IN A COMPETITIVE job market, you cannot rely exclusively on networking or any other single job-search tool. You need to use a number of different job search strategies and integrate networking into each of them.
A man who goes fishing and puts one hook in the water has only one chance of catching any of the millions of fish in the sea, and one fish is the best he can ever do. A man with two hooks in the water has double the chances of catching a fish and has also earned himself the opportunity to catch twice as many fish as the first guy.
The more hooks you have in the water, the better your chances of action. All the job search tools and approaches that we discuss in this section of the book—job banks, resume banks, headhunters, direct research and approach—have proven effective. No one alone is a guaranteed silver bullet, and any of them could deliver the ideal opportunity for you. Your plan of attack should embrace as many of these approaches as is practical in your situation. Intelligently pursuing all useful approaches will generate job leads. You can then leverage your networks for leads on and introductions to the hiring managers for the jobs you discover.
Corporate recruitment has moved online, so your job search must respond to these recruitment preferences.
With tens of thousands of job sites and resume banks out there, you could spend eternity strolling from one to the next. The danger is that this feels like productive work, and because it involves zero rejection it can be highly addictive. An Internet-based job search can seem magical because the media tells you it is magical, but job banks and resume banks are not magical. The Internet increases your ability to gather and disseminate information, but you need to understand, control, and leverage this power, not be controlled by it.
If you’ve been through a job search before, you are groaning at starting all over again, but if you follow this plan of attack, apart from having a successful job search, you will be prepared for future job searches: You will have the mechanisms in place to track interesting opportunities; you will have a database of relevant employers and a wide range of networking contacts; plus you’ll have a database of relevant job banks, resume banks, and headhunters. You will be more proactive in the management of your career and therefore more successful over the long haul.
If you don’t organize properly, you will get buried in an avalanche of information and leads, but it doesn’t have to be this way. Organization begins with setting up a career management base of operations for your professional life; this job search will be its first use, but the long-term success of your personal brand, MeInc, demands an organized place for your ongoing professional development and career management activities.
Online privacy is an issue for everyone today and is especially important during a job search.
I recommend you set up a separate e-mail account devoted exclusively to job search and career management affairs. You need an e-mail address that reflects the professional you, and it’s a good time to retire those addresses like binkypoo@yahoo.com or bigboy@hotmail.com that seemed such a good idea when your professional reputation wasn’t an issue. If you have a family, a separate account can also prevent a rug rat destroying critical data.
It is easy to set up an additional e-mail account, as your ISP almost certainly allows multiple addresses. Create an account name that reveals something about your professional profile, such as systemanalyst@hotmail.com or topaccountant@yahoo.com. Addresses such as these help recipients focus on your communication from the start, because they act as headlines for the reader. Many names like topaccountant@yahoo.com are long gone, and you will be encouraged to accept topaccountant1367@yahoo.com; before you accept this, try some variations: top10accountant@, greataccountant@, smartfinanceguy@, moneycounts@, PandL@, etc.
While you know better than to use your office e-mail for a job search, you should also never download your secure e-mail to your office e-mail box. Why? Companies can and do check Internet usage on your computer. Inappropriate activities can cost you a job.
Most telephone companies now allow you two or three alternate numbers at no extra charge with your basic service, and usually these come with a distinctive ring tone. This means you can have a dedicated and confidential number for all your job search and career management activities.
When you are employed—or if you want to create that impression—and involved in a job search, discretion is paramount. Consider sanitizing your resume by removing all “traceable-to-you” contact information (name, address, phone, fax), and replacing them with your career management e-mail.
By removing a current employer’s name (all recruiters and employers understand the need for this), you can further protect your identity, replacing it with a generalized description of the company and location. For example, if you work for Pepsi-Cola in Chicago, you could describe this as a “Midwestern Beverage Company.”
It usually isn’t necessary to sanitize prior employer names. However, if you have a senior title associated with a particularly visible company, it could be a clue as to who you are. In this case replace it with a more generic but recognizable job title.
It is important for your career that you build and maintain a career management database: Keep folders for target companies and your contacts within them, and the same for your contacts within recruitment firms. You might choose to add a Job Leads folder; into this you can put all the job postings you develop. You can add folders to contain contact info for both your on- and offline networking activities.
