Not-So-Novel Job Search Strategies

Job search strategies come and job search strategies go. Job seekers move along the age continuum. As they approach and overcome 50 years (of age), they begin to believe the hyperbole that they’re no longer useful and should be focusing on retirement rather than competing with the Gen-whatevers for plum career options. In the alternative, they buy into the notion that the only good they have left is data entry or human online search engine opportunities.

Dearie me. How far from true are these myths. The only thing holding back a mature job seeker is the amount of creativity they use for determining where to look and how much of their experience and stored skills they choose to market.

Being young and eager is an advantage. One of the benefits of youth and inexperience (so we’re still told) is the eagerness to learn and conquer new concepts. It is also the bastion of bringing new concepts to the workplace that are innovations imparted by college and university training. There are few to no bad habits that need to be unlearned in order to do things in the company way.

However, the senior job seeker, that is, the one who is over 50 years (of age) has several advantages that are most desirable to many employers. One of those advantages is having gone through many years of trial and error learn that has accompanied the training in school. That experience also carries the knowledge gained through years in the workforce in various capacities. That knowledge translates laterally to any position that the senior worker presents theirself as qualified to do.

The catch to being seen as qualified for the new position is communicating and demonstrating in the cover letter, the resume, and during the interview what lateral experience is being brought to the table and how it’s applicable to the new situation. It’s important for the senior job seeker to emphasize the things they’ve done during their career to contain costs (with demonstrable, verifiable examples) as well as revenue generating activities that resulted in good profit margins. Coupling those strategies with a few subtle comments about where being a team player turned into a team win is helpful.

Another boost is showing talking about universal concepts that allow the learning curve to be short because the only thing to really learn is the company way of doing things. The result of a short learning curve is lowered cost of hire which in turn results in cost savings and increased profits. Now that we’ve covered that logic, the other thing the senior job seeker can do during the interview phase of marketing theirself is point out how well they understand the economics of hiring compared with turning a business profit.

Since we’re still in the New Millennium economic depression (and will be there for at least another year), there are a lot of issues driving what the job seeker wants in terms of salary and benefits. The distance that must be traveled in order to get to the workplace will color whether an offer is accepted, Hiring Manager. Make certain you confer with your Human Resources professional with regard to the salary range and what factors may sweeten the pot in order to capture the honey bee to your hive.

Sometimes it will be cold, hard dollars and cents that will make the difference. Sometimes it’s simply a matter of flex time. Or there may be some non-monetary perks that are important to your candidate that help you sidestep tax obligations while still compensating your employee (yes, you definitely can get them to accept your offer, if you present something that’s tantalizing) with benefits they will enjoy. You just have to think outside the dots.

The point is, those of you who are in the job market and over 50 (years of age) need not resign yourselves to entry-level positions that only offer minimum wage. You have a lot to offer. Even if your last career or position wasn’t in sales or marketing, you need to think of yourself as a particular product and sell your product based on the benefits that make it (you) the best choice compared with all of your competitor brands.

May all your Entrances be through the doors of Success!

All It Takes

As if I don’t have enough to do, I have a series of meetings with government agencies the rest of this week. It seems they’ve stopped doing something very vital (paying me) and it’s causing a compromise in my agenda (paying my bills). Today’s meeting was striking because of the couple of questions that were asked asked. It was as though some angel were listening and watching and giving signals on what the job seeker should be doing during their interviews.

The precipitating questions were, “What is the highest grade you’ve completed in school?” and “Do you have any special education or training?”

In response to the first question, I answered two years of law school. In the back of my mind I was screaming and saying, “It wasn’t a grade as in high school. It was actual advanced studies.” But I just mildly responded without commentary. Commentary wasn’t necessary.

Things blossomed when I answered the second question. The litany went something on the order of:

• Mediation. In response to when, I said 1994.

• Tutoring. Literacy tutoring as well as youth tutoring. I wasn’t asked for the years in which these activities occurred and did not volunteer them.
• Disability accommodations for the visually impaired and through the Arthritis Foundation, learning disabilities, and several others that I can’t remember right now.
• Domestic violence. I’m a domestic violence advocate as well as a legal domestic violence advocate.

By that time, it was difficult to remember whether there was any additional “special training or education.” But that list that rolled off the top of my head begged the question,

“So do I get the job?”

