“Double-nickeled and Stuck! Getting re-employed at 55 or beyond” – Part Three (c)

If you’ve tracked with us through the first four “Double-nickeled and Stuck” posts, we’ve laid a foundation for the most critical piece of a job search – networking. With an optimally leveraged LinkedIn profile that is consistent with a properly formatted resume, the pieces are in place to move to where the success of your job search has an 80%-or-better chance of happening – networking.

That’s the reality. Over 80% of jobs are filled in this country as the result of referrals and networking. And that’s despite all the chest-thumping, flag-waving and heavy advertising by the likes of Indeed.com, ZipRecruiter, and myriad other popular job boards (has anybody seen Monster or CareerBuilder lately? – it seems they’ve left the party).

Some people are great networkers, most aren’t. Not that they couldn’t be. There just isn’t a perceived need. For many job seekers, it’s just plain laziness combined with a low level of perceived need. Maintaining a network, let alone adding to one, isn’t a priority when you’re up to your arse in the boss’s unrealistic expectations and projects.

Chances are, that’s where you are. So, now we’re up against it and gotta do something – quickly.

So let’s cut to the chase and dispense with the network building that you should have been doing while you were employed. We need to do a frontal assault and initiate a very targeted, almost emergency-like, strategic networking plan. You don’t have time to try to connect with your brother-in-law’s sister’s cousin who is a high-powered something-or-other just because your brother-in-law said you should and so you can claim you know him/her. That’s OK if this high-powered something-or-other happens to be a potential hiring manager in your space or is connected to a potential hiring manager.

Time and focused effort are of the essence under these conditions.  They need to be focused on finding a path to hiring managers.

Six part strategy

1. Get a paid LinkedIn job-seeker account. You can be on LinkedIn free – but the free account has been stripped bare since Microsoft bought LinkedIn.

You have two paid job-seeker options: Premium Career at $29.99 per month or Premium Business at $47.99. Both come with a free one-month trial. The Career package helps some but not a lot because it puts limits on who you can view and you only get three free InMails. Inmail is LinkedIn’s private email process that claims to greatly enhance your chance of getting a response from the LinkedIn member that you inmail. (Note from Gary to LinkedIn: it doesn’t so much anymore.)

You might want to consider the Business account for the purposes of your concentrated search because it gives you unlimited people-browsing of 1st- and 2nd- level connections but no visibility to 3rd-degree connections. Now, if you only have eight connections to start with, that isn’t going to help a lot so you’ll want to get your first level connections up as much as possible as quickly as possible during your search. That should result naturally as you network. Step 2 below will help you with this.

2. Take a day and start building a “tribe”. Any old Rolodexes stuffed in a closet? How about those business cards you’ve been collecting and doing nothing with? Who is in your Outlook contacts list that you’ve forgotten about? College classmates? Graduate school classmates? Your 1st level LinkedIn connections?

Your goal here is to try to come up with 100-150 names of people that you would feel comfortable calling to ask a favor.

They can fit into one of four categories:

Connectors – people who know a lot of people
Mentors – people you can learn from
Industry experts – people you need to know
Peers – who you can help and expect nothing in return

These people should become 1st level LinkedIn connections. Find them on LinkedIn and send them a connection request if they aren’t already a 1st level connection (see a suggested connection request script below in point 4).

3. Develop a target list of 30-50 companies that you may have interest in working for. This can be the toughest part of the strategy. Realistically, this list won’t all be in your existing industry, especially if you are not willing to relocate.

View it this way: you have deeply developed skills that are transferable to other industries. Open your thinking and consider other industries.

Here’s a key understanding for this step. We don’t care if they have an open position or not. So don’t limit your list to companies only posting open positions. You won’t get to 30-50 if you impose that limiter.

Here’s an example: a current coaching client is a highly-skilled marketing manager with a long, successful track record in a heavy industry niche, of which there are few other similar companies in his current location. He has no desire to relocate so he is reaching out to totally unrelated industries such as healthcare, software development, start ups. It’s been a challenge to get a list of 50 doing this but it’s developing.