Additions to these groups can be made at any time; when you see recruiters who work in your industry, put them in the appropriate folder. You’re creating a vehicle from which you can launch a massive career blitz tomorrow or four years from now. Organize yourself to capture information today that you can use throughout your work life.
We typically dump job postings or help wanted ads that don’t turn into anything or for other reasons aren’t suitable. I don’t want you to do this for two reasons:
Whenever you respond to a job posting, do exactly as requested, but also copy the job posting and all contact information for the company to a folder. You will need this if an interview occurs. Plus, you can cross-reference the job posting with people in your different networks and perhaps come up with a name and a title to which you can send the resume directly, thus doubling your chances of getting an interview.
On any job site it is a good idea to make your requirements broad to begin with; if a particular site drowns you with inappropriate jobs, gradually refine your target. Alternatively, you might not be getting enough responses from a particular site and might want to recast your needs in broader terms.
There are so many thousands of job sites, you could never hope to visit them all, so you have to integrate the job site/resume bank aspect of your search intelligently. You start by identifying which sites are relevant to your search: At www.knockemdead.com you can find an extensive listing of jobs sites for many different professions, and hundreds of other useful job search links on the Internet Resources pages of the website; this would be a useful place to start.
So we’ll assume you have sites to visit from the online resources and get right into what to do when visiting them.
Remember, those jobs you hear about from the job site that aren’t quite right for you are not a waste of your time. They are worth saving in a trading file to share with network contacts, for whom one of those jobs might be a perfect fit.
Most job sites are free for you to use. It’s the employers who are paying to post their job openings and search the resume bank. The job sites work with employers to develop ever more efficient screening tools. Setting up your account and filling out a profile is part of this process: Everything you do online is being tracked by someone for some reason.
Whenever you are filling out a profile or questionnaire on a job site keep the following in mind.
Job sites recognize that many people can do more than one job, and so they frequently allow you to register as many as five separate resumes and/or profiles. It is also a tacit acknowledgment that one “general” resume won’t cut the mustard. And yes, it is yet another benefit of the TJD exercises from Chapter 3 that it allows you to create relevant, intelligent, and deep profiles for each option.
Most job sites break up the registration/profile building/resume uploading process into a number of steps: often twelve or more specific dialogue boxes you have to work your way through. They typically include topics like: Target Job, Career Objective, Competencies, Relocation, Salary, Ideal Job, Education, and more.
These sites often offer examples to help you fill in the dialogue boxes—but remember that behind all this is the screening process.
Copy and paste all the different job titles you collected in the first part of the TJD exercise. Putting in more than one title only serves to increase your visibility.
No one wants to hear about your objectives, and putting them out there is only wasting space. This is where you will put your Performance Profile, weighted in accordance with employer needs as determined by the TJD process.
This dialogue box often has lots of space, so you can end it by inserting a header that says, “The opportunity to use these skills.” Then paste in the entire collection of Core Competencies you identified in Chapter 3.
You are not always limited to one answer—even in the case of check boxes. Always test and verify to see if you can select more than one answer. Never assume you are limited—not even if the directions on the screen indicate that you are. Similarly, you might not want to answer a supposedly mandatory question. Try leaving it blank; you’ll find out if it really was mandatory when you click “submit.”
It is always better to give a range rather than a single figure. I show you how to decide on this salary range in Chapter 22, where we discuss salary negotiation. Even though this box is always marked as mandatory, that isn’t always the case. Sometimes you can leave it blank if you feel this will be helpful to your cause.
No one is interested in your ideal job. The recruiter is searching a database and retrieving possible candidates from a list of keywords that they have put into the system. Copy and paste your Performance Profile and follow it with your Core Competencies. Test to see if there is more space by pasting in your Core Competencies again. No person will actually read the repetition (and if they did, they would regard it as a glitch) but the software will catch and reward you for it by increasing your ranking in the search results.
If they have a separate section for this, paste in your Core Competencies … as often as space will allow.
Education is the most questioned area of any candidacy. Much prone to exaggeration and outright lies, educational claims do get checked. Untruths can cause offers to be withdrawn and jobs to be terminated. Don’t fake it.
If you are involved in the pursuit of any postsecondary education but haven’t yet achieved it, you can use it if you state the school and the degree, and if you can, also state a projected graduation date … because you are enrolled in at least one course toward that degree. That you are pursuing education while you work is a plus in employers’ eyes, and you have a right to show it to them.
