(This article is part of a book called How to Find a Job, which now is available as an ebook on Kindle, nook, and Smashwords. All of the chapters have been revised, many have been expanded, and the book contains three bonus chapters (including Negotiating) that are not available on this blog.)
After Sending a Resume
Back in the days of job hunting via the newspaper, the follow-up phone call was almost as important as sending someone your resume. At worst, you were able to verify that your resume had landed on the desk of the intended recipient. At best, maybe the hiring manager had a few spare moments to talk to you about the job in question.
Today, things are different.
Back in 1998, when I first started job hunting, I mailed or faxed all of my résumés, because that was what you did. It took time, and a stamp. And as I said in the introduction of this book, the economy was in a very different place.
Obviously, the internet has changed things.
With the economy in such a horrible state, lots of people are applying for jobs. Lots and lots and lots of jobs. And many of them are applying for things they don’t qualify for, simply to fulfill their job application quota for Unemployment Insurance.
In 1998, I might have been one of 50 résumés on the desk of my future employer. Today? I heard through the grapevine that I was one of 400 candidates for some of the jobs I applied for. And this was a common occurrence.
Even if an HR person spends a total of 2 minutes looking at 400 résumés, it will take them more than 13 hours to look at every single one, and stick them into a Yes, No, or Maybe pile. (Though with 400 possible candidates, the Maybe pile may as well be a No pile).
This, of course, presumes that all the HR person is doing all day is looking at résumés. But I’m quite sure they aren’t. They’re doing everything else an HR person does every day. And more than likely, they’ve lost one or two HR compatriots to the economy, which means they’re also doing the work of their former comrades.
If the HR person spends an additional 3 minutes after reading your resume, just pressing a reply button and replacing the “Dear Applicant” at the top of the email to “Dear Bob Smith,” that would pull another 20 hours out of the person’s work week. For one position.
What do all these numbers mean?
First, they serve as a reminder that your resume and cover letter need to be error free. Because if they aren’t, most HR people will rejoice that you saved them the trouble of reading the rest of your resume, and move right along to the next one.
Is that fair? Maybe. Maybe not. But if you blew the chance to put your best foot forward, that’s no one’s fault but your own.
Secondly, it means you need to give a lot more consideration not just when to call, but whether or not you should call in the first place.
Remember when I told you to write down (or otherwise store) all the contact information for every job you apply to? In a lot of cases, the original job ad will say that you are not supposed to call. That is not a deterrent for the easily cowed – it is the clearly-stated wish of the person posting the job.
So if they say don’t call, don’t call.
If a contact name and phone number was offered, feel free to use it after a week has passed. Tell the person you talk to that you wanted to make sure they received your resume. If they say yes, thank them, say goodbye, and hang up the phone. If they offer to talk to you (or let you speak to someone else about the position) go for it.
Much of the time, however, all you will be able to do is wait and see if your phone rings. After sending out something in the neighborhood of 250 résumés, I doubt I got more than 50 letters, emails, or calls telling me that I hadn’t gotten a job.
Once again, you can debate if this is right or fair, but it doesn’t matter either way – at this time, that’s how things are.
After a Phone Interview
So let’s be optimistic, and say that you got yourself a phone interview. Excellent. I’m sure you’ll do great.
But what do you do once it’s over?
In a word? Well, five: Send a thank you note.
Granted, this can be tricky. In one case, I was interviewed by a national company, and from what I could tell, the person doing the interview didn’t work at the location where I’d be working. In another case, the woman I spoke to worked out of her house.
But I sent notes to the companies anyway, addressed to the address that I had on file. Did the notes get to them? Honestly, I’ll never know. But I think it was worth the effort.
After an In-Person Interview
Following up after an in-person interview can take a lot of forms, but the one you need to start with is the thank you note.
And here’s the thing: It has to be a paper and pen, in the mail, using a stamp note. Email doesn’t count.
Why? Email is free, and that devalues it somewhat.
As I’ve said before, I don’t make the rules.
My personal hero on the thank you note front was a guy who kept his thank you notes in his portfolio bag. Quite literally in the parking lot of the place he was interviewing, he’d sit for ten minutes post-interview and write, address, and stamp a note to the person he just spoke to.
He would then drive to the nearest mailbox and send the note on its way.
I thought that was brilliant. Because all too often, it’s easy to put off writing a note. You figure you’ll send one when you get home. But you’re mentally exhausted from the interview. So you figure you’ll send it the next day. Only you have job searching to do, and networking meetings to attend, and then it’s a week later.
By then? Probably too late.
I speak from experience. I once had what I thought was a really great interview. It happened late on a Thursday. I was wiped out afterwards, so I took the afternoon off. Then I spent all day Friday job hunting, and forgot about the notes. I finally sent them on Monday.
On Tuesday, I got a letter that said I didn’t get the job.
Would the note have made a difference? It’s possible. Had I gotten it in the mail on Thursday, my interviewer might have gotten it Friday. That little touch of goodwill might have been enough to push me from not being a candidate to being a candidate.
At best, all I did by sending a late note was make the person who interviewed me feel vaguely guilty.
When I was doing a lot of networking, my fellow network-ees requested that I run a session talking about how to compose thank you notes, since I was the sole writer of the group.
I agreed to do it, then found work and had to drop out of the group before I got to run the session.
In the end, however, I can’t say that I have a ton of advice.
To start with, get a nice, appropriate thank you card. Nothing with cute designs, and nothing left over from a wedding or baby shower. You might be tempted, but don’t do it.
Also, hand write the note. Your handwriting might be terrible (mine is) but it will feel more personal.
Second, keep it short and simple, and address the person you talked to by name:
Dear John Smith,
(You can use a comma here, by the way.)
It truly enjoyed meeting with you about the Chicken Farming position. I was particularly excited to learn about the new feeding methods you’re experimenting with, as I have been following the research on chicken feeding and I feel these new techniques are the next big thing.
If you have any follow-up questions for me, please don’t hesitate to call me at 555-555-5555 or email me at myemailaddress@myemailaddress.com.
Regards,
Frank Smith
To break that down, the note is:
Salutation,
It was (great, wonderful, a pleasure, etc.) speaking with you about the (name of position) position. Statement about portion of the interview that stood out to you in a positive light.
A line about mentions that the interviewer can contact you, and telling them how to do so.
Regards (Sincerely, Looking forward to hearing from you again),
Your Name
What does this note do for you? It reminds the person who performed the interview who you are. If they’re thinking about you, and they do have some kind of immediate question or comment, your contact information is in their hand, and there’s a (slim) chance they’ll contact you immediately to speak to you.
But mostly, it demonstrates that you’re really interested in the position, and everyone appreciates enthusiasm.
Other Uses for Thank You Notes
As I close off this chapter, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that you need to send notes to anyone who helps you along the way when you’re searching for work.
If you go on an informational interview? Send a note.
If a friend sends you a lead, and it turns into an informational interview, or a regular interview, send a note to your friend. They might not require one, but it will encourage them to think of you when they think of other possible opportunities.
And one more thing: Even if you don’t get the job? Send a thank you note. Why? Because it’s a nice thing to do. Because another position might open up in the company, and getting that second note might help the interviewer to remember you, and consider giving you a call.
There is also a possibility that the person who takes the job won’t work out, and you were the second choice. That thank you note might be the thing that gets you a call back.
Showing posts with label How to Find a Job. Show all posts
Showing posts with label How to Find a Job. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Sunday, November 27, 2011
How to Find a Job: Books
(This article is part of a book called How to Find a Job, which now is available as an ebook on Kindle, nook, and Smashwords. All of the chapters have been revised, many have been expanded, and the book contains three bonus chapters (including Negotiating) that are not available on this blog.)
When I started writing this book, my plan was to revisit all the books I read during the time I was job searching. Over the course of my unemployment, I read more than dozen books on things like marketing, and job hunting, and different aspects of the job search.
But here’s the thing: They were all pretty much the same.
So when people asked me for recommendations, I always fell back on the first one I read: “What Color is Your Parachute?”
The author updates it every year, in order to keep it somewhat current with the state of the job market. But the guts of it are pretty much the same year by year. It walks you through a lot of the things I’ve written about here in explicit detail. Thing like figuring out what you need, and knowing what you want to be when you grow up.
If you’re a reasonably fast reader, you can get through the text in a day. But all the self-evaluation will probably take you a week. Maybe two, if you take your time and do it as methodically as possible.
Are there other job books? Yes. But this was the one that made an impression, and I recommend it.
When I started writing this book, my plan was to revisit all the books I read during the time I was job searching. Over the course of my unemployment, I read more than dozen books on things like marketing, and job hunting, and different aspects of the job search.
But here’s the thing: They were all pretty much the same.
So when people asked me for recommendations, I always fell back on the first one I read: “What Color is Your Parachute?”
The author updates it every year, in order to keep it somewhat current with the state of the job market. But the guts of it are pretty much the same year by year. It walks you through a lot of the things I’ve written about here in explicit detail. Thing like figuring out what you need, and knowing what you want to be when you grow up.
If you’re a reasonably fast reader, you can get through the text in a day. But all the self-evaluation will probably take you a week. Maybe two, if you take your time and do it as methodically as possible.
Are there other job books? Yes. But this was the one that made an impression, and I recommend it.
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
How to Find a Job: Gurus
(This article is part of a book called How to Find a Job, which now is available as an ebook on Kindle, nook, and Smashwords. All of the chapters have been revised, many have been expanded, and the book contains three bonus chapters (including Negotiating) that are not available on this blog.)
I’m going to put my general upbeat-ness on hold here for one moment, and confess to something:
I’m not a fan of job coaches.
I’m not saying they’re bad people. I don’t think that’s the case. As an unemployed person, I spoke with a handful of them, and I found them (mostly) to be smart, kind, folks who wanted to help unemployed people find jobs.
But the ones I met tended to fall into three categories:
First, there were the coaches who knew some industries really well, but couldn’t help you with anything that was even vaguely off of their particular beat.
I live in a fairly industrialized area. There are a lot of major corporations around, mostly dealing with manufacturing, and our local gurus know those industries. They know who you need to talk to, and can probably get you a meeting with someone in the companies in question.
Unless you’re me, and you come in saying you’re a writer. Then they sort of nod vaguely, and scratch their heads, and say, “Well, you could try this person. Maybe. Possibly.”
The thing of it is, for a long time I thought I had some other kind of problem, and the coaches were unable or unwilling to tell me. Then I asked my friend, the videographer and director how his search was going. He said, “Well, when I talked to this job coach, he implied it was time to look for a ‘real’ job.”
Me? I got, “You know, there’s your vocation, and then there’s your avocation.”
That’s an actual quote. It was not useful. And kind of hurtful besides.
The second group of people I encountered were best described as arrogant.
One went so far as to say that if you did exactly what he said, you would get a job. It was a brilliant scheme, because if you didn’t do exactly what he told you to do and you didn’t get a job, he got to blame your unemployment on you.
Even if you did do exactly what he said, and it didn’t work, he could claim that you did it wrong.
Stranger still, this particular coach developed a weird kind of cult following around him, who did everything short of claim he could walk on water, even while they wandered around unemployed. It made me feel somewhat uncomfortable to talk to his disciples after a while, as some of them would heap burning coals of blame upon their head for not finding a job, while unemployment skyrocketed to 15%.
Finally, there were gurus who spouted stuff straight out of the books I was reading. Had I been paying for the advice, it might have cost me hundreds of dollars.
One coach was incredibly kind, and really wanted to help. I could tell. He’d been in the business for decades. But when I noted that I had just finished reading “What Color is Your Parachute?” he informed me that he didn’t like the book, because he found it overly simplistic.
I observed that it seemed to mirror his system of job-finding almost exactly. I even went on to cite examples. And that was kind of the end of our conversation.
To conclude, I think a job guru, or career coach, or whatever you want to call someone in that position might help you. But I also know that they usually cost money, and quite a bit of it.
So save yourself some money, and try to exhaust all cheap or free options before pursuing a job coach.
Now, if your company is paying for it, by all means, check it out. It might even be useful to you, if you’ve worked at a more “conventional” type of job. But it costs. And it costs at a time when you don’t have that much money coming in.
I’m going to put my general upbeat-ness on hold here for one moment, and confess to something:
I’m not a fan of job coaches.
I’m not saying they’re bad people. I don’t think that’s the case. As an unemployed person, I spoke with a handful of them, and I found them (mostly) to be smart, kind, folks who wanted to help unemployed people find jobs.
But the ones I met tended to fall into three categories:
First, there were the coaches who knew some industries really well, but couldn’t help you with anything that was even vaguely off of their particular beat.
I live in a fairly industrialized area. There are a lot of major corporations around, mostly dealing with manufacturing, and our local gurus know those industries. They know who you need to talk to, and can probably get you a meeting with someone in the companies in question.
Unless you’re me, and you come in saying you’re a writer. Then they sort of nod vaguely, and scratch their heads, and say, “Well, you could try this person. Maybe. Possibly.”
The thing of it is, for a long time I thought I had some other kind of problem, and the coaches were unable or unwilling to tell me. Then I asked my friend, the videographer and director how his search was going. He said, “Well, when I talked to this job coach, he implied it was time to look for a ‘real’ job.”
Me? I got, “You know, there’s your vocation, and then there’s your avocation.”
That’s an actual quote. It was not useful. And kind of hurtful besides.
The second group of people I encountered were best described as arrogant.
One went so far as to say that if you did exactly what he said, you would get a job. It was a brilliant scheme, because if you didn’t do exactly what he told you to do and you didn’t get a job, he got to blame your unemployment on you.
Even if you did do exactly what he said, and it didn’t work, he could claim that you did it wrong.
Stranger still, this particular coach developed a weird kind of cult following around him, who did everything short of claim he could walk on water, even while they wandered around unemployed. It made me feel somewhat uncomfortable to talk to his disciples after a while, as some of them would heap burning coals of blame upon their head for not finding a job, while unemployment skyrocketed to 15%.
Finally, there were gurus who spouted stuff straight out of the books I was reading. Had I been paying for the advice, it might have cost me hundreds of dollars.
One coach was incredibly kind, and really wanted to help. I could tell. He’d been in the business for decades. But when I noted that I had just finished reading “What Color is Your Parachute?” he informed me that he didn’t like the book, because he found it overly simplistic.
I observed that it seemed to mirror his system of job-finding almost exactly. I even went on to cite examples. And that was kind of the end of our conversation.
To conclude, I think a job guru, or career coach, or whatever you want to call someone in that position might help you. But I also know that they usually cost money, and quite a bit of it.
So save yourself some money, and try to exhaust all cheap or free options before pursuing a job coach.
Now, if your company is paying for it, by all means, check it out. It might even be useful to you, if you’ve worked at a more “conventional” type of job. But it costs. And it costs at a time when you don’t have that much money coming in.
Monday, November 21, 2011
How to Find a Job: Networking
(This article is part of a book called How to Find a Job, which now is available as an ebook on Kindle, nook, and Smashwords. All of the chapters have been revised, many have been expanded, and the book contains three bonus chapters (including Negotiating) that are not available on this blog.)
The piece of advice people offered up from the moment I lost my job until the moment I found full-time work was “It’s not what you know, it’s WHO you know.”
Of course, this is one of those cliché statements you get to hear all the time whether you’re looking for work or not. On the other hand, the reason it’s a cliché is because it’s true a significant percentage of the time.
The word “networking,” to me, always felt kind of painful and awkward. It doesn’t sound fun. It sounds like you’re going to be meeting a stranger (or a group of strangers) and you’re going to spend a painful 20 minutes or an hour or two hours sizing each other up.
It doesn’t sound enjoyable.
The thing of it is, networking does not have to be painful, and you can approach it in any number of different ways, depending on your comfort level.
For ease of use, let’s break these down by:
Large Networking Groups
Small Networking Groups
One-on-One/The Informational Interview
Large Networking Groups
I don’t know how common these were before the economy of the United States took a nose dive, but over the last three or four years more and more networking groups have sprouted up. At the Department of Workforce Development. At various churches. At universities and technical schools.
Really, pretty much anywhere a large group of people can be hosted.
And depending on who is running them, large networking meetings can be very useful. I attended a couple that brought in speakers on topics ranging from Unemployment Insurance to Résumé Tips to How to Handle Informational Interviews.
Additionally, when your world is sort of upside-down and you don’t have anywhere to be most days, networking meetings can be a huge boon. Much like a workplace, they give you somewhere to go that has familiar faces and people working towards a common goal. And as you get to know the people better, you’ll find yourself rooting for all your new friends to find work.
And they, in turn, will root for you. In fact, it’s kind of great when someone gets a job, just to see the spontaneous outpouring of emotion through cheers and clapping.
There are other opportunities in such meetings. People can practice interview questions. They can speed-network, which gives them a chance a practice their elevator speeches (more on that in a moment) and telling people what they do.
From what I can see, there are only two major drawbacks to networking groups.
First, there are rarely, if ever, people who can hire you there. You’re usually in there with ten or twenty or forty people who are in the exact same boat you are: Unemployed. And while the people there with you will hopefully remember you week by week, and maybe even find places you can apply, or people you can apply to, I saw few, if any, of these opportunities pan out for people.
I networked with two amazing groups of people. They were kind, generous, and seeing them every week was a great boon to me. But only a handful of them ever suggested job leads to me, and most of them were unfortunately not really in my scope of abilities.
The two or three jobs that would have been a good fit for me, I found on the same web sites they were hunting for work on.
