"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.

Competitive world out there

Depressing news, isn’t it, when you read or hear about the number of good people being laid off? What it means is, by and large, that everyone who is looking for a job is up against stiff competition.

Those who choose to blank out this fact, those who don’t want to be in competition and act as if it doesn’t exist when they know it exists, and those who are unaware of it, all operate from a much weaker position than those who acknowledge it and plan to do something about it.

That’s my thesis for this particular posting.

Competition is often a “dirty word” to many job seekers. They don’t like it. It makes them feel uncomfortable. They’re not used to it. It’s somehow common, dirty, pitting one person against another. It isn’t win-win; it’s one person wins, the others lose. It’s not fair. It’s not nice. Deep, deep feelings arise when you discuss it openly.

You can easily tell when you’re not being competitive. The signs are very easy to read.

First is, when you send off your resume in response to a job, and you don’t get anything back; no invitation to an interview; no calls from the HR Department or recruiter that posted the job; dead silence, maybe a postcard thanking you and telling you someone else has been chosen.

Second is, if you do get a response and get interviewed (whether by phone or in person or both), you don’t get offered the job.

Can’t be plainer than that.

I am adamant about those very real signs meaning that you aren’t being competitive. If either of these two signs show up with any regularity, you need to take a hard look at what you’ve been doing and begin to do something differently. The old rule applies: If you’re not getting the results you want, repeating what you did isn’t going to get different results.

And, as the quote at the beginning of this month’s article demonstrates, it’s a very competitive world out there. That means that you have fewer chances to find the job you want, and it also means that you have to be better equipped, more desirable as a job candidate, than the majority of people.

You are pitted against a lot of other people, make no mistake about it.

Interestingly enough, because I read many resumes in the course of what I do, my observation is that most people don’t know enough to make themselves really stand out by writing a “Killer” resume. Therefore, the competition is great in terms of numbers; it’s great in terms of people with the experience to do jobs; but it’s not great in terms of smarts about presenting oneself. That is one difference in favor of the sophisticated job seeker.

The difference in winning athletes, I believe, is (1) they know what to do, (2) they train to do it as perfectly as possible, (3) and they have the determination to do it. (They often work with coaches, by the way, which is a shameless plug for what I do, because they realize they can’t do it all by themselves.)

Yet job seekers, who, for the most part, aren’t very disciplined, approach looking for a job with an off-hand attitude that is sometimes downright sloppy, if not inefficient. We all know that, for example, very few job seekers are able to use all the available time they have at their disposal in an organized, effective manner; certainly few job seekers can say they occupy a full forty hours’ worth of time each week in effectively pursuing jobs. It’s almost as if there is a belief that looking for a job is not the same as any worthwhile project, as if all the rules for achieving any purposeful objective didn’t apply.

Networking is rarely done by job-seekers; I’ve said too much on that subject. The Broadcast Letters I’ve seen coming from job-seekers are few and far between. These are just a few examples. You’d be amazed at how few people “position” themselves and their resumes vis-à-vis the jobs, who expect the potential employer to do all the work of fitting together the pieces to make some sense as to why this particular resume is being submitted in response to this particular job.

Most job seekers, because of the trauma involved, want to limit themselves to those few tasks that don’t involve being rejected too often and are afraid to develop the new skills that will, indeed, take them into new territory.

For example, “selling” oneself (with all that word implies) is considered kind of dirty. The idea that, in this competitive world, you have to show how you exceed the competition, is somehow repugnant. That’s like being polite in a race and stepping aside when someone crowds you, to let them through.

Watching some people go unprepared to an interview always surprises me. It’s like running a marathon without having done any training. Assuming that, because you’re you have a certain amount of experience and/or training, the potential employer is going to want to hire you after interviewing you is just plain silly. Not assuming that you have serious competition, and not showing why you’re the best (yes, the best) person for the job (as opposed to your being just another qualified person), also strikes me as amazingly short-sighted and downright silly. Yet job-seeker after job-seeker does it.

So what do I believe you can do to be more competitive?