When completing questions about relocation, don’t jump to make a selection; not all questions are mandatory; if the question is optional, leave it open. If you do answer, select the broadest option possible. Even if you have the ability to list many preferred locations, don’t. Choose no preference, and you will get the same responses. Plus:
Recruiters often look for candidates who either are working for or have worked for certain companies or competitors. If you work for name companies and products, that is great. You can also drop corporate names and brand names if you have been a vendor or a client.
If suitable jobs are posted to the job site, it probably means that recruiters are also visiting its resume bank. In that case you may well want to upload your resume. Some considerations to bear in mind:
In addition to what we’ve talked about above, you can use job sites in other ways. Go to any job site and search their posted openings by putting in minimal keywords and restrictions. For example, if a medical insurance sales manager goes to www.6figurejobs.com and does a simple keyword search for “insurance,” she may get hundreds of results, and the vast majority will be for jobs that do not interest her. At the same time, those results will reveal recruiters and companies in her profession and target location.
Visit these sites and see if there are suitable job openings posted. Companies all use their own websites as recruitment vehicles and usually have their open jobs posted there. Even if they do not have jobs for someone like you posted, upload your resume anyway. You don’t really know what is going on at that company, and at the very least you will be in their database and therefore on their radar when a need arises.
If a company is looking for anyone even remotely connected with your area of professional expertise, they could also be looking for someone like you. Upload your resume and research the company to approach the appropriate hiring managers directly.
After visiting a company website, add the link to the appropriate folder in your career management database. Identify all the profession-specific employers at all the job sites you visit, then visit each of those employer websites and add them to a potential employers folder; your hit list of potential employers will grow exponentially.
This list of companies will also help your social networking activities. You can use the company names in database searches on the social networking sites to find contacts to approach for leads and introductions at these target companies. Everything in a successful job search is geared toward getting into conversations with people who could make the decision to hire you; as we have noted, typically someone one to three title levels above your own. Always strive to identify and get into a conversation with anyone who holds any of these target titles at any and every company in your area.
Responding to job postings is a big part of most job searches, but you can double, triple, and quadruple your chances of getting interviews from job postings by making direct approaches to the people in a position to hire you.
Whenever you see a job you can do, respond to the posting in the requested way. Also, flag all contact information for the company: website, mailing address, etc. When you learn how to find the names and titles of managers one to three title levels above yours you can approach them directly in three different ways, each one much more likely to produce an interview:
A successful job search is all about getting into conversations with people in a position to hire you, as quickly and as often as possible.
The more frequently you get into conversations with managers whose job titles signify they have the authority to hire you, the faster you will land that new position. Because you have skipped right over needing to be pulled from the resume database, you have sidestepped the recruiter’s evaluation process, and you have the opportunity to make a direct and personal pitch to the actual decision maker.
Your target for direct approach is always someone who can hire you (typically one to three title levels above yours) although any management title offers opportunity for referral. For example, while HR people won’t have the authority to hire you, the pivotal nature of their work makes them aware of all areas within a company that could use your skills.
Getting a resume to someone by name with a personalized pitch gives you a distinct advantage, never more important than when the economy is down or in recovery. At such times your competition is fierce and employers recognize initiative and motivation as differentiating factors in your candidacy.
The hiring titles to target during your job search are those titles most likely to be in a position to hire you. As indicated earlier, these people are usually one to three management titles above you.
Other titles likely to be involved in the selection process include management titles (again, one to three levels above you) in departments that have ongoing interaction with your department, and peers holding similar titles to that which you’re applying for.
Titles most likely to know people involved in the selection process and be able to refer you include management titles one to three levels above you in any department, and internal recruiters and HR professionals.
In fact any name is better than no name, and with the Internet at your fingertips there is endless opportunity to identify the names of people who carry the appropriate hiring titles for your needs.
Sometimes sending a letter and resume to the levels of titles mentioned above can mean upward of half a dozen pitches to a desirable target company, just to assure that all the right people know you are available. For example, let’s say you are a young engineer crazy for a job with Last Chance Electronics. It is well within the bounds of reason that you would submit a cover letter and resume to any or all of the following people, with each letter addressed by name to minimize its chances of going straight into the trash:
Think through all the titles likely to be of use to you, based on the above criteria, and keep them in mind when you go looking for names to attach to them: The more options you have, the more results you will get.
