Don’t subcontract your job choices

On July 8, 2019

In the July  9, 2019 Ask The Headhunter Newsletter a reader says all the job-search tools are mind boggling. What delivers the best job choices?

Question

job choicesI can’t decide whether to change employers or try for an internal move. I haven’t had to search for a new job in over a decade. The number of “tools” being marketed is mind boggling! Job sites, coaches, intelligent agents (really?), video resumes, and my favorite, services that use “big data” to match me to the perfect job. I tried one service that sends jobs to my mobile, but it’s spam. Can you recommend a few of the very best services to try?

Nick’s Reply

Your best job-search tool is the one between your ears. When you subcontract your job choices to someone (or something) else, you may wind up pursuing what comes along, rather than what you really want.

The employment industry is forever telling us that we need Big Data and career experts to guide us to our next great jobs. We need coaches and counselors and someone else to write our resumes. We need job boards and intelligent agents to deliver “opportunities” to our mobile devices. The problem is that while these tools may turn up something novel, they also lead us to relinquish our power to choose what’s best for us.

Which do you choose?

Try this little test. Think about going to interview with a company that found your resume in a database. What company? Well, one the database matched you to. So you go on the interview. How well would you come across in that meeting? How high would your enthusiasm and motivation be?

Now think about a product you really love, or a company you’d do flips to work for. Imagine what it would be like to meet and talk with a manager at that company. Exciting, eh? Incredibly motivating?

So, why would you let a database pick your next opportunity?

Relying too much on career help can make us passive and less effective. Take control of your career and learn how to advance it by pursuing what motivates you. How can you do this without automation and “professional” help? By taking small steps.

4 steps to your next job

In the world of psychology, we know that a daunting task — like job change – is best approached in steps. Succeed on the first little step, and you’re ready to take the next. Achieve several successes, and your confidence grows. Soon, you know you can reach the ultimate goal, and your self-assurance signals others that you’re worth hiring. Take charge. Take four steps on your own to get where you really want to go.

1. Talk to managers in your company

I’m glad you’re considering an internal move, especially if you feel you work for a good company. There are people who would pay a coach a lot of money for help to get a meeting with managers in your company. Yet, you can poke your head in almost any manager’s door almost any time you like. Pick one in an area you’re interested in. Introduce yourself. Ask the manager for advice and insight about how someone like you might fit into their area of the business.

Establish your credibility with the manager by briefly outlining what you accomplished last year in your current job. Talk about three things you did that helped the company. Then, ask the manager to name three challenges they see in their department. Suggest what you might be able to do to help. With proof of past success and ideas for what’s next, you have set the groundwork for an internal interview. It’s up to you to decide when is the right time to make a specific request.

2. Talk to a friend

Go visit a friend who works at a company you admire. Meet their co-workers and discuss your careers. What better way to “get in the door?” People pay to join networking groups to make new career contacts – but it’s hard to win the trust of strangers. So start with people that know you.

Your friends are the best sources of new contacts and ideas, if you put your heads together and consider who you know that can give you the advice and insight you want — before you actually need it. When you let other people open doors for you, it enhances your status. The next step is to return the favor: Offer introductions to the new folks you meet. One more step, one more success!

3. Talk to a company

Yes, directly. Not via a job ad or resume or recruiter. Pick your target company. Who do you know who knows someone who works there? How about the company’s customers, vendors, consultants, banker, accountant, or lawyer? I can almost guarantee you can find someone who will introduce you to an insider. (See Skip The Resume: Triangulate to get in the door.)

But, don’t ask them for a job interview. Instead, ask about their work. It’s an easy step – all you have to do is listen! Ask what they’re reading that influences their work, and for their insight and advice about their industry. Make a friend, and you’ll become an insider worthy of a referral to a new job.

4. Go to a professional event

Most job hunters freeze at the thought of picking up the phone and calling someone they don’t know. They’d rather write a stiff, formal cover letter ending with a plea that’s often interpreted as a threat: “I will call you in five days to schedule a meeting.”

From How Can I Change Careers?, p. 28

Attend professional and industry meetings regularly. Then take the next step: Offer to speak or conduct a workshop on a topic you know well. Attend more meetings. Become an active participant. Offer to help others. Become a hub of information and introductions. This takes time, so start taking steps now. The closer you are to the action in your industry, the closer you will get to managers who might be your next boss. (See Shared Experiences: The key to good networking.)