By the same token, even after meeting with a lot of these people for months, my understanding of their abilities was also thin on the ground, and I’m about 99% sure that the job leads I passed on to my cohorts were things their either weren’t qualified for, or had already applied for.
The second problem I would occasionally see were people who were so focused on networking meetings that it was like they forgot they were supposed to be looking for work.
I almost fell into that trap once myself. I got a phone call about an interview, but it was going to fall directly in the path of my weekly networking meeting. I was just about to say that I would rather interview on a different day, when I realized that I was going to the networking meetings in hope of landing an interview, NOT the other way around.
I quickly cleared my throat and accepted the interview.
One woman took the networking thing to such a strange extreme that I started to suspect, and still suspect, that she had a major financial crisis that needed to be resolved. She told the entire group that she went to three networking meetings every week, was thinking about a fourth, and that she made it a goal to set up five informational interviews a week.
We were all blown away by this, until her story started to unravel. She was asked if she was meeting with people at different companies in the area. No, she was meeting with people who were already in her networking meetings, on a one-to-one basis.
To learn about an industry she was wanted to get into? No, she would meet with just about anybody, regardless of their industry. Of course, she was meeting with unemployed people, so, it wasn’t like they could hire her. Or, for the most part, recommend her for jobs within their company.
This was the same woman who eventually got a job, packed up her family, and moved them to another city two hours away. To take a job at a company that had, by her own admission, downsized 50% of its staff. Her job? To teach them how to do more with less.
I was not surprised when she was looking for work about a year later.
The point is, don’t let networking become your “job.” The pay is terrible, and the benefits are worse.
Small Networking Groups
I consider smaller networking groups to be an offshoot of larger networking groups, and I’ve only heard of them being used for one thing:
Accountability.
The fact of the matter is, it’s easy to get into a routine of not doing much, when you have no job. You get up a little later. Maybe look around on the internet for jobs, then get distracted and start watching YouTube instead.
Then it’s noon, so you make a sandwich and watch some TV. Then more TV. Then just one more episode. Then most of the day is shot, so you check the internet for job postings one last time and figure you’ll do some hardcore job searching the next day.
And so on.
While I rarely heard great things coming out of large networking groups, I did see a lot of good coming from small groups. Two different sets of four people broke out from a large networking group I was in and started meeting once a week.
Each week they set goals. How many phone calls to make? How many résumés to send? How many informational interviews to set up?
And if they didn’t do something, they had to admit it to someone.
Lo and behold, in the first group, all four of them found jobs within three months.
In the second group, I only learned the fate of one of the members – he had a job within four months.
Granted, it might have been a coincidence, or the economy might have been moving for the first time in about 18 months (One of the groups of four started with a different fourth member, who got a job about two weeks into their new group-hood). But saying you’re going to do something, and actually having to stick to it can be two different things.
So consider a small group.
The Informational Interview
While I adore the book “What Color is Your Parachute?” it did have one idea in it that always struck me as sort of bizarre, and a bit like magical thinking.
I’m going to paraphrase heavily what I read in the book, and I encourage you to read the book yourself and make up your own mind, but here’s how it came across to me.
Let’s say you want to get into chicken farming, but you don’t know anyone in the industry. You completely canvas the all your local chicken farms, and determine they don’t have any available positions.
So you use your contacts, and try to talk to one of the higher-ups about having an “Informational Interview.”
What’s that? Well, it’s a chance to have a 20-minute conversation about “the industry.”
And what is supposed to happen is this:
You’ve already done a bunch of research on chicken farming, so you come in (but only for 20 minutes, never for more or less time) and you ask pointed, serious questions.
The most important one is, “What are the challenges of your industry, and what do you think would fix them?”
This is key, because as the person in a hiring position starts talking about what’s wrong, and what it would take to fix it, you start providing answers.
And because you seem to have answers, the person across the desk hires you to fix said problems.
That’s right. You get a job that wasn’t there before because you have magically created a position that’s going to solve all the problems of this particular company. Even though you’ve only been in the building for about 20 minutes.
In all my time as a job seeker, I never once met anyone this tactic worked for.
I did have one friend who went to the president of the company where he already worked, and told the president that the company needed someone to do X, Y, and Z. The president, in turn, said, “Would you like to do this?” And then my friend had a new position.
But that’s the only time I’ve heard of something like that happening personally.
This is not to say that an informational meeting can’t be useful in and of itself. I knew a lot of people who were trying to figure out what they wanted to do next, and started meeting with people in an effort to learn about different industries in the area.
In some cases, I heard stories of résumés changing hands, and being walked to various offices, or brought to the top of a particular pile.
But beyond that? Nothing.
I suspect that an informational interview is works best if you recognize, up front, that information is all you’re going to get out of it.
To use a metaphor: In a lot of ways, an in interview is like a blind date. You know something about each other going in, you suspect you have similar interests, and you go in hoping that everything will be awesome and you’ll come out of the date with some kind of relationship.
You should not treat an informational interview the same way you treat an interview/date. Yes, there is a remote possibility you’ll come out the meeting with more than information, but going in with that hope will more than likely make the meeting awkward.
So don’t think of it as an informational interview. Think of it as an informational meeting.
Go in expecting to learn about an industry. Go in well-prepared. Ask questions you really want answers to. Take notes. Then, after 20 minutes it up, say thanks and leave. Then send a nice thank you note.
Could more come of it? Yes. But don’t get your hopes up. Be nice, be confident, and be well-informed.
But don’t expect a call.
The Elevator Speech
Another thing I heard constantly being emphasized during my networking gatherings was The Elevator Speech.
Here’s how it is supposed to work:
You get into an elevator with someone, and you have 30 seconds to tell them who you are, what you do, and what kind of job you’d like to have. This, in turn, allows the other person in the elevator to say, “Hey, I know a company that needs you!”
In reality, I rarely, if ever, used my elevator speech outside of networking meetings. This had to do with the general awkwardness of the speech itself. There’s no good way to launch into an explanation of what you do unless you warn the person you’re talking to that you’re ABOUT to tear into your elevator speech.
All that said, people liked my speech a great deal, so here it is. I’ll follow it with a breakdown of how to make your own, and the rules that go with making one.
“Hi, my name is Joshua Patterson, and I am a writer who enjoys using words to educate and entertain. In the course of my career, I’ve been a technical writer and a communications specialist, and I’ve done everything from journalism, to PR, to newsletter creation, to writing industrial videos, and I have worked as a professional blogger and social media expert. I also have written three independent films which have been in 29 film festival all over the world and won 13 awards. I’m looking for a position that will allow me to use both my writing and my creative abilities.”
Talking at a reasonable pace, if you read that out loud it comes out to roughly 28 seconds.
Talk fast and you can get it to just above twenty. Talk slowly to a large crowd, and it’s maybe 31 or 32.
All that said, I knew people who spent days (so they said) trying to get their elevator speech down to 30 seconds, and many of them struggled to get it under a minute.
I worked on mine for maybe an hour, and I never wrote the whole thing down until I typed it just now. Generally, if knew I was about to give the speech, I’d jot down a couple of “what I’ve done” notes that were dependant on who I was talking to.
When people asked me how I did it, here’s what I told them.
To begin, get your name and your job title into that first sentence. That’s what people will cling to. It helps if you sound enthusiastic.
In my case, I said: “Hi, my name is Joshua Patterson, and I am a writer who enjoys using words to educate and entertain.”
So if you used to sell cars, you could say: “Hi, my name is John Smith, and I enjoy helping people find the vehicle that suits them to a T.”
Or: “I enjoy helping people find the perfect vehicle at the right price.”
Or: “I love handing people the keys to their new car.”
If you’re up for a CEO position, you could say something like, “I love taking all the great things about a company and making them even better.”
Or, “I enjoy solving problems.”
The point is, your opening line may be all someone clings to, so make sure your name and what you do (or used to do, or want to do) are in it..
After that, list a few accomplishments, and a tiny sliver of what you’ve done. The thing that bogged almost everyone I met down was their inability to let the majority of their accomplishments and abilities go by the wayside in the interest of brevity. Some of them would talk for three or four minutes straight, detailing every accomplishment, major and minor, and the subtle nuances of their last three or four positions.
There’s no time. You have 30 seconds, so make it count.
To go back to the sales idea, “I spent the last four years selling XYZ cars, and the six years before that selling ZYX cars. I was the seller of the month on two different occasions, and almost half of my customers loved working with me so much they would request me as their salesman when it was time to trade their car in for a new model.”
The point is, you need to tell people what you do (quickly) and demonstrate that you’re good at it (quickly). If you’ve got 20 years of selling behind you, and you’ve been in a few different businesses, it could look like this. “I’ve been in the sales game for 20 years now, and I love learning about new products and how they can help my customers. I’ve sold chickens, chicken feed, cars, trucks, canned goods, dogs, and airplanes, and the thing I’ve learned about customers is all of them love a good product at a good price.”
Ultimately, what you say has to be positive, but also the truth. Too much hyperbole will sound fake (I love selling more than I love eating!) and will probably turn off your listener.
Finally, close with what kind of position you want. “In my next job, I hope to get up every morning with a great product to sell, so I can spend my days telling customers what a great company I work for.”
That’s probably too much. “I’m looking for a new sales challenge,” is good.
The point is, you want to get your speech down to 30 seconds, you want a good opener with your name and job title, and you want a good closer that tells people what you’re looking for.
At one of my networking meetings, the woman running things had a single line that might help as well: “I like to help who do what by how?”
In my case, it would be, “I like to help companies educate and entertain their customers using the power of words.”
Again, “the power of” is probably over the top. But if you’re trying to pump up the enthusiasm factor, it could work.
There’s one more component to the elevator speech that I don’t think I ever heard emphasized enough, and that is: Conviction.
So many people I saw giving their speech said it like they weren’t sure what kind of job they had, or wanted. Their sentences went “up” at the end, like they were asking questions.
Many of them read directly off a sheet of paper, and often they sounded like they were reading it for the first time.
That won’t work.
Ultimately, your elevator speech must be something you can rattle off at any moment. And it shouldn’t be hard. When you had a job, you told people what you did all the time. Now you just need to do the same thing, but add, “At my last position” in front of it, and “In the future, I’d love to do more of the same (or something different!).
That’s all there is to it.
The piece of advice people offered up from the moment I lost my job until the moment I found full-time work was “It’s not what you know, it’s WHO you know.”
Of course, this is one of those cliché statements you get to hear all the time whether you’re looking for work or not. On the other hand, the reason it’s a cliché is because it’s true a significant percentage of the time.
The word “networking,” to me, always felt kind of painful and awkward. It doesn’t sound fun. It sounds like you’re going to be meeting a stranger (or a group of strangers) and you’re going to spend a painful 20 minutes or an hour or two hours sizing each other up.
It doesn’t sound enjoyable.
The thing of it is, networking does not have to be painful, and you can approach it in any number of different ways, depending on your comfort level.
For ease of use, let’s break these down by:
Large Networking Groups
Small Networking Groups
One-on-One/The Informational Interview
Large Networking Groups
I don’t know how common these were before the economy of the United States took a nose dive, but over the last three or four years more and more networking groups have sprouted up. At the Department of Workforce Development. At various churches. At universities and technical schools.
Really, pretty much anywhere a large group of people can be hosted.
And depending on who is running them, large networking meetings can be very useful. I attended a couple that brought in speakers on topics ranging from Unemployment Insurance to Résumé Tips to How to Handle Informational Interviews.
Additionally, when your world is sort of upside-down and you don’t have anywhere to be most days, networking meetings can be a huge boon. Much like a workplace, they give you somewhere to go that has familiar faces and people working towards a common goal. And as you get to know the people better, you’ll find yourself rooting for all your new friends to find work.
And they, in turn, will root for you. In fact, it’s kind of great when someone gets a job, just to see the spontaneous outpouring of emotion through cheers and clapping.
There are other opportunities in such meetings. People can practice interview questions. They can speed-network, which gives them a chance a practice their elevator speeches (more on that in a moment) and telling people what they do.
From what I can see, there are only two major drawbacks to networking groups.
First, there are rarely, if ever, people who can hire you there. You’re usually in there with ten or twenty or forty people who are in the exact same boat you are: Unemployed. And while the people there with you will hopefully remember you week by week, and maybe even find places you can apply, or people you can apply to, I saw few, if any, of these opportunities pan out for people.
I networked with two amazing groups of people. They were kind, generous, and seeing them every week was a great boon to me. But only a handful of them ever suggested job leads to me, and most of them were unfortunately not really in my scope of abilities.
The two or three jobs that would have been a good fit for me, I found on the same web sites they were hunting for work on.
By the same token, even after meeting with a lot of these people for months, my understanding of their abilities was also thin on the ground, and I’m about 99% sure that the job leads I passed on to my cohorts were things their either weren’t qualified for, or had already applied for.
The second problem I would occasionally see were people who were so focused on networking meetings that it was like they forgot they were supposed to be looking for work.
I almost fell into that trap once myself. I got a phone call about an interview, but it was going to fall directly in the path of my weekly networking meeting. I was just about to say that I would rather interview on a different day, when I realized that I was going to the networking meetings in hope of landing an interview, NOT the other way around.
I quickly cleared my throat and accepted the interview.
One woman took the networking thing to such a strange extreme that I started to suspect, and still suspect, that she had a major financial crisis that needed to be resolved. She told the entire group that she went to three networking meetings every week, was thinking about a fourth, and that she made it a goal to set up five informational interviews a week.
We were all blown away by this, until her story started to unravel. She was asked if she was meeting with people at different companies in the area. No, she was meeting with people who were already in her networking meetings, on a one-to-one basis.
To learn about an industry she was wanted to get into? No, she would meet with just about anybody, regardless of their industry. Of course, she was meeting with unemployed people, so, it wasn’t like they could hire her. Or, for the most part, recommend her for jobs within their company.
This was the same woman who eventually got a job, packed up her family, and moved them to another city two hours away. To take a job at a company that had, by her own admission, downsized 50% of its staff. Her job? To teach them how to do more with less.
I was not surprised when she was looking for work about a year later.
The point is, don’t let networking become your “job.” The pay is terrible, and the benefits are worse.
Small Networking Groups
I consider smaller networking groups to be an offshoot of larger networking groups, and I’ve only heard of them being used for one thing:
Accountability.
The fact of the matter is, it’s easy to get into a routine of not doing much, when you have no job. You get up a little later. Maybe look around on the internet for jobs, then get distracted and start watching YouTube instead.
Then it’s noon, so you make a sandwich and watch some TV. Then more TV. Then just one more episode. Then most of the day is shot, so you check the internet for job postings one last time and figure you’ll do some hardcore job searching the next day.
And so on.
While I rarely heard great things coming out of large networking groups, I did see a lot of good coming from small groups. Two different sets of four people broke out from a large networking group I was in and started meeting once a week.
Each week they set goals. How many phone calls to make? How many résumés to send? How many informational interviews to set up?
And if they didn’t do something, they had to admit it to someone.
Lo and behold, in the first group, all four of them found jobs within three months.
In the second group, I only learned the fate of one of the members – he had a job within four months.
Granted, it might have been a coincidence, or the economy might have been moving for the first time in about 18 months (One of the groups of four started with a different fourth member, who got a job about two weeks into their new group-hood). But saying you’re going to do something, and actually having to stick to it can be two different things.
So consider a small group.
The Informational Interview
While I adore the book “What Color is Your Parachute?” it did have one idea in it that always struck me as sort of bizarre, and a bit like magical thinking.
I’m going to paraphrase heavily what I read in the book, and I encourage you to read the book yourself and make up your own mind, but here’s how it came across to me.
Let’s say you want to get into chicken farming, but you don’t know anyone in the industry. You completely canvas the all your local chicken farms, and determine they don’t have any available positions.
So you use your contacts, and try to talk to one of the higher-ups about having an “Informational Interview.”
What’s that? Well, it’s a chance to have a 20-minute conversation about “the industry.”
And what is supposed to happen is this:
You’ve already done a bunch of research on chicken farming, so you come in (but only for 20 minutes, never for more or less time) and you ask pointed, serious questions.
The most important one is, “What are the challenges of your industry, and what do you think would fix them?”
This is key, because as the person in a hiring position starts talking about what’s wrong, and what it would take to fix it, you start providing answers.
And because you seem to have answers, the person across the desk hires you to fix said problems.
That’s right. You get a job that wasn’t there before because you have magically created a position that’s going to solve all the problems of this particular company. Even though you’ve only been in the building for about 20 minutes.
In all my time as a job seeker, I never once met anyone this tactic worked for.
I did have one friend who went to the president of the company where he already worked, and told the president that the company needed someone to do X, Y, and Z. The president, in turn, said, “Would you like to do this?” And then my friend had a new position.
But that’s the only time I’ve heard of something like that happening personally.
This is not to say that an informational meeting can’t be useful in and of itself. I knew a lot of people who were trying to figure out what they wanted to do next, and started meeting with people in an effort to learn about different industries in the area.
In some cases, I heard stories of résumés changing hands, and being walked to various offices, or brought to the top of a particular pile.
But beyond that? Nothing.
I suspect that an informational interview is works best if you recognize, up front, that information is all you’re going to get out of it.
To use a metaphor: In a lot of ways, an in interview is like a blind date. You know something about each other going in, you suspect you have similar interests, and you go in hoping that everything will be awesome and you’ll come out of the date with some kind of relationship.
You should not treat an informational interview the same way you treat an interview/date. Yes, there is a remote possibility you’ll come out the meeting with more than information, but going in with that hope will more than likely make the meeting awkward.
So don’t think of it as an informational interview. Think of it as an informational meeting.
