Category Archives: Uncategorized

Those little hamsters at LinkedIn have been very busy. They sent me an email yesterday to tell me that 18%of my network had changed jobs last year. They also suggested that I might want to send a few congratulations notes.

My first thought was – holy cow, that’s a lot of change. Of course, you have to take out the people who changed their title for vanity reasons and the people who changed it and then changed it back so that they could be in everyone’s status updates. Even taking that into account, it’s still a lot of change.

Then I got thinking about thank you notes. Where was LinkedIn when I got married?  How easy would it have been to send gift and shower thank you notes using LinkedIn?

But I digress. Lots of people made a change. And that change did not happen overnight. Oh sure, we all hear the story about sitting beside someone on a plane and having a new job by the time you land but let’s face it, unless you are a Google programming guru, it’s pretty unlikely that that’s how you will get your next job.

Nope, it requires thinking and research and <gasp> talking to people. Former colleagues, tweeps and vendors, are all fair game. When you start having conversations and someone refers you to an opportunity or a connection, don’t dismiss it out of hand.  Pick up the phone and make the call.  Explore it and then decide to cross it off the list.

You owe it to yourself and your career. Oh and if I forgot to tell you – thanks for the wedding gift. It was lovely.

If I see one more person eating salad, I am going to throw up.  Especially people who proclaim that they are eating salad without dressing.  Ugh.

I have not been in a fitness club but I imagine they are crammed.  You probably have to take a number to get on a treadmill.  Blech.

How many of those people are paying the same kind of attention to their career?  Doesn’t it deserve the same level of care and concern?

Are they reviewing their credentials with a trainer?

Stretching their multitasking muscle or strengthening their listening skills?

I know that cardio is important but so is collaboration.

When you are setting your goals and lining up the barbells for your new program, don’t forget your career.  When you look at the whole life package, it is important too.

In fact, maybe I’ll talk to the folks at GoodLife.  Maybe you could get four hours of career guidance along with your two hour fitness assessment and unlimited spin classes. I see a lot of potential for that kind of deal.

I am not going to write about resolutions, weight loss, smoking cessation or procrastination.  Nope.   No mention of the new year or new beginnings.  None of those things.

If you are old enough to be reading a blog, you are old enough to make your own decisions and you don’t need the turning of another year to tell you what to do. 

It is within your capacity to change your job, upgrade your skills or change the way you behave.

You can journal or go to a therapist.  You can “declare your intentions” (this is motivational speaker-ease for telling your friends what you are doing so that they can offer support/peer pressure).

Just decide and start.  Don’t worry about failing. Don’t even think about things not working out.  Just start whatever you are going to start.

It’s time.

I have been in two conversations this week about reputation management.  I am pretty sure that I had never heard of reputation management before this week.  It must be “trending”.

What does it mean to manage your reputation?  It’s not like we are celebrities or anything.  We don’t have teams of PR people putting a positive spin on our actions.

Nope, we have to manage them ourselves.

We do this by doing the right thing.  It’s easy to do the right thing when we need to cover our ass or when there is money involved.  We don’t give that a second thought.  And our lawyer friends have taught us, especially in the HR profession, that our actions have to be defensible.  And while that certainly is true, we can do better than that.

• We can stay in touch people from our old jobs and people who have moved on.
• We can make sure we check in on people during difficult assignments.
• We can ask for permission rather than forgiveness when we think things might go off the rails a little.

It might take a little courage but people recognize and appreciate those kinds of actions.    And that’s how you manage your reputation.

I was poking around in LinkedIn today.  I accepted an invitation to connect (even though it was an un-creative, un-personal invitation) and after I accepted, the lovely LinkedIn algorithm told me about a whole bunch of other people I might know or want to be connected to.

As my eyes drifted down the list, I was shocked and dismayed and I am not being dramatic at all.

First, there was someone in a Controller role whose tagline was that she was an expert in “fiancé and analysis”.  Come on.  There may be only one letter missing but what a difference in credibility, especially when a key characteristic of a successful finance person is attention to detail.  The accounting office is down the hall and to the left.  The marriage license office is in a whole different building.

Then there were three people who referred to themselves without using capital letters or only used capitals on some of the words.

• Mechanical engineering Specialist
• Customer Service supervisor

Call it grammar or call it low self-esteem but whatever the reason, fix it.  You are a professional person in a position.  Tell us what it is with respect and authority.