• Recognize and acknowledge that a minimum of 300 resumes will be received for any job you apply for, that it’s a harsh competitive world out there now
• Recognize and acknowledge that networking is one way to avoid some of the competition, and get out there and start doing it
• Make certain you have a “Killer” resume that shows you as being the best in your respective area of expertise or field
• Position yourself and your resume correctly (anybody who doesn’t understand this can e-mail me and I’ll send you a copy of the November 2003 Newsletter covering this subject)
• Prepare massively for all interviews
• Show in the interview why you’re the best person for the job
• Act like an athlete in training and take good care of yourself to keep yourself in top condition
• Never let rejection get you down to decrease your performance and keep a positive outlook no matter how difficult it all gets
• Sharpen all of your job hunting skills so you become a consummate professional

And, once you do get the job, make sure you continue to network and keep trolling out there for the next, better position. You can delude yourself into thinking that, when you land a job, you’re in a safe place but in this topsy-turvy world that is not clear thinking and the next merger, the next layoff, will catch you just as unawares as the one that you recently experienced.

No, it’s not a pretty world. But, by following some of the paths I’ve laid out here, you can minimize the stresses and strains and actually feel some mastery over the direction you’re headed in.

Being prepared for a job search

I recently ran into an individual who had been laid off. This was his third time. He’d been in banking in branch management, and when his bank was bought by another mega-bank they of course laid off many of the – in the English terminology – “redundant” personnel.

What I discovered during our initial meeting shocked me deeply. Apart from the fact that he had done nothing to prepare for a possible layoff, he said casually: “I really need to brush up on my PC skills.”

It takes a lot of denial to think that you’re not going to be laid off if you work for a bank in the United States in this day and age of mergers, and it takes even more denial to think that you can get along in any position today without being computer literate.

I’m probably preaching to the choir here about being prepared for a layoff and about becoming computer literate, but this individual reminded me just how many older people lack even rudimentary knowledge of how to use a PC. As a realization, the impact of it felt like a smack on the side of the head.

Let’s address the PC area first. This is a terribly important and basic issue in finding a job today because, as our previous newsletter has noted, many jobs today are listed on the Internet in on-line websites, and you have to know how to use the Internet before you can even look at these jobs. It’s even more important to all future employers because most of them absolutely require such skills and take them for granted and someone who lacks them is in deep, deep trouble as a candidate.

Here are the basic computer skills you will need to acquire if you haven’t already done so. You need to:

• Know how to use a Personal Computer (not a MAC). NOTE: MACs are perfectly fine computers, but they are not the dominant breed and, except for graphics work, most employers don’t require knowledge of how to use them.
• Know how to use the current Windows operating system (not that I prefer it but it is the dominant business operating system).
• Know how to use Word as a word processing program.
• Know how to use Excel as a spreadsheet program.
• Know how to use Access as a database tool (this is not as critical as everything I’ve mentioned already).
• Know how to use PowerPoint to produce a presentation (this becomes critical if your executive position requires you to give presentations).
• Know how to access the Internet and use Internet Explorer as a browser (again because Microsoft dominates the business market).
• Know how to use and send e-mail

So anyone who is reading this, whether employed or not, who doesn’t have all of these computer skills needs to find a good training outfit and sign up immediately. The YMCA or YMHA near you may be an inexpensive source for such training. There are other relatively inexpensive ways to acquire these skills and the expenditure is an investment in yourself. Sometime even your local library, that old stand-by for information, can provide you with classes that will teach you these computer skills or at least give you a line on inexpensive schools. This is not something you want to ignore or put off. It is basic, basic, basic.

The second issue is far more complex. If you are working in a field in which mergers and consolidation occur regularly and with increasing frequency, it behooves you to begin learning all of the key elements of successful job-hunting post haste. In other words, you need to learn how to find another job quickly.

The elements of conducting a good job search, the elements that you need to learn and master, include:

• Being able to write a “killer” resume
• Knowing how to write cover letters that sell you as a candidate
• Being able to use on-line job-listing websites
• Having a good elevator speech and being proficient about using it
• Knowing how to network
• Knowing how to use a broadcast letter
• Understanding how to work with recruiters
• Knowing where to find a support group and/or job coach or “buddy” to work with
• Understanding the interviewing process and knowing how to interview well
• Knowing how to negotiate so you maximize the offer

For most employed people in fields that are consolidating and merging, the number one priority is to learn how to network now, and then begin using these skills by actually networking. In effect, you’re always – I repeat – always lining up your next job as part of this process. This starts with finding all of the professional organizations in your field, joining them, and networking within them. You can then branch out to networking with individuals.