The interviewer and I both laughed. With all of those qualifications, it was more than appropriate to ask. Yet how many job seekers do so? Scant to none is the answer I’d venture. Why so few who will ask for the job after more than qualifying theirselves for it? Perhaps modesty is the answer. Then again, perhaps it’s due to fear. But there’s nothing to fear. Fear of failure? No. With that list, there were only successes and those under one’s control who would sneak to be reunited with you in order to stay with the program and keep growing. There were not litanies of failure.

Job seekers need to rethink their interviewing strategies. Maybe all it takes to get the job is to ask for it.

Job Search Effectiveness

There are so many in the media who are more than enthusiastic about jumping on the “tight labor market” bandwagon. It seems like everyone and his neighbor is harping about how hard it is to find a job and the extraordinary lengths to which people need to go in order to find one.

Are you having trouble finding candidates who are qualified to fill your reqs?

On yesterday’s news, a guy was interviewed. He stands on a street corner everyday at 5:30 AM with a sheaf of his resume under his arm. He passes out his resume until 7:30 AM and then goes elsewhere to do other job search activities. He said he highlights a few things here and there in his resume and relies on the person who’s reading it to do some intuitive, active reading to draw lineals from one experience to another.

There’s a flaw in that thinking. Recruiters who review resumes only have about one minute, at best two, to see the matches for the job req they have on their desk. If it doesn’t jump out at them within that time, it goes into the slush pile until the next time they’re looking for that same generic job title.

The other thing this guy who stands on the street corner does is yet another of the sins he’s committing against himself. In the discussions, we’ve shared about the one-minute impressionand how that boils down into the 15- or 30-second elevator pitch. Apparently the resume distributor has those first three elements of the positive impression down pat.

But when it came to talking about what he wants, he dismally failed. The reporter was adept at asking what he’d done before. We got a vague answer about management here and supervision there but nothing we could sink our teeth into. (Maybe I wanted to go see this guy. I may have something to offer him.)

The reporter pressed on. The next question was what type of job the resume distributor wants. This was the moment. He was asking for the world and the world was at his feet. His answer was, “well, I’ll take whatever is out there at this point in time.” After going through all of the efforts, he had no specific job he is angling to get.

I have to wonder how his resume points anyone to the precise thing they want let alone what he wants. No matter what shape our economy is in, there are certain things that are just basics. They have to be there in order for us to get started on a good job search. The resume distributor has put together a job history on paper and made thousands of copies of it which he diligently gives away to every passerby. But he hasn’t done any type of evaluation of this document nor attempted to tailor it to his search. In fact, he hasn’t even shaped his search!

Resume Distributor had the opportunity of a lifetime dropped into his lap. The reporter for statewide radio news asked him what type of job he wanted. His 10 seconds of fame and opportunity were there. All he could come up with was “I’m open to anything right now.”

Maybe he should have said, “. . . anything related to XYZ industry.”

I’ll bet I could have gone to the Occupational Outlook Handbook and found at least a dozen job titles that are related to this guy’s last job. From there, we could have worked on finding some things that are good matches for his personality and background and started a job search for him.

Since Resume Distributor didn’t give any clues about his background, let’s choose a generic job title and see if we can brainstorm some related job titles.

Accountant
bookkeeper
tax preparer
auditor
financial analyst
financial advisor
IRS agent
inventory taker
stock clerk

It might be fun to try some other job titles and see what alternates come up. At least we’d have some things to think about in case, during these times of change, some categories are simply being phased out.

Where Are the Community Members?

These days, social networking sites are popping up like flies on honey. They’re all over the place. Each has a unique twist, an appeal to a particular demographic, features that create stickiness and viral use. They all promote connectivity. I won’t even attempt to name all of them. But last year Hi5 hit the scene. LiveJournal was actually supposed to be a blogging site but turned social. MySpace and FaceBook had their day in the teen sun.

The youth got us started. Adults started getting interested. We then acquired Eons which is supposed to be appealing to the ancients (aka Baby Boomers). I still think they need to come up with a better name for the site. Ning and Xanga and Xing have exploded.

