Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) – It’s ON again!

nick-reddit-11And now for something completely different…

Join me today, February 11, 2014 for a special Ask The Headhunter Reddit AMA — Ask Me Anything — at 1pm ET.

Here’s the direct link to the AMA: http://redd.it/1xmn3g

I’m doing this in cooperation with my good buddies at PBS NewsHour, where I produce a weekly Ask The Headhunter feature. (If you’re a marketer, don’t miss my weekly column on CMO.com.)

We’ve done “open mic” on the Blog before, where you pound me with any and all questions, and I try to pound my keyboard and tackle them all without passing out. But this is something new — I’ll be answering questions throughout the day, and I hope we’ll attract some new “regulars” to Ask The Headhunter!


If you’re new to Ask The Headhunter, here are three good introductions to what this community is all about:

Ask The Headhunter In A Nutshell: The short course

Ask The Headhunter: Introduction

And a sampling from a recent edition of the Blog: Big HR Data: Why Internet Explorer users aren’t worth hiring


So please pile onto the Reddit AMA – at 1pm ET — Ask me about jobs, recruiting, hiring, stupid HR tricks, what I had for breakfast, where I like to backpack, and what my favorite band is! (Anything!)

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Cornell Presentation: Be The Profitable Hire

This is a special posting connected to a presentation for Executive MBA students at Cornell:

  • Ask The Headhunter / Be The Profitable Hire
    Cornell University Johnson School of Management
    March 23, 2013, in Palisades, NY

cornell-logoI’ll add more content here after the event — but the main purpose is to answer attendees’ questions that we didn’t have time for, and to carry on the discussion.

Please feel free to post your questions and comments below — I’ll do my best to respond to them all. Thank you for joining me, and special thanks to Cornell’s Johnson School for the wonderful hospitality!

Quick access to resources I referred to:

How to Work with Headhunters

How Can I Change Careers?

Keep Your Salary Under Wraps

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini

How to Get Your Point Across in 30 Seconds or Less by Milo Frank

Six Degrees: The science of a connected age by Duncan Watts

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Webinar: University of Michigan Ross School of Business

This is a special posting connected to today’s webinar:

  • Ask The Headhunter / Making Your Next Career Move: Sourcing leads & executing your value proposition
    Ross School of Management, University of Michigan
    December 5, 2012

(This event was limited to students and alumni of the Ross School.)

I’ll add more content here after the event — but the main purpose is to answer questions we didn’t have time for, and to carry on the discussion.

Please feel free to post your questions and comments below — I’ll do my best to respond to them all. Thank you for joining me, and special thanks to the Ross team for their wonderful hospitality!

Quick access to resources I referred to:

How to Work with Headhunters

How Can I Change Careers?

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini

How to Get Your Point Across in 30 Seconds or Less by Milo Frank

Six Degrees: The science of a connected age by Duncan Watts

 

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Webinar: Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University

Today I did a webinar for about 300 alumni of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University:

Do Online Job Applications Keep Americans Unemployed?

(Or, How can you beat this goofy system?)

As usual, following some brief ranting by me (about automated recruiting), it was an Ask The Headhunter Q&A event — and we discussed some provocative questions from the audience. This blog page continues the discussion. I welcome participants to post additional questions, comments and suggestions about the topics we discussed — or anything related.

The webinar will be available to Kellogg faculty, staff, students, and alumni online on the Kellogg website. Many thanks to the team at Kellogg for their kind hospitality today!

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PBS NewsHour: The new Ask The Headhunter feature

When PBS NewsHour broadcast a TV segment I that I appeared in on September 25, viewers flooded us with questions about online job application forms — and about all kinds of daunting obstacles they face in the job search.

I answered many of their questions in a special column on the NewsHour website. And the questions kept coming.

The host of NewsHour’s Making Sen$e program, Paul Solman, asked me to do a regular Ask The Heahdunter Q&A column — and the feature keeps growing!

It’s Open Mic!

We’ve done Open Mic here on the blog before — and that’s the theme of my new feature on NewsHour.

What’s your problem? What challenges are you facing in your job search — or if you’re a manager and you’re hiring?

Join me for the latest round of Q&A! My hope is that you’ll post your own advice, thoughts, biting commentary, suggestions, and ideas about what makes the employment system stop and go.

Ask The Headhunter Archive

Here’s the archive of Ask The Headhunter columns on NewsHour so far:

Six Secrets To Beat the Job Market

More Job Search Secrets: Show Potential Employers the Money

‘Talk Shop, Not Jobs’: The Right Way to Network and More

How Can Starting Your Own Business Help You Find Employment?

Ask the Headhunter: Insider Secrets to Landing the Job

As long as you keep asking questions, I’ll do my best to answer them. As long as you keep posting your comments, I’ll keep chiming in — and I expect the input and discussion you generate will change some lives, just as it does here on this blog.

The feature has been so popular that each new column has been trending on GoogleNews Spotlight. Join us and keep the discussion lively — and keep us trending!

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Cornell Executive MBA Presentation

This evening at Cornell University’s Palisades, NY facility we talked about How to Work With Headhunters. Executive MBA students in the Johnson School of Business joined headhunter Deborah Matson and me for an hour and a half of Q&A. We covered a lot of topics — but the seminar sizzled over one question: Should you disclose your salary history to an employer?

The purpose of this posting is to continue the discussion.

We’ve covered this topic on the blog many times, and opinions sizzle here, too! Check out the controversy, which includes dozens of comments from readers:

How to make more money: Withhold your salary history

Salary History: Can you afford to say NO?

Salary history: Will HR put up or shut up?

