Read Use Your Head to Get Your Foot in the Door Online

Authors: Harvey Mackay

Tags: #Business & Economics, #Careers, #Job Hunting

Use Your Head to Get Your Foot in the Door (28 page)

A couple of career-oriented Web sites were also big helps. Doostang, for example.
 
Let’s stick with Doostang for a minute. This is a career-oriented social network that lists a half million young professional people. The Online Communities Directory says Doostang is “open to alumni and students from globally ranked undergrad and MBA programs.” Do these sites actually work?
I applied for internships listed on those Web sites and actually got interviewed. That surprised me. Doostang is more similar to
Monster.com
. Another Web site is
LinkedIn.com
, which I would say is more of a long-term networking site.
 
How about your general presence on the Web? If people had Googled your name, they would have found entries on you. I did, and learned you were part of the Stanford rowing team and that your favorite place to pull an oar was on the Potomac as you enjoyed historical monuments.
You have to present yourself in different ways. Having yourself pop up from a variety of angles on the Web has become a much bigger deal. In 2008, an interviewer actually e-mailed me background on me he had collected on the Internet. I was happy there were only good things about me online.
 
You seemed to have managed your personal online identity so that it wasn’t frivolous.
I’m not a super-techy person. It’s not that I’ve tried hard to portray myself in a particular way, but I’ve been conscious that people would be looking at my presence on the Internet.
 
You have to be an excellent time manager to immerse yourself in such a way.
No doubt. It pays to be a sharp administrator and understand that follow-through has to be timely. That could be one of the most important things. I imagine someone who is poor at time management is going to have trouble getting a job these days.
Time management is huge. In the past couple of years my network grew so large that I was getting e-mails from lots of people and it was hard to keep up. I got a BlackBerry last fall because e-mails were coming in so quickly. When I was at interviews all day, I needed to be able to check my in-box between appointments.
I made it a big priority to get a job by the end of the year. I scheduled my time around being able to talk to people. When I was in Spain, I spent a lot of time talking to people in different time zones in what was the middle of the night for me.
 
Lastly, you don’t view members of your network in a one-size-fits-all way. You distinguish among people with specialized knowledge versus people who are bridges to other contacts versus pure-and-simple social contacts. You seem to have a clear idea of the roles various people play in your network.
You can’t go into every contact with the same attitude. I became much closer with some people and felt I could be more candid with them.
I also talked with head partners of various consulting firms and CEOs of small companies. Those contacts were more professional. Before every interview and phone call though, I always prepared and wrote out a list of questions. Often, the conversation would just flow from one topic to another. If it didn’t, I was ready with meaningful questions. That’s important when you’re dealing with people who are really busy. They appreciate that you’ve taken the time to map out what you wanted to talk about beforehand.
Mackay’s Moral:
To get to play in the majors, major in what
matters in the modern world.
“I have retraining C.E.O.s.”
© The New Yorker Collection 2009 Tom Cheney from
cartoonbank.com
. All Rights Reserved.
Chapter 54
Shriveling Your Way into a Job
“With more than three job seekers for every opening, more workers are having to take significant pay cuts to find employment,” according to a CNN Money report in 2009. The resulting squeeze may be a tighter fit than snuggling into that black cocktail sheath you wore so winningly in your college days.
Any new employer willing to take you on will be skeptical of your intentions and your integrity.
Be prepared to demonstrate permanent lifestyle cutbacks.
The new job shouldn’t seem like a panic trip to a fallout shelter. Be prepared to show how you and your family are meaningfully reducing monthly expenses to live within a new budget. Perhaps the second car goes. Your stay-at-home spouse is now in the market for part-time work. Private education for the kids may be trimmed back to public alternatives. Yes, even the summer cabin may have to go. A new employer may look for strong reassurance that this is a realistic long-term adjustment.
If you felt out of your depth with your former responsibilities, this may be the time to admit it.
Perhaps you didn’t like the extra weight of management. Maybe you really were aching to a return to those days as a technician or backroom researcher. Companies know that people won’t tolerate ego abuse long-term. If you convince them of a credible, revised self-image, that can be a major plus.
Position the move as a calculated transition strategy.
Establish what your potential employer’s expectations are. Maybe your new job prospect is only looking for a two-year commitment. Perhaps you will use the two years to train evenings and weekends for a new field of work. Or you only need two years more of employment until you can bridge to pension and retirement benefits. Your chances are much better if you and your employer share a plausible common plan.
A shower of companies—including some giants like General Motors and Citigroup—have downsized to survive. People should enjoy the same right that firms do, but they will only earn it by being tough and credible.
Mackay’s Moral:
Sometimes good things come in smaller
packages.
Quickie—What Personnel Types Prize
Retired auto executive and turnaround artist Lee Iacocca once said it was an advantage for a manager to get along with people “because that’s all we’ve got around here.” What was true for Iacocca is even truer for human resources executives. The HR honcho or employment manager—depending on the level of your job—is considered a company’s foremost internal authority on selecting staff. If you don’t cut the mustard with these often soft-spoken but usually hammerhead-tough guard dogs, what do you think your chances are of getting an offer?
Not all HR executives are alike, but most share some common traits.
• When personnel types hear anything that smacks of prejudice, gender bias, or good ol’ boy redneckism, it rivals the sound of a .45 magnum ricocheting in an echo chamber.
• Personnel types at great companies like Medtronic have their eyes on one attribute above all others: talent.
• Human resources administrators have to complete countless files. Administration may not be the heartthrob of your career interests, but it’s in your best interest to radiate respect and appreciation for the need for timely and accurate reporting.
• Companies with poor teamwork behavior are the dysfunctional families of business. The HR folks usually mend the fences, so you’re an asset if you come across as a good neighbor who easily embraces company goals.
• Personnel types often have academic training in psychology, sociology, or industrial relations. For conversation, the
Harvard Business Review
, the C-suite feature on the Bloomberg financial Web site, and the Conference Board Web site are all excellent sources for top-notch human resources articles.
Chapter 55
Fly Under Fetching Colors
In the May-June 2009 edition of the
Conference Board Review
, there’s an article with a dynamite rating somewhere between TNT and mega-blast. The title is “Talent Is Everything” and it’s authored by three senior managers at a Deloitte research subsidiary. Here are four of the power points made:
• “Top executives may be asking many of the right questions, but they often lose sight of what appeals to and keeps hold of talent in the first place. Compensation and benefit packages are surely important, but the opportunity to develop professionally consistently outranks money in surveys of employee satisfaction.”
• “Only by helping employees build their skills and capabilities can companies hope to attract and retain talented workers. They join companies and stay there because they believe they’ll learn faster and better than they would at other employers.”
• “Extreme surfers have used global practice networks to push the limits of their sport. In the 1950s, six-foot waves were considered challenging; today, big-wave surfers routinely and successfully ride sixty-to-seventy-foot waves. Big-wave surfers tend to congregate at specific beaches and breaks to learn their craft, and they connect at competitions and, increasingly, through the Internet. They gain from carefully watching each other and observing new techniques and practices under different wave conditions.”
• “Cisco . . . has invested heavily in an e-learning platform that blows up the notion of centralized training facilities and creates a pull platform for employees from more than forty thousand business partners, all of whom can access analytic tools and information regarding Cisco products on an as-needed basis.”
So what has this to do with me? I’m just a poor working stiff out on my duff, looking for a job.
Companies want to hire people with that special pixie dust called talent
.
Talented people:
• recognize the importance of compensation and benefits but always rank the opportunity for “professional development” as the leading priority in picking their next job;
• join companies and stay there because they believe they’ll learn faster and better than they would at other employers;
• congregate at skill centers where their skill base is going to be demanded and developed the fastest and in the most advanced way;
• want the opportunity to “pull” training that nourishes their hunger for knowledge rather than waiting for some central training office to figure out what program they should be spoon-fed next.
If you want to be regarded as talented, your odds are much better if you maintain—and if you really persuade yourself to believe—that:
• Professional development is your #1 priority.
• You want to join Organization X because it offers the best learning opportunities.
• You regard Organization X as a hot spot for learning the state of the art in the industry, or you are uniquely skilled to bring Organization X into contact with those hot spots so it can benefit from them.
• You intend to spend every spare moment and most of your evening hours devouring the best training programs your industry has to offer, and you hope Organization X will help you access them.
Mackay’s Moral:
The secret of success is really no secret at
all: talent plus hard work.
Quickie—Timing Is Everything
People go around all their lives asking:
What should I buy?
What should I sell?
 
