Roadmap to the Hiring Manager

We all want to get to in front of the hiring manager, both in reputation (or brand) and in person. Although getting there can be a long march, it’s even longer without a roadmap!


Here’s another one from the “Chronicle of My Job Search Mistakes”: By not thinking about their level of relationship to the hiring manager, I was not asking my contacts for the right help.

I was networking, but not interviewing, so there had to be something missing. When a networking contact failed to show up a meeting, I sketched out a roadmap to the hiring manager (thanks for the napkin Caribou Coffee!).

Based upon a contact’s level of relationship to the hiring manager, I determined to ask them for help in one of three areas: Connect, Learn or Influence.

Connect: People who have limited information about the company or hiring managers, but can make introductions to others who are inside the firm, understand the firm, or have a relationship with the hiring manager.

Learn: People who have a good working knowledge of the business, who could teach me about the culture, business model, view of the department where I want to work, and hiring practices. They can make connections to people with influence with the hiring manager.

Influence: People who are close to the hiring manager and can carry the message of how I can serve the company to the hiring manager.

Ranking of contacts:

I considered two factors. The first was knowledge of the company. The second was their strength of relationship to hiring manager.

A company insider who does not know the hiring manager, is great to learn from but has little direct influence. The same goes for service providers who work in the hiring manager area or former employees of the firm.

An outsider who is a good friend with the hiring manager will not have a strong working knowledge of the company, which limits their ability to match you against the current needs of the firm. This is why they behind the hiring manager’s peer, in terms of influence. My highest ranking goes to the person who manages the hiring manager.

Learn versus Influence:

Do you need both? Yes. Meet with “Learn” contacts first, so you can determine if the company/role is a proper fit and then get ideas on how to fine tune your pitch.

Where to start:

Ask for any type of connection, but the priority of contacting them would be learning before influencing.

Again, the roadmap to the hiring manager will be unique, but you will still connect, learn and influence – if you understand where each networking contact fits, you are more likely to get a better result.

Good luck today.

Mark



www.candidateschair.com – Tools and Advice from a Candidate’s viewpoint to help get past job search roadblocks and keep your spirit strong. Please take a visit.


http://TwitJobs.net The Career Community

Arguments for Hiring Someone in Job Transition – Skills You Will Not Find on a Resume

If you were to change Newton’s third law of motion, which states “To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction”, to fit job transition it will sound like this: “To every job search experience there is always an equal learning you can use again.”


After meeting 250+ candidates and my own transitions, I have seen traits and skills that are learned in job search. A candidate may not put these skills on a resume, but they a huge benefit to the hiring company.

1 – Eager to Work: Businesses always want to find a ‘motivated’ employee. Knock. Knock. We’re here.

2 – Ability to Network: It’s more than learning networking techniques like LinkedIn, but the willingness to build to reach out to others and knowledge of how to work with others.

3 – Value of Network to Business: A network is not just for finding a job. It is a wickedly powerful tool to find and connect to clients, vendors, investors, candidates and advice, often with a national reach.

4– Communication Skill: Besides developing an effective pitch, it’s also delivering it in multiple forms: in person, e-mail, blogs, Twitter, resumes, etc. Most important, candidates know how to keep it short.

5– Broadened view of business/Awareness of trends: When else in your career will you just focus on meeting so many people, seeing so many businesses and learning about the market.

6 – Understanding of their skills: The virtually continuous feedback stream from networking and interviews, gives a sharp view of skills, including those which are stronger than a candidate may think.

7– Open to new ideas: Search forces a candidate to think differently about a career path, how to find answers, what skills to use and living in new financial world… and they successfully lived through it.

8 – Not afraid of risk: How often do we complain of people not willing to take a bit of risk? Candidates try new ideas almost daily with their most precious resource: themselves.

9 – Dig up the Answer: No roadmap on how it should get done. No problem. Candidates get creative to find connections, get inside companies, learn the language and get to know who will interview you.

10 – Ability to deal with adversity: Search is a war of attrition between what’s it like out there a Candidate’s psyche. Unlike work, everything is personal, which makes every defeat that much tougher.

11– Constraints inspire innovation: No corporate support, limited finances and less than welcoming marketplace. Candidates are not going to quit, so they make constraints a source of innovation.

12 – Local community contacts: Most networking is done locally and these are great for working in the community for non-profits and corporate awareness.

People currently employed can also see these items, but there is a greater frequency and heightened awareness when in search that cements these traits into a candidate. Of course, no two candidates will have the same level of these traits – but they will be there (and many others as well!).

Job search always gets a bad rap, so we all tend to hide our efforts in job search – then promote how it’s really has improved us and what we can bring to a company.

Good luck today.