The real reason employers want your salary history: Hiring is a crapshoot

How to negotiate with a headhunter

At today’s seminar, an HR manager from Johnson & Johnson made a good point: If you decide to withhold your salary history from an employer, how you say it counts a lot. If your attitude is uncooperative, an employer can read a lot into it. If you decline politely and respectfully, an employer might let it slide. What’s your take on disclosing salary?

Do you have other questions that we didn’t have time to cover? Comments and observations? Please post them here, and we can continue our discussion.

Many thanks to Cornell for its hospitality, and for the opportunity to talk shop with Johnson School EMBAs.

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Cornell Presentation: How to work with headhunters, and without them

This is a special posting connected to the presentation:

  • Ask The Headhunter / How to Work with Headhunters, and without them
    Cornell University Johnson School of Management
    March 5, 2011, in Palisades, NY

(I posted a preview of the topic here: Good Headhunters: They search for living resumes.)

I’ll add more content here after the event — but the main purpose is to answer questions we didn’t have time for, and to carry on the discussion.

Please feel free to post your questions and comments below — I’ll do my best to respond to them all. Thank you for joining me, and special thanks to Cornell’s Johnson School for the wonderful hospitality!

Quick access to resources I referred to:

How to Work with Headhunters

How Can I Change Careers?

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini

How to Get Your Point Across in 30 Seconds or Less by Milo Frank

Six Degrees: The science of a connected age by Duncan Watts

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Harvard Webinar Audio: Can I stand out in the talent glut?

Last week I did a webinar for hundreds of Harvard Business School alumni, titled Can I stand out in the talent glut? The presentation was largely based on the ideas and methods that I talk about in How Can I Change Careers? (Which, by the way, isn’t just for career changers. It’s for anyone who wants to stand out.)

Talent glut? Yep — and you’re part of that big clog of talent stuck in the Employment System, trying to land a job. Big bucks are conspiring to keep you from getting together with the manager who needs to hire you — and HR departments are playing along. In fact, they’re paying along, to the tune of billions of bucks.

Listen to the audio (approximately 7 minutes), and please chime in on the discussion:

Why is it so hard to stand out? Simple: Everyone is dumbing down, pretending jobs come from key words and databases. And employers have come to believe that the more they spend acting stupid, the more successful they’ll be!

In the next post, we’ll get more specific — we’ll “run the numbers” and listen to a little more audio. But they’re not my numbers. Though I’m not a number-crunchin’ guy, I know that if I just wait long enough, there’s an Ask The Headhunter subscriber out there who will step up to help. And one did.

An experienced CEO named Mike, with a specialization in finance, actually ran the numbers for me, after he got burned by one of the job boards — TheLadders. After wasting 14 months applying for between 600-700 C-level jobs on TheLadders, he now describes that “exclusive” service for “$100k+ jobs” as “a long-shot Powerball lottery tucked inside a well-oiled public relations machine.”

(Maybe Ladders CEO Marc Cenedella would like to use that line in one of the daily e-mails he blasts out to all those C-level executives who pay him for lottery tickets every month.)

We’ll cover Mike’s scathing analysis in the next post, but this isn’t about TheLadders.

This is about Can you stand out in the talent glut? By the time we got done with the webinar last week, lights seemed to flicker on in a lot of Harvard MBA heads: This ain’t rocket science.

So stick around. We’ll talk about the daunting challenges you face landing that next job, and we’ll talk about getting past them. (And you don’t have to be an MBA or a C-level exec to understand it.) You might be surprised at what works, but you probably already know what doesn’t.

(Anybody want to take a guess what our friend Mike calculated are the odds that a Ladders member will actually land a C-level job through TheLadders? Harvard folks who attended the webinar: Please keep it under your hat for just a little bit, and let others take a stab at Mike’s estimate!)

[UPDATE: For more audio from the Harvard Business School webinar, and for the odds of landing a C-level job through TheLadders, see TheLadders: A long-shot Powerball lottery tucked inside a well-oiled PR machine.]

Harvard Webinar: Can you stand out in the talent glut?

This is a special posting connected to the Harvard Business School Career Management Webinar I presented on November 3, 2010. I’ll add more content here after the event — but the main purpose is to answer questions we didn’t have time for during the hour, and to carry on the discussion.

Can you stand out in the talent glut?

Please post your questions and comments below. Thanks for joining me!

[UPDATE: Don’t miss this audio excerpt from the webinar!]

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Q&A on Midmorning, MN Public Radio: Oct 5 10am CT

Please join me on Midmorning with Kerri Miller, Monday October 5, 10am Central Time, on Minnesota Public Radio.

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UPDATE: I’m glad to take overflow questions from the show here on the blog. Just post them in the comments section below… I’ll try to get to them all!

Here’s the audio from today’s Midmorning segment:



I referenced these articles during the segment today:

Put a Free Sample in Your Resume

Too Old to Rock & Roll

Information and statistics about job boards:

Job-board Journalism: Selling out the American Job Hunter (an oldie but goodie)

CareerBuilder is for Dopes

Job Board B.S. Abounds

Why do people pay to use job boards?

Your question might also be answered in one of the many other articles on the web site: Ask The Headhunter.
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This is live, call-in talk radio — bring your questions! MNPR streams live online.

Our topic? The Job Hunt! The insider’s edge, how to find a job, how to interview, how to get the job, and if you already have the job, how to keep it and advance in your career.

I’m told that a representative of Monster.com will be on the show, too…

(If your questions don’t make it on the air, please post them below and I’ll do my best to address them all after the show!)

Tune in here!

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