Whenever possible, if working in such a high-risk field, you need to create a Plan B. This includes understanding your industry, which companies are growing and which are declining, networking to learn as much as possible about trends, who pays what, who can use your skills, what skills are required by those who are hiring, and the like. It is constant education, paying attention to yourself, not immersing yourself in your job and job skills to the exclusion of what’s going on around you.

If you take the actions suggested here, any abrupt transition can be met with some measure of equanimity.

The expectation is, you could lose your job at any time. Your tenure is comparable to a hired gun or a tenant farmer or a month-to-month tenant. In the “new economy” there is less and less security as a salaried employee, to be cynical about it.

On being laid off

Some people still feel shame when they're laid off, as if they did something "bad" or "sinful." Especially if a few others still remain on the job at their old company. So, in addition to the real pain of not having a job to go to, and getting paid regularly so you can pay your bills and support your family, it is all too easy to slip into feeling bad, feeling depressed, feeling isolated. This often colors the job seekers' attitude when looking for a new job.

In the first place, in these terrible economic times, layoffs seem to be the "norm", not the "exception." This means you don't have to explain that you were laid off, why you were laid off, and why others are still working at your prior company. All you have to say is, "I was laid off by XYZ & Company." You don't have to explain a damned thing beyond that, unless asked in a job interview.

Denial and its consequences

When one of my clients began talking to me about how unpleasant it was to look for a job, and after I’d asked “Why?”, he explained that this was because he had no hope of success and therefore was not to motivated to do very much, and therefore it would take emotional energy he felt he didn't have.

He had been out of work for more than a year, with no interviews at all now, and he considered himself on “the fragile list” (his words), so therefore it wasn't easy to keep plugging along. In short, he explained (with quite a bit of insight, I thought) he had had lost confidence.

In addition, he talked about being concerned about how, if he did take a job and didn't like it, it brought up the bigger question of finding what you want to do as opposed to finding a job. I thought that was an excellent question namely, "How do I go about finding what I want to do as opposed to finding a job?" Another reason, no doubt, for not exerting the energy to find a job.

It was a litany I’ve heard regularly from people who have been out of work for some time, and this type of hopeless attitude creeps up on people insidiously. I believe, unless reversed, it can seriously decrease your chances of finding a job and it can furthermore destroy your chances for functioning normally in a job again.

So what’s all of this about? Well, my analysis runs like this:

1. Most people don’t know how to look for jobs. They’ve never been taught how to do this. Their training and life experience hasn’t prepared them for it. What they know is how to do the work they were doing while employed. However, they think that they “should” know how to find a job as if it were an everyday, quite ordinary skill – which it’s not. Especially in a very competitive job market.

2. Most people also aren’t accustomed to rejection. There is a natural tendency to withdraw when faced with it. Only sales people, and perhaps a few others, can persist in the face of it. A few ‘No’s is all it takes to get someone to drop any further attempt to pursue whatever it was that they wanted. But hardly anybody wants to acknowledge this because it’s too painful and, therefore, it’s very difficult to get over.

3. An awful lot of people thought the job they had was a sinecure, even if it wasn’t held that long. If not for life, it was a “career” or a “profession”. (The individual I mentioned at the beginning of this piece, for instance, had been with one company for twenty-odd years.) And, if they’re laid off, after they’re laid off, they’re angry about it, resentful, because they feel (wrongly, I believe) they’re “owed” a job.

4. Denial is operative with such people. For example, they often haven’t made a budget to see how much time they have before the funds run out.

What bothered me initially about my talks with this client was how he had filled his life with "errands" that took up so much of this time, as opposed to job hunting activities and his avoidance about confronting how important such activities were, as if a job would be presented to him, instead of him being responsible for finding and getting a job himself.

