Recruiter's Couch

Laura is away this week and asked me to stand in as a guest blogger – a big honour for someone who has only recently graduated and has only been working in the recruiting field for a short time. I first began my foray into human sourcing in 2007 as an intern, and have been spending my summers at Ian Martin ever since working as a research analyst. My degree is in psychology; in particular my research has been into moral cognition.

Or at least a cyber-village – to make one professional a cut above the rest in their field

This sentiment is fundamentally important to successful job seeking. As a very green job seeker, I have made sure to keep my ears keen to the advice from other professionals who are successful in their fields, and my eyes open and searching for strategies posted online. This strategy is vitally important when beginning, but also appears to be of crucial importance to staying successful.

The job market is changing constantly (some argue it does so daily); and keeping up with it requires an adaptive personality. In my experience so far, the best strategy has been to

• Look at what makes other professionals successful and humbly listen.
• Seek out sourcing/seeking strategies which are posted online (these are prolific)
• Constantly ferret out new tools for fast searching online; these can be found through referencing by other professionals.

From these points, a common theme arises: you need the help of others to grow more successful and stay on top. It will often be other professionals who will develop new and prodigious strategies/tools that will propel you further than you could have gone on your own.

This mindset of being ‘forever the student of the cyber-village’ is intrinsic to the success of all professionals.

 by Jeff Millar

If you can’t remember what you started five minutes ago, you are distracted.

If you find yourself staring at the little spinning wheel while your computer thinks, you are distracted.

If you leave the kettle boiling until its dry, you are distracted.

It happens.  It’s summer. People are slowing down and relaxing their mind-focussing muscles.

It can be especially frustrating if you are looking for a new gig.  You get to the end of another day and feel like you have accomplished nothing.

The day started well. You sat down at your desk, showered, dressed and ready to work.  You woke up your computer, took a sip of coffee and bang!  It was dinner time.  Whoa.

Try this:  before you power up the master of distraction, make a list of things to do. Make them short and specific.

• Invite 2 people to connect via linkedin
• Send one thank you note
• Exercise
• Apply for 2 jobs
• Eat lunch
• Make a lunch date for next week
• Read a whole newspaper

In between these activities, you will have all the regular distractions (email, phone calls, letting the dogs out) but if you keep coming back to the list and checking off the items you will a) feel more accomplished at the end of the day and b) continue to push everything forward.

You will be connected, knowledgeable, fit and energized – the perfect state of mind for new opportunities.

For a long time, I avoided Skype. I thought it was just going to create more “noise” in my inbox. It’s hard enough to concentrate as it is.

But then I started working with a couple of candidates in the UK and it seemed like the best option for communicating with them. It worked very well. I could see when they were online and they could see when I was online. It was nice to eliminate the trans-ocean phone tag.

Over the course of this process, I reached out to a couple of friends and former coworkers who have moved overseas. We were still in touch but the connection was not the same as it used to be. Time zones, meetings and family stuff made it difficult to find time to talk that did not entail someone staying up way too late.

Now I have a few friends on Skype. Not fifty gazillion, just a few and it is the coolest thing. I see when they come online and they can see me. It does not mean that we have to have a long and meaningful talk. We just see each other.

It’s a bit like passing a friendly colleague (as opposed to the flakey, rude or otherwise annoying ones) in the hall on the way to get coffee. Even if you are in a hurry, you nod and make eye contact. If you have a minute or you have some news, you stop and talk but otherwise, you just keep going, safe in the knowledge that the connection is still there and real.

Skype is the same. It’s like passing my trans-Atlantic friends in the hall and there is comfort in that.

Last week, I saw Anderson Cooper interview Lady Gaga on the venerable CBS show 60 Minutes.  She is a pretty interesting character.  Anderson was asking her about how she handles the way the press hang around waiting to catch her in an embarrassing situation.

“Well, Anderson, I am just not a barf in the bar kind of girl”.