Apart from cross-referencing target companies with the members of your expanded networks to get referrals and introductions, you can also use online search tactics and tools to locate the names of the people you need to reach.
Start with keyword searches on Google.com, Bing.com, Ask.com, and so forth. They are all likely to deliver names, and they’ll all get different results. For example: A professional in pharmaceutical sales looking to make direct contact with hiring authorities for a job at a specific company in the Pittsburgh area could try all the following keyword searches and gather new usable information on each search.
Do each of these searches first as a standard Google search then as a Google News search, which looks for mentions of those keywords in media coverage:
Pharmaceutical sales (company name)
Pharmaceutical sales (company name) Pennsylvania
Pharmaceutical sales (company name) Pittsburgh
Pharmaceutical Mgr sales (company name) Pennsylvania
Pharmaceutical Mgr sales (company name) Pittsburgh
Pharmaceutical Director sales (company name) Pennsylvania
Pharmaceutical Director sales (company name) Pittsburgh
Pharmaceutical VP sales (company name) Pennsylvania
Now:
Try these and other keyword phrases and, of course, you will come up with job openings and job sites. But look carefully and drill down beyond those first couple of pages and you will come up with names to go with your target hiring titles. Drill down five or ten pages, and you will come up with people holding these titles at this and other target companies in your area.
When you find news information relevant to the subject of your search, use it as an opener for your letter or e-mail.
You can also:
Online resources are a valuable supplement to the information you get from your personal and professional networks. Apart from reaching out through your networks to people who work or once worked at the target company, sites such as www.vault.com will tell you what past and current employees think about their employer. Other online resources such as www.wetfeet.com will give you great info about your target companies.
As you develop dossiers of information on potential employers, some companies will rise to the top as particularly desirable. This will provide useful background information for interviews and show that you have done your homework. It is also flattering to the interviewer, who sees you’ve paid attention to detail and shown effort and enthusiasm, each of which can end up being deciding factors in a tight job race.
This effort also has long-term value because you are building a personalized reference work of your industry/specialty/profession that will help you throughout your career.
Here are some other online resources for company research and identification of management title holders.
www.virtualpet.com/industry/howto/search.htm
The resources available reach to the horizon. Standard & Poor’s has a database of executives by name and title with contact information called the “Biographical Directory/Database.” Higher-level target hiring titles will be identifiable there or through one of the following options:
www.privateeye.com/?from=p31702&vw=background&Input=Name&piid=44
www.econtentmag.com/Articles/ArticleReader.aspx?ArticleID=4089
www.lambresearch.com/CorpsExecs.htm
As you build these dossiers of information about individual companies, one of those folders will likely be for your dream company. Beware of applying for jobs at these “super desirable” employers right away. I’m sure you’ve heard about the latest Broadway hit, but you may not realize that hit shows don’t start on Broadway; they go through months of rehearsals, previews with selected audiences, and even road trips to try out the show. They do this because they don’t want to screw up when they hit the big time.
The same applies to you. Most likely your resume and interviewing skills (that is, your script and performance skills) are not up to speed at the beginning of your search. The last thing you need to do is fumble an opportunity to join the company of your dreams. It is better to hold off until you know that your resume is the best it can be for the target job on which it is focused. That way, it’s also likely you will have had a couple of interviews, and you won’t swallow your tongue in the first few minutes.
There are few clear-cut lines of demarcation in this area.
These people rarely deal with salary levels under $100,000 per year. They are more interested in obtaining your resume for their database than seeing you unless you match a specific job they are trying to fill for a client.
You may have heard the term headhunter. It is now applied to anyone who provides employment services, but in reality it only fits executive search consultants and a few contingency recruiters.
What type of employment services company is best for you? Well, the answer is simple: the one that will get you the right job offer. The problem is, there are thousands of companies in each of these broad categories. How do you choose between the good, the bad, and the ugly?
Fortunately this is not as difficult as it sounds. A retained executive search firm is not necessarily better or more professional than a contingency search firm, which in turn is not necessarily better or more professional than a regular (EPF) employment agency. Each has its exemplary practitioners and its charlatans. Your goal is to avoid the charlatans and get representation by a company with experience placing professionals like you.