4. Using LinkedIn, research and find 3-5 people to contact within those companies.
When you select a company by typing the name into the LinkedIn Search bar at the top left of your Home or Profile page, the top banner of the company will contain a live link in blue that says “See all __ employees on LinkedIn”. That’s where you will find people you may want to contact.

Most thumbnail profiles that appear will have their titles. Certainly, you will be looking for those who will likely be the decision makers for hiring someone with your background. But don’t limit it to them. Look for people that you may already know or who are doing what you do in the company, or did at one point.

At this point, you should have a range of 90-250 names to contact (30 companies x 3 contacts, 50 companies x 5 contacts). You’ll need that many because we are talking about a numbers game here which will become clearer as we work through the rest of the process.

Now, here’s where we inject a twist that most job-seekers don’t always view as rational. Don’t call these people to ask them for help in finding you a job. Why? Because people don’t like being put into that position and you will have ended a relationship before you even got started. We have a different strategy.

First, send a personalized LinkedIn connection request. You can often add a personal touch by looking for the common connections, work history, schools attended, etc.

For instance, maybe something like this:

Hi Allen.  I came across your LinkedIn profile. Your career experience is very intriguing.  I also see that we (have the same alma mater/we share a common acquaintance in Sadie Sue/worked at the same company back in ’08/etc.).  I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn. Gary Foster

LinkedIn forces you to be succinct.  You have a max of 300 characters and spaces for this connection invitation.

Once sent and accepted, you’ve now set yourself up for the key networking step.

5. Call or email with a request for an informational interview. Informational interviews are telephone or person-to-person interviews that are not designed to get you a job but to get AIR – Advice, Insight and Recommendations.

This process is NOT about making direct requests to be considered for a position. This is about building a relationship, not getting a job.

If they’ve connected with you on LinkedIn, you’ve moved from a dreaded cold call to a warm call.

The intent of the conversation is twofold: (1) to get information about the company to help you determine if it is a company that you would want to work for and (2) to position yourself for consideration for a position if one exists, or develops later.

Click here and download a document that has email and voicemail scripts that you can use to arrange these informational interviews.

If you are fortunate to have connected with someone who may be the hiring manager for your desired position, all the better. But don’t hesitate to reach out to others who may know of unposted positions or movement within the company that may be opening up opportunities in your area of expertise. Moreover, they may have a direct pipeline to the hiring manager, and, depending on your effectiveness in the informational interview, may offer to hand-walk your resume into the hiring manager, or at least encourage him/her to take your call.

Here’s a taste of the type of questions you should consider asking when in an informational interview, courtesy of Nancy Collamer, career consultant, speaker, and author at MyLifestyleCareer.com from her book “Second Act Careers”.

• What do you enjoy most about your job?
• What are the most frustrating aspects of your job?
• What are the most important characteristics for success in this career/company?
• What training should I pursue to make myself more marketable in this field?
• Which professional associations would you recommend that I join?
• What are the challenges, trends, and opportunities in this profession/company?
• Are there good options for freelance or consulting work within this industry?
• Which magazines, journals or websites do you recommend?
• Are there opportunities for flexible work arrangements?
• Is there someone else you recommend that I talk to?
• May I use your name in making the introduction?

6. The last step is to follow up. If you succeed in getting an informational interview, be sure to do the following:

• Send them an immediate note or email.
• Let them know what developed as a result of the time you spent with them, including any connections that they don’t know that came from their recommended contacts.
• Stay in touch periodically – keep them in your “tribe”.

C’mon Gary – are you serious about all this?????
Dead serious! Sound a bit daunting? Yep – it sounds daunting mostly because it’s so different from what most new job seekers think should be the approach. Today’s search requires a process.  This is a process that works – when worked.

I’ve seen this work – beautifully. I’ve seen it fail – miserably. The common denominator in both situations? The job seeker. This process requires attitude, commitment, and persistence.

Go back and read Part Two in this series where we talked about attitude and commitment and the need to maintain energy through this process and guarding against overwhelm.

Plain and simple, we are suggesting you play a numbers game here that 90% or your peers won’t do. That’s why they don’t find the good jobs or get back to their previous salaries.  They compromise and “settle for.” Most often, they will retreat back and follow all the sheep back into the application process.