You’re right. So many tools are being marketed to help you find a job that it’s mind boggling. Most of them don’t work. Worse, almost all of them make you a bystander to the selection process. Don’t jump at “opportunities” that come along, and don’t subcontract your career choices to some database or to a coach.

The best career tool is between your ears — it’s you. You’re good at your job because you do it step by step. You can build confidence — and the network you need — to succeed at career change. Or you can wait for Indeed and LinkedIn to text you with your next job.

Start taking small steps toward the goal you choose, not the one that comes along. Every one of those steps is other people who do the work you want to do.

Where is the locus of control in a job search when we rely on automation, databases and “experts?” How do you choose the companies and work you pursue? What “tools” actually limit your choices? What tools expand them?

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Hey, Babe, don’t I know you from somewhere?

On October 3, 2011

In the October 4, 2011 Ask The Headhunter Newsletter, a job hunter asks whether social networks like LinkedIn are a great way to get a foot in the door when looking for a new employer.

I am currently looking at new job opportunities. Your suggestions are to network in order to find out more information about a company and to get to know the right people before you even think of trying to get a job there.

What is your view on making contact with people you don’t know at all via social networking sites, such as LinkedIn? I have joined some of the professional communities and this seems like a great way to make initial contact with people in a particular industry, but is this just a fake idea or is there actually some merit in this method?

My Advice

Getting to know a company through people connected to it is the best way to land the right job, and it’s the best way to avoid mistakes. But social networking sites portray this inaccurately. They show you a cool database of names and information, and they suggest that the links between people’s records constitute “your contacts.”

What’s a link?

That’s absurdly reductionist. It’s like suggesting that because your name sits alphabetically beside another, you share a “contact.” In the database, perhaps you do. But in real life, the fact that we both do business with a certain auto mechanic, or that the mechanic attended the same college we did, doesn’t hold any value. The only thing we share is a coincidence. To make that serendipitous “link” useful, one or both of us must invest a lot to create the shared experiences that lead to a relationship and friendship.

What are you going to do for me?

LinkedIn — like any other online social network — is just another social environment. Imagine walking up to someone at a friend’s party — someone you’ve never met — and asking them to recommend you to the president of their company. Other than the fact that you and the person “share a link” via the friend whose party you’re attending, there are no shared experiences between you. There’s no justification in asking for such a favor, and the person has no reason to trust your intentions. Even if the referral were made, the president of the company would not be able to obtain any useful judgments about you from the mutual contact, because there’s no basis for such judgments. There are no shared experiences. Just that serendipitous meeting.

That’s why you feel so awkward asking a favor of someone you don’t know who doesn’t know you.

The LinkedIn party is not much different. In both cases, the only way to make a real contact is to start a conversation on a legitimate topic you’re genuinely interested in. Use the normal rules of conversation. Invest in a real relationship that takes time to develop. But don’t expect someone who is “linked” to you in a database to feel any obligation to talk to you.

I found you in the phonebook

People construe the existence of a social network as permission to exploit nodes (people) when there’s no substance in the links between them. That is, they think that belonging to a huge list of people means those people should bend over backwards to help them. When help doesn’t come, LinkedIn turns a dumb expectation into a dumber process: Make more links until you get what you need!

LinkedIn is little more than a big phonebook. No one’s going to take your call just because you looked them up. It takes more. (See also: LinkedIn’s New Button: Instantly dumber job hunting & hiring.)

Take a hike

To answer your question, I think a social network is just one more list of people. So’s a phonebook, and I always hang up when someone calls me from a list. I also instantly delete e-mails that say, “I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.” That’s the new “Hey, Babe, don’t I know you from somewhere?” and it’s just as presumptuous — and just as offensive.

LinkedIn is a nice directory. Social networks are the new phonebooks. How you make new friends who care about you, however, hasn’t changed. You still have to hang out with them and share experiences that matter.

What do you think about social networks? How do you use them effectively? Hey, is this blog a social network? Have you met anyone on the blog who’s become a friend?