Go in expecting to learn about an industry. Go in well-prepared. Ask questions you really want answers to. Take notes. Then, after 20 minutes it up, say thanks and leave. Then send a nice thank you note.
Could more come of it? Yes. But don’t get your hopes up. Be nice, be confident, and be well-informed.
But don’t expect a call.
The Elevator Speech
Another thing I heard constantly being emphasized during my networking gatherings was The Elevator Speech.
Here’s how it is supposed to work:
You get into an elevator with someone, and you have 30 seconds to tell them who you are, what you do, and what kind of job you’d like to have. This, in turn, allows the other person in the elevator to say, “Hey, I know a company that needs you!”
In reality, I rarely, if ever, used my elevator speech outside of networking meetings. This had to do with the general awkwardness of the speech itself. There’s no good way to launch into an explanation of what you do unless you warn the person you’re talking to that you’re ABOUT to tear into your elevator speech.
All that said, people liked my speech a great deal, so here it is. I’ll follow it with a breakdown of how to make your own, and the rules that go with making one.
“Hi, my name is Joshua Patterson, and I am a writer who enjoys using words to educate and entertain. In the course of my career, I’ve been a technical writer and a communications specialist, and I’ve done everything from journalism, to PR, to newsletter creation, to writing industrial videos, and I have worked as a professional blogger and social media expert. I also have written three independent films which have been in 29 film festival all over the world and won 13 awards. I’m looking for a position that will allow me to use both my writing and my creative abilities.”
Talking at a reasonable pace, if you read that out loud it comes out to roughly 28 seconds.
Talk fast and you can get it to just above twenty. Talk slowly to a large crowd, and it’s maybe 31 or 32.
All that said, I knew people who spent days (so they said) trying to get their elevator speech down to 30 seconds, and many of them struggled to get it under a minute.
I worked on mine for maybe an hour, and I never wrote the whole thing down until I typed it just now. Generally, if knew I was about to give the speech, I’d jot down a couple of “what I’ve done” notes that were dependant on who I was talking to.
When people asked me how I did it, here’s what I told them.
To begin, get your name and your job title into that first sentence. That’s what people will cling to. It helps if you sound enthusiastic.
In my case, I said: “Hi, my name is Joshua Patterson, and I am a writer who enjoys using words to educate and entertain.”
So if you used to sell cars, you could say: “Hi, my name is John Smith, and I enjoy helping people find the vehicle that suits them to a T.”
Or: “I enjoy helping people find the perfect vehicle at the right price.”
Or: “I love handing people the keys to their new car.”
If you’re up for a CEO position, you could say something like, “I love taking all the great things about a company and making them even better.”
Or, “I enjoy solving problems.”
The point is, your opening line may be all someone clings to, so make sure your name and what you do (or used to do, or want to do) are in it..
After that, list a few accomplishments, and a tiny sliver of what you’ve done. The thing that bogged almost everyone I met down was their inability to let the majority of their accomplishments and abilities go by the wayside in the interest of brevity. Some of them would talk for three or four minutes straight, detailing every accomplishment, major and minor, and the subtle nuances of their last three or four positions.
There’s no time. You have 30 seconds, so make it count.
To go back to the sales idea, “I spent the last four years selling XYZ cars, and the six years before that selling ZYX cars. I was the seller of the month on two different occasions, and almost half of my customers loved working with me so much they would request me as their salesman when it was time to trade their car in for a new model.”
The point is, you need to tell people what you do (quickly) and demonstrate that you’re good at it (quickly). If you’ve got 20 years of selling behind you, and you’ve been in a few different businesses, it could look like this. “I’ve been in the sales game for 20 years now, and I love learning about new products and how they can help my customers. I’ve sold chickens, chicken feed, cars, trucks, canned goods, dogs, and airplanes, and the thing I’ve learned about customers is all of them love a good product at a good price.”
Ultimately, what you say has to be positive, but also the truth. Too much hyperbole will sound fake (I love selling more than I love eating!) and will probably turn off your listener.
Finally, close with what kind of position you want. “In my next job, I hope to get up every morning with a great product to sell, so I can spend my days telling customers what a great company I work for.”
That’s probably too much. “I’m looking for a new sales challenge,” is good.
The point is, you want to get your speech down to 30 seconds, you want a good opener with your name and job title, and you want a good closer that tells people what you’re looking for.
At one of my networking meetings, the woman running things had a single line that might help as well: “I like to help who do what by how?”
In my case, it would be, “I like to help companies educate and entertain their customers using the power of words.”
Again, “the power of” is probably over the top. But if you’re trying to pump up the enthusiasm factor, it could work.
There’s one more component to the elevator speech that I don’t think I ever heard emphasized enough, and that is: Conviction.
So many people I saw giving their speech said it like they weren’t sure what kind of job they had, or wanted. Their sentences went “up” at the end, like they were asking questions.
Many of them read directly off a sheet of paper, and often they sounded like they were reading it for the first time.
That won’t work.
Ultimately, your elevator speech must be something you can rattle off at any moment. And it shouldn’t be hard. When you had a job, you told people what you did all the time. Now you just need to do the same thing, but add, “At my last position” in front of it, and “In the future, I’d love to do more of the same (or something different!).
That’s all there is to it.
Friday, November 18, 2011
How to Find a Job: The Care and Feeding of Business Cards
(This article is part of a book called How to Find a Job, which now is available as an ebook on Kindle, nook, and Smashwords. All of the chapters have been revised, many have been expanded, and the book contains three bonus chapters (including Negotiating) that are not available on this blog.)
I’m not sure that business cards warrant their own chapter, but when I was networking, there were many, many, many conversations about them.
Much like résumés, everyone has their own take, and this is mine: I have never seen a business card help anyone to land a job.
When I lost my job, I was told that I needed a business card. So I went to an office supply store, and bought some of those print-and-separate cards, and then I was immediately stuck: Because what was I going to put on them?
My name? Yes. Address, phone number, email address? Yes.
Job title?
I didn’t have one, because I didn’t have a job. And if I put something too specific (Technical Writer, Communications Specialist) it would pigeonhole me, and I didn’t want that. Writing is a very broad skill that can be applied in many ways, and I can literally rattle off six or seven things I’ve done without giving it a second thoughts.
(Prove it? Sure! Journalism, PR, technical writing, professional blogger and social media writing, newsletters, award-winning independent films, novels. I didn’t even have to glance at my bio or résumé to list those off. But more on that later.)
In the end, I put on all my contact information, and the card read: Writer.
Over the course of two years, I gave away more than a hundred of those cars, to people I was networking with, to people interviewing me, to friends who requested a few to have on hand in case someone was looking for somebody with my kind of skills.
I cannot confirm that any of those cards were ever used to contact me.
I, in turn, accepted nearly a hundred business cards into my keeping. And I think I referenced exactly two of them, when trying to connect with networking friends on LinkedIn. After that, I never gave the cards a second thought.
Even as I write this book, those cards are sitting around, collecting dust.
However, I’m sure you remember the message of the essay that kicked off this book: Try Everything.
And it’s for that reason and that reason alone that I think you should have a business card.
The fact of the matter is, there is always a chance that someone will get their hands on your card, and hand it to the right guy at the right moment, and you’ll get a phone call.
And one phone call, even in this economy, can be all it takes to go from not working to working.
So let’s talk about business cards.
Should you print them yourself? Or get them made professionally?
During my years of my networking, I saw a myriad of business card types. One woman didn’t have any cards on hand when she was headed to her first networking meetings, so she printed them on paper and cut them up.
I wouldn’t recommend that.
One wanted a little more color on her cards, so after she printed them up in black and white she colored in the logo with a highlighter.
That’s also something I wouldn’t do.
Beyond that, I’d say that it’s up to you.
If you Google for a few minutes you can find a half-dozen places that will print and ship you professional business cards. The catch is, it’s like ordering checks: The fancier your cards get, the more expensive they are. On the flip side, the more you order, the cheaper they are.
I’ve even seen some places that offer you the first 50 cards or so for free, minus the cost of shipping.
That’s not a bad deal, though the templates are usually very limited (meaning your card won’t stand out from others printed for free) and it usually means you’re signing up for a mailing list. One company offered free cards, but then immediately set you up to auto-order more cards in the future, unless you turned that function off.
Watch out for scams like that.
As for making them yourself, I will say that people are going to be able to tell. Even though the cheapest printer you can find today prints at a very good quality, and the cards are made to separate, and do it well, people will know you made them at home.
If you think people you give them to are going to care, well, don’t make your own. My assumption was always that people knew I was looking for work and that I couldn’t necessarily afford to spend a lot of money on something as frivolous as a business card. And I’m not sure I’d want to work for someone who didn’t think someone was worth hiring if they didn’t have a “real” card.
But that’s just me.
(One caveat: If you decide to become a consultant? Print “real” business cards. Because then you’re not a job-seeker, you’re a small business owner.)
Other thoughts: I did see a few people take their old business cards from their last job, cross off their old phone number and email address, and write their current one in. To give to a friend? Sure. To give to someone who you’re hoping will hire you? No.
What do you put down as your job title? Good question. For some people (sales, HR) I would think it would be simple enough to list yourself as Blank Professional (Sales Professional, HR Professional). For a CEO? I have no idea. Then again, if you’re at a CEO level, chances are you won’t need a card, as standing out from a pack of 5 applicants is easier than standing out from a pack of 100 applicants.
Should you put other things on your business card? You can. I wouldn’t recommend your Facebook or Twitter accounts unless you use them strictly for business purposes. I would recommend that you include the link to your LinkedIn account, as it effectively turns your business card into a link to your résumé.
And if you do decide to make a business card, do yourself a favor and keep five or ten of them with you at all times. Keep them in your wallet, purse, or bag. Because they won’t be of any use to you in a pile in your house.
I’m not sure that business cards warrant their own chapter, but when I was networking, there were many, many, many conversations about them.
Much like résumés, everyone has their own take, and this is mine: I have never seen a business card help anyone to land a job.
When I lost my job, I was told that I needed a business card. So I went to an office supply store, and bought some of those print-and-separate cards, and then I was immediately stuck: Because what was I going to put on them?
My name? Yes. Address, phone number, email address? Yes.
Job title?
I didn’t have one, because I didn’t have a job. And if I put something too specific (Technical Writer, Communications Specialist) it would pigeonhole me, and I didn’t want that. Writing is a very broad skill that can be applied in many ways, and I can literally rattle off six or seven things I’ve done without giving it a second thoughts.
(Prove it? Sure! Journalism, PR, technical writing, professional blogger and social media writing, newsletters, award-winning independent films, novels. I didn’t even have to glance at my bio or résumé to list those off. But more on that later.)
In the end, I put on all my contact information, and the card read: Writer.
Over the course of two years, I gave away more than a hundred of those cars, to people I was networking with, to people interviewing me, to friends who requested a few to have on hand in case someone was looking for somebody with my kind of skills.
I cannot confirm that any of those cards were ever used to contact me.
I, in turn, accepted nearly a hundred business cards into my keeping. And I think I referenced exactly two of them, when trying to connect with networking friends on LinkedIn. After that, I never gave the cards a second thought.
Even as I write this book, those cards are sitting around, collecting dust.
However, I’m sure you remember the message of the essay that kicked off this book: Try Everything.
And it’s for that reason and that reason alone that I think you should have a business card.
The fact of the matter is, there is always a chance that someone will get their hands on your card, and hand it to the right guy at the right moment, and you’ll get a phone call.
And one phone call, even in this economy, can be all it takes to go from not working to working.
So let’s talk about business cards.
Should you print them yourself? Or get them made professionally?
During my years of my networking, I saw a myriad of business card types. One woman didn’t have any cards on hand when she was headed to her first networking meetings, so she printed them on paper and cut them up.
I wouldn’t recommend that.
One wanted a little more color on her cards, so after she printed them up in black and white she colored in the logo with a highlighter.
That’s also something I wouldn’t do.
Beyond that, I’d say that it’s up to you.
If you Google for a few minutes you can find a half-dozen places that will print and ship you professional business cards. The catch is, it’s like ordering checks: The fancier your cards get, the more expensive they are. On the flip side, the more you order, the cheaper they are.
I’ve even seen some places that offer you the first 50 cards or so for free, minus the cost of shipping.
That’s not a bad deal, though the templates are usually very limited (meaning your card won’t stand out from others printed for free) and it usually means you’re signing up for a mailing list. One company offered free cards, but then immediately set you up to auto-order more cards in the future, unless you turned that function off.
Watch out for scams like that.
As for making them yourself, I will say that people are going to be able to tell. Even though the cheapest printer you can find today prints at a very good quality, and the cards are made to separate, and do it well, people will know you made them at home.
If you think people you give them to are going to care, well, don’t make your own. My assumption was always that people knew I was looking for work and that I couldn’t necessarily afford to spend a lot of money on something as frivolous as a business card. And I’m not sure I’d want to work for someone who didn’t think someone was worth hiring if they didn’t have a “real” card.
But that’s just me.
(One caveat: If you decide to become a consultant? Print “real” business cards. Because then you’re not a job-seeker, you’re a small business owner.)
Other thoughts: I did see a few people take their old business cards from their last job, cross off their old phone number and email address, and write their current one in. To give to a friend? Sure. To give to someone who you’re hoping will hire you? No.
What do you put down as your job title? Good question. For some people (sales, HR) I would think it would be simple enough to list yourself as Blank Professional (Sales Professional, HR Professional). For a CEO? I have no idea. Then again, if you’re at a CEO level, chances are you won’t need a card, as standing out from a pack of 5 applicants is easier than standing out from a pack of 100 applicants.
Should you put other things on your business card? You can. I wouldn’t recommend your Facebook or Twitter accounts unless you use them strictly for business purposes. I would recommend that you include the link to your LinkedIn account, as it effectively turns your business card into a link to your résumé.
And if you do decide to make a business card, do yourself a favor and keep five or ten of them with you at all times. Keep them in your wallet, purse, or bag. Because they won’t be of any use to you in a pile in your house.
Thursday, November 17, 2011
How to Find a Job: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Blogs
(This article is part of a book called How to Find a Job, which now is available as an ebook on Kindle, nook, and Smashwords. All of the chapters have been revised, many have been expanded, and the book contains three bonus chapters (including Negotiating) that are not available on this blog.)
Hooray for good old social media, which has so taken over the world. If you’re under 40.
The fact is, if you reject the idea of social media wholeheartedly, you will probably still be able to find a job. In fact, it’s possible to dive so far into social media that you can end up wasting time tweaking your social media sites and checking for new job postings every ten minutes on Twitter.
But as I said in my opening essay, the best way to get a job is to try everything. And while you might not be a big fan of social media, it can be a very quick way to let a lot of people know you’re looking for work.
When I was job-hunting, I teamed with a friend to offer a presentation on social media basics. I provided a handout, which I’ll include at the end of this chapter. It contained, among other things, links on setting up social media sites, including blogs.
Blogs
When I started writing this chapter, I gave it a title starting with the most useful job-getting social media option, and concluding with the least useful option.
I put blogs last. Why?
Well, I don’t know how much a blog will really help your job search. It can be fun to write about your progress on one, if you enjoy the writing process. And it can also be a place you can go to write short postings/articles about your area of expertise. The friend I co-taught the social media class with was a hardcore Linux user, whose blog posts had been repurposed as articles on well-respected Linux web sites.
You can even link your blog on LinkedIn, allowing people who find your profile there to read your thoughts on matters that affect your particular industry.
But if you don’t enjoy writing, or aren’t a particularly good writer, creating an unused blog isn’t going to do anything but suck up your time.
Facebook
As near as I can tell, Facebook is useful for only one thing when it comes to your job search: Letting everyone you’re friends with know that you need a job.
The day I found out I was getting close to being unemployed, I hit my Facebook page the moment I got home and announced I was looking for work.
Here’s what that led to: An outpouring of goodwill that lasted for over two years.
Though most of my friends didn’t know where I might find another position, many were encouraging and kind. Several of them promised to keep an eye out for jobs, and started sending me job postings they thought might work for me.
And when many of my friends starting losing jobs, I would contact them with job postings, suggested web sites, and other information I thought they could use.
And I do know a few friends who used Facebook to tell people they lost jobs, and shortly thereafter were given contact information for other jobs in their industry.
In the end, it can’t hurt to let people know you’re looking for work. But if you’re not a Facebook user, you don’t need to create a profile just to tell people you’re out of work.
Twitter
Amongst the people I networked with, Twitter was far and away the toy almost no one knew how to play with.
Oddly, an essay about a recent video game gave me the words I could best use to describe Twitter.
Saying that you don’t know how to use Twitter is a bit like saying you have a big pile of Legos, but you don’t know what to do with it.
Legos can be used for quite literally any number of things. You can craft an infinite number of toys. You can make art. You can build furniture, if you’ve got a lot of free time and a whole bunch of little plastic blocks.
That’s Twitter.
Twitter is a place you can hang around and chat with your friends. Twitter is a place you can use to advertise your business by posting links to your products. Twitter is a place where you can write a novel and release it a line at a time. (Yes, really, people have done this.)
Or it’s a place where you can set up an account, follow a bunch of industries you’re interested in, and just check in periodically.
I remember very vividly the day I was sitting in a networking meeting and an older gentleman started rattling off the Twitter accounts he was following. All of them were accounts that linked to job postings all over the country. He had found dozens of accounts to follow, and was applying for jobs left, right, and center.
He had found his niche.
