to benefit from your passion, expertise, and time.
** Thanks to Paul Williams (@PaulWill1977 on twitter, who works with the UK Stroke Association) for this link.
“Apply With LinkedIn” App Could be a Game Changer
GigaOM leaked the news yesterday that LinkedIn is getting ready to launch a plug-in for employers’ websites called Apply With LinkedIn, which will allow job candidates to apply for available positions using their LinkedIn profiles as resumes.
Game Changer for Corporate Recruiting
Depending on LinkedIn’s pricing and packaging strategy, this has the potential to be a game changer in the recruiting and hiring world. Not only could it drive standardization in the front-end of applicant tracking systems, but it will virtually eliminate two of the biggest pains of online job application processes (the need for applicants to cut and paste into predefined boxes, and the need for HR folks to try and fix resume parsing errors).
I also anticipate that this move could seriously cut into the profits of job boards such as Careerbuilder.com and Monster.com, especially if LinkedIn creates an attractive bundle that combines access to LinkedIn job boards with the application plug in for corporate career sites.
Game Changer for Jobseekers
For jobseekers, the Apply Within LinkedIn app could be a game changer too, especially if corporations move to “Upload from LinkedIn” as their preferred option.
For any jobseeker who has ever labored over the cumbersome cut-and-paste requirements of some corporate career sites and wondered why they have to upload everything when they’ve already attached their resume, the option to point and click will come as a welcome relief. The ability to set up job alerts and immediately apply using your cellphone will speed up candidate time-to-market.
As much thought and strategy will need to go into creating your LinkedIn profile as has traditionally gone into your resume, and it will become even more important that your profile be 100% complete.
The Downsides
The biggest downside that I see is the potential for higher incidents of spray-and-pray job applications, which is a no-win for everybody. In fact David Zax with Fast Company has suggested that this will make Apply with LinkedIn a non-starter.
For jobseekers, the one-size fit-all format for LinkedIn profile will limit their ability to tailor their application to the specific information needs of each company, which goes against the grain of job search best practices. Further, a fully developed LinkedIn profile is announcement to the world that you are open for business, job-offer wise, which you may not want your current employer to know
How Will This Play Out?
LinkedIn has probably redefined recruiting and job search best practices more than any other platform, so it will be interesting to see how the business model rolls out. Unfortunately they have a recent history of alienating their core base by monetizing member services that have previously been free, and creating fee structures that price casual users out of the market.
The plug-in may end up being a tool for large corporations only, and its ease of use may make it more of a liability than an asset it when it comes to candidate screening and selection. But with the right business model it could become the must-have tool for applicant-employer interface, no matter what the company size. How do you think this will play out?
Jobseekers, be Interview-Ready: Company Research 101
A question was posted on LinkedIn recently asking hiring managers what their pet peeves were when it comes to interviewing job candidates. Over and over again, respondents indicated that their pet peeve is candidates who come to the interview and don’t know anything about the company.
Jobseekers, there is no excuse. When you go into the interview, you should know the company’s products, its mission, its history, its industry, its competitors, its strategic goals, and any big projects/products/announcements that have made it in the news.
“But I Don’t Know How To Research a Company!” you say? Here’s how:
- Start with the company’s website. Look for an “About Us“, “News & Press“, “Our Team” sections. Look for an “Our Services” or“Our Clients” section. Basically, read everything you possibly can on the company website.
- Look at what the company says about itself on LinkedIn. Don’t forget to check out new hire listings.
- Go back to the team list you found in step one. Now search each of these names in LinkedIn. How long have they been in the position? Where were they before that? Do they mention any projects they’ve been involved in? What groups do they belong to? Have they asked or answered any questions in LinkedIn Q&A? Have they contributed to any group discussions? Do they have a blog?
- Google the company name and click through to some of the links. This is a scavenger hunt, of sorts. You won’t know what’s good until you find it. Skip through to the third, fifth, seventh and tenth pages. Look for articles that mention the company in terms of industry trends and developments, new products, customer service experiences. If you have more time, read more articles.
- Go back to the google search page, and toggle on the NEWS tab. Search the company again. Look for press releases, industry analyses, financial analyst reports, controversies, praise, mentions by journalists. Often you’ll find more illuminating information from the financial and industry analysts who talk about an annual report than you will from the report itself.
- Reset the time parameters, and look for news articles about the company from a year ago, two years ago, five years ago.
- Search the company name together with “merger” or “acquisition”. Has the company acquired other companies or been acquired? Is there any news about how smoothly (or not so smoothly) this went?
- Search the company name together with the title of your target position. You may be able to find out who the incumbent was before you, some of the projects they were involved in, any PR (negative or positive) that they attracted.
