"As Good As..." versus "Better Than..." [Must read]

Critical Information

How’s this for odds? 

Thirty out of three hundred. And of those thirty, maybe five will be selected. And of those five, only one, perhaps two (the second as a “back up”) will be finalists. 

There’s only one winner, folks, and the first prize is, you guessed it, the job being offered. 
  
I’m making a generalization here, of course, and my figures may be off if you’re a stickler, but in this job market, even though the tempo may have picked up slightly in the last few months, those are the kinds of figures HR personnel and recruiters report as seeing regularly when a job is advertised as being open. What this means, of course, is that it’s still a very, very, very competitive world out there and anyone who applies for a job from a monster.com-lookalike or a newspaper ad is facing stiff competition.

All of which leads me to the topic of the month, which is that most resumes don’t work hard enough to ensure that the job-seeker is included in the dreadful “first cut.”

You see I believe that the ideal resume is NOT one that basically says “I am as good as anybody else” and “I have the experience you want.” That may possibly get you into the “first cut” of the thirty individuals who are selected, and I emphasize the word “may” here because, in such a competitive world, it is possible that they may pick the first thirty, all of whom say “I am as good as anybody else” and “I have the experience you want” in their resumes, and then get tired because there are forty, or fifty, or even sixty who have these characteristics. 

So the thirty-first and all the others that are as good just don’t get picked. After all, thirty is a good round number and to sort through them to winnow it down to find the five to bring in for an interview is a fair amount of work. Five interviews is also actually quite a lot of work when you think about it, in this busy world in which employers are asking each person to shoulder more than their share of work.
 
Yet that is the type of resume I see, more often than not. It lists what the applicant has done and, if it lists a few achievements here and there, it is still comes across as muted, monochromatic, rather lifeless and certainly not anything like the kind of document it needs to be to galvanize the reader to really, really want to see them, speak to them about what they did and how it can help at the company with the open job. 
 
I see these factual, job-description monochromatic type of resumes with awesome regularity and they’re very clear, very succinctly written, as if the world were the same as it was twenty years ago.

No, I believe there’s a better way and it is based on the idea that the ideal resume is one that basically says “I am much better than anybody else” and “I have the experience you want and have put it to great use for my prior employers.” Think about it. Which person would you, if you were the person doing the screening for the hiring, choose? 

Now a funny thing happens when you lay this philosophy on the table. 

People get scared. They immediately say, “I haven’t had anything like that kind of experience and I couldn’t possibly claim that I’m exceptional.” They don’t believe in tooting their own horn; they really want an “objective”, flat job description type of resume. 

I don’t mean to imply that anyone needs to lie about what they’ve done. But, after some digging, I usually find that the people I’m talking to have indeed made a substantial contribution to the companies they’ve worked for; they just never thought much about it, or they tend to minimize it. And, believe me, in my work, sometimes it does feel like digging during an initial session when we’re building a resume. (But I like to do that kind of work, obviously.)

That’s why I’ve come to believe that most people can’t write a “Killer” resume for themselves. They’re just too close to the subject-matter to be objective. And, more often than not, they’ve been taught not to brag or trumpet their accomplishments. It’s actually painful for them to write a “Killer” resume, I’ve found. 

So, if I may be so bold as to ask you to step back, and look at your resume, to see if it does indeed say, “I am much better than anybody else” and “I have the experience you want and have put it to great use for my prior employers.” If it does, bravo! If not, back to the drawing board!

** Why It’s Important To Unhook Your Ego From Your Job **

The most debilitating thing about being laid off (or fired, for that matter), aside from the very real loss of income, occurs when a person suddenly finds herself / himself cut off from a sense of their own worth – precisely because their sense of their own worth has been inextricably tied up in their having … holding … and performing … a job.

The first question one usually gets asked when someone first meets you is: “And what do you do?” That’s the occasion to gauge where on the ladder or social scale you stand. I had a friend, a perverse friend, who held a very good job as the Head of a Data Center for a large IT Operation, who used to tell people, just to watch their faces fall: “Oh, I’m a garbage man.”

And, truth to tell, many people who face the mirror in the morning, equate their worth with their job title: “I’m a Vice President … an accountant … a manager … a project manager … the Special Assistant to …” etc., etc., etc. … ad absurdum. Think of poor Kenneth Lay, now that he isn’t Chairman of Enron any more, and how his whole puffed-up persona was linked to that role.