When I began talking about getting started, he often began to tell me about all the other things he had to do. When I asked him to do a series of specific tasks, like updating his resume on the on-line systems, finding jobs on such websites as monster.com, and working on cover letters, he at one time gave me an estimate of three weeks to complete this, while in the same breath telling me that he had resources for only two months. A sense of urgency was lacking, obviously. I can only put this down to that dreaded word denial.

I’m happy to report that this particular client now has an offer to work on a contract basis, using some of his skills acquired over his twenty-odd years. This came about because:

1. We created a completely re-written resume that sells him and, after being posted on the on-line services, pulled responses from recruiters. He also has gotten favorable responses from employers, including interviews because of this resume.

2. We coached him on interviewing, so he knew how to present himself positively and knew what to expect when he was interviewed.

3. We talked through his resistance, denial and the incorrect things he believed. None of this was completely dealt with, obviously, but enough to help him to be functional again.

The fact that the world has been responding to him has of course raised his morale and helped him to deal with many of the negative thoughts he’d been thinking. My prognosis is that he’ll take the contract work, perhaps be hired by them on a full-time basis or, if not, find another job similar that makes use of his not inconsiderable talents.

In terms of finding the type of work he really loves, that’s another story that I’ll be glad to discuss in another posting because it is, as I told him, a really good question.

Attitude and the effect it can have on any job search

I once interviewed a very capable individual and probably would have hired him if it hadn’t been for the fact that he spent at least twenty minutes during the interview venting about his prior boss and company, describing with barely concealed hostility how badly run his company had been. It was obvious that he felt hurt and angry at having been laid off, still hadn’t gotten over it, and it dominated the interview. Although he could have done the job, I was thoroughly turned off and disqualified him as a candidate.

Most people looking for a job feel similarly aggrieved, but don’t like to admit it openly. They may strongly deny that they have this attitude, but it can creep through and color what you say during an interview, even if you’re not aware of it. It can also affect how you conduct your job search.

My observation is that, by the time they decide to hire a coach, a significant minority of people are showing signs of depression. They feel as if they are at the end of their tether, financially or emotionally or both. They’ve been terribly hurt by the layoff they’ve experienced, as was the person I mentioned at the beginning of this article, and because of the inevitable rejection they find themselves encountering during their job search, they often harbor a feeling of resentment that infuses everything they do. Because of this, they often aren’t doing what is really productive to advance their job search. I sometimes wish they would have decided to seek coaching before they reached such a state; I’m also glad that they decided to seek help because it represents a step out of their resentment, depression and hostility.

As you can imagine, it’s important to recognize and acknowledge these feelings when you’re seeking a job because they can seriously impede the progress of your job search. More than is often acknowledged, these feelings can be terribly corrosive and destructive. So I wanted to discuss it in this article and talk about what can be done.

For those of you who have been in sales or similar work, it’s a trite observation: You have to have a positive attitude to be successful. As researchers have discovered, this also holds true in sports. You have to go into an endeavor believing sincerely that you can succeed at it, or your performance will be less than optimal. Creating an internal image of doing what you need to and then making it happen physically is what good athletes do.

Adopt a positive attitude … Think positively … These words have been said so many times -- they don’t have much impact any more, which is a shame because it is so terribly important to have that mind-set. So much has been said and written about maintaining a positive attitude that the words often fall on deaf ears.

In job-hunting, I believe, keeping a positive attitude can’t be stressed enough. It is absolutely necessary to build and maintain a positive, forward-looking frame of mind because:

• It keeps you motivated in the face of constant rejection.
• If you have a negative attitude, it distorts your outlook.
• A negative attitude cuts you off from avenues that you might otherwise explore.
• Negativity comes across subtly in interviews, without your being aware of it, and it counts heavily against you.
• A negative attitude slows you down, encourages you to do less, the end result being that you see fewer people and make fewer contacts and thereby begin limiting your chances of finding a new job.
• A negative attitude undermines your feeling of confidence and your belief in yourself.
• A positive attitude, conversely, makes the hard work of looking for a job easier.

So, given that it’s an absolute imperative to have a positive attitude, what steps can a job-seeker take to foster one?