- Do it again, using the title of the person you will be reporting to. Is your soon-to-be-supervisor new in the position, or was there somebody in the position before him/her? How recent was the change? This search should be done both in Google and in LinkedIn.
- Search the company name together with the word “convention”, or “trade show”, or “conference”. Look for any presentations, keynote speeches, whitepapers. At a minimum, you will learn which industry associations and events the hiring company deems valuable.
- Search the company name together with keywords from the job description. Use one keyword at a time: Research. Marketing. Project Manager. ISP. This is a great way to find clues to the goals and challenges that you will be facing that are specific to your target position.
- Search the company name together with the word “case study”. IT companies love to create case studies of their success stories. Check out what problems these vendors helped your target company to solve. Match this information against press releases announcing a different vendor for the same solution, which is often a clue that a mega-project went bust.
- Use www.wefollow.com to search for the company and any of its employees on twitter. Check out their twitter streams. What are they talking about? What are they excited about?
- Google “who are COMPANY’s main competitors“. Look for entries from sites such www.finance.yahoo.com, wikinvest.com, www.hoover.com, and www.corporatewatch.com.
- Use www.glassdoor.com to research the company culture.
Organize Your Information
The amount of information you will uncover will vary depending on the company’s size and years in business. For smaller firms, you might not get much more than their stated business goal and the names of its founders and executives. That’s fine, that’s more than you knew before. Try other search engines like bing. Pipl is a great tool for doing a deep search on people’s names. For most mid to large-sized companies, the information will be so voluminous that it will be overwhelming. Organize your findings by the questions you want answered:
- What is the company’s product/service and target clientele?
- Where does the company say it is heading in the next five years? What are its goals, values, mission?
- Has there been any events recently that confirm or contradict those values, mission, goals?
- Who are its main competitors? How does the company stack up against these competitors?
- Has there been a lot of staffing changes recently? Is this because the company is growing, or is it an indication of potential trouble?
- What are the company’s main challenges? Pain points? Risk exposures?
- What are the company’s main competitive advantages?
If you want to position yourself as the solution to their problem, think like a marketer. Do your market research. Understand who the company is, what its challenges and pain points are, where they are going, and how you can contribute. Then, be ready to demonstrate your insights in your interview.
Interview-on-Demand™ Using VerbalSummary™ Technology – How Cool Is That?
I’m excited! Over the next couple of months, I’m going to be putting together some new coaching and career marketing packages that I know will take my clients’ job searches to a whole new level. Sure, it will still involve creating killer resumes that get noticed, but this is just one tool in the arsenal. It will also involve providing state-of-the-art options to reach recruiters and hiring managers where they are at – on their smartphones, through social media, and at in-real-life networking events and business functions.
One of the innovations that I will be offering is Interview-on-Demand™ using VerbalSummary™ technology, a tool developed by recruiter Jerry Albright to present candidates to hiring managers. Using Interview-on-Demand™, we will create a two to four minute audio clip with a link imbedded in your resume, in which you respond to some typical interview questions about your particular area of expertise.
Why is this so powerful? My goal has always been to create documents that capture my client’s voice. Interview-on-Demand™ does that, and even more. By pressing the play button on your resume, recruiters and hiring managers will get authentic insights into your strengths, your personality, your approach to work, in a way that can’t be conveyed on paper. Jerry’s been using it for a couple of years now, and not only has it helped to grow his business exponentially, but it’s shortened the time to hire and substantially reduced the effort it takes to present his candidates. Using VerbalSummary™ technology, the candidates literally present themselves.
Isn’t This Just the Same as Video Resumes? Not even close. Video resumes have numerous downsides. Aside from obvious production quality issues, they create an opening for discrimination claims, they don’t work on all platforms, and they don’t easily fit within existing candidate screening and recruiting processes. Interview-on-Demand™ will be built right into your resume, so it will work in conventional resume distribution models.
Interview-on-Demand™ won’t just be limited to resumes. We can use it in your LinkedIn profile, QRcode it in your business cards, embed it in your blog, or add it your email signature – any way that you use to communicate. And that’s not even the best part (although it is pretty good), the best part is that, using VerbalSummary dashboard, we’ll be able to track in real time how many times your Interview-on-Demand™ has been listened to, so that we can gauge how well your job search strategy is working. Pretty cool, huh?
When Will Interview-on-Demand Be Available? In the next few weeks Jerry and I will be working out the nuances of adapting a recruiter-focused tool to the needs of a career coach (really, the tool is so well designed that it won’t take much), and I will be putting myself through VerbalSummary™ bootcamp to master the technology.
If you would be interested in being a test pilot for Interview-on-Demand™, then let me know.
Career Coaches and Resume Writers who may be interested in adding this to their service offerings, let me know.