The unspoken rule seems to be: Equate your personal net worth with the role you hold at work.

The equally unspoken rule is: No work, no role, no worth.

When looked at objectively, after all, the person who’s been laid off today is still exactly the same person who held the job yesterday. She or he has the same capabilities, talents, internal resources and work experience that made holding the job possible. She’s still the same person the employer thought valuable when they hired her in the first place.

So what’s changed? Well, for one thing the salary isn’t rolling in. For another, the laid off person doesn’t have an office to go to or a boss or people, if he or she is a manager, to manage, or co-workers to associate with. There’s no job description. There’s no power or sense of accomplishment. There’s no challenge. (These, by the way, are excellent reasons for seeking out a support group.)

But, if you really look closely at it, all of that is external to the individual.

So what I’m saying is, if you’ve linked your worth to the role you’ve played (or are playing) in your job, you’re riding for a fall. And that fall, the more you’ve linked your worth to your job, is going to be precipitous if your job ever goes away.

My observation is that most people who are laid off experience some degree of depression, starting off with shock, sometimes disbelief or denial, anger and resentment and this often translates itself into lack of energy and motivation in connection with finding a new position. Underlying this is – what else? – the severing of the link to the job and the loss of ego … status … position.

So what can you do about it? Well, for one thing you can begin to look at yourself in terms of the qualities that contribute to making you who you are – the qualities that contributed to whatever you’ve achieved in the work-a-day world, but also those qualities that have contributed to your having friends, a life-partner, if you’re a parent those qualities that have gone into parenting your children, contributions you’ve made in other areas of your life. Are you courageous, inventive, creative, empathetic, humorous, analytic, objective, supportive, etc., etc.?

The list, I hope, is long and diverse; if not, “attention must be paid.” Those qualities are what contribute to your individuality and worth in the first place, not the fact that you hold a certain type of job or earn a certain amount of money.

(Please note that I’m not running down the importance of the money, which is another issue completely. It may be important to pay the bills, and it can buy status symbols, but it doesn’t really have anything to do with – ironically – to your self-worth.)

What I’m proposing here is, as the title suggests, that you, dear readers, unhook yourselves from your jobs and substitute something with more permanent worth to bolster your egos.

Being Flexible and Adapting in this New Economy

One of my clients pointed out a trend that many of you readers, if you’re unemployed and lucky enough to be chosen after an interview, may have encountered. After working her way through the interviewing process in two jobs, and after being told she had been chosen as a finalist for the job in both cases … nothing happened. Not a thing. No phone calls. No e-mails stating that someone else had been chosen. Complete silence. It was as if both companies had fallen off the edge of the world.

When she finally followed up, she was told by the people involved, “We lost our funding. Stay in touch, maybe in the second quarter the position will open up again.”

Talk about feeling let down. Talk about feeling powerless. What a waste of effort it had all been was her feeling. And, it appeared, there was nothing that she – or for that matter, anyone -- could do about it. No strategy was going to revive the prospects of either company, improve their sales or profits, and revive the job opening.

Yet something didn’t make sense about this to me. I reasoned that, although both companies had “lost” the funding, there was probably still a real need for the “problem” those job opening were supposed to solve. The rationale for creating those openings must still be open, and someone had to perform the work. That seemed logical.

So, when we strategize together, after thinking about it, I said to my client, as I’m wont to do: “What would happen if…?”

“What would happen if,” I said, “you went back to these two companies, to the hiring managers, and stated what we’ve just talked about? Namely, that the need for the job probably hasn’t gone away. And, therefore, what if you asked them, since they knew your capabilities by this time after so thoroughly interviewing you, if you might work on a few of their urgent projects on a contract basis? Would you be willing to do that to see what they said?”

Of course she would, my client said. And she did.

And, in one out of the two cases, the idea struck a chord with the hiring manager. Yes, he told her, there was a real need for a project and he would see if they could contract with her to do the work. After some shuttling back and forth, and a few discussions, her got back to her.

Lo and behold, she had a one month agreement, signed sealed and delivered, and was earning a reasonable fee. Not a great one, but a heck of a lot more than the nothing she had beforehand.