1. He or she can heighten their awareness of how they come across to others. Sometimes knowing how you present yourself to others is a revelation precisiely because it’s such a “blind spot.” Do you sound angry? Is resentment creeping into your communications? The self-awareness and acknowledgment of the impression you’re making on others is a first step in reversing the trend.

2. Working with a coach or a “buddy” or a therapist can make it easier to provide such an objective reading of your current attitude. If you can’t do it objectively by yourself, find someone you can do it with.

3. Regular aerobic exercise really helps. I can’t stress this enough. Getting the heart and blood pumping, increasing your endorphins, bringing oxygen to your brain, all can help to turn negative thoughts and feelings into positive ones. Start a daily aerobic exercising regime and keep to it as part of your job search. The key word here is “aerobic”.

4. Putting together a weekly plan, following it and working it conscientiously, all contribute to a fundamental feeling of accomplishment. This, in turn, will create positive feelings and confidence.

5. In addition to having a coach or “buddy” or therapist, joining a job-seeker’s support group can provide a “safe haven” in which the job hunter can “vent” and share his or her feelings with others in similar circumstances.

6. It’s terribly important to get rid of your feelings of anger and resentment, once and for all, by putting it all behind you. I’ve sometimes suggested that people write a long letter to their former employer, listing all the things they feel angry and resentful about, balancing it with the things they appreciated. This letter should then be filed or torn up, never sent, of course.

7. Making a list of one’s accomplishments – I usually recommend twenty-five accomplishments – helps people to focus on their positive life experiences. (As a sidelight, this also provides valuable raw material for your resume.)

8. Knowledge of what’s involved in a job search, understanding the underlying methodology and the steps involved, can help to keep your expectations at a realistic and reasonable level. This averts the unanticipated disappointment and accompanying resentment that results in feeling “down”. For example, knowing that a Broadcast Letter campaign will result in a return similar to direct mail campaign at .5%, as a rule, can prevent the inevitable disappointment when you get a single response after two hundred letters have been sent out.

One person I worked with told me, “I need a dose of your coaching -- because I’ve reached a dead end and I realize I’m off track.” We had worked together for a time, and then he dropped out of coaching. I smiled when I told him, “You make it sound like some kind of patent medicine or a quick fix.” He came back to coaching because he had begun to realize that his job search was going nowhere, and it showed in the hostility in his tone when he talked about it.

During our coaching session, I glanced at my notes and saw that our last coaching session had taken place in January, and it was now seven months later. I suggested that regular weekly coaching could keep him on track and that, in turn, it would bolster his morale. “No,” he said, “I really am very independent and don’t like to be coached. Let’s just lay out a plan and I’ll follow it myself.” After analyzing where he went off the track, we laid out a plan that basically replicated what we had worked on seven months earlier, and that ended our session. Needless to say, I felt badly for him because, unless he was very lucky, with his negative attitude and hostility (which he didn’t want to confront), he would in all probability find himself once again in the same position, facing the same dead end, and he’d be even more resentful in the long run.

I’d have recommended a therapist to him; I often do with such clients. In his case I don’t believe he would have been open to such a suggestion.

Job-hunting for those who have been “downsized” also often carries with it a self-imposed stigma, a sense of shame, that starts with the internal belief that anybody who’s been laid off has done something wrong. After all, some of the others weren’t laid off. Remember, this isn’t a rational belief. Combine this sense of shame with the widely-held belief that job-hunting is by its very nature a solitary endeavor, and, whether you’re a man or a woman, it can get quickly translated into being very macho. I’ve encountered many clients who start off feeling they have to do it all themselves, alone, without anyone else’s assistance; and, if they can’t, they believe they’re failures, weaklings, and don’t deserve to find another position. Ironically, for both woman and men, this epitomizes the “macho” go-it-alone approach.

I’d sum it up by saying: Getting help from someone else, accepting help, is not a sign of weakness; it’s a sign of strength. And: A positive attitude and knowing what to do are the keys to peak performance.