Why 90-250 names? Simple. You’ll be lucky to get one response out of five calls you make or emails you send. 1:5 = 18 to 50 conversations. Do you think that something might develop out of that many conversations? Count on it!

Work it daily – but don’t kill yourself!
We suggested in Part Two, limit your search to thirty hours. Give this calling/emailing effort 2-3 hours a day, EVERY DAY, keeping a spreadsheet log of your calls, emails, contacts, and conversations. Have faith that it will develop.

I’ll share two contrasting experiences I’ve had with coaching clients.

Case A: a 58-year-old registered nurse with a 10-year track record as the Clinical Manager of a large urology practice. Six-figure earner with a stellar track record. Got sideways with the lead physician and walked out – and then panicked.  She found me on LinkedIn, we started a coaching relationship and she followed the inverted pyramid process to the letter, including this networking strategy. Within less than six weeks, she found herself with three interviews and ended up in a dream job as a clinical liason for a cancer drug company doing what she really loves doing – educating clinicians on the efficacy of cancer drugs. She now travels extensively, makes 25% more than she was making at the urology practice and is thrilled with the new control that she has over her time.

Case B – not so good. Similar situation in some ways. Talented six-figure marketing person needing a job. Followed the inverted pyramid to the point of the networking and tried it for a while but succumbed to the difficulty and rejection in the numbers game and returned to the application process which only heightened her frustration. I couldn’t convince her to stay committed to the process and our coaching relationship dissolved. I just checked her profile – finally landed on her feet 12 months later but it appears to have required a relocation.

Trust the process – turn it into a game, a game with a very promising finish line.

P.S. Here’s a helpful hack for you. LinkedIn profiles rarely provide emails and you are limited on the number of free inmails you get. There is a Google Chrome extension called ContactOut that does an amazing job of providing emails for people you pull up on LinkedIn. Go to www.contactout.com using Chrome as your browser and download it.

The program will put a little black magnifying glass on your top browser search bar. When you pull up a profile, click on the magnifying glass and a window will open in the upper right of your screen and tell you if they have an email address for that person. I have found they have emails for upwards of 70% of the people I look at. You have to be careful because some of the emails are associated with companies that the individual left, so they aren’t always current. But if they have non-company emails address like gmail or yahoo, they usually are still alive.

I hope this series has been helpful. We would appreciate hearing from you as to what worked for you and what didn’t. Scroll down and leave us a comment below.

“Double-nickeled and Stuck! Getting re-employed at 55 or beyond” – Part Three (b)

In Part Three (a), we laid out some of the changes to the job search process that have evolved recently in the face of advancing technologies and changing economic conditions.  We also focused on the first of the three components in the inverted-pyramid strategy that comprises an effective job search for someone past the 50-year mark – the resume.

In Part Three (b), we dive into the second tier of the pyramid – social media.  But not just any social media.  If you haven’t been under that proverbial rock, you know that LinkedIn has become the 800 pound gorilla in job search.  We’ll dig into why and how to use it most effectively.

Optimizing the resume and the LinkedIn profile are the foundation on which you build the ultimate solution to regaining meaningful re-employment – networking.

 

LinkedIn – friend or foe?

If you are a bit of a Luddite and eschew social media, let me just say that LinkedIn stands apart from the Facebook-like social media and to shun it is to put a huge hole in your ability to re-enter the job market.

 

Here are two statistics that should help you understand why LinkedIn has to be a key part of your search strategy.

  • 500 million users worldwide; 128 million users in the U.S.
  • Over 90% of recruiters (corporate and third party) and hiring managers  use Linked In to find people.

For more detail on what LinkedIn has become, try this link.

For a job seeker, LinkedIn has two purposes:

  1. get noticed
  2. network effectively. 

Let’s not make it any more complicated than that.

Get noticed – FIRST!

I’m going to come at you from the perspective of a recruiter and a power user of LinkedIn to find people, because I’m both.  I suggest you put on a recruiter’s hat as you think about how you are going to put LinkedIn to work – and I’m going to fit you for that hat.  So try to track with me on this.