In the meantime, here’s a sample of VerbalSummary in action, so that you can get a taste of how this whole thing will work.
Fishing in the Swimming Pool and Other Job Search Mistakes
An ex-military professional posted a question on LinkedIn: Why do employers on Linkedin say they have a hard time finding good qualify [sic] people to hire/employees? When in the mean time I have a hard time getting hired?
I had a look at his LinkedIn profile and quickly identified some deadly mistakes that were making him invisible to employers.
Mistake #1: Military-Jargon Rich, Keyword Poor
If you want to be found by recruiters (corporate or third party), you have to understand how they think and work. If they think they need a Manager of Corporate Training, then they will use boolean search strings that include “Corporate Training” or “Corporate Trainer”. Education Management Professional won’t show up. If they think they need a Supply Chain Specialist, they will use boolean search strings that includes “supply chain”. Supply Sargent won’t show up. Jobseekers need to review job ads that interest them (and they are qualified for), and then incorporate the keywords in their online profile and resume. Military-to-civilian jobseekers need to translate military vocabulary and acronyms into words that are relevant in the civilian work world.
Mistake #2: Career Story – There’s No “There” There
From the candidate’s LinkedIn profile, I could tell a little bit about where he’d been, but not what he did or whether he was any good at it. Job search is marketing, and marketing is story telling. Jobseekers need to use their resume, their LinkedIn profile, their networking time, their contributions in online discussions, and their interview answers to tell a compelling story about what they are good at, the kinds of problems they are good at solving, the kinds of situations they are good at managing, the kinds of goals they are good at achieving. And they need to use examples from their career to prove it.
Mistake #3: “I Don’t Know What I Want To Do Next” Syndrome
When I looked at the candidate’s LinkedIn profile, I had no idea what kind of position he was looking for. So even if a recruiter happened to stumble across his profile, there wasn’t enough information to determine whether the candidate was the kind of person the recruiter was looking for. Some jobseekers are afraid to be specific in their career goals, or to name a target position, for fear that they will miss some opportunities. What happens instead is that they miss all opportunities. Jobseekers need to be as specific as they can be about what they are looking for.
Mistake #4: Fishing In The Swimming Pool
If you want to find the right job, then you need to fish where the fish are at, and not stand in a swimming pool and hope that the fish will show up. One of the possible career goals for this candidate may be Early Childhood Educator (hard to tell for sure, because of mistake #3). There are thousands of positions for which LinkedIn is an ideal place for self-promotion. But for some kinds of positions, LinkedIn (and other social media platforms) are a waste of e-space. Organizations that hire ECE specialists don’t use LinkedIn for recruitment. The largest ECE-themed group on LinkedIn has only 1500 members worldwide. Jobseekers need to find the right niche job boards, discussion forums and professionals associations if they want to be found for highly specialized positions, and LinkedIn may not be it.
When It Comes To Networking, Don’t Be A Jack
Don't Be A Networking Jack
(Cross-posted at Radical Events)
Some people have a natural ability to network. They can fearlessly enter a room, strike up a conversation with anybody, exude confidence, and walk away with a dozen new friends and business contacts. But for many of us, networking is an acquired art. Sometimes a painfully acquired art.
I recently had the opportunity to watch various people practice their networking skills ( I’m an inveterate people watcher, in case you didn’t know), and got to meet some genuine networking artists, a few artists-in-training, and one memorable my-kindergartener-could-have-painted-better-than-that.
I’ll call him Jack. That’s not his real name, but it’s apt. Halfway through a three-day event, many people were calling him Jack, only with three additional letters attached.
When It Comes to Networking, Don’t Be a Jack
- Don’t make distribution of your business cards the sole focus of your networking efforts.
- Don’t introduce yourself with a long-winded and too-obviously rehearsed list of credentials, in a my-letters-are-bigger-than-your-letters kind of a way.
- Don’t monopolize conversations. If you know less about the person you’ve just talked to than they know about you, there’s a problem with your networking approach.
- If you are going to follow the fake-it-until-you-make-it model of business development, be credible. Nobody is going to believe that a guy from Brazil just sent you a cheque for tens of thousands of dollars for unspecified services, especially when, if asked for details, your story deflates like a suddenly untied balloon.
- Don’t be the self-appointed conference commentator. Don’t ask so many questions during conference presentations and panel discussions that you take the program off track. It really isn’t all about you.
- Don’t bring a world-weary “in-my-day” attitude to a networking event. Or anywhere, really.
- Don’t tell people what they are doing wrong with their business, their job search, their life, and how they could be millionaires, or hundred-thousand-aires, if they just follow your advice.
