Recruiter's Couch

Let’s start a movement. Let’s make tomorrow, Friday September 7th, an official LinkedIn recommendation day.

Today, when you are in those mind wandering moments that we all have, think about someone you would refer. 

• Perhaps a former colleague or manager
• Someone who provided great service like a vendor or a realtor
• A fellow volunteer

To make a recommendation, go to your contact list, find the person and click recommend beside their name.  Choose the relationship that you have/had and then go crazy.  Remember that this will be seen by the world.  This is not Facebook.  Drunkface comments are not welcome.   Be clear about how you know the person, what they did and how well they did it.

Think how great it will be when they open their inbox to find an out of the blue recommendation. That will surely make their day. It’s like sending a thank you card without the hassle of the envelope or stamp.

Of course we make recommendations for altruistic reasons but imagine if you are one of the recipients. Remember, it is a bit of a traditional that one recommendation deserves another.

So give it some thought and mark your calendar. Let’s start a wave in the big LinkedIn stadium.

I think we all crave community.  We all want to walk into a room of people and not just be acknowledged but greeted with some genuine warmth.

It’s not like I’m looking for a hug and a French kiss everywhere I go.  A simple smile and some brief eye contact would be okay.

But where does it come from?  Do I have to greet people like that before they will greet me the same way?  Do unto others and all that stuff?

Or do certain environments promote a kind of warm, friendly undertone?  Do we try to pick staff/members /people who also value this feeling of connection?

It does not seem to be just environmental.  I can go to a spa where I pay lots of money to be feel good and taken care of.  A spa should be warm in a comfy temperate way and the people there should make me feel like they really care about my well being.  The last time I was in a spa that was definitely not the case.   It was more like I was intruding on their breaks.

On the other hand, there is the train. When I am on the way into the city in the morning, there is “Customer Service Ambassador” in the accessibility car which is five cars back from the engine.  I never see the person but they make periodic announcements during out 25 minute journey.  On Friday morning, they always say “this train is now out of service. Please be sure to wake your neighbour.”  I love that.  Each time I hear it, I look around and other people are nodding and smiling.  A commuter train in the morning is definitely not known for its warm and friendly atmosphere yet here is an example of warm connections.

So, I don’t know where it comes from.  For now, I’ll keep doing my best to put my best smiling eyes forward and hope that it comes back.

Guess what?  Summer is almost over.  Soon it will be Labour Day and then life will return to its regular rapid fire pace.  You know: when you realize you are already behind and its only 9:15 in the morning.

So rather than waiting until midnight on Labour Day Monday to list your September career resolutions, start now.

Find the last known version of your resume.  Maybe it is on a memory stick or on your home computer.  When you find it, put it somewhere that you can access anywhere.  You can put it in the documents section of Gmail or Hotmail if you use either of those mail programs.

You can also use a very cool thing called Dropbox.  It gives you a virtual vault to store files or pictures and it is free.  You can access your stuff by going to dropbox.com or you can download a little app to any PC that you use and Dropbox becomes one of the options listed in your “save as” list where you save files.

The point is to have your resume easily accessible.  This will allow you to keep reviewing it and adding things to it.

This also eliminates the situation where a recruiter calls you about an opportunity and the conversation ends with you declining to pursue it because your resume is not up to date and you don’t have time to find it, let alone update it.

Once that is no longer an obstacle, you can actually take a few moments over the next week or two to tweak it so that it represents who you are today.

So, put aside the romance novels and the Julia Child reruns and get to it.

I am sure I am not alone when I say that I have been nearly consumed by the Olympics. Not only have I been dominating the TV at home but my colleague has a live feed on his desktop that has helped to feed my habit as well (which might explain why my post is late this week).

I am in total admiration of the athletes who have had a singular focus for the years leading up to this point. I feel like my fingers are in so many different pies that that kind of focus is just unimaginable.

But my admiration for all things Olympic has been tarnished by the uniforms of the female athletes. Why exactly do beach volleyball players, hurdlers and sprinters need to wear bikinis?

I am not a scientist but I don’t think it serves to improve their aerodynamics. Possibly seeing rock hard abs is intimidating to their opponents?

I am in awe of the US beach volleyball team made up of two middle aged mothers who won gold not once, but three times. Three!  Who is going to explain to their children why they are practically naked on the front page of newspapers in North America this morning?

Are men going to pare down their uniforms for the games in Rio?  Perhaps they can take a page from history and just wear a loin cloth. That might restore the balance a little bit.

What are you wearing to work today?

I have been reading a lot lately about the gamification of work. While I support making anything having to do with making work interesting and engaging, I am not in favor of people treating their careers like a game.

I can hear it now.  “Go ahead and try to fire me. I have infinite life and infinite money.”