What is a recruiter trying to accomplish, whether they are third party, like myself, or an HR corporate “talent acquisition representative”  or, for that matter, a LinkedIn-savvy hiring manager operating on his/her own?   OK, this is a “duh” – they are looking for someone to fill a new or vacated position that requires a specific set of qualifications and experience.  But, here is a key understanding.  They want that list of prospects to be short.  These are busy people.

Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to not only be on the short list but to be as close as possible to the top of results that their search produces.

I’m going to try to keep this fairly simple and manageable by just focusing on what I feel are the four most important components of your LinkedIn profile.  There are other components that deserve attention but, IMHO, get these four done right first.  These do the heavy lifting on getting you found.

But first, a warning.  You’re being scanned

You have 6-12 seconds to make an impression with your profile.  That’s been researched and documented.  Recruiters, by nature and necessity, scan both resumes and LinkedIn profiles and spend, on average 1/10th of a minute looking at you.  If you don’t grab them in the first one third of your LinkedIn profile and “incent” them to look at more of your profile, they are moving on. So you have to say it early and effectively.

#1: A picture is worth a – – – – –

Amazingly, 30-40% of the folks on LinkedIn don’t have a picture.  Even if you’ve got a face ideally suited for radio, I suggest a professionally done photograph with a smile.  I saw stats recently that said you are seven times more likely to be found if you have a picture, and eleven times more likely if you show teeth in a nice smile.  Who knew?

I won’t speak for other recruiters but if my initial search has produced a list of, say, 200 people that I want to pare down to 25 or less, my first round of elimination are those without a picture.  Seriously, without even looking at their qualifications.  It just tells me they aren’t current,  probably a bit sloppy, or, more likely, aren’t interested in being found to start with.

Don’t cut corners here.  Forget the I-phone selfie. Get the photo done professionally, dress professionally and have a solid, light-colored background.  No distracting, busy background.

#2:  Headlines sell newspapers – and job seekers

Right underneath your picture is the most valuable piece of LinkedIn real estate – your headline.  It’s one of the first, if not the first place the LinkedIn search algorithm goes in reviewing a profile.

There you have a space of 120 characters to tell the hiring world what you would like to be found for.

If you don’t, it defaults to the title on your current employment in your work history.  Maybe you’ll be lucky and that title sufficiently states what you would like to be found for, but that’s pretty rare.  You need to proactively go in and edit that headline using the titles that you are guessing that a recruiter or hiring manager is typing into her/his search string.

Here’s my LinkedIn profile headline.  These are the things that I want people to contact me about.

Medical Recruiting | Executive Search | Job Search and Career Coach | Speaker

Here’s another from one of my past coaching clients:

Laboratory Sales Professional | Healthcare Operations Management | Business Development Director

Here’s another one from a referral that just contacted me this week looking for some assistance on re-entering the job market:

Consultant seeking project or full time employment.

Headline #3 doing any good? No.  In fact, I think a headline like that backfires, especially if the rest of the profile reveals someone past 55.  Again, headlines that say “seeking new opportunities”, or something to that effect,  fall to the bottom of my list of prospects. As a recruiter, I am paid to find top performers who are currently fully-employed and “heads down” but open to new opportunities.

How do I know I have the right titles?

As an experienced professional, you should know what titles are the most common in your industry and area of expertise.  But if there is some doubt, or you want to make sure that you pick up on shifts in job titles in your space, review job postings that appear on the career sections of the professional organization websites that you follow.  If they don’t have a career site, contact someone at the organization for advice.  Or who do you know in your network that does what you do that might have some insight into title changes?

With 120 characters, you have room to include different wording of titles.  Start with something.  Remember, editing your headline is a 2-minute experience if you need to change or add something.

#3:  Summary and Work History

Right below your photo and headline is a summary section.  You’ll notice that when you click on anybody’s profile that this section only shows two lines of content with the option to “show more” to see the rest.

Remember the 1/10th of a minute?  You need to say in the approximately 230 characters (including spaces) in these two lines something that will catch the hiring manager/recruiter’s attention get them to and click on “show more”.  In the balance of the section, you should list 4-6 major accomplishments along with your special skills listed vertically using hard returns after each skill.

Here’s the Summary from  J.T. O’Donnell’s profile to illustrate what I mean.  J.T. is one of the premier LinkedIn trainers and long-time career and job search coach.