While I was on a roll, I looked up profiles of two people I know.  Their profiles had titles, dates and company names but no descriptions of what they do.  I know, for a fact, that these two women have complicated and demanding jobs but it was not reflected at all in their profiles.  It’s like offering someone a ham and cheese sandwich and then just giving them a plate with two pieces of bread and a pickle.  It may look attractive but it will never fill you up.

Maybe people just don’t care what their profile says.  Maybe it’s just there because someone told them to “get on LinkedIn”.  That’s okay but don’t expect it to turn any heads if there is nothing to see.

I know it’s getting busy.  Really I do.  But it’s time to review your resume.  Today (or this weekend at the latest).

For most of us, resume review involves several steps.

• Figuring out where you put the most recent version.
• Thinking about what has changed since you last looked at it.
• Making the changes so everything looks nice and is spelled right.

Now is the time to do this.  We are still clear eyed about the future. We have not yet run up the credit cards buying gifts or made the drunken gaff at the staff party.  We don’t have the pressure of New Year’s Eve hanging over our heads.

You can sit for a moment in a Starbucks or in your car and actually consider what has changed since you last stepped off the hamster wheel of everyday.  How have the changes affected you and your habits?

I am not talking about tearing apart your whole life – just a few minutes of reflection.  Then get down to the business of refreshing that door-opener of a document: your resume.

This way, when someone asks you about your new year’s resolutions, you can help yourself to another mimosa and tell them you are well on your way.

I used to believe in the idea of six degrees of separation but now I think it’s more like three. I keep tripping over people who are connected to people I know.

I guess in my field it’s more common to find connections. Let’s face it.  I phone strangers for a living. I rarely work with the same people twice and if I do my job well, more people get pulled into the spinning wheel of connections.

There are some pretty big lessons here.

You have to nice to everyone because you never want to find out that you just bad mouthed your neighbour to his best friend.

It would also be bad if you were very critical about a former boss only to find out that he just got hired where you just interviewed.

And here’s a good one:  sarcasm does not work on a screen. You can use it in a phone call, video,  podcast or anything else where the recipient can see your face. If they can’t see your eyes, they won’t get the joke. Trust me. This one can be messy.

So remember, that as we get older, the world gets smaller.  You never know when you will find yourself talking to a future boss/reference/in-law.  Be nice to everyone.  If you can’t be nice, then at least be respectful and polite.  It will pay off in the end and if it hasn’t paid off, then it’s not the end.

Halloween is over and I had not even put away my vampire teeth when the holiday music started playing downstairs in the mall. Aaaack!

This means the deluge of holiday parties can’t be far off.  Usually, I dread these sorts of things.  People stand around sipping wine and nibbling at snacks even though they are starving.  They smile their very best fake smile and hope their boss is not counting the glasses of wine they have consumed.

This year is going to be different.

I have decided to change my approach.  I am going to look at each soiree as a chance to say hello to people I don’t often get to talk with and introduce myself to some new folks.

Why?  – Because maybe I can help them.  This may sound a bit cracked, but hear me out.  I talk about jobs, resumes and careers for a living.  Who does not want help with that?

The only thing I have to figure out is how to start the conversation.  For me, that’s the hardest part.  Gone are the days when “Come here often?” or “What’s your sign?” would open up friendly dialogue and I think it’s a bit crass to start with “What was your T4 last year?”.

If you met a headhunter at a party, what would you want to know?

Some days I wish I worked with widgets.  Widgets come in various sizes for specific uses.  They come in red, chartreuse or any other colour you might want.

You can guarantee that a widget is going to fit in the hole.  You can be pretty certain that if it is round or square, it will continue to be round or square. Widgets don’t care if it is raining or hot.  They don’t even mind the full moon.

But I don’t work with widgets.  I work with people and it can very hard to determine kind of person I am dealing with.  There is no bar code on a candidate’s forehead that lets me scan their history and attributes.

Clients can describe education and past experience but it’s not like either of us can log on to Amazon to pick the engineer or customer service person that will fit the role.  (Although, there might be something to this…..)

I am seriously thinking of going back to school to get a degree in Widgetery and perhaps even a post grad certificate in managing widgets to their fullest potential.  How hard could that be?