Reasons I do this coaching

Yes, I do charge for it, by the hour, but I also do this work because I enjoy doing it. I enjoy helping people. I also do it because I'm good at it, both in working with people and in terms of helping them to successfully find a job. I like the fact that I'm independent, and have no ax to grind as a "headhunter" or an "executive service" or "outplacement group" can have. My approach is to work with clients on an hourly basis, hour by hour, with no long-term contracts. I believe deeply in quid pro quo, providing value to clients, and am not afraid of being judged on the results. I also often take a different approach from people who have had an HR or counseling background, because I come from the sales and marketing side of business and I believe it is critical, in these tough economic times, to sell oneself, to market oneself; I'm also tough at times with clients because I've managed people across the country for results that brought in revenues and helped them to excel at their tasks. I also understand businesses from the inside out, as an employee, as a manager with specific goals to achieve, and as a business owner. Make no mistake about it, it's very tough out there right now, and in that regard I've helped people to snap out of negative thinking and the helpless feeling that they may never be chosen. I'm proud to be able to do this.

Why use a job coach?

What are the benefits of eJobCoach?

The sad truth is that while many people have invested years of training and experience in their field or profession, they are amateurs when it comes to job searching.

Similar to a competitive athlete, having your own coach:

• Provides objectivity and accountability;
• Teaches you how to conduct an effective job search;
• Keeps you focused and on the right track to a new job;
• Provides expert assistance with networking, even for shy people;
• Teaches you how to tap into the "hidden" job market;
• Shows you how to write Killer Resumes and Cover Letters;
• Helps you to be pro-active with Broadcast Letters;
• Provides interviewing tips, skills and techniques;
• Counsels you on working with recruiters and head hunters;
• Maximizes your salary negotiations; and much more…

"What do I do first?"

In one coaching session, my client thanked me for helping her to determine what to do first, second and third. I guess I took it for granted that there is a sequence to this effort. “It’s pretty confusing," she said, “when you start to look for a job. You don’t really know what to do because no one’s ever trained you or taught you about it.”

So I thought I’d describe my viewpoint about how to go about looking for a job, and finding one, from the very start, from ground zero. In project management parlance, there are some things that precede others and others that can be done in parallel and still others that can be done at any time. Obviously, you can’t send a response to an online listing if you don’t have a resume to do so with. You can’t negotiate for benefits and salary before you’ve gotten an interview and been chosen.

The first thing to do is somehow rid yourself of any hostility about being laid off, if you’ve been laid off. This might involve sending a letter to your ex-boss or company, venting all the anger you feel, but not mailing it. Or it could be expressed in a self-help or support group. Or you might try a therapist who could help you work through any such feelings.

Next, re-orient yourself about what kind of job you want to go for this time around. Do you want to find exactly what you had before? Do you want something similar but in a related field? Or do you want to try to change what you were doing? The reason for this is obvious -- because you next want to write a resume that targets your intended job and field.

Sometimes (and here’s where it gets complicated), you may want to network first to help determine what jobs might be available for someone with your talents and experience, and then go to the resume-writing stage. If you go the networking route at this stage, you will need an “elevator” speech.

Then it’s resume-writing time. With some of my clients, I find, multiple resumes for two or more job-hunting “tracks” make sense.

Once your resume (or resumes) has (have) been written, you can begin signing up for on-line services (the more, the merrier) and placing your resume out on them. And you need to search that old stand-by, the want ads, weekly.

At this point you can begin to branch out to pro-active networking. You can also create a broadcast letter if you have targeted a specific industry.

Then it’s a matter of resolutely answering ads and networking, supplemented by special pro-active broadcast letter mailings. It’s a numbers game, very much like the marketing campaigns I used to conduct.

Before you do connect and get asked for an interview (unless you’re networking, in which case the interview is usually so built-in you won’t even know you’re participating in one), you need to learn how to conduct yourself in any interview so that you’re the one who is chosen, and, if chosen, you need to learn how to negotiate the best benefits and salary.

In addition, it helps to understand how to work with recruiters. And, for emotional support, it might be a good idea to know where to find a support group and/or job coach or “buddy” to work with.

Hopefully, this sequence makes it a little easier to confront the tasks you need to perform, and the sequence you need to perform them in, to begin the arduous work of finding your next job.