18+ years of experience in the development and delivery of HR, employment, recruiting, job search, and career development tools and resources. Delivered 200+ presentations to 10,000+ professionals on a wide variety of career topics. Managed teams of 50+ with budgets of $35M+.

Specialties:
Career Advice & Job Search Strategy
Career Assessment & Planning
Career Decoder
Interview Preparation
Salary Negotiation
Career Coaching
Personal Branding
Resume Development
LinkedIn Usage
Employment Branding
Team Training & Corporate Development
Executive Leadership Coaching
Social Media in the Workplace
Recruiting
Candidate Experience
Talent Acquisition & Retention Strategies

The Experience section, where you list your previous work history should emphasize results, accomplishments – notable and number or percentage-based achievements, much the same as your resume.   Again, remember the scanning.  Numbers jump off the page.  Numbers show productivity.  Numbers show problem solving.

The Experience section must be consistent with the resume.  It doesn’t have to be an exact duplicate of the resume but it must be consistent.  You don’t want to create doubt through gaps or inconsistencies between the two.

But I’m going to give away my age!

Yeah, maybe.  But you can be smart about it and not put your 1984 graduation date in your education section.  Just state the college/university and the degree.

And don’t go back more than 15 years in the Experience section.

Pictures don’t lie so there really aren’t any tricks there.  But I’d still go with a photo vs trying to hide the age by not having one.

#4: Endorsements and Recommendations

Endorsements and recommendations can help you come up higher on a list of candidates that a recruiter’s search produces.

You can select 50 different skills in the Featured Skills and Endorsements section.  There are two schools of thought here: (1) take advantage of all 50 or (2) narrow your selection of skills to a 12-15 that really focus on your core skills.

I’m a fan of the 12-15. I think it makes it easier for the endorser to make a decision on what they are going to endorse you for.  Plus it’s easier to move the one’s that I want to get endorsements for into an order that will insure that I get more endorsement for that skill.

You can check out my selection of skills and how I’ve ordered them with a quick visit to my profile. 

How do you get endorsements? Give them.  Most savvy people that you endorse will endorse you back.  Strive to get 99+ showing on your key skills.  These skills should align with those stated in your headline.

Recommendations are important.  Here, I suggest being bold and reaching out to people who you are confident would recommend you.  Send them a recommendations request (click the three dots just to the right of your picture – you’ll find the “request a recommendation” link there).   If they don’t respond, remind them a couple of times – the failure to respond is usually because they are busy.  If a few reminders don’t get movement, be bold and write one for them and ask them if they would submit it.

Also, giving recommendations will usually generate a recommendation in return.

Keywords

Let me wrap this up by emphasizing the importance of keywords.  Keywords related to your skill set and to the types of positions you want to be found for need to be dispersed throughout your profile.  They can appear in your headline, your summary, your work history and in your endorsements.

LinkedIn has a very effective search algorithm and experienced recruiters will use very sophisticated search techniques using LinkedIn’s Boolean search method.  Keywords will be the foundation of any search.

Here’s a search string a former recruiting colleague of mine and LinkedIn power-user used to find a Mechanical Engineer with R&D background for one of his clients.  At first glance it’s a bit of a brain twister but on examination you can see how he has used different types of keywords, along with some filters ( current companies, location) to narrow his search.

R&D/Mechanical Engineer Search String

(“mechanical engineer” OR “mechanical engineering” OR “R&D Engineer” OR  “Research and Development Engineer”) AND (R&D OR “research and development”)  AND (“drug delivery” OR “drug-delivery” OR intravenous OR “combination device”)  AND “medical device” NOT director AND NOT (VP OR “vice president”) AND (“product launch” OR “product development”)  AND CAD AND (FEA OR “finite element analysis”)  + Current company: Sanofi, Medtronic, Eli Lilly and Company, Novo Nordisk, PA Consulting Group, West Pharmaceutical Services, Ypsomed AG, Cambridge Consultants, Team Consulting +Location: United States

This search produced less than a dozen qualified candidates for this recruiter from a universe of 458,680 mechanical engineers and 41,700 mechanical engineers with R&D background on LinkedIn and resulted in a very lucrative placement and a happy client and candidate. This illustrates why having the recruiter hat on and understanding the importance of having a complete profile with keywords can really enhance your search.    Your goal is be one of those twelve in a search. All of the above will help get you there.