As for myself, when I applied for jobs, a lot of the time I could find a Twitter account associated with the business I was applying for. I’d follow it, and roll back through their recent Tweets, and if there was something worth thinking about, I’d jot it down so I could bring it up in my interview, if I ever got one.
So get on Twitter and play. Give it 30 minutes a day. Find your niche. And if you find it’s not for you, go ahead and shut down your account.
LinkedIn
This the one social media site that I will insist you get on, because I know that it works.
If you’re not familiar with LinkedIn, it’s best described as a place you can store your résumé and your rolodex.
In fact, you should have your résumé available when you go to sign up for LinkedIn, as it will ask you for it. This will help you to fill in your profile with very little work.
Once you’ve got your profile up and visible, start connecting with friends on LinkedIn. For that matter, if you meet someone while networking, and they’re willing to link up, do so.
Why?
Because LinkedIn can give you access to information you might not have had before – and it makes it easier for people to find you.
When I was on the job hunt, I updated my LinkedIn profile and made it a point to connect with an many people as possible on LinkedIn. Friends. Acquaintances. People I met at networking meetings. Everyone was fair game.
And that helped get me work.
One day, a friend of a friend went looking for a writer. And when someone goes hunting for something on LinkedIn, the first people they find are friends. And then friends of friends. And then friends of friends of friends.
If I hadn’t connected to my friend on LinkedIn, I wouldn’t have showed up in her friend’s top listings of people who did what I do. I might have been there, but I would have been floating around a lot farther down the list.
Interestingly, this business later chose to contact me, not through LinkedIn, but through Facebook. And suddenly I had work.
Surprisingly, this happened to me twice. Someone was looking for the skills I had, and LinkedIn popped me to the top because I was a friend of a friend.
So if you do nothing else in social media, get your LinkedIn profile online. If someone is going to be searching job sites for people with a certain skill set, that’s the one they will search.
And you want them to find you.
Social Media – Where it is and How to Use It
1. LinkedIn – www.LinkedIn.com
LinkedIn: The Unnoficial Guide: http://www.squidoo.com/linkedin
2. Facebook – www.facebook.com
Newbies Guide to Facebook: http://news.cnet.com/newbies-guide-to-facebook/
3. Twitter – www.twitter.com
Job Sites:
www.twitter.com/microjobs
www.twitter.com/jobangels
www.twitter.com/socialmediajob
www.twitter.com/simplyhired
Newbie’s guide to Twitter: http://news.cnet.com/newbies-guide-to-twitter/
4. Blogging – www.blogger.com (There are others, but this one is free and easy to use).
Starting to Blog – A Beginner’s Guide to Blogging with Blogger: http://www.butterscotch.com/tutorial/Starting-A-Blog
Idiot’s Guide to Blogging: http://www.idiotsguidetoblogging.com/
5. Industry specific social media- http://www.linux.com as an example.
Other options- ezinearticles.com
Yahoo and Google groups
6. Other Links:
Finding a Job Using Social Media – Created by Red Shoes PR: http://www.slideshare.net/JessDennis/finding-a-job-using-social-media
7 Secrets to Getting Your Next Job Using Social Media: http://mashable.com/2009/01/05/job-search-secrets/
Hooray for good old social media, which has so taken over the world. If you’re under 40.
The fact is, if you reject the idea of social media wholeheartedly, you will probably still be able to find a job. In fact, it’s possible to dive so far into social media that you can end up wasting time tweaking your social media sites and checking for new job postings every ten minutes on Twitter.
But as I said in my opening essay, the best way to get a job is to try everything. And while you might not be a big fan of social media, it can be a very quick way to let a lot of people know you’re looking for work.
When I was job-hunting, I teamed with a friend to offer a presentation on social media basics. I provided a handout, which I’ll include at the end of this chapter. It contained, among other things, links on setting up social media sites, including blogs.
Blogs
When I started writing this chapter, I gave it a title starting with the most useful job-getting social media option, and concluding with the least useful option.
I put blogs last. Why?
Well, I don’t know how much a blog will really help your job search. It can be fun to write about your progress on one, if you enjoy the writing process. And it can also be a place you can go to write short postings/articles about your area of expertise. The friend I co-taught the social media class with was a hardcore Linux user, whose blog posts had been repurposed as articles on well-respected Linux web sites.
You can even link your blog on LinkedIn, allowing people who find your profile there to read your thoughts on matters that affect your particular industry.
But if you don’t enjoy writing, or aren’t a particularly good writer, creating an unused blog isn’t going to do anything but suck up your time.
As near as I can tell, Facebook is useful for only one thing when it comes to your job search: Letting everyone you’re friends with know that you need a job.
The day I found out I was getting close to being unemployed, I hit my Facebook page the moment I got home and announced I was looking for work.
Here’s what that led to: An outpouring of goodwill that lasted for over two years.
Though most of my friends didn’t know where I might find another position, many were encouraging and kind. Several of them promised to keep an eye out for jobs, and started sending me job postings they thought might work for me.
And when many of my friends starting losing jobs, I would contact them with job postings, suggested web sites, and other information I thought they could use.
And I do know a few friends who used Facebook to tell people they lost jobs, and shortly thereafter were given contact information for other jobs in their industry.
In the end, it can’t hurt to let people know you’re looking for work. But if you’re not a Facebook user, you don’t need to create a profile just to tell people you’re out of work.
Amongst the people I networked with, Twitter was far and away the toy almost no one knew how to play with.
Oddly, an essay about a recent video game gave me the words I could best use to describe Twitter.
Saying that you don’t know how to use Twitter is a bit like saying you have a big pile of Legos, but you don’t know what to do with it.
Legos can be used for quite literally any number of things. You can craft an infinite number of toys. You can make art. You can build furniture, if you’ve got a lot of free time and a whole bunch of little plastic blocks.
That’s Twitter.
Twitter is a place you can hang around and chat with your friends. Twitter is a place you can use to advertise your business by posting links to your products. Twitter is a place where you can write a novel and release it a line at a time. (Yes, really, people have done this.)
Or it’s a place where you can set up an account, follow a bunch of industries you’re interested in, and just check in periodically.
I remember very vividly the day I was sitting in a networking meeting and an older gentleman started rattling off the Twitter accounts he was following. All of them were accounts that linked to job postings all over the country. He had found dozens of accounts to follow, and was applying for jobs left, right, and center.
He had found his niche.
As for myself, when I applied for jobs, a lot of the time I could find a Twitter account associated with the business I was applying for. I’d follow it, and roll back through their recent Tweets, and if there was something worth thinking about, I’d jot it down so I could bring it up in my interview, if I ever got one.
So get on Twitter and play. Give it 30 minutes a day. Find your niche. And if you find it’s not for you, go ahead and shut down your account.
This the one social media site that I will insist you get on, because I know that it works.
If you’re not familiar with LinkedIn, it’s best described as a place you can store your résumé and your rolodex.
In fact, you should have your résumé available when you go to sign up for LinkedIn, as it will ask you for it. This will help you to fill in your profile with very little work.
Once you’ve got your profile up and visible, start connecting with friends on LinkedIn. For that matter, if you meet someone while networking, and they’re willing to link up, do so.
Why?
Because LinkedIn can give you access to information you might not have had before – and it makes it easier for people to find you.
When I was on the job hunt, I updated my LinkedIn profile and made it a point to connect with an many people as possible on LinkedIn. Friends. Acquaintances. People I met at networking meetings. Everyone was fair game.
And that helped get me work.
One day, a friend of a friend went looking for a writer. And when someone goes hunting for something on LinkedIn, the first people they find are friends. And then friends of friends. And then friends of friends of friends.
If I hadn’t connected to my friend on LinkedIn, I wouldn’t have showed up in her friend’s top listings of people who did what I do. I might have been there, but I would have been floating around a lot farther down the list.
Interestingly, this business later chose to contact me, not through LinkedIn, but through Facebook. And suddenly I had work.
Surprisingly, this happened to me twice. Someone was looking for the skills I had, and LinkedIn popped me to the top because I was a friend of a friend.
So if you do nothing else in social media, get your LinkedIn profile online. If someone is going to be searching job sites for people with a certain skill set, that’s the one they will search.
And you want them to find you.
Social Media – Where it is and How to Use It
1. LinkedIn – www.LinkedIn.com
LinkedIn: The Unnoficial Guide: http://www.squidoo.com/linkedin
2. Facebook – www.facebook.com
Newbies Guide to Facebook: http://news.cnet.com/newbies-guide-to-facebook/
3. Twitter – www.twitter.com
Job Sites:
www.twitter.com/microjobs
www.twitter.com/jobangels
www.twitter.com/socialmediajob
www.twitter.com/simplyhired
Newbie’s guide to Twitter: http://news.cnet.com/newbies-guide-to-twitter/
4. Blogging – www.blogger.com (There are others, but this one is free and easy to use).
Starting to Blog – A Beginner’s Guide to Blogging with Blogger: http://www.butterscotch.com/tutorial/Starting-A-Blog
Idiot’s Guide to Blogging: http://www.idiotsguidetoblogging.com/
5. Industry specific social media- http://www.linux.com as an example.
Other options- ezinearticles.com
Yahoo and Google groups
6. Other Links:
Finding a Job Using Social Media – Created by Red Shoes PR: http://www.slideshare.net/JessDennis/finding-a-job-using-social-media
7 Secrets to Getting Your Next Job Using Social Media: http://mashable.com/2009/01/05/job-search-secrets/
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
How to Find a Job: Web Sites
(This article is part of a book called How to Find a Job, which now is available as an ebook on Kindle, nook, and Smashwords. All of the chapters have been revised, many have been expanded, and the book contains three bonus chapters (including Negotiating) that are not available on this blog.)
Perhaps fifteen years ago, everyone knew where to go to look for a job: The Newspaper.
It was a simple process. You needed a job, so you went to the local newspaper stand, or bookstore, and you bought a paper, and you looked at the want ads.
If you were being extra-frugal, you would wait until Sunday, when the classified section was full-to-bursting with people looking for people.
Obviously, things have changed. Everyone knows that today you have to look up job listings on the Internet.
The problem is, most people don’t know where to start.
So here you go:
Start and end at Indeed.com.
Why there? Well, long story short, it’s a web site that goes to all the other web sites and looks for job posts with criteria that you select. So instead of going to fifteen web sites and punching in the information you want, you can go to one.
There are other advantages to this site as well. To start with, you can upload your résumé there.
I will say, however, that I feel uploading a résumé at almost any job site is next to worthless. In today’s economy, a simple post on a web site will get a 200 or 400 résumé response. People who have 400 résumés to sort through will not be hunting web sites looking for additional résumés. They’ll go straight to LinkedIn if they go anywhere at all. More on that later.
Other things you can do at Indeed include performing searches using key words. So go there and put in Chicken Farmer, or just Farmer, and see what you come up with.
You can restrict your hunt by zip code, which is nice, and you can also restrict the distance you’re willing to go for work. So if you’re okay with driving 50 miles, punch that in. But if you need to be near your day care, save yourself some time and narrow your field.
And here’s one tip I always gave to friends looking for work that I have never seen anywhere else: Try putting in your zip code without any other search terms and seeing what comes up.
At first, this can be somewhat awkward, as you’ll see a ton of jobs you aren’t qualified for or have no interest in.
But what I discovered from doing this over time was that there are a lot of jobs that might use my skills, but which didn’t come up on regular searches.
For example, a couple of local businesses were looking for people to give tours of their facilities. They wanted workers with an educational background, because the majority of the tours were meant for local schools and day cares.
I thought that sounded like a great way to spend my working day, so I applied. Didn’t get the job, but I applied.
I found one job with an odd title that was partly writing, partly helping university students, and partly basic office work. It never came up in any of my more pointed searches, it wasn’t a job I would have thought to look for, but it sounded like it could be fun and it came with some amazing benefits.
Of course, I didn’t get that job either.
The point is, searching only by zip code will increase the time you spend job hunting each day, but it’s time very well spent.
A few other thoughts on job hunting online:
If a job sounds too good to be true, it probably is. One particular job site (Job.com) kept offering up postings of low-end work (filing, for example) at 15 or 20 dollars an hour. If you find yourself at an unfamiliar job site, go to Google and put the name of the job site and the word scam into your search. More than likely, the site will come up on a listing somewhere.
For ease of use, when I performed my job search I didn’t just click on each posting and start reading it then and there. I right-clicked (I use a PC) on each job posting I thought would interest me and opened them in a new tab. Once I was done perusing the job headlines, I’d go from tab to tab and look at the jobs more closely.
Eventually, I learned that even job postings have a tier of sorts. If I was reading a posting and wasn’t sure if I was interested or not, I’d save it to my Favorites (I had folders in my web browser for “Applied” and “Job Possibilities”) and I’d come back to it later.
Once a week, I’d go through the Maybe pile and take another look. Sometimes, I realized that the job really wasn’t for me. Other times, I’d wonder why I hadn’t immediately applied.
But either way, it was worth having a pile of things to consider.
Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t remind you to follow all the rules of paper-and-ink when it comes to applying for jobs online.
Because the Internet can be such a casual place, it’s easy to forget to put your most businesslike foot forward.
For example, some job sites will ask you if you WANT to include a cover letter. Unless the person posting the job tells you that they don’t want one, you need to create a cover letter and send it along. At worst, they won’t look at it. At best, they’ll be impressed you did so, when so many others didn’t. There is almost literally no way sending that letter can hurt you.
Along those same lines, read through the job posting very carefully and make sure you give them everything they’re asking for. If the posting says No Attachments, then copy and paste your résumé into your email. If they ask for references, send them.
And be sure to note if there is any special information on the job posting that might be useful, and either write it down or put it into some kind of computerized database. Useful information includes the address of the workplace, phone numbers, the name of the person you contacted, and whether or not you’re allowed to contact the job poster via phone.
Perhaps fifteen years ago, everyone knew where to go to look for a job: The Newspaper.
It was a simple process. You needed a job, so you went to the local newspaper stand, or bookstore, and you bought a paper, and you looked at the want ads.
If you were being extra-frugal, you would wait until Sunday, when the classified section was full-to-bursting with people looking for people.
Obviously, things have changed. Everyone knows that today you have to look up job listings on the Internet.
The problem is, most people don’t know where to start.
So here you go:
Start and end at Indeed.com.
Why there? Well, long story short, it’s a web site that goes to all the other web sites and looks for job posts with criteria that you select. So instead of going to fifteen web sites and punching in the information you want, you can go to one.
There are other advantages to this site as well. To start with, you can upload your résumé there.
I will say, however, that I feel uploading a résumé at almost any job site is next to worthless. In today’s economy, a simple post on a web site will get a 200 or 400 résumé response. People who have 400 résumés to sort through will not be hunting web sites looking for additional résumés. They’ll go straight to LinkedIn if they go anywhere at all. More on that later.
Other things you can do at Indeed include performing searches using key words. So go there and put in Chicken Farmer, or just Farmer, and see what you come up with.
You can restrict your hunt by zip code, which is nice, and you can also restrict the distance you’re willing to go for work. So if you’re okay with driving 50 miles, punch that in. But if you need to be near your day care, save yourself some time and narrow your field.
And here’s one tip I always gave to friends looking for work that I have never seen anywhere else: Try putting in your zip code without any other search terms and seeing what comes up.
At first, this can be somewhat awkward, as you’ll see a ton of jobs you aren’t qualified for or have no interest in.
But what I discovered from doing this over time was that there are a lot of jobs that might use my skills, but which didn’t come up on regular searches.
For example, a couple of local businesses were looking for people to give tours of their facilities. They wanted workers with an educational background, because the majority of the tours were meant for local schools and day cares.
I thought that sounded like a great way to spend my working day, so I applied. Didn’t get the job, but I applied.
I found one job with an odd title that was partly writing, partly helping university students, and partly basic office work. It never came up in any of my more pointed searches, it wasn’t a job I would have thought to look for, but it sounded like it could be fun and it came with some amazing benefits.
Of course, I didn’t get that job either.
The point is, searching only by zip code will increase the time you spend job hunting each day, but it’s time very well spent.
A few other thoughts on job hunting online:
If a job sounds too good to be true, it probably is. One particular job site (Job.com) kept offering up postings of low-end work (filing, for example) at 15 or 20 dollars an hour. If you find yourself at an unfamiliar job site, go to Google and put the name of the job site and the word scam into your search. More than likely, the site will come up on a listing somewhere.
For ease of use, when I performed my job search I didn’t just click on each posting and start reading it then and there. I right-clicked (I use a PC) on each job posting I thought would interest me and opened them in a new tab. Once I was done perusing the job headlines, I’d go from tab to tab and look at the jobs more closely.
Eventually, I learned that even job postings have a tier of sorts. If I was reading a posting and wasn’t sure if I was interested or not, I’d save it to my Favorites (I had folders in my web browser for “Applied” and “Job Possibilities”) and I’d come back to it later.
Once a week, I’d go through the Maybe pile and take another look. Sometimes, I realized that the job really wasn’t for me. Other times, I’d wonder why I hadn’t immediately applied.
But either way, it was worth having a pile of things to consider.
Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t remind you to follow all the rules of paper-and-ink when it comes to applying for jobs online.
Because the Internet can be such a casual place, it’s easy to forget to put your most businesslike foot forward.
For example, some job sites will ask you if you WANT to include a cover letter. Unless the person posting the job tells you that they don’t want one, you need to create a cover letter and send it along. At worst, they won’t look at it. At best, they’ll be impressed you did so, when so many others didn’t. There is almost literally no way sending that letter can hurt you.