Mark

www.candidateschair.com – Tools and Advice from a Candidate’s viewpoint to help get past job search roadblocks and keep your spirit strong. Please take a visit.


http://TwitJobs.net The Career Community

Job Search: Take Two

The following is a guest post from Dave Opton the founder of ExecuNet.com – he and his team have been providing amazing insight into career management and networking since 1988 – so he’s done a few laps around the track! Dave was gracious enough to agree to write a post for CandidatesChair.com. Many thanks Dave! - Mark Richards.


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Ever since I can remember, there has been a “factoid” making its way around the career management world about how long someone should plan their job search will take. What I can’t recall and never remember seeing is the source from which this “factoid” came. In any event if you are in a job search, you have probably heard it too. It goes something like: You should plan your search to take about 1 month for every $10,000 you seek in salary.


I haven’t the slightest idea nor have I ever seen statistics that indicate whether this rule of thumb is right, wrong or anything in between, and I have been roaming around the career management space since (dare I say it?) 1961.

That said, in talking with ExecuNet members, this is a subject that comes up with great frequency. Certainly not surprising, as most executives tend to be more type A’s than B’s and as such focus on objectives to be reached within a specific timeframe and get pretty impatient if and when it doesn’t look like that is happening. In addition, as leaders, they are used to being in control (more or less), and if things are not going the way they want them to and fast enough, they can make the needed changes.

In truth, I believe the foregoing is a major reason why we all find the search process so frustrating. There is only so much of it we really can control, and a great deal of it that we can’t. When you are “action oriented” and you feel you are in a situation when you can’t “make things happen,” to say it is frustrating doesn’t do it justice.

Also, how much time a job search is going to take is also one of those questions where I am not sure that an actuary could really give anyone a meaningful answer. There are so many variables involved, such as geography, age, function, industry segment, compensation needs, and the economy just to name a few.

Armed with the foregoing, hopefully you can understand why it is when someone asks me to guesstimate a timeline that I try to say this is one of those questions where “the answer is, there is no answer.” But of course, most people think that this is just a cop-out on my part and ask for a number anyway.

At that point I am likely to say something along the lines of, “Well,” and using my own personal experience as a starting point, “I can tell you that whatever length of time you think it will take, you are probably underestimating it significantly. It is kind of like when your spouse says they are going to do some redecorating and they estimate the cost at $X and as a seasoned pro you immediately make a mental note that it is much more likely to be at least $2X+.”

While we can all try to smile at our spouse’s budget estimates, translating that to a job search isn’t so funny. It is, however, very important in this sense: Part of trying to manage your way through a process as frustrating as a job search is to set realistic expectations. For without them, people tend to set goals that reality will make it very hard to attain, and when they are not attained, they feel it is somehow a sign that there is something seriously lacking in themselves when, of course, that is not the case at all. Easy to say but much harder to internalize.

I talk with members almost daily whose searches have been going for several months and in many cases more than a year, and aside from looking for ideas on handling the frustration, they also want some ideas on what they can do to try and re-energize the quest.

There is a lot that could be said on this subject and even more that’s been written, but for whatever it’s worth, here are a couple of thoughts for those who might be in this situation:

• Keep in mind that this is essentially a sales process, and as such, do what companies do if a product they have introduced to the market is not producing the results they expected – repackage it. As a candidate, that could mean a résumé makeover, tuning up your phone and/or in-person interviewing skills, making sure you are doing really thorough research in terms of target companies, and certainly working harder to expand your personal and professional networks.

• Make sure that because things have gone much longer than you wanted them to that you don’t fall into the trap of locking yourself in your home office and spending your days “clicking and praying.” It is counterproductive both strategically and emotionally.

• Get out, about and involved, both online and especially offline. Relationships can start online, but trust, which is the tipping point in personal referrals, comes much more often from face-to-face relationships built over time. If you are not already actively involved in at least one professional organization and one civic organization, do so. Keeping yourself intellectually “tuned in” is really important in terms of both attitude and energy, both of which are critical in terms of how others react to you.

• Since most people get jobs as the result of a linkage process (i.e. networking), everything you can do to give yourself the opportunity to create those links is very much worth the time and effort. If you are a member of ExecuNet, you have long heard us write and talk about effective networking being built on a foundation and attitude of “giving, not getting.” Approaching both people and/or events with the idea that you’re there as a resource to others does a lot to get your focus on the right stuff.

• If you are someone who has trouble doing some or all of this revamping yourself, you might consider getting an executive coach to help. It is certainly nothing to be ashamed of and from an accountability and structure perspective can be very helpful in getting things back on track. At ExecuNet, members frequently ask our help in finding such a resource, and we are happy to refer them.

And don’t ever forget what every salesperson will tell you: every “no” is simply one step closer to “yes.”



Dave Opton, Founder

ExecuNet

Blog: Six Figure Learnings

www.execunet.com

Twitter: @Oppy




http://TwitJobs.net The Career Community