The second company is still mulling over her offer. Something may, or may not, come of it.

Now my client has a leg up over any other applicant, if the work she does is the quality they expect – and, knowing her, it is. They have a chance to look her over, and she, in turn, has a chance to look them over. She gets to work, which as any of you who aren’t working now know, is more satisfying than the alternative. She also gets a reasonable amount of money for her efforts.

Not an ideal situation. But what is? In this New Economy, with our country at war, it obviously pays to be creative and flexible.

Signs of the times

An excerpt from a letter that I ran across from a Hiring Manager at a large aerospace company:

I am the hiring manager for the XXX positions in X-----. I had over 700 applicants to fill 2 positions. I appreciate your dedication and follow up but I have filled all of the open positions at this time. Thank you.

Our observations:
This is a ratio of 350:1. For each job offered, if we look on the whole as being averaged, 350 resumes were received. This is actually higher than many positions we used to hear about, which averaged 300:1.

OK, so what does this mean? Well, one interpretation of this data is that you can hide your head and do nothing because you’re so frozen with despair and go into permanent shock and withdrawal.

Another interpretation (and more healthy, I believe) is that you can do everything to stand out in a very crowded field; which means having absolutely the best possible resume and cover letter to enable you to stand head and shoulders above all the others who apply for that opening. Still a third interpretation is you can get out of that field and go into another (possibly your own business, which you may have some control over but which will have its own very engaging problems). A fourth interpretation is that you can start networking, really networking as if it is a serious full-time, difficult enterprise, to find those jobs before they pop out into the light of day; very few people, as I’ve said time and again, actually do this. Except for the first one, these aren’t exclusive choices.

I’d welcome any e-mails and discussion about any additional choices you, as a reader, may know of.

Prelude to piece below about "despair"

Before you - if you're not employed - start generalizing about how lousy the economy is and how much the deck is stacked against you, and how impossible it will be to find a job comparable to the one you had, I want you to understand that I am currently coaching a woman, a single woman, who is eligible for Medicare who currently earns better than $6000 a month.

Here are a few salient facts in this "rotten" economy:

• She was laid off around the middle of the year.
• She began feeling "down" and "depressed", which was wasted emotion.
• In less than three months, she received not one, but two, comparable job offers.
• She took one of them.
• She is now looking at changing her job, once again, because a Household Name Company is very interested in her and it would mean a shorter commute.

The point here is not that we work miracles or that thinking positive will get you a job or that this stuff about the economy being bad is all poppycock. The point is, no matter how bad it may seem to you, it is still possible to get a new job in this terrible, rotten, downward-spiraling economy. Operative word here is "possible".

One other point. As with any of my clients, we built a "Killer Resume" for her that, which when posted out on Hot Jobs or Monster continues to pull in responses from Headhunters and Companies on a regular basis. In caopching sessions, we invariably review the jobs that come up and role play for any interviews. We strategize about ways to find job openings on a regular basis. This client knows the drill and goes right into an almost automatic series of responses that are known to work when something comes up. It took a time for me to teach this, but it gives her a methodology to use at will.

So, please, don't paint yourself, dear reader, in a corner by axiomatically deciding that the economy is so-o-o-o-o bad, so rotten, that nothing exists out there for you.

Despair and its after-effects

I once coached a young man from Pennsylvania for a short period of time. This was about a year and a half ago. He had been in Information Technology and had been earning a salary over $75K. When I coached him, he had already been out of work for over a year.

We re-wrote his resume and worked on his interviewing skills; but he had the notion that he had been betrayed by his former employer, who had laid him off when things got tough for skilled IT professionals, and he felt that because of his knowledge and schooling he deserved to be given a new position; and this attitude permeated everything he did.

Our coaching sessions only last a month, at which time he felt he’d learned everything he needed to and could go it alone. We spent four hours together in some very intense sessions. He was feeling very contractive and didn’t want to spend any additional money on coaching. His attitude was: I learned what I needed to, now I can make use of it. (To me, this was not coaching, it was teaching, and I believe that a coach may do some teaching as part of the relationship, but he or she actually does more than that; my philosophy is if a coach were just a teacher, it would be OK to just teach a basketball team how to play the game.)