Next series, we’ll take a look at a networking strategy – where the rubber really hits the road.

Let us know your thoughts about this post.  Have you had success using LinkedIn?  Other than just an up-to-date profile, how else have you used LinkedIn successfully in your job search?  Scroll down and leave us a comment – we appreciate your feedback.

 

 

“Double-nickeled and Stuck! Getting re-employed at 55 or beyond” – Part Three (a)

OOPS!

I goofed!  I didn’t plan ahead very well.  There’s no way I can cover Part Three in one post and expect you to hang in through all that needs to be covered.  I’m turning Part Three into its own part three series so it’s more digestible.  I guess sort of 3a, 3b, 3c.

So, in our three-part part-three , we’re going to try to put today’s job market into the proper perspective for the over-55 job seeker.  Part 3a is still pretty long. Hope you can hang with me.

Where do you fit?

I’m confident to say that you are reading this because you fit one of these categories:

  1. The unemployed
  2. The soon to be unemployed
  3. The “working worried”
  4. The “bored, is this all there is, I’m ready for something more fulfilling”
  5. The confused, concerned, frustrated, worried –  and angry

Did I miss a category?  If so, leave what I missed in the comment section below with a detailed description.  We’re here to learn also.

While you were asleep – – –

Let me officially welcome you to a job search environment that has NO resemblance to what you did on your last job search.

As an executive recruiter for the past 16 years and job search coach for the last five, I’m in this crazy job market and deal with folks in different situations every day.  I know it is a very difficult and different market.  For you to succeed, you not only need to be on top of your game, you’re going to be playing a different game.  Oh, and BTW, in addition to increased competition and complexity, we now get to sprinkle in something that will cling to us like a barnacle for the balance of our days – ageism.

Here’s a story of a coaching client of a few years back that epitomizes the traps that a new entrant into the search process can fall into.  This talented lady was only in her late 40’s but had been laid off from a business office management position where she had worked for nearly ten years.  Divorced with an active teen-ager at home (equestrian hobby – expeeensive!!), she immediately launched her own search.  In desperation, she had reached out to me with this story:

  1. Applied and sent her resume to 238 positions posted on various company websites and job boards over a nine-month period
  2. Had four interviews, three of which were scams. One legitimate opportunity which she wasn’t selected for.
  3. Had burned through the meager savings she had (nasty divorce!) and her unemployment checks were about to go away.

It had been ten years since a job change.   She actually got the job she just lost through a referral from a friend.  So her exposure to the job market was very thin.  She did what she assumed any job seeker would do.

I wish it were an isolated story.  It’s not.  It repeats with the majority of the calls I have with over-50 job seekers.  I had one this week with a PhD-level IT professional who had applied at over 50 locations in a 6-week long search effort with no interviews and only four actual responses – all form-letter turn downs.

Black-hole job seeking

 Applying is a natural response to a job market re-entry.  But it doesn’t acknowledge what economic shifts, technology and social media have done to the job market over the last 20 years, particularly in the last 5-10.

Back in the dark ages of 1995 when the internet was still in diapers, applying is what you did, but you did it by faxing your resume or filling out a paper application at the company location.

Then came the online era with CareerBuilder (1995), Monster (1999),  Indeed.com (2005) and their ilk along with Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) technology.  The process hadn’t really changed much – you could now just do it online from your desktop.  You still had to wait for a response but now for an email rather than a phone call or snail-mail letter.

Companies started getting hammered with resumes.  According to Forbes, in 2013 the average number of people who applied for any given job was 118.

Inc. Magazine says it was 250.

Applicant tracking systems developed to handle this onslaught.  With their development, the whole system shifted from “screening in” to “screening out.”

Applicant tracking systems screen out by reading keywords and keyword phrases, incorrect headings, formatting, wording/grammar.  They search for job gaps, look for age clues (I’m sure they wouldn’t admit to that!), compare your tasks and duties to the HR boilerplate job description – they seem to have no limit to the elimination tactics that can be programmed in.