Along those same lines, read through the job posting very carefully and make sure you give them everything they’re asking for. If the posting says No Attachments, then copy and paste your résumé into your email. If they ask for references, send them.
And be sure to note if there is any special information on the job posting that might be useful, and either write it down or put it into some kind of computerized database. Useful information includes the address of the workplace, phone numbers, the name of the person you contacted, and whether or not you’re allowed to contact the job poster via phone.
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
How to Find a Job: Some Thoughts on Cover Letters
(This article is part of a book called How to Find a Job, which now is available as an ebook on Kindle, nook, and Smashwords. All of the chapters have been revised, many have been expanded, and the book contains three bonus chapters (including Negotiating) that are not available on this blog.)
One of the things that surprised me when I went to networking meetings was how controversial cover letters were.
A few people I encountered didn’t see the point in including them at all, since most of the jobs they applied for online didn’t specifically say that they wanted one, and a few didn’t include a place for you to upload one.
But guess what? You need a cover letter. Period. This may change in ten years, but for now, keep writing them and keep including them with your résumé.
On the opposite end of the spectrum were the tweakers – the guys who would spend hours perfecting each cover letter in a myriad of ways in hopes that the HR person who glanced at it would see all the key words they had included in the job ad, and immediately run to the hiring manager screaming, “This is the guy!”
As far as I know, that never happened to anyone either.
I had my own problems with cover letters.
When I was hunting for a job, I found the cover letter to be the most frustrating aspect of the search. After all, my résumé was generally set in stone. But each cover letter often required special alterations. The name of the job. The person I was sending it to.
Here’s what I do know:
About half the time, no one reads your cover letter. I once spent an hour perfecting a letter, only to discover that the computer system I was uploading it to didn’t have a spot for me to append a cover letter.
To get around this, some people put their cover letter in the body of their résumé, which would probably work very well. However, I’d recommend that you first save your résumé as a new file name so you don’t end up sending other jobs your résumé and an inappropriate cover letter.
In other words, if you’re going to add your cover letter to your résumé save the file as something like Your Full Name Résumé and Cover Letter Company Name.doc.
Another thing that surprised me was just how afraid so many people were of writing cover letters because they felt that they “weren’t writers.”
Now, granted, I am a writer, and I was a little lost as well. But I had a fancy-pants company helping me write my letter, so I had less to worry about.
In the end, however, I used a format I pulled up off the Internet. And it got me interviews, and both my job search company and the Department of Workforce Development gave me a thumbs-up on it.
So if you’re struggling with it, here’s the letter format than worked for me.
1. First, let’s talk salutation.
Your letter should always begin with the name of the person who posted the advertisement. It needs to read
Dear John Smith:
And because it’s business letter format, there should be a colon after Smith, and not a comma. Why? I don’t know. I learned the rule when I was in high school, and it appears whoever is in charge of these things says business = colon.
If the job posting doesn’t tell you who to contact, it might be worth your time to call the company and get the name of the person who will be vetting the job. At the very least, write:
Dear Hiring Manager:
But try to avoid that if at all possible.
2. Next, your first paragraph.
What you need here is to tell them what job you’re applying for.
I am writing to you in reference to the Chicken Farmer position.
Or:
I am sending you my résumé in reference to your search for a Chicken Farmer.
That’s it. That’s your opening paragraph.
3. Tell them a bunch of reasons you’d be great for the job.
I think this paragraph was the portion of the résumé that caused people to pull their hair out. Because most books, articles, and pros on the job search tell you that this is where you brag about your qualifications.
But, of course, you don’t want to brag too much.
And also, you want to make sure you’re using the same terminology that the job posting uses, because if they called it a Chicken Farmer, and you were a Chicken Worker, and they had the same job responsibilities but different titles, well, then they’ll probably throw away your résumé without even looking at it, even though you’re perfect for the job, right? Right?
Frankly, fear does funny things to people.
Relax.
Remember, this paragraph isn’t going to be what gets you the job. All it has to do is get people to read your résumé. A single paragraph can’t take the place of a one or two page document. So don’t try.
What you want to do is hit a few highlights. So if you were a Chicken Farmer in the past, your paragraph should look something like this:
I have two years of experience as a Chicken Farmer. My duties included sorting chicks, interacting with customers both chicken and human, feed purchasing, and general chicken maintenance. In 2010 received the Poultry in Motion award on two separate occasions, for being chicken farmer of the month.
Now, if you haven’t ever been a Chicken Farmer, things get a little more tricky. What you need to do is convince the person reading your letter that you have work skills that are similar, or ones that would translate to the new job.
Let’s pretend you were an auto mechanic. You might try:
While I am new to the field of Chicken Farming, I feel my years as an auto mechanic will serve me well in the posted position. As a mechanic, I interacted a great deal with customers, and was frequently praised for providing explanations they could easily understand. I also have a strong memory for diagnostics – once I knew how to spot a problem with a model of car, I was able to recall it much more easily the second time. And I feel that chicken feed selection and purchasing will be very similar to the selection and purchasing of auto parts.
Now, I can’t say the above paragraph is perfect, but it does demonstrate that you’re a hard worker and that you have valuable skills that might be just what the chicken farm is looking for.
Finally, your letter needs a quick closer:
As requested, my résumé and three references are attached to this email. If you wish to contact me at this position, please call me at 555-555-5555 or email me at emailaddress@emailaddress.com. I look forward to hearing from you.
Regards,
John Smith
1234 Fake Address Way
City, State Zip Code
555-555-5555
emailaddress@emailaddress.com
Are there other tweaks you can make? There are probably hundreds.
Amongst the many people I’ve spoken with, I’ve seen letters that carefully bullet-pointed the things the job posting asked for, and make a list of ways they matched that list. So, for example, they’d write
You Want:
Four years of chicken farming experience. Excellent customer service skills.
I Have:
Six years chicken farming experience.
Two Poultry in Motion awards for customer service.
Did this work? Well, some of those people got jobs. So it must have worked on someone.
Beyond that, here are a few thoughts that might help.
First, always make sure you remember to tweak your cover letter for each individual job. You’ll get a lot of postings that look exactly alike on the surface, but they will almost certainly have one or two different requirements listed. Try to address those requirements as much as you can.
Keep things in a positive light. Your letter shouldn’t say “Though I have no experience in chicken farming.” It should say, “I have experience in this other thing, which is LIKE chicken farming.”
Get someone to read over your letters before you send them. I had my wife read all of my letters, which probably got boring for her over time. But I sent out over 250 cover letters without a typo.
Finally, save all your letters in an easy-to-access folder. And save the document with an easy-to-remember name as well. Don’t call it Cover Letter 3. Call it Big Farm Chicken Farmer Cover Letter. Why? So if you apply for other chicken farming jobs, you can copy and paste the text into a new letter and tweak it, instead of trying to recreate your letter from scratch, or spend hours hunting your email sent items trying to figure out when you sent the letter.
One final story:
In all the time I spent hunting for work, I encountered three sets of people who hadn’t even looked at my résumé when I went into the interview.
One was an emergency situation where a totally different person was given my résumé and asked to meet with me at the last minute.
One person met with me based on the recommendation of another person, and pulled out my résumé just as I was walking in the door.
And the last person? Brought me in based solely on my cover letter. He liked it because, well, it was short, to the point, told him that I had the skills he needed, and most importantly, it was typo-free.
If all you have to do to stand out from the pack is send out a letter with no errors in it, then it’s worth your time to do it right. So please, do it right.
One of the things that surprised me when I went to networking meetings was how controversial cover letters were.
A few people I encountered didn’t see the point in including them at all, since most of the jobs they applied for online didn’t specifically say that they wanted one, and a few didn’t include a place for you to upload one.
But guess what? You need a cover letter. Period. This may change in ten years, but for now, keep writing them and keep including them with your résumé.
On the opposite end of the spectrum were the tweakers – the guys who would spend hours perfecting each cover letter in a myriad of ways in hopes that the HR person who glanced at it would see all the key words they had included in the job ad, and immediately run to the hiring manager screaming, “This is the guy!”
As far as I know, that never happened to anyone either.
I had my own problems with cover letters.
When I was hunting for a job, I found the cover letter to be the most frustrating aspect of the search. After all, my résumé was generally set in stone. But each cover letter often required special alterations. The name of the job. The person I was sending it to.
Here’s what I do know:
About half the time, no one reads your cover letter. I once spent an hour perfecting a letter, only to discover that the computer system I was uploading it to didn’t have a spot for me to append a cover letter.
To get around this, some people put their cover letter in the body of their résumé, which would probably work very well. However, I’d recommend that you first save your résumé as a new file name so you don’t end up sending other jobs your résumé and an inappropriate cover letter.
In other words, if you’re going to add your cover letter to your résumé save the file as something like Your Full Name Résumé and Cover Letter Company Name.doc.
Another thing that surprised me was just how afraid so many people were of writing cover letters because they felt that they “weren’t writers.”
Now, granted, I am a writer, and I was a little lost as well. But I had a fancy-pants company helping me write my letter, so I had less to worry about.
In the end, however, I used a format I pulled up off the Internet. And it got me interviews, and both my job search company and the Department of Workforce Development gave me a thumbs-up on it.
So if you’re struggling with it, here’s the letter format than worked for me.
1. First, let’s talk salutation.
Your letter should always begin with the name of the person who posted the advertisement. It needs to read
Dear John Smith:
And because it’s business letter format, there should be a colon after Smith, and not a comma. Why? I don’t know. I learned the rule when I was in high school, and it appears whoever is in charge of these things says business = colon.
If the job posting doesn’t tell you who to contact, it might be worth your time to call the company and get the name of the person who will be vetting the job. At the very least, write:
Dear Hiring Manager:
But try to avoid that if at all possible.
2. Next, your first paragraph.
What you need here is to tell them what job you’re applying for.
I am writing to you in reference to the Chicken Farmer position.
Or:
I am sending you my résumé in reference to your search for a Chicken Farmer.
That’s it. That’s your opening paragraph.
3. Tell them a bunch of reasons you’d be great for the job.
I think this paragraph was the portion of the résumé that caused people to pull their hair out. Because most books, articles, and pros on the job search tell you that this is where you brag about your qualifications.
But, of course, you don’t want to brag too much.
And also, you want to make sure you’re using the same terminology that the job posting uses, because if they called it a Chicken Farmer, and you were a Chicken Worker, and they had the same job responsibilities but different titles, well, then they’ll probably throw away your résumé without even looking at it, even though you’re perfect for the job, right? Right?
Frankly, fear does funny things to people.
Relax.
Remember, this paragraph isn’t going to be what gets you the job. All it has to do is get people to read your résumé. A single paragraph can’t take the place of a one or two page document. So don’t try.
What you want to do is hit a few highlights. So if you were a Chicken Farmer in the past, your paragraph should look something like this:
I have two years of experience as a Chicken Farmer. My duties included sorting chicks, interacting with customers both chicken and human, feed purchasing, and general chicken maintenance. In 2010 received the Poultry in Motion award on two separate occasions, for being chicken farmer of the month.
Now, if you haven’t ever been a Chicken Farmer, things get a little more tricky. What you need to do is convince the person reading your letter that you have work skills that are similar, or ones that would translate to the new job.
Let’s pretend you were an auto mechanic. You might try:
While I am new to the field of Chicken Farming, I feel my years as an auto mechanic will serve me well in the posted position. As a mechanic, I interacted a great deal with customers, and was frequently praised for providing explanations they could easily understand. I also have a strong memory for diagnostics – once I knew how to spot a problem with a model of car, I was able to recall it much more easily the second time. And I feel that chicken feed selection and purchasing will be very similar to the selection and purchasing of auto parts.
Now, I can’t say the above paragraph is perfect, but it does demonstrate that you’re a hard worker and that you have valuable skills that might be just what the chicken farm is looking for.
Finally, your letter needs a quick closer:
As requested, my résumé and three references are attached to this email. If you wish to contact me at this position, please call me at 555-555-5555 or email me at emailaddress@emailaddress.com. I look forward to hearing from you.
Regards,
John Smith
1234 Fake Address Way
City, State Zip Code
555-555-5555
emailaddress@emailaddress.com
Are there other tweaks you can make? There are probably hundreds.
Amongst the many people I’ve spoken with, I’ve seen letters that carefully bullet-pointed the things the job posting asked for, and make a list of ways they matched that list. So, for example, they’d write
You Want:
Four years of chicken farming experience. Excellent customer service skills.
I Have:
Six years chicken farming experience.
Two Poultry in Motion awards for customer service.
Did this work? Well, some of those people got jobs. So it must have worked on someone.
Beyond that, here are a few thoughts that might help.
First, always make sure you remember to tweak your cover letter for each individual job. You’ll get a lot of postings that look exactly alike on the surface, but they will almost certainly have one or two different requirements listed. Try to address those requirements as much as you can.
Keep things in a positive light. Your letter shouldn’t say “Though I have no experience in chicken farming.” It should say, “I have experience in this other thing, which is LIKE chicken farming.”
Get someone to read over your letters before you send them. I had my wife read all of my letters, which probably got boring for her over time. But I sent out over 250 cover letters without a typo.
Finally, save all your letters in an easy-to-access folder. And save the document with an easy-to-remember name as well. Don’t call it Cover Letter 3. Call it Big Farm Chicken Farmer Cover Letter. Why? So if you apply for other chicken farming jobs, you can copy and paste the text into a new letter and tweak it, instead of trying to recreate your letter from scratch, or spend hours hunting your email sent items trying to figure out when you sent the letter.
One final story:
In all the time I spent hunting for work, I encountered three sets of people who hadn’t even looked at my résumé when I went into the interview.
One was an emergency situation where a totally different person was given my résumé and asked to meet with me at the last minute.
One person met with me based on the recommendation of another person, and pulled out my résumé just as I was walking in the door.
And the last person? Brought me in based solely on my cover letter. He liked it because, well, it was short, to the point, told him that I had the skills he needed, and most importantly, it was typo-free.
If all you have to do to stand out from the pack is send out a letter with no errors in it, then it’s worth your time to do it right. So please, do it right.
Monday, November 14, 2011
How to Find a Job: Making a Résumé
(This article is part of a book called How to Find a Job, which now is available as an ebook on Kindle, nook, and Smashwords. All of the chapters have been revised, many have been expanded, and the book contains three bonus chapters (including Negotiating) that are not available on this blog.)
When I first started writing this book, I contemplated including a sample résumé or two. Specifically, I thought about including my own, because I know that it worked.
How do I know?
Easy: I based in on my father-in-law’s résumé. It got him a job. And it got me a job. And since he was at a level where he could hire people, he knew what he liked to see in a résumé, and in his own words, he would have definitely called me in for an interview if he saw my résumé.
(This is a huge compliment. Trust me.)
But here’s the thing: Go to ten different web sites, and you’re going to find ten different styles of résumé.
You don’t even have to do that, really. Open up the latest version of Word, click the option in the upper-left corner (it claims it’s the Office button on my version) and one of the options under new documents is Résumé.
There are over 120 résumé templates there. And any one of them might work for you.
For that matter, I don’t think you can talk to two different résumé experts without discovering that they split in a major way about some résumé detail.
For example: I went to a networking group where the leader swore up, down, and sideways that having a two-page résumé was not only acceptable, but the norm these days.
And then I talked to a friend who had just gotten a business degree. She told me she’d been informed that unless you were going for a job at C-level (CEO, CFO) your résumé could never, ever, ever, ever, be longer than a page. Not ever.
Even on my own résumé, I had a so-called expert recommend that I take off the word “Achievements,” which I had used to highlight what I had accomplished at each one of my jobs. This was the same person who said I should remove the Month/Year listing for each one of my jobs, and list only the years, to make it look like I had been at my last job longer.
Later, I started to feel the Year/Year thing was dishonest, and I changed it back.
So I have, in the end, only three pieces of advice I’ve collated on making a great résumé:
1. The right résumé is the one that gets you the job.
What does that mean? It means that there is no such thing as a wrong résumé. Can you get all your jobs and accomplishments on one page? Great. Do it. If it gets you the job, it was the right résumé. If it didn’t, it might have been the wrong one. If you send out the same résumé 20 times and no one calls you back, think about changing it.
But really, the way any one person reacts to your résumé comes down to what they’re looking for, and whether or not it’s on your résumé at the moment they’re looking for it. Much the way a horror movie isn’t going to appeal to a romance movie fan, well, if you don’t have what they want, you aren’t getting the call.
In the end, your résumé must be simple, easy to read (every HR person I spoke to during my job search said they spent somewhere between 90 seconds and two minutes looking at a résumé), and tell the person looking at it why you’re the best person for the job.
Everything else is just shuffling the words.
2. Weed out every typo.
Before you send out your résumé to anyone who can give you a job, send it to five friends with English degrees.
If you don’t have friends with English degrees, go to the local office of the Department of Workforce Development (DWD) and have someone look over your résumé. Or call up a few good friends.
But whatever you do, get it checked.
Your résumé’s job is to get you a job, and if there are grammatical errors on it, the only thing your résumé is telling people is that you don’t care enough to assemble a one-to-two-page piece of paper and make it error free. So what kind of work are you going to do for them?
So get it looked at. A lot. And if you have a very picky friend, after you make the fixes, send it to them again to make sure you didn’t add a typo.
It’s worth the time it takes.
3. In today’s world, there’s no such thing as having just one résumé.
When I really started thinking about what skills I had, I began to realize that having just one résumé was insufficient. So I started making copies of my résumé and moving information around.
I made about a dozen folders inside the Résumé folder on my computer, I copied my résumé into each one, and I started making changes.