InfoWorld IT ExecConnect sprang up daring to connect IT pros with one another and enhance their knowledge of tech matters. Ziggs was around but burrowed in deeper to offer professionals a venue for business-related networking and connection. Ryze and Jigsaw keep doing what they do. And we have our long-standing communities that started as discussion boards that are striving to continue as discussion boards without giving up their traditional personalities in order to yield to Web 2.0 attributes.

Because of Web 2.0 features, we can now know in an instant whether our friend or desired contact is online or not. However, none of these sites (except for Ziggs) offer a means of contacting our presently online friend. So this form of voyeurism is a bit puzzling to me. But we know they’re online.

So Many Places, So Many Friends

There’re so many places to network. These are opportunities to meet new people, make new connections, develop new relationships, expand, leverage our people power. Instead, most people are joining a community and then using their address book to bring everyone they’ve known on one site into the new one. It’s good to have some familiar faces about us when we’re new on the block. It get’s lonely when you’re the first. But to how many places are we going to drag our “friends” before we settle down and just get acquainted with who’s there? Why not set up our little island and develop some of the indiginees as friends and then tell our friends from other places (maybe) about these great folks who have some commonalities with them?

The complaint that’s starting to rise from our address book compatriots is that there are so many networks that it’s difficult to keep up with what’s happening and even more difficult to get actual work done. (Imagine that!)

The reaction to people not getting much of their work done, the stuff that they’re required to do in order to earn their salary (that does all those frivolous things like pay bills, buy food and clothing, put the kids through another week of school, get a dumb toy for the pet), is that they’re monitoring their own activity and putting curbs on where they go as well as how long and how often. It isn’t unusual to go to some of the more popular networks and see the conversations have dropped significantly. Where there had been nearly daily conversations running from numerous members, now it isn’t uncommon to find a solitary post from one member in a week, with no responses nor other conversations. Why? Because the attention of people is being torn in too many directions. There simply isn’t enough time. More importantly, the conversation started on one of the Ning networks is very likely the same conversation that’s running on one of the recruiter or HR networks, with all of the same participants raising the same objections, speculations, projections, and answers.

Thinning Things Out

The social networking scene is glutted. It’s over-saturated. What we need is to have a few of these networks stop trying to compete for our attention in nearly the same way and start developing a personality, a brand, that makes the site unique for a particular purpose. Ziggs has succeeded in doing this. They are definitely a business networking site. Ryze is for marketing minds, or rather, for sales minds. The safety factor on that site is that it’s so extremely difficult to figure out how to add someone to your network that you’re nearly completely insulated. ZoomInfo is not so much a networking site as a search site. There are few, if any, toys. I appreciate the fact that they’ve chosen to differentiate themselves in these ways.

And I also appreciate InfoWorld IT ExecConnect because of their unique stance. I just wish they were more sticky and more viral. It’s necessary to log in each time you want to use the site and you nearly need to live in the community in order to know what’s happening. I’ve found communication there is quite limited, and disappointing. But they do offer periodic email notices about select events and white papers. I enjoyed their older sibling, TechRepublic, much more because they encouraged interaction among members and awarded points for answering questions and offering solutions. The articles had great quality and the content was not only interesting but useful in many ways.

In this regard, however, I also appreciate LinkedIn. They started out as a connection hub. They’ve expanded their palate in order to make connecting with others a more professional event and not a wholesale business card swap. (So much more civilized.) They’ve begun encouraging networking and collaborating by nurturing conversations through strategically worded questions and answers. These then help disclose expertise and knowledge in particular areas and ways to substantiate that knowledge. With LinkedIn, they’ve managed to resist the “upload your image” syndrome that many other sites have adopted. I still like this. I like the guessing game and the disclosure when I am browsing on another site. It’s a bit like having a phone friend and then finally meeting them in person at the department store.

Peaks and Valleys

It would be interesting to do a study of both the older web communities and the new ones to see when the greatest number of users site and use the site to comment or post information. The next measure would be to determine the type of contributions members are making. From that data, the site could determine what is more meaningful to its constituency and when their visits are likely to occur. It could be that some of these sites need to be optimized for certain types of content during certain hours of the day and allowed to “rest” at others. During the peak hours would be the best time to offer the more popular services and goods while the basic services stand alone to serve as and when needed.

Are any of you community builders listening?

social networking, virtual communities, Web 2.0, saturation, differentiation,

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