Involvement in professional associations is always a good sign, demonstrating commitment and an enhanced level of competence. In the employment services industry, the high-end employment agencies and contingency search firms—as well as some retained search firms—belong to the National Association of Personnel Services (NAPS), the premier professional organization with state associations in all fifty states. The Association for Executive Search Consultants (AESC) is the premier organization for the retained executive search firms. Career Management Institute (CMI) is the leading association for job search and career management counselors, and NATSS (National Association of Temporary and Staffing Services) is the leading association for temp firms.
Involvement in independent or franchise networks of firms can also be a powerful plus for a job search. For example, an independent headhunter network like NPA (www.npaworldwide.com) has hundreds of member firms around the world. Membership in one of the leading franchise groups, such as Management Recruiters, Robert Half, or Dunhill, likewise gives you access to a coordinated network of employment services professionals. These networks also have extensive training programs that ensure a high-caliber consultant. Franchise networks can be especially helpful if relocation is in your future, as they tend to have powerful symbiotic relationships with other franchise members around the country and the world.
It is prudent to ask whether your contact has professional accreditations. Most of the national professional associations have training programs that offer accreditation, so these can be another sign that the recruiter is a committed and connected member of his profession. The most widely recognized of all these is the CPC designation. CPC (or its international equivalent, CIPC) stands for Certified Personnel Consultant. The CPC and CIPC designations are recognized as a standard of excellence and commitment only achieved after rigorous training and study.
CIPC designation requires that the holder has already achieved CPC designation, and it requires adherence to an international code of ethics as designated by the International Personnel Association (IPA).
Although certification can be applied for after two years of experience in business, even the newest holders of a CPC usually have five years of experience. The average CPC probably has seven to ten years of experience, and with it comes excellent contacts on the corporate side.
Qualified CPCs (like holders of the other accreditations) can also be relied upon to have superior knowledge of the legalities and ethics of the recruitment and hiring process, along with the expertise and tricks of the trade that only come from years of hands-on experience. (I should note that while I hold a CPC accreditation, mine is an honorary one, in recognition of my contributions to the discussion of career management.)
Finally, when dealing with an agency or personnel professional, don’t get intimidated. You are not obligated to sign anything, nor are you obligated to guarantee anyone that you will remain in any employment for any specific length of time.
For a full list of the accreditations relevant to resume, recruitment, and career management professionals, go to www.knockemdead.com on the blog and advice pages.
You can develop mutually beneficial relationships with employment professionals in all these categories. Their livelihood depends on the people they know in the professional world. Look at how many years of experience they have in employment services and how well they understand your profession. Look for involvement with their professional communities and professional accreditations.
If a recruiter is interested in representing you, expect a detailed analysis of your background, and prepare to be honest. Do not overstate your job duties, accomplishments, or education. If there are employment gaps, explain them. Be circumspect, because an unethical headhunter can create further competition for you when you share information about companies you are talking to. The details of your communications with a company are nobody’s business but your own. If the recruiter asks who you are talking with, say your job search is confidential and you’d like to know whom she plans to speak with. Explain that you will happily tell her if you are already in communication with that company.
Find out what the recruiter expects of you in the relationship, and explain what you expect. Reach commitments you both can live with, and stick with them. If you break those commitments, expect the representation to cease. Keep the recruiter informed about all changes in your status: salary increases, promotions, layoffs, or other offers of employment.
Don’t consider yourself an employment expert. You get a job for yourself every three or four years. These people do it for a living. Ask for their objective input and seek their advice in developing interviewing strategies with their clients.
Such companies fill temporary assignments for employers and provide employment services to companies in all industries and at most professional levels, from unskilled and semiskilled labor (referred to as “light industrial”) to administration, finance, technical, sales, and marketing professionals, as well as doctors, lawyers, and management up to the CEO and COO level.
This latter part of the business is usually referred to as “interim management.” To find companies and associations for the interim management sector, simply key “interim management jobs” into your browser.
Always useful for quickly getting skills up to speed and re-establishing credentials after an absence from the workforce, temp or interim management work can offer a valuable stopgap in a drawn-out job search.