    Liz Ryan is a veteran HR professional and job coach. Her article “How Technology Killed Recruiting” provides a really good, helpful review of ATS technology.

Today, it’s estimated that 80% of corporate recruiting departments use an ATS.

 Companies: 1 – Candidates: 0

– if you are keeping score.  What used to work, and what most job seekers still think works, is a black hole.

Forbes says only 23% who apply will get an interview.  Inc. says only 2.5%.  My coaching clients agree with Inc.  So do I.  Any frustrated job seeker I’ve talked with doesn’t come close to the 23% if they pursue this self-directed, “spray and pray” strategy.

The hidden job market

Permit me to deepen the black hole even further.

Upwards of 75% of real jobs aren’t even posted!  They’re hidden.

What you say? Why?

Maybe the hiring manager isn’t ready to pull the trigger.  Perhaps budget approval is pending. Maybe he/she doesn’t trust his HR group to find the right talent and prefers to work her/his own professional network first.  For sure, he/she doesn’t want to be buried in the off-target resumes the ATS is likely to produce.  Perhaps they need to replace someone and are using a recruiting firm to keep the search confidential. Or maybe the company is posting it internally hoping their internal referral system will kick in.  Or maybe they just don’t have the budget to post it out.

Just know that it’s a big percentage and it’s where the better jobs are – hidden from your view.

So what’s a poor job seeker to do?  Heard enough to know that a mindset shift is in order? No?  Then chew on this – upwards of 80% of jobs are filled through networking, only 10-12% through online postings.

Think about it.  When you apply on line, you are doing what every other lazy, uninformed job seeker is doing.  Those aforementioned job-applications-per-job-posting confirm that.  You have chosen to be part of a very “un-select” group.  Can I say “sheep-like follower” and have you still hang with me?

EGAD!  I have to network?

OK.  Enough already with the problem.  Get me to a solution.

Here it is!  Network your ass off!

Scroll back about four paragraphs.  See that 80% number.  It’s for real.

I know.  You don’t do job fairs and Junior Chamber of Commerce networking events.  Elevator speeches in a noisy room over cheap wine to an equally desperate stranger just isn’t your thing.  That’s OK.  Those events attract the same people that are applying and are continuing to show their naivete and desperation by working these events.

You need to take it up a notch – a big notch.

Picture this:  a group of “talent acquisition” professionals (aka internal, corporate HR recruiters) whose primary job is to kick you into the black hole.  Key understanding here:  when you apply, you land right in the middle of the human resources department.  So what?

HR recruiters have NEVER, NEVER been able to say “yes” to a hire.   But they have ALWAYS, ALWAYS been able to say “NO”.  Just suppose they had a bad hair day – or are buried in resumes and days behind.  Or just plain don’t give a s*#t.  Still like your odds?

Where do you need to be?  With someone who says YES (forgive me for the “duh”).  That would be?  The hiring manager (another “duh” – sorry).  How are you going to reach her/him?  Not through an HR rep of any kind – they go to a special school to learn to lay down their lives to protect the hiring manager from direct contact by a candidate.  How dare you make them look bad!

Summary:

  1. Don’t make HR your starting point by applying. You’ve injected a roadblock on the front end of your search.
  2. Find a direct route to the hiring manager.
  3. Realize and accept the fact that you will eventually have to deal with HR. Remember that they do things like schedule interview times, explain and administer benefits, complete paperwork. They are policy and procedure people – and they are good at it.
  4. So don’t piss them off. At any stage of the process, they can still cut you off at the knees and destroy your progress.  Consider them a necessary part of a successful triumvirate – of you, HR and hiring manager- and treat them with respect and be responsive to the things they need from you in the process.

Where do I start?

It has to start with a success mindset that is tempered with the knowledge that this could be a real slog with the possibility of numerous setbacks and disappointments along the way.  There will be temptations to compromise, to take a “settle for” position.  And that may be necessary in the short term to meet financial needs.  But it needn’t be permanent.

Your success in your job search will be a test of perseverance and will depend on your belief in yourself and your ability to stay with a process i.e. a systematized approach to the activities that will eventually guarantee your success.