So, for example, in my Freelance Writing folder, I moved all my freelance work to the top of my résumé, and I devoted extra verbiage to the various magazines, newspapers, and online forums I had written for.
When I put together a teaching résumé, I emphasized all the work I had done at my jobs that involved me working in an educational capacity.
And so on.
A lot of job experts will tell you that each résumé you send out should be tweaked for the job you’re applying to. So, for example, if the job description listed “punctual” somewhere, they would find a way to get the word punctual on their résumé.
This was mostly designed to game the system when companies started using computers to vet résumés. And it might work. I don’t know. I know people who would spend hours tweaking their résumés, but I never heard conclusive proof one way or another that this got them more interviews.
(The very odd rumor I heard was that some people took to copy/pasting the job description in the footer of their electronic résumés, and then turning the font white so the computer would pick their résumé out of the stack, but a human wouldn’t be able to read it. The only problem there is, computers often reformat things. I’m guessing if anyone ever tried this trick, they probably got caught and didn’t get the job. Don’t waste your time.)
This leads me to my last thought on this particular tweak. Many résumé formats include a Summary Paragraph. I don’t know that it’s a requirement, but I was told by two different HR people how important it was. If you’re not familiar with one, it goes at the top of résumé and it looks like this:
Six years experience in chicken farming. Worked as a feeder, sorter, medicine-maker, milker, and chicken-builder.
Depending on the job type in question (teaching, writing, computers) I would always list my skills in the order that would most interest the person reading it. So for a computer job, I would write:
7 years experience in on-the-phone and on-site computer troubleshooting. 6 years experience in on-site education. 5 years of experience in journalism.
But if the job was in writing, I’d arrange it like so:
5 years of experience in journalism. 7 years experience in on-the-phone and on-site computer troubleshooting. 6 years experience in education.
As it turns out, this is the right thing to do, as both HR people informed me that if they didn’t see what they were looking for in that first line, they would toss the résumé into the No pile. They had 200 other résumés to look at, and skipping over someone who didn’t list the skills they needed saved them precious minutes.
Now, this might concern you, because you want to be a chicken farmer and you’ve never been one before. Relax. Find the skills that will interest HR and put those first. Your customer service experience, for example.
Other Résumé Tips and Tricks:
Here are a few other things that I learned during my tenure as an unemployed person.
Name your résumé something that will be easy to search for on your computer.
Mine was Joshua Grover-David Patterson Résumé.doc.
Why call it that? Because as time wore on and I wrote more cover letters, put together more collections of data about myself for networking meetings, and various other tasks, after a while my résumé was buried in the clutter of the Résumé folder on my computer.
And there are a number of other reasons to do this. You might drag and drop your résumé into the wrong folder. You might get a job, lose the job, and then have to find your résumé again a year or two down the road.
The point is, make it easy to find, and easy to locate using the Search function. By giving your résumé an easy title to remember, it will be easy to locate for uploading, emailing, printing, and whatever else you need it for. Yours should be Your Complete Name Résumé.doc.
Next, get yourself a jump drive and back up your résumé on it.
This one is simple enough. You should always back up the important files on your computer, and right now your résumé is the most important computer file you own. And if you have the jump drive with you, a fresh copy of your résumé is always one computer away.
Emphasize your accomplishments.
I’m still at a loss as to why my so-called job guru insisted that I remove the word Accomplishments from my résumé. It didn’t save space, and didn’t make my résumé any easier to read. In fact, it made it more difficult, as some of my paragraphs blended together on the page and it become harder to tell what was my job description, and what I did above and beyond my job description.
When I added that single word, suddenly in interviews I could easily point to what I had done that was exceptional. And make sure what you list there is exceptional. Employee of the Month. Amount of money you saved the company. Ways that you made a big impact.
Showed up for work on time every day isn’t an accomplishment, it’s just expected.
Always have a copy of your résumé with you.
When I started getting interviews and going to networking meetings, I went to an office supply store and spent fifty dollars on a nice black satchel, a professional-looking binder, and a punch of plastic sheets to store papers in.
Then I printed up five copies of my résumé, along with all the different kinds of documents I’ve written, and I put them into the folder.
Why? Because you never know when someone is going to ask for a résumé, so you want to have one on hand. I even went to a couple of interviews where the person who was supposed to talk to me had either misplaced my résumé or, in one case, was interviewing me because another person was called away on an emergency.
Carry copies of your résumé. And when you update your résumé recycle your old ones and make new copies.
Keep track of where you send your résumés.
This one will be key if the Unemployment Insurance people ever ask you where you’ve been applying. The fact is, it’s easy to let this slip by for a week or two. Don’t let that happen. Write down where you applied, and make sure that each week you’re not applying to the same places.
Create a text-only résumé.
It’s probably worth your time to make a “no frills” résumé.
By which I mean: Go to File | Save As |and under Save as Type, choose .txt. Then open up that file in a program other than word (Notepad or Wordpad, for example) and clean out the formatting junk in it.
What is this good for? Résumé copy/pasting, which you’ll surely be doing lots of as you continue to send out résumés.
Why would you want this? Well, a lot of the time, jobs will ask that you copy and paste your résumé into the body of an email. And sometimes, that works great.
And other times, it looks terrible, as all your formatting becomes characters your email program doesn’t understand.
Speaking of which, always remember when applying for a job to follow the rules laid out in the job posting. If they say no attachments, it means that if you attach your résumé to an email then it will probably be deleted before a human ever sees it.
And if the job requires transcripts, or reference contacts, or work samples? Make sure you provide what they’re asking for.
At one point, a friend and I applied for the same job. Both of us were qualified. Neither of us got a call for an interview. Why? Because we both missed one of the required attachments.
Give them everything they ask for. Always.
When I first started writing this book, I contemplated including a sample résumé or two. Specifically, I thought about including my own, because I know that it worked.
How do I know?
Easy: I based in on my father-in-law’s résumé. It got him a job. And it got me a job. And since he was at a level where he could hire people, he knew what he liked to see in a résumé, and in his own words, he would have definitely called me in for an interview if he saw my résumé.
(This is a huge compliment. Trust me.)
But here’s the thing: Go to ten different web sites, and you’re going to find ten different styles of résumé.
You don’t even have to do that, really. Open up the latest version of Word, click the option in the upper-left corner (it claims it’s the Office button on my version) and one of the options under new documents is Résumé.
There are over 120 résumé templates there. And any one of them might work for you.
For that matter, I don’t think you can talk to two different résumé experts without discovering that they split in a major way about some résumé detail.
For example: I went to a networking group where the leader swore up, down, and sideways that having a two-page résumé was not only acceptable, but the norm these days.
And then I talked to a friend who had just gotten a business degree. She told me she’d been informed that unless you were going for a job at C-level (CEO, CFO) your résumé could never, ever, ever, ever, be longer than a page. Not ever.
Even on my own résumé, I had a so-called expert recommend that I take off the word “Achievements,” which I had used to highlight what I had accomplished at each one of my jobs. This was the same person who said I should remove the Month/Year listing for each one of my jobs, and list only the years, to make it look like I had been at my last job longer.
Later, I started to feel the Year/Year thing was dishonest, and I changed it back.
So I have, in the end, only three pieces of advice I’ve collated on making a great résumé:
1. The right résumé is the one that gets you the job.
What does that mean? It means that there is no such thing as a wrong résumé. Can you get all your jobs and accomplishments on one page? Great. Do it. If it gets you the job, it was the right résumé. If it didn’t, it might have been the wrong one. If you send out the same résumé 20 times and no one calls you back, think about changing it.
But really, the way any one person reacts to your résumé comes down to what they’re looking for, and whether or not it’s on your résumé at the moment they’re looking for it. Much the way a horror movie isn’t going to appeal to a romance movie fan, well, if you don’t have what they want, you aren’t getting the call.
In the end, your résumé must be simple, easy to read (every HR person I spoke to during my job search said they spent somewhere between 90 seconds and two minutes looking at a résumé), and tell the person looking at it why you’re the best person for the job.
Everything else is just shuffling the words.
2. Weed out every typo.
Before you send out your résumé to anyone who can give you a job, send it to five friends with English degrees.
If you don’t have friends with English degrees, go to the local office of the Department of Workforce Development (DWD) and have someone look over your résumé. Or call up a few good friends.
But whatever you do, get it checked.
Your résumé’s job is to get you a job, and if there are grammatical errors on it, the only thing your résumé is telling people is that you don’t care enough to assemble a one-to-two-page piece of paper and make it error free. So what kind of work are you going to do for them?
So get it looked at. A lot. And if you have a very picky friend, after you make the fixes, send it to them again to make sure you didn’t add a typo.
It’s worth the time it takes.
3. In today’s world, there’s no such thing as having just one résumé.
When I really started thinking about what skills I had, I began to realize that having just one résumé was insufficient. So I started making copies of my résumé and moving information around.
I made about a dozen folders inside the Résumé folder on my computer, I copied my résumé into each one, and I started making changes.
So, for example, in my Freelance Writing folder, I moved all my freelance work to the top of my résumé, and I devoted extra verbiage to the various magazines, newspapers, and online forums I had written for.
When I put together a teaching résumé, I emphasized all the work I had done at my jobs that involved me working in an educational capacity.
And so on.
A lot of job experts will tell you that each résumé you send out should be tweaked for the job you’re applying to. So, for example, if the job description listed “punctual” somewhere, they would find a way to get the word punctual on their résumé.
This was mostly designed to game the system when companies started using computers to vet résumés. And it might work. I don’t know. I know people who would spend hours tweaking their résumés, but I never heard conclusive proof one way or another that this got them more interviews.
(The very odd rumor I heard was that some people took to copy/pasting the job description in the footer of their electronic résumés, and then turning the font white so the computer would pick their résumé out of the stack, but a human wouldn’t be able to read it. The only problem there is, computers often reformat things. I’m guessing if anyone ever tried this trick, they probably got caught and didn’t get the job. Don’t waste your time.)
This leads me to my last thought on this particular tweak. Many résumé formats include a Summary Paragraph. I don’t know that it’s a requirement, but I was told by two different HR people how important it was. If you’re not familiar with one, it goes at the top of résumé and it looks like this:
Six years experience in chicken farming. Worked as a feeder, sorter, medicine-maker, milker, and chicken-builder.
Depending on the job type in question (teaching, writing, computers) I would always list my skills in the order that would most interest the person reading it. So for a computer job, I would write:
7 years experience in on-the-phone and on-site computer troubleshooting. 6 years experience in on-site education. 5 years of experience in journalism.
But if the job was in writing, I’d arrange it like so:
5 years of experience in journalism. 7 years experience in on-the-phone and on-site computer troubleshooting. 6 years experience in education.
As it turns out, this is the right thing to do, as both HR people informed me that if they didn’t see what they were looking for in that first line, they would toss the résumé into the No pile. They had 200 other résumés to look at, and skipping over someone who didn’t list the skills they needed saved them precious minutes.
Now, this might concern you, because you want to be a chicken farmer and you’ve never been one before. Relax. Find the skills that will interest HR and put those first. Your customer service experience, for example.
Other Résumé Tips and Tricks:
Here are a few other things that I learned during my tenure as an unemployed person.
Name your résumé something that will be easy to search for on your computer.
Mine was Joshua Grover-David Patterson Résumé.doc.
Why call it that? Because as time wore on and I wrote more cover letters, put together more collections of data about myself for networking meetings, and various other tasks, after a while my résumé was buried in the clutter of the Résumé folder on my computer.
And there are a number of other reasons to do this. You might drag and drop your résumé into the wrong folder. You might get a job, lose the job, and then have to find your résumé again a year or two down the road.
The point is, make it easy to find, and easy to locate using the Search function. By giving your résumé an easy title to remember, it will be easy to locate for uploading, emailing, printing, and whatever else you need it for. Yours should be Your Complete Name Résumé.doc.
Next, get yourself a jump drive and back up your résumé on it.
This one is simple enough. You should always back up the important files on your computer, and right now your résumé is the most important computer file you own. And if you have the jump drive with you, a fresh copy of your résumé is always one computer away.
Emphasize your accomplishments.
I’m still at a loss as to why my so-called job guru insisted that I remove the word Accomplishments from my résumé. It didn’t save space, and didn’t make my résumé any easier to read. In fact, it made it more difficult, as some of my paragraphs blended together on the page and it become harder to tell what was my job description, and what I did above and beyond my job description.
When I added that single word, suddenly in interviews I could easily point to what I had done that was exceptional. And make sure what you list there is exceptional. Employee of the Month. Amount of money you saved the company. Ways that you made a big impact.
Showed up for work on time every day isn’t an accomplishment, it’s just expected.
Always have a copy of your résumé with you.
When I started getting interviews and going to networking meetings, I went to an office supply store and spent fifty dollars on a nice black satchel, a professional-looking binder, and a punch of plastic sheets to store papers in.
Then I printed up five copies of my résumé, along with all the different kinds of documents I’ve written, and I put them into the folder.
Why? Because you never know when someone is going to ask for a résumé, so you want to have one on hand. I even went to a couple of interviews where the person who was supposed to talk to me had either misplaced my résumé or, in one case, was interviewing me because another person was called away on an emergency.
Carry copies of your résumé. And when you update your résumé recycle your old ones and make new copies.
Keep track of where you send your résumés.
This one will be key if the Unemployment Insurance people ever ask you where you’ve been applying. The fact is, it’s easy to let this slip by for a week or two. Don’t let that happen. Write down where you applied, and make sure that each week you’re not applying to the same places.
Create a text-only résumé.
It’s probably worth your time to make a “no frills” résumé.
By which I mean: Go to File | Save As |and under Save as Type, choose .txt. Then open up that file in a program other than word (Notepad or Wordpad, for example) and clean out the formatting junk in it.
What is this good for? Résumé copy/pasting, which you’ll surely be doing lots of as you continue to send out résumés.
Why would you want this? Well, a lot of the time, jobs will ask that you copy and paste your résumé into the body of an email. And sometimes, that works great.
And other times, it looks terrible, as all your formatting becomes characters your email program doesn’t understand.
Speaking of which, always remember when applying for a job to follow the rules laid out in the job posting. If they say no attachments, it means that if you attach your résumé to an email then it will probably be deleted before a human ever sees it.
And if the job requires transcripts, or reference contacts, or work samples? Make sure you provide what they’re asking for.
At one point, a friend and I applied for the same job. Both of us were qualified. Neither of us got a call for an interview. Why? Because we both missed one of the required attachments.
Give them everything they ask for. Always.
Friday, November 11, 2011
How to Find a Job: What Are Your Needs?
(This article is part of a book called How to Find a Job, which now is available as an ebook on Kindle, nook, and Smashwords. All of the chapters have been revised, many have been expanded, and the book contains three bonus chapters (including Negotiating) that are not available on this blog.)
When I lost my job, my wife was an award-winning journalist, and we had a two-year-old.
When you’re a journalist, you have crazy hours. It’s just a fact. You do not go in at eight, eat lunch at noon, and leave at five. You might work late shifts throughout the week. You might have weekend shifts. You might have an early deadline, and head off to work well before the sun rises.
So this meant that my job, whatever it was going to be, had to be on the total opposite spectrum. I did need to work 8-5. I did need to have my weekends free. I did need to know that no one was going to be calling me at ten at night and asking me to come in for an emergency shift.
And I could never be more than 30 minutes away from our day care, because I had to pick up and drop off our child.
Some people want a big salary. Some people want six weeks of vacation. Some people want to work 30 hours a week. Some people want to work from home.
The point is, you need to think about all these things before you start looking for work.
And I should probably emphasize the word “before.”
Once again, you should write them down. Why?
Because it’s more than probable as the weeks go on that you will start to slip on where you’re willing to send a resume.
Somewhere near the tail end of my first year on unemployment, I started to panic. At the time, my unemployment funds were running out, I had no idea if there would be another extension, and I knew that I was close to tapping into the money we had saved up that I had sworn I’d never touch.
So I took an interview in a place that was too far away for me to drive in 30 minutes. And the pay was too low. And while the job involved writing, it was mostly advertising a product I had little to no interest in.
Now, granted, I got the interview. And I showed up in my suit, and because I spent several years taking voice lessons and acting in plays, musicals, and operas, I knew how to act the part of the enthusiastic worker. And more to the point, I was honest about the fact that, while they would always get my 40 hours, I was always going to be a little late and leaving a little early.
And I didn’t get the job.
I would love to say that was the first and last time I applied for a job that I knew wasn’t going to work for the life I had, but it wasn’t. I sent out a handful of resumes while I was job-hunting for things that I knew simply were not going to happen.
I’m here to tell you, don’t do that.
Granted, there may be a week during your unemployment that you have to apply for something, and there’s a job listing in front of you, and it’s too far away, or the pay is too low, or any other number of possible problems.
And it’s all you have to apply for.
If that’s what you’ve got, well, go ahead and do it. But before you do, take a look at the list of things you need, and make a list of all the things you’re going to need to ask them for in order to make the job happen.
Then, after you apply, tuck that list in with the list of jobs you’ve applied for, so if you get the interview you can bring them up.
So let’s go back to that list. What should be on it? Well… whatever is most important to you.
In my case it was:
Within a 20 minute drive of my day care.
No nights, weekends or other odd hours.
Little or no travel.
Willing to be flexible in the event of family emergency (sick child, etc.).
A livable wage.
Did I have other requirements? I did. But these were the ones that I couldn’t budge on, no matter what. And in the end, I got them all.
You might have a totally different idea of what your needs and/or wants are. Sit down. List them. Figure out which ones are the ones that you can’t ever, ever, ever budge on.