There was also, as there almost always is, a sense of macho in what this young man was feeling – namely, This is something I need to do myself.

The other day I heard that he was still unemployed, approximately two and a half years after being laid off, and it bothered me. It bothered me and it made me sad because I had coached him; because it was an unfortunate thing for a bright young man to be without a job; and because I believed that he had a problem that was greater than he was willing to acknowledge or seek help for, and that was the root of his problem. I have had a few clients like him, and I could almost predict with some certainty that they would not find a job quickly or easily.

Now it’s perfectly true that it’s a difficult job market out there, and that most job openings are competitive. Some areas of the country are worse than others, and the city in Pennsylvania that this young man lived in was not in the greatest shape economically. The IT marketplace is not the free-for-all it once was, when if you had a skill, a job would practically find you because a company needed that skill so badly.

But I believe his problem was two-fold. First, he had an attitude that communicated itself to potential employers and that attitude had hardened into a fixed world-view that was almost openly hostile. And second, he had begun, because what he was doing didn’t work, to slide into despair. Despair, to me, is that area where you think, “What’s the use? I won’t even try. It’s not worth it in terms of the hurt and rejection. It’s also not worth it because there’s nothing out there.” This was occurring even as he decided to stop my coaching services.

I mention all this because I believe that there are many people out there who have let themselves believe that it isn’t worth trying, that the hurt and rejection are just too much to bear, and they in turn have begun ever so slowly to sink into a attitude that is tinged with despair and could possibly develop into full-fledged despair. And once that happens, I believe it’s very difficult to come back to a place in which you have a positive outlook.

As a coach, when I work with clients looking for a job, part of my responsibility, I believe, is to help keep the person I’m coaching in a positive frame of mind. It’s not just to teach them what to do. In an interview, you have to know what to do and how to communicate, and your underlying attitude is usually more important than you may know. I, personally, can’t keep someone in a positive frame of mind, of course, but it’s my job to show them what this looks like and to help them develop ways to maintain it as a general attitude.

• One way to revive a positive outlook is to get positive feedback. That’s elementary, of course, but it does work. When a client begins to get interviews, even if they don’t always result in job offers, it’s positive for them and they reflect it.
• But even if you don’t get interviews, there are other ways to get positive feedback from the world, and your task is to discover them (or work with your coach to discover them).
• Unhooking your ego from your job or profession is one way to start.
• Building a support group that extends beyond your family is another.
• Doing something that provides such feedback, such as volunteering, can provide it.
• Taking pleasure and sustenance in using your own personal skills in your personal life is still another way to do this.
• It goes without saying that exercising regularly will improve your outlook when you’re up against a dry period in a job search.
• Sometimes taking a second job can help, even if it’s being a waiter or waitress or something that involves physical effort.

The important thing is to learn to be forward-looking, optimistic and extremely positive. One characteristic of the people who get offered jobs, based on my observations, is that they’re “likeable” and “positive.”

In addition to having the skills, you want to be around them. The sour puss, the person who is a “downer”, the one who is “negative”, often doesn’t get chosen. And it can’t be artificial or forced; it has to be real and natural.

So if you take anything away with you, from this blog, please don’t give in to despair, don’t even get started down that road. And keep your attitude as positive as possible. Keep this as a reminder: It’s not only good for your job search; it’s good for your life.

Patience and why it's important

I know that, when you’re unemployed, the slightest thing can set you off. I’ve seen it often. The longer you’re out, the shorter your temper can become, until the littlest thing can trigger anger and an emotional outburst. The tendency is to begin to view the world as a “them” vs. “me” place, which often leads you right into a bunker mentality. Which is, of course, where you don’t want to be.

One side result of this type of thinking is that you (a) tend to have a slight edge to your voice, a tone that indicates hostility to those with whom you communicate, and that will really sink you during an interview or any situation in which you’re interacting with another person; and (b) another result is that you tend to be impatient with everyone, and begin to want things to be happening on your timetable, not someone else’s.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a fair world. It isn’t a nice world. It isn’t even a particularly rational world. What I mean by this is that it’s inevitable that you’re going to be encountering people who are rude, people who are unprofessional, people who have absolutely no empathy for your particular plight. The people you deal with may be emotionally immature or just downright stupid, frankly. They certainly do not have your interests at heart.