An inverted pyramid strategy

One of the ways I have found that removes some of the mystery and angst with my coaching clients and sets them up for success is to view the start in the form of an inverted pyramid with three components:

With my coaching clients, we start from the bottom and work up.  I put the relative importance of each component in that order.  Resume and Linked In Profile are foundational to the most important component – networking.  They must be done well.

Resume

Here’s where I raise the hackles on professional resume writers, some of whom are friends, most all of whom are outstanding at their trade.

The resume is very important.  However, I find that most job seekers inflate its importance. I put it as the least important of the three components for a few simple reasons:

  1. Nobody ever hired anybody off a piece of paper.
  2. An effective job search doesn’t lead with a resume. The resume should follow activities that result in requests for the resume.
  3. Resumes become the most relevant component in a strategy that is limited to applying to posted jobs and/or using third party recruiters.

I’m not a professional resume writer.  I could be – and pick up a few extra Benjamins each month I suppose, but I choose not to.  I leave the choice to the client – shell out $500 to $1,500 for a “Picasso” or work with me and let’s build the resume together to accepted formatting and content standards.

Here’s my strategy with this that has proven successful with coaching clients.

Generally accepted resume formats, or templates, aren’t complicated.  A skilled resume writer is trained to pull out of you the skills, responsibilities and accomplishments in your work history, your educational background and relevant other experiences and wordsmith it into a really pretty doc with boxes/graphs/tables/shaded areas that help justify their fee using semi-advanced word processing composition skills – true “Picassos”.  They are good and earn every penny of what you are willing to cough up.

My position is that you don’t need to spend the money on a Picasso because, if you are conducting an effective networking-based job search, the resume is in a secondary position and not the lead position.

So I help my coaching clients become the author of their own resume which then forces them to dig deep into their past and resurrect the accomplishments that will add power to the resume and, more important, to their stories.  It’s not hard for the two of us together to put it into an acceptable, professional format without having to go to a workshop on Microsoft Word composition or spend half of next month’s mortgage on a Picasso.

Thumbs down on density and responsibilities

I’ve probably seen 10,000 resumes over 16 years and 95% of them were stinkers, even at the exec level.  Why?  Because they almost always focus on responsibilities at the expense of accomplishments.  And invariably they are too dense and try to say too much.

Hey, I get it.  When you are in the “my resume is my salvation” mindset, you are going to want to try to say everything about you in two pages – hence size 8 font and a ton of boring, self-indulgent, inflated, irrelevant information.  And, might I say, almost guaranteed rejection by a busy, fast-moving hiring manager or recruiter.

So that’s where I go with coaching clients and where you should go if you are going to self-direct and write your own document.  Description of responsibilities should be brief and the list of number-based, quantifiable accomplishments should dominate the resume.

Here’s another clue:  recruiters and busy hiring managers like white space.  They abhor size-8 font and pontification.

A serendipity

It’s amazing to witness what this exercise does by taking people deeper into their past and re-discovering the high level of impact they have had but had either forgotten or didn’t feel was significant.

This exercise has a couple of very positive serendipitous effects.  First, by resurrecting and acknowledging forgotten/overlooked accomplishments, a new self-confidence emerges.  That depression, anger and settle-for attitude you brought with you after the groin-kick starts to turn.   Secondly, this exercise plays an amazing role in preparing the seeker for conducting a “knock their socks off” interview.

Summary

To sum up part 3a:

  • The majority of jobs (and the best) are hidden.
  • A “spray-and-pray” strategy is a fool’s journey.
  • Don’t front-end your search with a trip into the HR Department, aka “black hole.”
  • Your resume is very important and it needs to be crisp and concise.  But don’t lead with it.
  • Lists of responsibilities on a resume don’t get hiring manager attention, achievements do.  Emphasize hard-hitting, quantified, problem-solving, attention-getting accomplishments.  Prove that you have had impact.

Next step?  Entry into the social media world.  Nope – not the Facebook world.  The Linked In world – the default platform for getting found as a job seeker.  Next week – Part 3b – why you need Linked In.

 

Leave your thoughts about this part in the comments section below.  Have you had good or bad experiences in your job search leading with your resume?  We’d really like to get your feedback and hopefully learn something new about experiences out there in this ever-evolving job market.