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Last week, we got a request for a Proposal Co-coordinator from one of our engineering clients. They needed someone for a few weeks to help pull together and format a massive amount of information for a proposal.

I immediately thought of a candidate that I had met recently. She had been laid off from her position as a meeting planner/event coordinator. My colleague looked at her resume and asked why I thought she would be a good fit.

What does a good event planner do well?

• Listens to client needs, wishes and expectations
• Gathers information from a variety of sources
• Facilitates decision making
• Lays out timelines and schedules
• Juggles all of the details and stakeholders while the event is on
• Maintains a pleasant demeanor
• Functions well with immovable deadlines

Aren’t those the same qualities required to help pull together a large proposal? The only piece that we thought might be missing was strong skills with Microsoft Office. It turns out that she created all the printed materials for her events so we checked that off the list too.

We introduced the client and the candidate and the fit was obvious right from the get-go. The candidate did a stellar job and the client was very happy.

So why is it so difficult to recognize transferable skills? Both my colleague and the client needed some guidance (read: persuasive conversation) to see that her skills were indeed suitable. There was a baseline assumption that the successful candidate would come from an engineering or technical background.

Will they be more open-minded now? I hope so but it is up to us in the recruiting field and up to candidates themselves to lay out their skills and experience in a way that best maximizes their potential fit for the role.

Maybe it’s like paint by numbers. Hiring managers are pretty sure that the picture of the successful candidate is a horse in a field but maybe we open their minds to the possibility that a horse in a parade or even a horse in the kitchen could be successful too.

It is pretty common for creative types to bring a portfolio of work samples to an interview. Little known fact: it can be very useful for any position.

All the stuff that you have been saving in a file folder in your desk or inbox now has a use. Organize it into a nice zippered binder with those neat plastic page protectors and some dividers. It does not have to be any fancier than that.

Things to include:
• Resume
• Degrees, certificates
• Awards, accolades
• Course curricula
• Presentations
• Community recognition
• Complimentary emails/letters
• Newsletters/articles that mention you/your product or service
• Performance reviews

Just the act of putting together a portfolio can be very constructive. Think about making a scrapbook of your career and how useful it would be, especially if you are in transition or think you would like to be in transition.

Your career portfolio will serve two purposes:
• when your work feels pointless, it will remind you of your successes
• when you go to an interview and the hiring manager says “Tell me about yourself”, you can pull it out and give a concrete illustration of your successes to date. You will also look very organized and confident.

There is one more added benefit. You now have a place to store future “career souvenirs” – your portfolio. When someone next invites you to come and explore a new opportunity, you just add the new material and you will be fresh and ready for a successful career conversation.

If you see any movies over the holidays, make sure Avatar is one of them.  James Cameron introduces us to a whole new world.  There are take-aways for everyone on the recruiters couch.

1. Take a chance on a new world – Doing what you have always done may not be an option anymore. Industries are changing and what works today might be very different from what worked before. This goes for people hiring and people looking.

2. Respect the other person. If you are interviewing a candidate, respect the person who has taken the time to come and meet with you. Be on time and review their resume before you start. If you are meeting a potential employer, be on time, be neat and be prepared. Know about the role and their environment before you go in. It will not guarantee that you get the job, but it will show that you respect what they do.

3. Whatever you do, do it with heart. You can learn lingo. You can learn processes. You can learn people’s names but no one can teach you about heart. What enabled Jake to draw all the different sides together was his heart. Everyone from the Commander Woolrich to Neytiri’s mom could all see it. If you can find this quality in yourself, then put it out there. People will respect you and you can get things done.

I was just looking at one of the people in my volunteer group on linkedin. She has a full profile with her career highlights and education but only a few links and most of them are for our group not professional peer links.

This concerns me because if there is one thing I have heard over and over again, it’s that you can’t leave your career to chance.

It used to be that if you graduated from a good program, got into a good company and worked hard, the opportunities to grow would just happen. They just appeared, ripe for the picking.

Not anymore. I talk to people everyday who followed this path. They worked really hard and did everything that was asked of them. They were always too busy to look for new jobs or do anything else to manage their career. Now, they have all the time in the world and they don’t know where to begin.

Managing your career is like to going to the gym: no one likes to do it but you sure feel good when it’s done. Your career needs twenty minutes three times per week just like your body.

It can be finding connections on linkedin or surfing for interesting job ads or just going to a meeting or conference and talking to someone new or reviewing your resume. It all counts.

These activities should not stop once you get to your new gig either. No matter how immersed you are in your new organization, make the time update your profiles, join new associations and add your new responsibilities to your cv.

Some companies seem to be very proud of the fact that they are not using agencies. They are using internal resources to do all the sourcing, recruiting, assessing and hiring.

In the short term, this makes sense. It can foster stronger relationships between corporate recruiters and hiring managers. It can allow more people to be involved in the hiring process. There are more discussions about employment branding and employee value propositions.

But let’s be careful about leaving this as a long-term or even an intermediate term solution.

Listing a job description on the company’s careers page and posting on Workopolis is no longer sufficient to stay ahead and attract the top candidates. You will have a difficult time maintaining a full collection of prospects who are interested helping to build your brand, sell your widgets or design the next big thing.

Twitter, Linkedin, specialty job boards, viral marketing, deep web searching. These are just some of the tools that push your information out into the marketplace to show that your organization is the employer of choice in your space.

We research these emerging trends in candidate awareness and implement progressive strategies everyday for every search. In fact, the research factor that we offer is separate and distinct from the assessment, interview and relationship building elements and is carried out by a certified individual with a highly specialized skill set.

One more thing: just as all these new tools make people more findable for us, they also give people the choice to be more easily found. If one of your employees has a bad day, all they need to do is click the mouse a few times and they can announce to the world that they are ready for a change.

Maybe it’s time for your internal resources to do what they do best: retain the talent that you have. Let’s face it; no one does that better than you. After all, why would you read all of the resumes in the haystack to find the one needle when we might have a whole pack of excellent needles available to you right here?

For years, the recruiting business has been shrouded in mystery. Really great recruiters had big rolodexes on their desks. They knew everyone and more importantly, they knew who was coming and who was going. It was that insider knowledge that provided value to their clients. Lots of openings were not even advertised. People got referred by someone inside or recommend by someone outside. It all happened quietly, off to the side.

Not any more. The internet has opened up an abundance of information to us all: candidates and employers alike. It is a dramatically different landscape. Think about it. When you have a bad day, you can vent on Twitter. When you decide it’s time to find a new gig, you can change your status on linkedin or post it on your blog. You can search and find hiring managers where you want to work, not just wait to be found. And the same goes for employers. Gone are the days of print ads in the Report on Business. Even job descriptions look different. Who ever heard of “an employee value proposition”? It’s a whole new world.