The real questions they should be asking are:
When
should I buy?
When
should I sell?
This principle is true when you buy a house.
It’s true when you buy stocks.
 
It’s also true in managing your career:
When
should I start looking for another job?
When
should I present myself as a candidate when a company
is conducting a search to fill a vacancy?
Chapter 56
Winning the Circuit:
The
Why
Behind Multiple Interviews
 
 
 
Much can be learned by observing how dolphins feed:
• First, dolphins hunt in packs.
• Dolphin groups, or pods, will herd a school of fish into a dense crowd—known as a bait ball—before attacking. If oceans were boxes, this tactic would be the equivalent of driving someone into a corner. Atlantic bottlenose dolphins actually do drive their fish prey into mud banks.
• Dolphins use clicking sounds known as echolocation. This is the sophisticated animal version of sonar.
• Dolphins may eat plenty of fish, but they don’t chew any of them. A dolphin’s teeth are structured to catch darting, oily fish that are then gulped down whole.
Modern companies prize teamwork as never before. They want team players because that’s how companies work. It’s no surprise they interview candidates the way dolphins hunt:
• They do multiple interviews. An interview will be with a person’s prospective boss, generally with some probable peers, and sometimes even with a subordinate. In an intense way, the interviewers will bombard a candidate with a barrage of questions. They will often pose leading questions and dangle enticing open-ended statements just to see where a candidate will go.
• A group always has a better chance of pinning someone down than an individual does. For a candidate, a corner is often an inconsistency. Don’t, for example, explain a hole in your résumé one way to one interviewer and offer a whole different spin to a second. Let’s say you extol team play to the human resources director and boast about being a personal performer to the sales manager. Are they getting Jekyll or Hyde, or both in one, which—as we know—can be far worse?
• Corporate culture is the recognition point of corporations. It’s the same shared values that allow the various managers to communicate with each other about their kind of company, people, decision making, teamwork, competitive spirit, approach to innovation, etc. A candidate needs to know everything about a firm’s culture before an interview takes place.
• Dolphins swallow fish whole, and it’s your job not to be breakfast. In fact, your mission is to persuade your interviewers that you are a smart, spirited dolphin, not a flashy herring, a slippery eel, or a run-of-the-mill cod.

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