If you are unemployed and need the cash flow for bills, working with a temp company can supply that and expose you to employers in the community that, if you really shine, could ask you to join the staff full-time. This “temp-to-perm” approach is increasingly popular with companies hiring at all levels, as it allows employers to try before they buy.
Here’s some advice when considering interim and temp job agencies and services:
Career services can help recently graduated students, as well as those about to finish school, and an increasing number of these services also try to help alumni. These dedicated professionals are horrendously overworked. So take the time to stand out by having thought through your issues. Stress your willingness to listen to good advice. If you are then seen to act on that advice, when you come back for more you will have earned the department’s respect and will garner yourself more personal attention and guidance.
For students, the best way into corporate America is through internships and on-campus recruiters, who can recommend interns and entry-level hires to the company. Career Services is the best way to learn about these recruiters. Treat your entire interaction with Career Services the same way you intend to treat the interview process. Make a real effort with your appearance and professional demeanor.
Campus recruiters go to society and association meetings on campus all year long to see who is engaged, enthusiastic, and professional in their approach to life and career. Most campus recruiters have already chosen the best before they officially arrive on campus for the job fairs. When you take an active part in campus affairs, you will get to know many of these recruiters. Career Services will usually know which recruiters are involved with which campus activities.
You will also start to build a powerful network of peers for your whole career, because these are likely to be the most successful people in the professional world, as they are already engaged and committed.
Job fairs (sometimes called career days) are occasions where actively hiring companies get together, usually under the auspices of a job fair promoter, to attract large numbers of potential employees to a one-day-only event. They aren’t of much value to senior-level professionals.
Job fairs aren’t regular events, except in times of high employment, so they won’t take much of your time, but you should become an active participant when they do occur.
They often charge a small entrance fee, in return for which you get direct access to all the employers and formal presentations by company representatives and local employment experts. When you organize yourself properly, take the right attitude, and work all the opportunities, job fairs make for a great job search opportunity.
When you attend job fairs, go prepared with:
Job fairs are an opportunity for networking with other job hunters as well. If you know other people going to a job fair (perhaps you are a member of a job search support group), you should go with a collaborative effort in mind. You may be in different professions, but if you all make the effort to speak to other attendees and to collect business cards from other attendees regardless of their profession, you can help one another find more leads.
If you are attending solo, still make the effort to network with other attendees. Ask them to meet you later in the day to exchange leads that might be mutually beneficial. I have witnessed this in action at job fairs and seen a group of twenty who were total strangers in the morning happily exchanging handfuls of business cards at the end of the day.
It’s easy to walk into a job fair and be drawn like a moth to the biggest and most attractive booths, sponsored by the largest and most established companies, and ignore the lesser ones. Remember that the majority of the jobs in America are generated by companies with less than 500 employees. You should visit every booth, not just the ones with the flashing lights and all the moths fluttering around.
Attend with specific objectives in mind:
In addition to the exhibit hall, there will probably be formal group presentations by employers. As all speakers love feedback, move in when the crush of presenter groupies has died down. You will have more knowledge of the company and the time to customize your pitch to the needs and interests of the employer, plus you’ll get more time and closer attention.
Job fairs provide the best opportunities for administrative, professional, and technical people. However, this doesn’t mean middle management and executive staff can’t gather information, collect cards, and generate leads.
On leaving each booth, and at the end of the day, go through your notes while everything is still fresh in your mind. Review each company and what possibilities it may hold for you. Also review what you have learned about industry trends, new skill requirements, marketplace shifts, and long-term staffing needs. Plan to send e-mails and make follow-up calls within the week to everyone with whom you spoke.
When sending e-mails—not just job-related e-mails but all e-mails—it is a professional courtesy to provide a revealing and concise subject line. It should allow the receiver to immediately know who you are and what you want.
The use of a powerful subject line can mean the difference between getting your e-mail opened or not. The intent of a headline in a newspaper is to grab the reader and draw her into the story; in an e-mail, your subject line is your headline: It is what draws the reader into your e-mail and lets her know what she’s going to be reading about. Your subject line needs to be intriguing and professional.
