Recruiter's Couch

My son needs to find a part time job to help offset his living/movie/beer expenses while he is going to college.  He finds the whole idea of looking for work overwhelming and unsatisfying.

This stems from two issues.  One:  he is only qualified for a few types of jobs and none of them involve using his brain, his empathy or any of his other best qualities.  Two:  he figures people should shake his hand and hire him.  He should not have to put all his information into an applicant tracking system and hope that someone notices.

In order to help him get started, I sent him this list on Monday morning.

Have some juice

Print 10 resumes

Take a shower

Put on a nice shirt and pants 

Go to the grocery store to the customer service desk and ask if you can talk with the store manager. Or you can go upstairs and find the butcher or produce manager. 

Tell them you a college student and that you live in the Neighbourhood ‎ and you would really like to work there. Even if it’s just for the holidays. 

If they say “we’ll get back to you”, ask when you should follow up. 

Also ask for their card.

Don’t forget to stop by the other shops in our neighbourhood and in the mall. 

Make a list in your phone of every place you stopped at and who you talked to 

When you get back home, put in your calendar any people you need to call back. 

So get out your fake smile and hit the road!

I love you. 

Mom

He does not have a job yet, but he said the guy at the bong shop seemed pretty interested.  I’ll keep you posted.

It’s that time of year again – the time of year when we fill the malls looking for the perfect gifts.  What if there are some job seekers on your list?  It’s unlikely you can find them a job to wrap up under the tree but here are some things they might really appreciate.

• A new dress shirt and scarf/tie – that’s bound to make them feel better as they step into their next interview

• A month of LinkedIn Premium – you can read about that here.

• A couple of hours with a career coach

• A compilation of the best career podcasts or TED Talks

• A gift subscription to a magazine. A real magazine that comes in the mail.  That way when they go to the mailbox, there will be something good to look at instead of just rejection letters.

• A gift certificate from Vistaprint for business cards or personalized thank you notes

• Resume review with an experienced resume editor

• A fancy pen or folio to complete the accessories for their interview outfit

• Guest passes to a couple of yoga or meditation classes

• Coffee gift cards. There will always be time to use up before meetings and interviews and wrapping your hands around a hot cup of coffee or tea is a lovely way to deal with that.  As an added bonus, if they meet someone randomly, they can offer to take them for coffee without worrying about having cash.

All the best for some great shopping!

If you will indulge me, I’d like to depart from my usual career ranting, and focus instead on a bigger issue: being mean at work.

It’s been all over the news. It seems that no workplace is free from rudeness, bullying and harassment. I am not sure why this is the case. We are not in grade school any more. We are grown ups with mortgages, dogs and kids.

When we are at work, we are all working for a common cause. We have customers and products. We work to make those products better. We wrap some trust and reliability around them and people buy them.

Where is there room for being mean in this process?

Sure, we all have bad days and sometimes we say things that hurt people’s feelings either because we are grumpy or sleep deprived. That’s okay. But when you see someone’s face fall after you make what you think is a hilarious joke, stop and acknowledge it.

The lines between our work lives and our personal lives will continue to blur. What used to be six degrees of separation is shrinking to five degrees or, if you are in the recruiting business, three degrees. This means it is very likely that the person you are talking to could be your neighbour’s best friend or your cousin’s co-worker.

I am not saying there is no room for humour or that we should always have a fake smile plastered on our face, but we can certainly make a conscious effort to be friendly and consider other people’s feelings, especially at work. It won’t solve the violence in the workplace problem but it will certainly help to raise the bar a little.

I was comparing notes with a candidate this week. We were talking about how easy it is to get completely lost and distracted when surfing the web.

I learned this in the early days of the internet. I was researching mechanical engineers to design racing bicycles. i remember stumbling across a really interesting blog and at the bottom of the first page was a picture from the writers recent vacation in the Dominican.

All of the sudden I found myself on sunwing.ca looking at when I could go to that resort.

Woah! Not productive.

If you are using the internet to search for opportunities, you need to wrap some discipline around your activities or you will just be wasting your time.

Here are some things to try:

• set a time limit – give yourself an hour or 40 minutes
• focus on a specific topic/job title/company
• open a word document – when you see something that is off the path but worth looking at further, you can copy and paste the web address into the word doc to review in another session. You can also use apps like Evernote or clipper.
• create a goal for your session – perhaps you want to identify four of your old classmates to reconnect with or five jobs that you want to consider.

Adding structure will make your journey much more satisfying and yield better results.
Because after all, you don’t want to book the trip to Costa Rica until you have the new job to pay for it!

There has been a recurring theme in interviews this week.  People are looking for jobs for the rest of their lives.  “I just want somewhere I can settle in and work until retirement”.

Guess what?

Employers don’t care about that.  They want to know what you are going to do for them, not what you want them to do for you.

There is no problem with wanting stability and a place to grow and develop.  But keep that to yourself.  When a hiring manager hears the word stability, they jump right to complacency and obligation.

You want to describe what you bring to the role, your energy, your desire.  That’s what they are interested in.

It is fine for stability to be on your list of job criteria but when you are interviewing with a name brand company and you are asked why you want to work there, stability is not the best answer.  You want to talk about their top ranking, out pacing the competition, innovative facilities.  That’s the good stuff.

You might even want to re-calibrate your definition of stability.  If you have just finished at a high growth company or an organization going through big changes, starting at a “stable” company may be the worst thing for you.  When you are still on-boarding four weeks in, you might be ready to poke your eyes out with a fork.

So think carefully about what you are really looking for in your next role.  Then think equally carefully about the things that make you so well suited to that role.  That list is interview gold.

There was really good post on LinkedIn this week by Laszlo Bock, one of the VP’s at Google.  You can read it here. He said that the way to make your resume stand out from the rest is to quantify your successes.  He had some solid examples that really illustrated how powerful this is.  He did not point out how hard it is to do.

It’s easy if you have a job that is measured in numbers.  If you are in sales, for example, you can point to year over year growth or an increase in new customers.

It’s trickier if you are in Human Resources or Graphic Design.

It’s not really harder; you just have to think of your activities in a different way.  Mr. Bock works with engineers and as a rule; they are pretty quick to “run some numbers up the flagpole”.  Those of us, who are firmly rooted in art or words, have to think a little more.

Here is the process:

• Think of activity or responsibly you want to describe.
• Start with an action word.
• Decide what part you want to get specific about: the quantity or the speed
• Can you find statistics within your industry or company or work group to figure out where you rank? Can you say you were in top percent or top ten?
• If you are not at the top of the pile, did you improve from the last quarter or year? That makes a good story too.

The idea is go from soft gooey statements to factual phrases that make the reader understand that you know what you are doing and can demonstrate it in a concrete way.

Compare these statements:

Went above and beyond to support my team and its deliverables.

Stayed late one night each week to process incoming tasks enabling my team to complete 100% of our projects before the deadline.  This had never been done before.

It’s better isn’t it?

This really is a good exercise.  Identifying your success in such a specific way will not only make your resume better.  It will also give you stronger examples to use in an interview.  Definitely a win win situation.  Thanks Laszlo!