And don’t budge.
When I lost my job, my wife was an award-winning journalist, and we had a two-year-old.
When you’re a journalist, you have crazy hours. It’s just a fact. You do not go in at eight, eat lunch at noon, and leave at five. You might work late shifts throughout the week. You might have weekend shifts. You might have an early deadline, and head off to work well before the sun rises.
So this meant that my job, whatever it was going to be, had to be on the total opposite spectrum. I did need to work 8-5. I did need to have my weekends free. I did need to know that no one was going to be calling me at ten at night and asking me to come in for an emergency shift.
And I could never be more than 30 minutes away from our day care, because I had to pick up and drop off our child.
Some people want a big salary. Some people want six weeks of vacation. Some people want to work 30 hours a week. Some people want to work from home.
The point is, you need to think about all these things before you start looking for work.
And I should probably emphasize the word “before.”
Once again, you should write them down. Why?
Because it’s more than probable as the weeks go on that you will start to slip on where you’re willing to send a resume.
Somewhere near the tail end of my first year on unemployment, I started to panic. At the time, my unemployment funds were running out, I had no idea if there would be another extension, and I knew that I was close to tapping into the money we had saved up that I had sworn I’d never touch.
So I took an interview in a place that was too far away for me to drive in 30 minutes. And the pay was too low. And while the job involved writing, it was mostly advertising a product I had little to no interest in.
Now, granted, I got the interview. And I showed up in my suit, and because I spent several years taking voice lessons and acting in plays, musicals, and operas, I knew how to act the part of the enthusiastic worker. And more to the point, I was honest about the fact that, while they would always get my 40 hours, I was always going to be a little late and leaving a little early.
And I didn’t get the job.
I would love to say that was the first and last time I applied for a job that I knew wasn’t going to work for the life I had, but it wasn’t. I sent out a handful of resumes while I was job-hunting for things that I knew simply were not going to happen.
I’m here to tell you, don’t do that.
Granted, there may be a week during your unemployment that you have to apply for something, and there’s a job listing in front of you, and it’s too far away, or the pay is too low, or any other number of possible problems.
And it’s all you have to apply for.
If that’s what you’ve got, well, go ahead and do it. But before you do, take a look at the list of things you need, and make a list of all the things you’re going to need to ask them for in order to make the job happen.
Then, after you apply, tuck that list in with the list of jobs you’ve applied for, so if you get the interview you can bring them up.
So let’s go back to that list. What should be on it? Well… whatever is most important to you.
In my case it was:
Within a 20 minute drive of my day care.
No nights, weekends or other odd hours.
Little or no travel.
Willing to be flexible in the event of family emergency (sick child, etc.).
A livable wage.
Did I have other requirements? I did. But these were the ones that I couldn’t budge on, no matter what. And in the end, I got them all.
You might have a totally different idea of what your needs and/or wants are. Sit down. List them. Figure out which ones are the ones that you can’t ever, ever, ever budge on.
And don’t budge.
Thursday, November 10, 2011
How to Find a Job: What Are You Good At?
(This article is part of a book called How to Find a Job, which now is available as an ebook on Kindle, nook, and Smashwords. All of the chapters have been revised, many have been expanded, and the book contains three bonus chapters (including Negotiating) that are not available on this blog.)
As I talked about in What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up, one of the things I always find is that people generally think about doing more of what they’ve always done.
And that’s fine. If you were once a loan officer, and want to be one again, then you probably have the necessary skills to be one again.
But the problem with the current economy is that if you were let go from your job, there’s a strong chance that what you do isn’t as in demand as you would like it to be.
Take me, for example.
About six weeks into being unemployed, I got a letter to report to my local Department of Workforce Development (DWD) office.
Now, at the time, I was already going to a (very expensive) office that my ex-company had set me up with. There were computers at the expensive place I could use. Fancy paper to print resumes. Highly paid individuals who could help me vet my resume and cover letter. Classes I could take that would tell me what I was good at, and where I should look for work.
They even had a networking meeting every Friday morning, and bonus classes almost every week, covering everything from opening your own business to… other business-related stuff.
You get the picture.
At any rate, I was called to the DWD. If I didn’t report, they would cut off my Unemployment Insurance (UI) and that, as they say, would be that.
So I went to a two-hour meeting, where they told me all the wonderful things that the DWD had made available to me. Which was pretty much all the same stuff that was available to me at the building across town.
When I arrived, the very first thing that happened was that we were told why we had been called into the meeting in the first place.
Answer One: You were frequently out of work. (Obviously, this wasn’t me.)
Answer Two: There were few or no available jobs in your line of business.
How’s that for a cold splash of water in the face? I had been called into the meeting because THERE WERE NO JOBS I COULD DO. (Cue ominous music.)
The thing is, I went into that meeting feeling pretty good about myself. I was getting my resume together. I was meeting people who I thought might have leads for me. And, okay, there weren’t a lot of job leads out there on the Internet for a guy like me, but I was finding some. Surely I would find more, right?
Well, apparently, the government of my state felt differently.
I spent the rest of the meeting feeling vaguely nauseous.
But in a way, it gave me a push that I really needed. Previous to that point, I had set my heels into the ground and said that I was going to get a job doing more-or-less what I had already been doing. That was my skill set, that was what my resume said I could do, and that’s what I was going to do.
I quite literally “forgot” that I had spent seven years doing an entirely different job, which had an entirely different skill set. I also ignored the fact that I had an education degree.
My brain just sat there, saying that I could do one thing, and only one thing.
But that wasn’t true of me, and I’m sure it’s not true of you.
Granted, you may have skills you don’t want to utilize. You might be able to fix cars and build houses, but maybe you hate building houses. Fair enough.
You might be able to do taxes and sell cars, but you hated selling cars.
Fair enough.
But perhaps you can combine those skills and find a whole new way to use them that’s going to bring home a paycheck and make your workday enjoyable as well.
How? Well, that’s up to you.
Over the course of the last three years, I’ve seen a handful of my friends leave the field of journalism.
One of them started teaching writing at a local school.
Another, who did a lot of work in the business field, got into the non-profit world as a liaison to large businesses. It was easy for them, because the person was already on a first-name basis with most of the people they were going to be in contact with.
Another moved into grant writing.
Now, you could argue that two out of these three examples just took another writing job. And that’s true. But what they did NOT do is leave one newspaper and join up with another newspaper, or magazine, or newsletter. They took their skills and applied them in another way.
As for me, I blew the dust off my old education degree and taught a bunch of kids how to make movies, using the skills I developed writing independent films. I had a lot of fun, and I got to help an amazing bunch of kids make a project that is now part of my hometown’s school curriculum.
That’s a lot of storytelling, but I hope it makes my point: You are more than what you were doing just before you lost your job.
And if you want to go back to doing exactly what you were doing, then that’s fine, and the very best of luck to you.
But don’t ever forget that you have other skills you can pull from. Figure out what they are. Write them down. Find places to put them on your resume.
And then compare and contrast them to the list of things you’ve always wanted to be.
There are possibilities there.
As I talked about in What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up, one of the things I always find is that people generally think about doing more of what they’ve always done.
And that’s fine. If you were once a loan officer, and want to be one again, then you probably have the necessary skills to be one again.
But the problem with the current economy is that if you were let go from your job, there’s a strong chance that what you do isn’t as in demand as you would like it to be.
Take me, for example.
About six weeks into being unemployed, I got a letter to report to my local Department of Workforce Development (DWD) office.
Now, at the time, I was already going to a (very expensive) office that my ex-company had set me up with. There were computers at the expensive place I could use. Fancy paper to print resumes. Highly paid individuals who could help me vet my resume and cover letter. Classes I could take that would tell me what I was good at, and where I should look for work.
They even had a networking meeting every Friday morning, and bonus classes almost every week, covering everything from opening your own business to… other business-related stuff.
You get the picture.
At any rate, I was called to the DWD. If I didn’t report, they would cut off my Unemployment Insurance (UI) and that, as they say, would be that.
So I went to a two-hour meeting, where they told me all the wonderful things that the DWD had made available to me. Which was pretty much all the same stuff that was available to me at the building across town.
When I arrived, the very first thing that happened was that we were told why we had been called into the meeting in the first place.
Answer One: You were frequently out of work. (Obviously, this wasn’t me.)
Answer Two: There were few or no available jobs in your line of business.
How’s that for a cold splash of water in the face? I had been called into the meeting because THERE WERE NO JOBS I COULD DO. (Cue ominous music.)
The thing is, I went into that meeting feeling pretty good about myself. I was getting my resume together. I was meeting people who I thought might have leads for me. And, okay, there weren’t a lot of job leads out there on the Internet for a guy like me, but I was finding some. Surely I would find more, right?
Well, apparently, the government of my state felt differently.
I spent the rest of the meeting feeling vaguely nauseous.
But in a way, it gave me a push that I really needed. Previous to that point, I had set my heels into the ground and said that I was going to get a job doing more-or-less what I had already been doing. That was my skill set, that was what my resume said I could do, and that’s what I was going to do.
I quite literally “forgot” that I had spent seven years doing an entirely different job, which had an entirely different skill set. I also ignored the fact that I had an education degree.
My brain just sat there, saying that I could do one thing, and only one thing.
But that wasn’t true of me, and I’m sure it’s not true of you.
Granted, you may have skills you don’t want to utilize. You might be able to fix cars and build houses, but maybe you hate building houses. Fair enough.
You might be able to do taxes and sell cars, but you hated selling cars.
Fair enough.
But perhaps you can combine those skills and find a whole new way to use them that’s going to bring home a paycheck and make your workday enjoyable as well.
How? Well, that’s up to you.
Over the course of the last three years, I’ve seen a handful of my friends leave the field of journalism.
One of them started teaching writing at a local school.
Another, who did a lot of work in the business field, got into the non-profit world as a liaison to large businesses. It was easy for them, because the person was already on a first-name basis with most of the people they were going to be in contact with.
Another moved into grant writing.
Now, you could argue that two out of these three examples just took another writing job. And that’s true. But what they did NOT do is leave one newspaper and join up with another newspaper, or magazine, or newsletter. They took their skills and applied them in another way.
As for me, I blew the dust off my old education degree and taught a bunch of kids how to make movies, using the skills I developed writing independent films. I had a lot of fun, and I got to help an amazing bunch of kids make a project that is now part of my hometown’s school curriculum.
That’s a lot of storytelling, but I hope it makes my point: You are more than what you were doing just before you lost your job.
And if you want to go back to doing exactly what you were doing, then that’s fine, and the very best of luck to you.
But don’t ever forget that you have other skills you can pull from. Figure out what they are. Write them down. Find places to put them on your resume.
And then compare and contrast them to the list of things you’ve always wanted to be.
There are possibilities there.
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
How to Find a Job: What You Want to Be When You Grow Up
(This article is part of a book called How to Find a Job, which now is available as an ebook on Kindle, nook, and Smashwords. All of the chapters have been revised, many have been expanded, and the book contains three bonus chapters (including Negotiating) that are not available on this blog.)
When you’re a little kid, you spend a lot of time thinking about what you’re going to be when you grow up. Interestingly, my daughter answered this question at school, and at four years of age she’s decided she’s going to be a princess.
It could happen.
In middle school, I was given a set of questions which then spit out a list of jobs I was “suited for.” The top two were, at the time, Priest and Disk Jockey.
In high school, you start thinking about college or technical school, and what you want to do, and what degree you’ll get that will lead you to that career. Then in college, maybe you refine that plan.
Then you graduate, and you get a job, and for a while there, you think you’re set for life. This is what you do, and eventually you’ll go from the guy on the bottom rung to being the guy on the top rung. From the chicken farmer to the owner of the chicken farm, or Chicken Farms, Inc. Or maybe just the assistant manager, if you’re less ambitious.
And most humans are, to a degree, sedentary. Even if they don’t like their job, they can at least tolerate it. So they stay where they are, and they get their raises and their promotions, and they never look outside their little box.
But if you’ve lost your job, well, congratulations! You’ve just been thrown out of the box.
So ask yourself a question, maybe for the first time in years: What Do You Want to Do With Your Life?
Now, I’m not saying that if you were a loan officer, that you should think about becoming a chicken farmer. There’s little to no skill set crossover there.
But hey. Don’t let me spoil your dream.
Ultimately, there’s nothing wrong with saying that you still want to be a loan officer. There’s nothing wrong with assembling your resume so that people can tell you were a good loan officer.
And if there are dozens of loan officer jobs, then go for them, and get one, and have a great life.
But if there’s something else you wanted to do, this might be the perfect time to look into it.
So do yourself a favor. Put together your resume. Fix all the typos in your cover letter. And get out there and apply for those jobs you know you can get.
But while you’re at it, take some time, even if it’s just an hour one day, and think about what you really want to do with your life. And if it’s important to you, try to make it happen.
When you’re a little kid, you spend a lot of time thinking about what you’re going to be when you grow up. Interestingly, my daughter answered this question at school, and at four years of age she’s decided she’s going to be a princess.
It could happen.
In middle school, I was given a set of questions which then spit out a list of jobs I was “suited for.” The top two were, at the time, Priest and Disk Jockey.
In high school, you start thinking about college or technical school, and what you want to do, and what degree you’ll get that will lead you to that career. Then in college, maybe you refine that plan.
Then you graduate, and you get a job, and for a while there, you think you’re set for life. This is what you do, and eventually you’ll go from the guy on the bottom rung to being the guy on the top rung. From the chicken farmer to the owner of the chicken farm, or Chicken Farms, Inc. Or maybe just the assistant manager, if you’re less ambitious.
And most humans are, to a degree, sedentary. Even if they don’t like their job, they can at least tolerate it. So they stay where they are, and they get their raises and their promotions, and they never look outside their little box.
But if you’ve lost your job, well, congratulations! You’ve just been thrown out of the box.
So ask yourself a question, maybe for the first time in years: What Do You Want to Do With Your Life?
Now, I’m not saying that if you were a loan officer, that you should think about becoming a chicken farmer. There’s little to no skill set crossover there.
But hey. Don’t let me spoil your dream.
Ultimately, there’s nothing wrong with saying that you still want to be a loan officer. There’s nothing wrong with assembling your resume so that people can tell you were a good loan officer.
And if there are dozens of loan officer jobs, then go for them, and get one, and have a great life.
But if there’s something else you wanted to do, this might be the perfect time to look into it.
So do yourself a favor. Put together your resume. Fix all the typos in your cover letter. And get out there and apply for those jobs you know you can get.
But while you’re at it, take some time, even if it’s just an hour one day, and think about what you really want to do with your life. And if it’s important to you, try to make it happen.
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
How to Find a Job: A Few Quick Thoughts on Unemployment
(This article is part of a book called How to Find a Job, which now is available as an ebook on Kindle, nook, and Smashwords. All of the chapters have been revised, many have been expanded, and the book contains three bonus chapters (including Negotiating) that are not available on this blog.)
Being unemployed is no fun.
Trying to figure out how Unemployment Insurance (UI) works is even less fun.
Why?
Well, originally, I wanted to fill this chapter with a set of steps that would tell you how to go about filing for UI. But guess what?
That’s impossible.
Why?
Because the rules are different in just about every state. And as a bonus, the rules are always changing. Even if I spent the next couple of months researching (UI), and released this book the moment that information was complete and accurate…
Chances are good that the information would not be complete and accurate by the time you downloaded and started to read this chapter.
That doesn’t mean I don’t have advice. I do.
But before I get to it, I have to make a couple assumptions.
1. You’re a good worker who did your job.
2. You were laid off, and not fired, nor did you quit your job.
Why do I have to make those assumptions? Because if I don’t all my advice is null and void.
At one point, while trying to help a friend, he told me he’d been let go. He told me he was having trouble getting his UI money. I made suggestions. I offered thoughts.
Then I found out he had been fired.
Being fired, whether justly or unjustly, is a whole different issue. It makes it harder to find work, and it makes it harder to convince your local government that you deserve UI, which more often than not requires that you worked hard and obeyed the rules of your workplace.
So if you didn’t, you might be out of luck. And you might want to give some thought to your work ethic before you start hunting for another job.
All that said, a few thoughts:
1. Unemployment Insurance is confusing and underfunded, and getting clarification is a massive headache. So call on Thursday.
A True Story: The week I was going to be let go, I called up the fine folks at UI and to tell them I was losing my job and to ask them what I needed to do next.
I was put on hold for a minute. And then UI hung up on me, with a message to check their web site. I called back several times, and every single time I was hung up on before I could talk to a person. They didn’t have anyone to talk to me, and there was no hold option. There was just the web site.
So do yourself a favor: Go to the web site.
More often than not, your questions will be answered if you read through all the information there. And why not take the time? You could be unemployed for a while, and you have some free time. So sit back and start reading.
If there’s something you really don’t understand, write it down. And call on Thursday. Why Thursday? Because according to a woman I met from the UI office, that’s the least-busy day. You might still have to try a few times (I always did) but you’ll get through.
2. Sooner or later, you may end up Under Investigation. There’s nothing to do but wait, answer their questions, and keep filing for UI.
When I lost my job, I hopped online and signed up for UI, a simple and quick process that resulted in them sending me a check within a matter of days. It was simple and mostly made sense.
Over the next two years I spent five different periods of my life Under Investigation, which was confusing and emotionally draining and did damage to my savings account. Why?
In a word, freelance work.
I started writing for a magazine. And I took on some work at a local school. And I did a freelance movie-editing job. And I wrote a script for an industrial video.