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LinkedIn’s New Button: Instantly dumber job hunting & hiring

On July 27, 2011

I don’t know who I feel more sorry for: Job hunters or employers. LinkedIn has introduced a new button that lets you instantly apply for a job — no resume, no cover letter, no effort. It’s instantly dumber for everyone concerned. (From Mashable: LinkedIn Launches Button That Lets You Apply for Jobs.)

The last thing job hunters and employers need is a quicker, easier way to apply for a job. What we need is more prudent, thoughtful, and careful job hunting and hiring — which means improving the process, not speeding it up. LinkedIn’s new button puts the emphasis on getting an application in quickly — while LinkedIn’s founding philosophy is that making good contacts and cultivating relationships requires effort and patience.

It’s dumb ideas like this that instantly put you into even more mindless competition with thousands, if not millions, of other instant applicants. This is why employers find themselves sorting through more and more drek applications. A bigger, fatter pipeline with a button that accelerates the flow of crud doesn’t improve recruiting and hiring. It instantly devalues LinkedIn’s equity in the personal networks it has worked so hard to facilitate.

LinkedIn’s New Career

LinkedIn, the bastion of online “social networking” and “relationships,” seemed to have taken a smart turn when it announced its “careers” initiative a few months ago. The company would offer tools to help employers and job hunters find one another, using LinkedIn as their path to personal contacts that yield the best working relationships.

The social networking company started building a new career service by hiring some top-notch business development folks from top-tier companies — implying it was going to build on the success of the networking tools it has become so famous for. Then LinkedIn drove off the road, and picked up churn-’em and burn-’em sales people from the big job boards and — Presto! — LinkedIn is now dumbing down hiring and job searching, just like Monster and HotJobs and CareerBuilder.

What’s the brilliant new idea these sales nomads from the job boards dragged in the door? Now you can apply for a job with a button.

A Button for The Drek Pipe

Gimme a break. We’ve seen it before: A hot company does an IPO and suddenly loses sight of its essence and turns the reins over to a management team with a solid history of selling commodities faster and harder. Where LinkedIn once preached use your contacts and your brain, now it’s selling volume and instant.

The highly-motivated new hires that LinkedIn originally brought in to launch the careers initiative — we’re talking cream-of-the-crop, seasoned relationship-builders from some of today’s leading companies — were given marching orders to extend LinkedIn’s dominance in social networking into the career sphere. That’s what lured them to LinkedIn. And it all sounded great: a natural extension of one of the most valued brands on the Web.

But in short order, LinkedIn went from selling the value of networking and personal relationships to dialing for dollars and pulling a Ladders-type about-face. (Remember TheLadders’ “exclusive” services for “executives only?” What a promising concept! Today TheLadders is just another job board selling database access for $15/month to any sucker who’s inbetween HotJobs and Monster.)

Like a lot of entrepreneurs with a great idea, Reed Hoffman implemented his idea as a database. Like a lot of great concepts supported by databases, Hoffman’s great idea became the database — with the result that LinkedIn’s database is now the product. It’s far easier to expand a database and to sell access to it, than it is to think up new ways to make personal relationships generate profits.

It seems LinkedIn has abandoned the concept that made it so successful.

Selling The Database

The impressive business development and relationship-building experts the company hired last year found that their long-range objectives had suddenly morphed into boiler-room-style monthly quotas. They were told to hit the phones and start burning through call lists. Selling the commodity and closing quick deals became more important than developing relationships that would lead to long-term business. The word on the street is that LinkedIn’s primo new hires, who believed in the mission, found themselves cast aside.

Their replacements, a second-string crew of telemarketers (reportedly including some from the likes of Monster.com), were closing deals with employers — but hardly relationship-building deals. Word got out that companies would sign up to search the database to make one hire, then bolt. The telemarketers weren’t selling a relationship with LinkedIn. They were hawking short-term access to a database, slapping the high-quality LinkedIn brand on Monster.com-level services.

It looks like the promising links between career development and thoughtful networking via LinkedIn snapped.