Or how about this:  If I don’t like your proposal, I’ll get a few birds and a slingshot and show you how much I want to destroy it. (I’ve been practicing this one……)

Although, there are good parts of gaming too. Gamers have been using VOIP and chat technology way longer than us corporate wonks. This has created a generation of multi-taskers who can talk, make decisions and choose complex button combinations at the same time.

Also, gamers are always trying to get to the next level. That’s good in the workplace isn’t it?

And gamers have been collaborating since long before it became fashionable. I remember my son playing on the same team as his cousin and a guy from camp who both lived far away at the time. No silos there. True, they were trying to kill bad guys with automatic weapons but they were doing it together, as a team.

Perhaps it’s time for Electronic Arts or Ubisoft to start management consulting practices.  Maybe they could help organizations sort out which parts of gamification make sense for their work groups.

Until then….keep playing Angry Birds.  You never know when you might have blast apart someone’s proposal.

My son has his first job this summer. He is a dishwasher at a sleep away camp. It is a tough job and it came with a tough boss.

For the first couple of weeks, he was lonely and tired and frankly, ready to quit.

I am happy (and relieved) to report that he is, in his own words, going to stick it out.

Here is what he has figured out so far:

• Having a cute teller deposit your first pay cheque is cool
• Being able to buy stuff that your parents won’t is nice
• Dishes don’t get homesick or wet the bed
• You can use your non-working time to do stuff with your friends.
• A tough boss is only tough when you are at work. It is possible to have fun in the other parts of your life.
• A good night’s sleep always makes you feel better.

That’s quite a bit to learn at 17. Many of these things did not gel for me until I was in my thirties and forties so kudos to him for getting through it.

I don’t know whether this experience will give him a leg up on having a successful career but I am pretty sure he will never be a dishwasher again.

Recently I started working in downtown Toronto. I take the train into the city every morning. This has proven to be quite a learning experience.

It is like we are salmon running a river. We all pour off the trains and get funneled into troughs that lead to the subway or flow out onto the sidewalk.

A veritable sea of humanity.

It turns out that people walk just like they drive. They don’t look before they cut into your path.  Or they are texting and walking. That happened to me the other day. This suit was walking in front of me at a nice pace, suddenly pulled out his phone and not only started walking slower but also with his head down. Honestly, I could have decked him.

The other thing you have to watch for is people with lace-up shoes. They seem to think nothing of stopping I’m the middle of traffic to tie their shoes. If I stop, the person behind me walks into me and so on and so on. Sure, we don’t have to file accident reports but it sure gets you off your flow. It also makes people sigh at you and no Canadian likes that.

Lastly, I have learned to watch for ladies with rolling bags. You know: the briefcases with long handles and wheels. I hate to be gender specific but men seem to handle them just fine. Ladies invariably either trip themselves or the person behind them. Maybe if you have that much stuff, you should take a cab.

All this and I have not even mentioned people who snore on the train….

So whether you are walking, driving or networking, keep your eyes up and pay attention.  We’ll all be grateful.

We can all look back and recognize that certain points in our careers were pivot points. Moments or events that ended up setting the stage for what ever was coming next.

Is there a way to tell when you are at a pivot point?  I’m not sure. I don’t think it would be reasonable to live your life as if every moment was the moment that was going to define the rest of your life. You would go nuts. Your friends and family probably would too.

You could though spend some time reflecting on your career to see if you could, by looking back, identify projects or actions that are particularly meaningful now.

This can be done a couple of ways. You can sit with coffee and your resume and go through things in your head. You can invite a good friend for coffee and take them on a tour of your career.

I think I prefer the second method. When you explain your actions to someone else, you have to provide context and this generally allows more of the good stories to come to the surface.

Frequently, the friend is the one who will stop you in mid sentence and say “Hey, that turned out to be key didn’t it?”

Think. Talk. Repeat.

As you tell your story more and more,  patterns may emerge. Patterns that help you identify how to set things in motion for more and better pivot points.

I heard a fellow interviewed on CBC Radio the other day.  He had been unemployed for more than two years.  His last job had been in IT services.  When asked why it was taking so long to get a job, he said it was because employers were looking for people with specific certifications that he did not have.  He had done well in his previous company by learning on the job so he had never taken any courses.

This is tragic but predictable.

It’s all well and good when you are fully employed and everyone in the organization knows what you can do but what happens when you find yourself somewhere else?

Certifications and credentials act as risk reducers.  When a hiring manager sees that you have five years of experience in database administration but no courses relating to that field, do they automatically assume that you must be highly competent at learning on the fly?  No, they wonder why you never took the time to formalize your experience.

It’s the same with a professional engineering designation.  Who would spend four years slogging away in a very tough academic environment  and then not seal the deal by doing the courses and exams for their P. Eng?

Yes, its added effort when you are already busy in your job but these kinds of extracurriculars pay big dividends down the road.

They give instant validation of your skills and that might be just the thing to get your resume to the top of the pile.  That’s worth a couple of night courses, isn’t it?