Love it.

Love it.

Love it.

This is the kind of authenticity that everyone needs to bring to an interview.  It does not matter if it is a telephone interview with a recruiter or a face to face meeting with a hiring manager.  Confident, direct and truthful is the way to go.

This does not give you permission to be rude or disrespectful.  If you are asked how you got along with your former boss, you really shouldn’t say he was a jerk or he couldn’t read financial statements to save his life.  It is okay, however, to explain that you made decisions differently or you had different approaches to customer service.

An interview is like the nice pair of shoes in the shop window.  You go in to see if they have your size. You try them on.  You walk around for a while, thinking of outfits that will work with them.  You think about whether you can afford them.  You see if the salesperson will give you a deal and together, you decide if they are the right pair for you. 

If they don’t feel comfortable in the shop, don’t buy them, no matter how good a deal they are.  They will mock you every time you see them in your closet.

Lady Gaga wouldn’t settle for ill-fitting loafers.  Why should you?

Stop hiding behind your laptop and get out.  Forget about getting your inbox to zero.  It’s never going to happen.  Monster and Workopolis will keep churning out jobs.  It will be there when you get back.

There are tons of industry events going on.  It’s the season for garage sales and community picnics.  The weekend soccer and baseball tournaments have started.

These are all prime places to talk to people about what you do and what you want to do.

This does not mean pressing your business card in to the hand of every soccer mom you meet nor does it mean you should have a sheaf of resumes in your sock.

You need to be able to say clearly and concisely who you are and what you are looking for.  Mumbling something about being an office manager is not good enough.  Saying that you manage a small group of admin pros that provide support in a major staffing company, now that’s saying something. In one breath, you have identified that you are a manager and that you work in a big company; two nice hooks that might incent interest or even further conversation.

Technology has changed six degrees of separation to only three degrees of separation.  This means that the guy you meet at the ball game could be the neighbour of your next boss.  Really.  We are all that connected.

So practice, practice, practice.

When someone asks you what you do, be ready.

Would you describe your resume as bold, gutsy or the ever popular ballsy?

Probably not.  Most people’s resumes aren’t.  They are lackluster descriptions of the jobs that they have done since they graduated.

Sometimes there are “highlights” or “action verbs” but do they really represent the skills and experience behind the document?

A bold resume clearly states what you are good at and more importantly, what problems you can solve.

• I create software that makes your process faster.
• I build highly productive sales teams.
• I resolve customer issues quickly and effectively.
• I can identify and attract candidates that will thrive in your demanding culture.

This is what a hiring manager needs to see.  They don’t have time to get to the bottom of the first page to figure out what you can contribute to their team. They need it to be front and centre.

In order to do this, you need to know what you are really good at.  Try this: distil your work/career/experience into just three words.  Yes, only three.  It’s hard but when you get three words that are happy with, you can use them as the foundation for your newly refreshed and revised audacious resume.

I have been talking about resumes this week.  Not sure why, but it seems to be a hot topic.  A resume is the conduit to your next chapter and needs to be as finely tuned as possible.

Remember when we read newspapers that were actually made of paper not pixels?  Remember how they were folded in half?  The most important headlines went above the fold.  You could read all the

essential and important information even if the paper was in a stack at a newsstand.

This allowed you to do two things: decide to buy the paper or decide that you could spend the money on something else.

Resumes work the same way.  The critical information that you want to convey to the reader has to be above the fold if you want it to have maximum effect.

Try this:  put your resume on your screen and start reading at the top. Count one steamboat, two steamboat, three steamboat.

How far did you get?  How much information does the reader know about you?  Is it enough to get the job? Or even get into the “A” pile?

I know if sounds crass, but that’s about all the time you get, especially if the reader is a recruiter.  Most recruiters are either a) incredibly pressed for time or b) have only a loose understanding of the job or c) both.

Make it easy for them to see why your resume should go into the “A” pile –put the good stuff at the top.