Some of the complaints I’ve heard include:

• “They’re really impolite; they didn’t get back to me to tell me whether they hired someone else or not. The least they could have done was send me a postcard. I finally found out they filled the position from someone I know in the field.”

• “I had a call from them, and then nothing…”

• “I must have sent off thirty resumes, and no company, not one, acknowledged they received them and none of them responded to them.”

• “I could tell, from the moment I walked in, that they wanted someone younger.”

• “The person I was talking to was younger than me by twenty years and didn’t really even have the experience I do.”

• “The person who interviewed me on the phone couldn’t describe the job and told me they didn’t have a job description they could send me.”

• “They don’t return phone calls…”

• “They’re asking for the moon but all they want to pay is a junior level salary.”

And more… A long litany of complaints, all of them perfectly justified. But the problem with thinking this way is that, as the incidents begin to mount up, your resentment increases and you can begin to build such a case against these potential employers that it ultimately becomes corrosive and damaging to your effort to find that next good job.

For the most part, with a few exceptions, the people I’m referring to here are basically very capable individuals who more often than not get asked to come in for interviews. Because they want a job so badly, they fall prey to disappointment when they don’t get called back, or when they receive no notification about the job’s having been filled. That’s when this cycle of building resentment starts.

So what can be done about it?

• First, it’s important to realize how destructive it can be to begin resenting the way a potential employer does business. Empathy helps here. Perhaps, as in many companies today, the HR Department is short-handed and over-worked and can’t find the resources to send out notification that the job has been filled and that the position is now closed. Try to see things from the employer’s viewpoint.

• Second, don’t sweat the small stuff. The important things, such as moving on and keeping a steady stream of resumes going out that respond to all of the new qualified job listing, merit your attention, your energy and emotions. You want to keep a positive attitude so you can be at your best, despite any real or imagined slights. When the “right” position comes along, you want to be at your best because the competition will be fierce.

• Third, you want to be patient. We know that every week the money in your savings account decreases. But, as the old maxim states, you can’t push the river. A baseball player with a batting average of .300 is doing damned well, yet we often forget to recognize that what this means is that he has missed 70% of the balls thrown at him. If he loses his patience because of this, in all probability he’ll increase the probability that he will miss the next ball or hit it badly.

• Fourth, you want to be realistic. We can speed up the process of getting a new job but we can’t make it an overnight occurrence. How often I have heard a job seeker say, “I need to find a job in four weeks” without understanding what it actually takes to find that type of job in today’s job market, without having any foundation of fact underneath that estimate. It reminds me of when I used to be a V.P. of Sales, when a rookie salesman would say, “I’m closing that sale in three weeks”; when, realistically, the prospective company’s buying cycle (the time it took to buy something it wanted or needed) was sixteen weeks at minimum.

I wrote the paragraphs above because I also teach clients to network, and time and again the biggest hurdle they have to get over is expecting instant response. If you go out and network with five people, that doesn’t mean that you’re automatically in the “hidden job” market and jobs will automatically begin to be offered to you. Yet, with a slight bit of exaggeration, that’s the expectation. “I saw five people, which was a lot of work, and I’m no further along than I was when I started, so why should I continue to network?” is the type of reasoning that I often hear.

In analyzing it, I find that it is impatience that really scuttles any chance of really getting into, and making a success of, networking. Because of impatience, because of the lack of immediate results, far too many people give up on networking and kill their chances of getting into the hidden job market. Yes, a certain amount of knowledge, of how-to-do-it, is involved. But the overwhelming mistake, at least in my experience, is a lack of patience to allow your efforts to work.

Networking and job hunting is like fishing. You can’t fish and be impatient. It just won’t work. You can’t network and be impatient. It just won’t work.

So that’s what’s wrong with being impatient. It’s not understanding the time element and why certain things take as long as they do that will scuttle your efforts. You can’t afford to generate unrealistic time pressures, creating unrealistic deadlines, and still maintain the stamina for a long-term job-hunting effort.

I now tell clients that it takes networking with one hundred people to begin to penetrate the hidden job market.

So, please, don’t set unrealistic deadlines. Please, don’t get yourself to the point that you lose patience with the process and with people. I know it’s frustrating but : Patience is, I hate to say it and as trite as it sounds, a virtue.