The Button: Impulse Job Hunting

I held off on commenting on what I’ve seen, hoping that LinkedIn was just straying momentarily from its mission to link all people and all companies into an incredibly facile network based on knowledge and solid relationships. I hoped LinkedIn would get back to the knitting. I visited Linkedin.com’s About section, hoping to find LinkedIn’s mission statement, or at least a definition of what the company’s objectives are; something that would indicate the company could find its way back. To my surprise, LinkedIn has no statement of purpose, or even a definition of what the company does. Not unlike TheLadders, LinkedIn defines itself by its database and with statistics about all its members. There’s not a word about the value of relationships and connections. It’s all about the database — the path to job board perdition.

Then I saw the announcement in the Mashable article: Just push the LinkedIn button. Says Mashable:

“The button is much like the Twitter tweet button or the Facebook Like button… The button essentially lets you submit your LinkedIn profile as your resume — no cover letter necessary.”

How much dumber can the career industry get? Job boards have turned HR departments into swill pots of incoming drek from job hunters who have learned to play the numbers and apply for every job they can find, whether it’s a fit for them or not. There are more inappropriate candidates in HR’s inbox than ever — and now LinkedIn makes applying for a job no more thoughtful than liking a website.

LinkedIn’s great accomplishment is to make job hunting an “impulse buy.” A drive-by app. Dumber than dumb. Could the database whizzes at LinkedIn already be busy building that mobile app? Drive by a company, submit an application via your smartphone! See a product ad or an article about a company? Scan the code and Bam! your application is in! It could be a great place to work! Don’t hesitate!

Ever wonder why employers never call you back or return your calls after you go on a job interviews? This is why. Expect more of it.

Just Another Job Board: Wishful thinking for dummies

On the comments section of the aforementioned Mashable article, reader Mike Young says:

“Will apply for all of them ;-)”

Another says:

“Awesome! Now all we need is an “Apply All” button so we can make the job apps fly.”

Mike Young sounds like he’s kidding. But LinkedIn isn’t. LinkedIn just made it easier for Mike to act dumb (if he chooses), and easier for employers to be dumber. LinkedIn could post its mission statement as one simple sentence: Wishful thinking for dummies.

Good jobs come from great personal contacts and from the hard work of building solid relationships. (If Reid Hoffman is reading this, Remember why you started LinkedIn? Do we need another job board?) There’s an astonishing amount of talent on the street today, due to our uncertain economy. Rather than recruit intelligently, employers waste untold overhead dollars “processing” millions of inappropriate incoming applications from thoughtless job hunters who believe the more jobs they apply to, the better.

Now LinkedIn has created a button to make it even easier to apply for any job that comes along. (What’s the harm, eh? The more, the better! HR departments will love it!)

Dumber Living Through Databases

George Carlin had a great line: Suppose you could have everything in the world? Where would you put it?

Today, every employer has every job hunter’s information, and every job hunter has every job listing on the planet — right there, online. And none of them know where to put it.

LinkedIn was a great idea. It could be fostering a whole new era of job hunting and hiring, by showing people how to cultivate relationships and parlay them into opportunities to work together. But rather than raise the bar, LinkedIn’s career team is taking a reductionist approach. Rather than delivering the hope of good relationships by teaching people how to behave smarter, LinkedIn is selling a database.

Rather than create new career services based on the company’s trademark networking and relationship-building, LinkedIn has allowed its brand to be commandeered by the same people who brought you “better living through job boards.” Having turned Monster.com, CareerBuilder, and HotJobs into useless data dumps, they’ve glommed onto LinkedIn as a Great Brand ripe to be ransacked. But the brand can’t cover up the same-old dumb business model that cheats employers of their time and money, and job hunters of good job prospects.

Get Back to Work

LinkedIn is still a good idea, but if you want to use it to find a job, you’re better off using it the way it was originally intended. You have to invest your time to develop relationships that LinkedIn merely helps you start. You can’t send LinkedIn, like a dog with a note in its mouth, to apply for a job for you.

Don’t be a dummy. Don’t get suckered into another job-board-style “career service” that will do the work for you. No one can do this for you.

Check out Jason Alba’s LinkedIn For Job Seekers. Alba teaches you how to exploit the LinkedIn database by using your brain to develop and cultivate healthy relationships by doing a lot of hard work.

If you push the button, your naked LinkedIn profile instantly arrives — and sits — in some personnel jockey’s inbox while the job hunter who carefully cultivated a personal contact is already talking to the hiring manager. And you just look dumb and dumber by the minute.

So does LinkedIn.

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