I told UI all of these things, and at the time, they didn’t care.
And then my UI money would run out, and they would have to recalculate what I should be getting, and suddenly, my checks were On Hold.
According to the letter I got, this could last five weeks or longer.
It was always longer, especially the last time, which took 13 weeks.
The fact is, this is an extra-scary time. You’ll get a letter each week telling you they don’t know when you’ll get your money, but that you should keep filing. You’ll get extra letters, asking for monetary information. And you’ll probably end up on the phone with UI, who somehow always manage to call just when you’re in the middle of doing something, and you have no idea where the information they want is located.
Take a breath. Relax. If you did everything they asked of you (and I’m going to assume you did) sooner or later, everything will work itself out.
And please, don’t let my experience sour you on freelance work. While I didn’t enjoy being investigated, everyone I spoke to was kind and fair and just wanted to make sure that everybody on UI was following all the rules.
More importantly, it’s good to get fresh work on your resume. Never pass up that chance.
3. Always remember that it’s your money, and that you deserve it.
One of the things that surprised me was how many people I met got mumbly when they told me they were on unemployment. And I understood. Being on unemployment was something that happened to other people. People with medical conditions. People who were too lazy to work.
Other People.
But there’s no reason to feel shame. At one point, the country I lived in topped out at 15% unemployment. For those easily confused by math (like myself!) that means every time you saw a grouping adults capable of working 15 of them didn’t have a job.
As I type this, the number is still bouncing up and down a bit, but it’s around 9%. A big improvement, yes. But it still means that when you look at 100 people, 9 of them don’t have a job.
My point? You are not alone in your predicament. And UI was designed to help you through it. Now, it might not be enough (in fact, it almost certainly isn’t) but it is something, you have paid into it, and this is what that money is for.
So if someone asks you, tell them the truth. You’re unemployed. You’re currently searching for a job.
Then tell them what you do, and ask them if they know anyone who needs you. Because people love to help.
4. Don’t expect to be off UI in the very near future.
While this isn’t about UI specifically, I do think that it’s important to keep yourself in a positive frame of mind.
When you lose your job, it’s easy to think that in two weeks, or three, or four, you’ll be back to work and things will be status quo.
When I lost my job, I stumbled across a comforting video that told me that at that time, the average span people were unemployed was about 19 weeks.
Granted, I didn’t want to spend 19 weeks without a job, but if that was the average, well, that was the average, and why fight it?
I hit 19 weeks, and then I started to panic. But then I looked around at all the other people I’d run into in my networking meetings. Most or all of them had been let go the same week I had, and here we all were, still looking for work.
I felt the same way after a year.
I felt the same way after two years.
Then things started to change. More of the people in my networking groups started getting jobs. Soon there were fewer and fewer faces I knew.
And then one day shortly thereafter, I had a job.
The economy is in flux. Look around. If you’re seeing that your friends are still out there hunting for work, then take some comfort in that. If you see that all your friends are getting work, then take comfort in knowing that you probably will as well.
And if everyone you know is getting hired but you, start thinking about changing your strategies a bit. But remember – it happens when it happens.
And you’ll be okay.
Being unemployed is no fun.
Trying to figure out how Unemployment Insurance (UI) works is even less fun.
Why?
Well, originally, I wanted to fill this chapter with a set of steps that would tell you how to go about filing for UI. But guess what?
That’s impossible.
Why?
Because the rules are different in just about every state. And as a bonus, the rules are always changing. Even if I spent the next couple of months researching (UI), and released this book the moment that information was complete and accurate…
Chances are good that the information would not be complete and accurate by the time you downloaded and started to read this chapter.
That doesn’t mean I don’t have advice. I do.
But before I get to it, I have to make a couple assumptions.
1. You’re a good worker who did your job.
2. You were laid off, and not fired, nor did you quit your job.
Why do I have to make those assumptions? Because if I don’t all my advice is null and void.
At one point, while trying to help a friend, he told me he’d been let go. He told me he was having trouble getting his UI money. I made suggestions. I offered thoughts.
Then I found out he had been fired.
Being fired, whether justly or unjustly, is a whole different issue. It makes it harder to find work, and it makes it harder to convince your local government that you deserve UI, which more often than not requires that you worked hard and obeyed the rules of your workplace.
So if you didn’t, you might be out of luck. And you might want to give some thought to your work ethic before you start hunting for another job.
All that said, a few thoughts:
1. Unemployment Insurance is confusing and underfunded, and getting clarification is a massive headache. So call on Thursday.
A True Story: The week I was going to be let go, I called up the fine folks at UI and to tell them I was losing my job and to ask them what I needed to do next.
I was put on hold for a minute. And then UI hung up on me, with a message to check their web site. I called back several times, and every single time I was hung up on before I could talk to a person. They didn’t have anyone to talk to me, and there was no hold option. There was just the web site.
So do yourself a favor: Go to the web site.
More often than not, your questions will be answered if you read through all the information there. And why not take the time? You could be unemployed for a while, and you have some free time. So sit back and start reading.
If there’s something you really don’t understand, write it down. And call on Thursday. Why Thursday? Because according to a woman I met from the UI office, that’s the least-busy day. You might still have to try a few times (I always did) but you’ll get through.
2. Sooner or later, you may end up Under Investigation. There’s nothing to do but wait, answer their questions, and keep filing for UI.
When I lost my job, I hopped online and signed up for UI, a simple and quick process that resulted in them sending me a check within a matter of days. It was simple and mostly made sense.
Over the next two years I spent five different periods of my life Under Investigation, which was confusing and emotionally draining and did damage to my savings account. Why?
In a word, freelance work.
I started writing for a magazine. And I took on some work at a local school. And I did a freelance movie-editing job. And I wrote a script for an industrial video.
I told UI all of these things, and at the time, they didn’t care.
And then my UI money would run out, and they would have to recalculate what I should be getting, and suddenly, my checks were On Hold.
According to the letter I got, this could last five weeks or longer.
It was always longer, especially the last time, which took 13 weeks.
The fact is, this is an extra-scary time. You’ll get a letter each week telling you they don’t know when you’ll get your money, but that you should keep filing. You’ll get extra letters, asking for monetary information. And you’ll probably end up on the phone with UI, who somehow always manage to call just when you’re in the middle of doing something, and you have no idea where the information they want is located.
Take a breath. Relax. If you did everything they asked of you (and I’m going to assume you did) sooner or later, everything will work itself out.
And please, don’t let my experience sour you on freelance work. While I didn’t enjoy being investigated, everyone I spoke to was kind and fair and just wanted to make sure that everybody on UI was following all the rules.
More importantly, it’s good to get fresh work on your resume. Never pass up that chance.
3. Always remember that it’s your money, and that you deserve it.
One of the things that surprised me was how many people I met got mumbly when they told me they were on unemployment. And I understood. Being on unemployment was something that happened to other people. People with medical conditions. People who were too lazy to work.
Other People.
But there’s no reason to feel shame. At one point, the country I lived in topped out at 15% unemployment. For those easily confused by math (like myself!) that means every time you saw a grouping adults capable of working 15 of them didn’t have a job.
As I type this, the number is still bouncing up and down a bit, but it’s around 9%. A big improvement, yes. But it still means that when you look at 100 people, 9 of them don’t have a job.
My point? You are not alone in your predicament. And UI was designed to help you through it. Now, it might not be enough (in fact, it almost certainly isn’t) but it is something, you have paid into it, and this is what that money is for.
So if someone asks you, tell them the truth. You’re unemployed. You’re currently searching for a job.
Then tell them what you do, and ask them if they know anyone who needs you. Because people love to help.
4. Don’t expect to be off UI in the very near future.
While this isn’t about UI specifically, I do think that it’s important to keep yourself in a positive frame of mind.
When you lose your job, it’s easy to think that in two weeks, or three, or four, you’ll be back to work and things will be status quo.
When I lost my job, I stumbled across a comforting video that told me that at that time, the average span people were unemployed was about 19 weeks.
Granted, I didn’t want to spend 19 weeks without a job, but if that was the average, well, that was the average, and why fight it?
I hit 19 weeks, and then I started to panic. But then I looked around at all the other people I’d run into in my networking meetings. Most or all of them had been let go the same week I had, and here we all were, still looking for work.
I felt the same way after a year.
I felt the same way after two years.
Then things started to change. More of the people in my networking groups started getting jobs. Soon there were fewer and fewer faces I knew.
And then one day shortly thereafter, I had a job.
The economy is in flux. Look around. If you’re seeing that your friends are still out there hunting for work, then take some comfort in that. If you see that all your friends are getting work, then take comfort in knowing that you probably will as well.
And if everyone you know is getting hired but you, start thinking about changing your strategies a bit. But remember – it happens when it happens.
And you’ll be okay.
Monday, November 7, 2011
How to Find a Job: Introduction
(This is part of an ongoing series on how to find a job. If you have a question or comment or something I think I should add, please hit me up on Facebook, Twitter, or leave a comment here (Links are to your right). I’ll be releasing the revised, expanded chapters as an ebook!)
When I became a part of the work force of the United States of America, it was 1991, and I was in high school. Over the course of my high school career, I worked as a dishwasher, a sandwich maker, and a delivery driver.
In college, I toiled at a computer help desk for my work-study job (mostly saving lost papers from damaged disks), and during the summers I was everything from a furniture assembler to a blackjack dealer. (Ah, temp work!)
Then in 1998, I graduated from college, and it was time to go from having a job to having a career.
It was a great time to enter the work force. At one point a friend informed me that Madison, Wisconsin was experiencing negative unemployment – there were more jobs than workers to fill them.
I got a job at a medium-sized company, and worked there for almost ten years. During that time, the economy started to crumble, and I went from engaged to married to married with a child.
When an opportunity arose to take a new position at another company that offered me more money and a shorter commute, I took it.
Then the bottom fell out of the economy, and I fell with it. I was Let Go.
(It’s funny, really. Two words, five letters, and yet they completely upend your life.)
I spent the next two years either unemployed or underemployed. And while that was distressing to me, what bothered me even more was watching good friends of mine also losing jobs as the economy continued to worsen.
As they got their world flipped upside-down, I started reaching out to them. I’d send them encouraging emails. I’d tell them what web sites to use to hunt for work. When they wanted to see what a resume looked like, I’d send them a copy of mine, as it had been vetted by a half-dozen experts and friends, and was getting me interviews.
And wonder of wonders, my friends got jobs. While, I should note, I remained unemployed. (I later realized there was a reason for that, which I’ll talk about later.)
Still, I got a lot of nice thank-yous from friends and family. One good friend referred to me as the Obi Wan Kenobi of the unemployed. I was the master, showing all the Jedi-in-training how to not just find a job, but handle the stresses of not having a job.
The thing is, I didn’t spend those two years doing nothing. I didn’t sit around and wait for a job to come to me. I went out looking for work, and took on part-time and freelance jobs in an effort to keep myself busy and explore new avenues of my abilities.
I also started putting my novels, which I had been unable to get an agent to look at, up on the Kindle, nook and on Smashwords. I started getting great reviews. And I started a new blog, Everybody Thinks They Can Write.
When I finally got a full-time job more than two years later, I immediately wrote an essay about how I found work. I originally wrote it as a letter to a really wonderful woman who runs a great networking group in my area.
Then I put a revised version of it up on my blog… and it kind of took off. I got emails about it. I got Facebook questions about it. And I got Tweets about it. A LOT of tweets about it, both people who sent it on to friends, and folks who worked in HR and loved my thoughts and attitude, and some folks who were looking for work and got the encouragement at the exact moment they needed it.
The thing of it is, I knew exactly how they felt. During the course of my unemployment, I had low periods. I suspect everyone does. When you lose your job, your first thought is not, “Oh good, I know how to handle this,” but, “What am I going to do?”
Even going to your local library often adds to the confusion, instead of taking away from it. There are probably thousands of books, dozens of networking opportunities, and a handful of headhunters and job gurus available, and trying to figure out what is going to work for you and what you have to spend on it can often make things worse instead of better.
Plus, right now, you’re trying to hold onto every single dollar you have, because you don’t know when you’ll be making more of them.
And that’s why wrote this book.
When I lost my job, I hit the library. I went to networking meetings. And my company generously offered me a free program that was designed to train me in the fine art of finding a job. I experienced the confusion of not really knowing what to do.
In the middle of all of it, my favorite networking lady (the one I sent the email in the next chapter) said this: “If there was a book that told you how to get a job, and it always worked, someone would have already written it, and everyone would have read it.”
That’s why I wrote this.
I wanted to put all the information I got into one book, and sell it, cheap. This book will not tell you, step-by-step, how to get a job.
What it does is it distills all the things I learned over the course of two years into short, easy-to-digest chapters. I wanted to write a book that was simple, fun to read, and would offer up hope and an idea of how to move forward from here.
I wanted to write a book for all my friends who had lost a job, or who will lose their job, that gives the exact same advice I’d give them if we got together over dinner.
I hope this book helps you find work. I hope it fills your head with ideas you haven’t thought of.
And I hope that it gives YOU some hope, when you need it the most.
Happy job hunting.
And by the way, if you read this and have questions, feel free to drop me a line on Twitter, Like me on Facebook, or visit my blog and ask questions. At some point, I’d like to revise and expand this book, and I will put your name in the Thank Yous.
When I became a part of the work force of the United States of America, it was 1991, and I was in high school. Over the course of my high school career, I worked as a dishwasher, a sandwich maker, and a delivery driver.
In college, I toiled at a computer help desk for my work-study job (mostly saving lost papers from damaged disks), and during the summers I was everything from a furniture assembler to a blackjack dealer. (Ah, temp work!)
Then in 1998, I graduated from college, and it was time to go from having a job to having a career.
It was a great time to enter the work force. At one point a friend informed me that Madison, Wisconsin was experiencing negative unemployment – there were more jobs than workers to fill them.
I got a job at a medium-sized company, and worked there for almost ten years. During that time, the economy started to crumble, and I went from engaged to married to married with a child.
When an opportunity arose to take a new position at another company that offered me more money and a shorter commute, I took it.
Then the bottom fell out of the economy, and I fell with it. I was Let Go.
(It’s funny, really. Two words, five letters, and yet they completely upend your life.)
I spent the next two years either unemployed or underemployed. And while that was distressing to me, what bothered me even more was watching good friends of mine also losing jobs as the economy continued to worsen.
As they got their world flipped upside-down, I started reaching out to them. I’d send them encouraging emails. I’d tell them what web sites to use to hunt for work. When they wanted to see what a resume looked like, I’d send them a copy of mine, as it had been vetted by a half-dozen experts and friends, and was getting me interviews.
And wonder of wonders, my friends got jobs. While, I should note, I remained unemployed. (I later realized there was a reason for that, which I’ll talk about later.)
Still, I got a lot of nice thank-yous from friends and family. One good friend referred to me as the Obi Wan Kenobi of the unemployed. I was the master, showing all the Jedi-in-training how to not just find a job, but handle the stresses of not having a job.
The thing is, I didn’t spend those two years doing nothing. I didn’t sit around and wait for a job to come to me. I went out looking for work, and took on part-time and freelance jobs in an effort to keep myself busy and explore new avenues of my abilities.
I also started putting my novels, which I had been unable to get an agent to look at, up on the Kindle, nook and on Smashwords. I started getting great reviews. And I started a new blog, Everybody Thinks They Can Write.
When I finally got a full-time job more than two years later, I immediately wrote an essay about how I found work. I originally wrote it as a letter to a really wonderful woman who runs a great networking group in my area.
Then I put a revised version of it up on my blog… and it kind of took off. I got emails about it. I got Facebook questions about it. And I got Tweets about it. A LOT of tweets about it, both people who sent it on to friends, and folks who worked in HR and loved my thoughts and attitude, and some folks who were looking for work and got the encouragement at the exact moment they needed it.
The thing of it is, I knew exactly how they felt. During the course of my unemployment, I had low periods. I suspect everyone does. When you lose your job, your first thought is not, “Oh good, I know how to handle this,” but, “What am I going to do?”
Even going to your local library often adds to the confusion, instead of taking away from it. There are probably thousands of books, dozens of networking opportunities, and a handful of headhunters and job gurus available, and trying to figure out what is going to work for you and what you have to spend on it can often make things worse instead of better.
Plus, right now, you’re trying to hold onto every single dollar you have, because you don’t know when you’ll be making more of them.
And that’s why wrote this book.
When I lost my job, I hit the library. I went to networking meetings. And my company generously offered me a free program that was designed to train me in the fine art of finding a job. I experienced the confusion of not really knowing what to do.
In the middle of all of it, my favorite networking lady (the one I sent the email in the next chapter) said this: “If there was a book that told you how to get a job, and it always worked, someone would have already written it, and everyone would have read it.”
That’s why I wrote this.
I wanted to put all the information I got into one book, and sell it, cheap. This book will not tell you, step-by-step, how to get a job.
What it does is it distills all the things I learned over the course of two years into short, easy-to-digest chapters. I wanted to write a book that was simple, fun to read, and would offer up hope and an idea of how to move forward from here.
I wanted to write a book for all my friends who had lost a job, or who will lose their job, that gives the exact same advice I’d give them if we got together over dinner.
I hope this book helps you find work. I hope it fills your head with ideas you haven’t thought of.
And I hope that it gives YOU some hope, when you need it the most.
Happy job hunting.
And by the way, if you read this and have questions, feel free to drop me a line on Twitter, Like me on Facebook, or visit my blog and ask questions. At some point, I’d like to revise and expand this book, and I will put your name in the Thank Yous.
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