Everybody has a purpose in life. In some cases, it’s to be the bad example. I’m sure Jack has a much bigger purpose on this earth, but for me, he will eternally be my example of how not to network.
Storytelling As A Resume Strategy | Tim’s Strategy™
“I have never met a boring person, but from time to time I’ve failed to ask the right question.”
Spend some time in a networking event, and chances are that the people who you will remember most are the ones with whom you exchanged stories. Hiring managers will tell you after a day of interviewing candidates, the ones who stood out were the ones who had an interesting story to tell.
Good marketing is good storytelling. And a job search is all about good marketing. But if you wait for the interview to tell your stories, you may be missing an important opportunity to distinguish yourself from the crowd. Stories, when told in the right way, to the right audience, can be a terrific resume differentiator, the key to standing out in a pool of qualified candidates.
So, what are the critical success factors to making a story-telling strategy work? Find out on my guest blog post on Tim’s Strategy: Ideas for Job Search, Career and Life
Extreme Candidate Makeover – Ex-Recruiter Show
(Originally aired February 8th, 2010)
Listen in as career coaches Karen Siwak, Dawn Bugni, Janice Worthington, Jeremy Worthington and Karla Porter give feedback and advice to two jobseekers on what works, and what isn’t working, in their resume.
Five Statistics That Matter for Your Job Search
Each year for the past nine years CareerXroads has conducted a survey about the sources of new hires. The most recent survey (full report available here) solicited source of hire stats for 43 large companies, who collectively filled 176,000 positions in 2009. While the sample size is small, and arguments can and have been made about the accuracy and applicability of the statistics, the survey results are nevertheless revealing, and have some important implications for how jobseekers invest their job hunt energy.
- Internal transfers and promotions were the source of 51% of all full-time hires in 2009. This is up by 19% from 2006.
- Why it matters: It is the perennial jobseeker debate: should I take a lower level or lower paid position, just to get back in the workforce, or should I wait for my dream job? Three years ago, it may have been good advice to hold out for your dream job because two thirds of positions were being filled externally. Today, it may not be such a good strategy. If you can get your foot in the door of a good company, you stand a better chance of being able to work up to your dream job.
- Referrals account for 26.7% of all external hires, and yield an average of one hire for every 15 received.
- Why it matters: You hear it all the time: if you want to land a new job you must network, network, network. This stat demonstrates why. More than a quarter of jobs are filled with somebody who leveraged their network of contacts to get a referral. Outside of internal transfers and promotions, referrals were the single largest source of new hires. BUT, and it’s a big one, nearly 75% of external hires were NOT referrals, which means that as a jobseeker you need to have a multi-pronged job search strategy.
- Job boards and corporate career sites accounted for 22.3% and 13.2% of new hires respectively, 35.5% in total.
- Why it matters: There is a lot of noise about job boards being dead. Don’t believe it. Don’t spend all day, every day, scanning job boards, but do make sure that you are checking in on a regular basis to see who is hiring. Use aggregator sites such as Indeed.com and SimplyHired.com to monitor multiple boards at once, and Linkup.com to monitor new postings on corporate boards.
- Third party recruiters accounted for 2.3% of all external hires in 2009, down from 5.2% in 2005.
- Anecdotal auxiliary stat on this: a typical recruiter will have some kind of contact with an average of 100 candidates a week, but will place a fraction of 1% of them.
- Why it matters: A lot of jobseekers have the misconception of the importance of recruiting firms in the grand scheme of job placements (a lot of recruiters do too). Candidates are often outraged about recruiters who focus exclusively on passive candidates, and begrudge the seeming injustice of it. But 97.7% of jobs aren’t filled through external recruiters. Those 2.3% of jobs that are tend to have very specific technical, sales or leadership pre-requisites that are hard to find, or have a mismatch between the location of the talent pool and the location of the job. Be findable by recruiters, but don’t invest a huge part of your job search energy on trying to break down the recruiter’s door. And don’t sweat it if the recruiters aren’t returning your calls.
- 2.3% of external new hires were people who walked in the door
- Why it matters: It’s a comparatively small number, but here’s the thing. Most jobseekers don’t do it. My guess is less than 20% do it. In fact, I’d be venture to say that less than 10% do it. This means that 23% of jobseekers who are so bold as to walk into a company and ask for the job actually end up landing a job. Polish up your cold-calling technique if you want to be one of them.
So jobseekers, now that you have some insights on sources of hire, how will you change your job hunt strategy?
Meet Karen Siwak
An award-winning Certified Résumé Strategist, Karen has crafted top calibre career transition packages for thousands of clients. Her specialty is helping people identify and articulate their unique brands and value propositions, and she is passionate about empowering clients with the tools, strategies and confidence to take control of their career search. Read more...
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