Do not use a subject line that states the obvious, like “Resume” or “Jim Smith’s Resume.” If you are responding to a job posting, the job title and job posting number are necessary, but just a start. Combine this factual information with a little intriguing information, such as:
Financial Analyst #MB450—CPA/MBA/8 yrs exp
Posting 2314—MIT Grad is interested
Job #6745—Top Sales Professional Here
Or if there is no job posting to refer to:
IT Manager—7 yrs IT Consulting
Benefits Consultant—Nonprofit Exp in NY
Referral from Tony Banks—Product Management Job
You can also try longer subject lines, for example:
Your next Reg HR Manager—EEOC, FLSA, & ADA exp
A message in your inbox will typically reveal a maximum of sixty characters (the previous example is just fifty-six characters), and an opened message will show up to 150 characters. To be safe, try to get your headline in the first thirty characters: “Your next Reg HR Manager—EEOC, FLSA.” But feel free to use all the extra headline space for a subhead; for example: “Your next Reg HR Manager—EEOC, FLSA, ADA, OSHA. 10 years exp all HR includes arbitration, campus, executive recruitment, selection, compensation, T&D.”
All the social networking sites have special interest groups that are used by recruiters, and it is becoming increasingly common for job hunters to post pitches about themselves in the discussion groups; this helps them become visible to recruiters, Google searches, and the like. So it is common sense to create an extremely abbreviated resume that captures the professional you with the most important keywords as identified by your TJD exercises.
This same thinking for extended subject lines will apply to your discussion group posts. These aren’t the place for “out-of-the-box thinker” warm-and-fuzzies, but hard-hitting, attention-grabbing statements like this: “HR Management - EEOC, FLSA, ADA, OSHA, T&D, arbitration, campus/executive recruitment, selection, compensation, restructuring.”
Almost all recruitment has now moved to the Internet, as have newspapers, so their role in your job search is not as it was in years gone by; however, there are still uses for a local or national newspaper in your job search campaign.
1. Companies that rely on the local community for both customers and employees still use the newspaper as a major recruitment vehicle.
2. The business news stories can tell you about company success stories, new contracts signed, new products and services introduced, and companies coming to town. They keep you informed and mention movers and shakers by name.
Reminding that person of the article (“I saw you quoted in the Argus last week …”) is flattering and will get you a few minutes of that person’s time to make a pitch, get an interview, or get some leads. (If you want to learn how to get yourself quoted in the press, examine the PR chapters in the e-book Knock ’em Dead Professional Communication available at www.knockemdead.com.)
3. Most local papers have a promotions/movers-and-shakers column. It will tell you about companies and give you the names of people you can contact. If someone gets promoted or leaves one company for another, that leaves a job to be filled.
4. Industry overviews and market development pieces can tip you off to subtle shifts in your local professional marketplace.
There are still some great job leads in newspapers and magazines, and the fact that most people aren’t using them as a job search resource anymore is a good enough reason to at least check them out. A good place to start online is www.onlinenewspapers.com, which helps you identify and link to newspapers all over the world.
Almost all job search activities take time and effort, so use passive marketing tactics whenever you can to increase your professional visibility and credibility.
For some time now, artists and designers have been creating online portfolios for their work as a cost-effective marketing device. If audio/video/graphics/multimedia can help promote the professional you, it might be worth considering an e-resume or e-portfolio for yourself, or have it built for you. This can cost anywhere from $40 up to $3,000.
Think of your web resume as a miniature website (you’ll need to update it to reflect current professional activities); it gives you a constant marketing presence and extends your professional visibility and credibility in a couple of other ways: Increased visibility increases your credibility. For example, recruiters are doing Google searches on people before meeting them as part of the selection screening process. A well-put-together web resume will enhance others’ perception of you before those initial meetings.
For professionals in the creative arts, a web-based resume/e-portfolio allows you to provide a multimedia proof of your achievements and strengths. With a web-based resume on its own site, you have the opportunity to expand beyond the immediate page, offering access to examples and supporting documents in other media.
It will not replace your main resume (which can offer a link to your multimedia site), but it’s a great opportunity to prove you have strong presentation skills—a claim supported by a video or audio clip of a presentation. Including articles, a list of awards, graphics, audio and video clips, blogs, and photos on your site are just some of the options you have to make your multimedia case. Prospective employers, headhunters, clients, and colleagues will get a far more comprehensive picture of the professional you, and because a properly delivered e-portfolio is more engaging (when the content is good), it speaks of a technologically adapted professional.