EIGHT "DON'TS" TO KEEP ON YOUR FRONTAL LOBE WHAT'S IN YOUR PORTFOLIO ? ARE YOU TEETERING ON THE BRINK OF "HAVE NOT ?" BRING YOUR RESUME UP TO DATE MY ADVICE IS . . . EIGHT "DON'TS" TO KEEP ON YOUR FRONTAL LOBE Don't fall in love with the first company that makes you an offer. This happens almost as often to mid-careerists as to new grads. Being wanted is an addictive drug, especially to fragile egos. Depending on how long you have been job hunting, one struggling company that wants you can seem far more attractive than a dozen more prosperous employers who might want you. Resist. Some of the saddest stories we hear are from people who failed at panic control. If you catch yourself rationalizing -- "So they've had a few disastrous years. They're probably due for much better times" -- lie down until these thoughts pass. You're setting yourself up. Even worse is convincing yourself that you haven't seen the company's best side. Remember, interviews are like fraternity rush parties. A company does work to show it's best side. The more poorly managed the organization, the more marginal its products and services, the more charming and persuasive its recruiter needs to be. Unless they can cause people to act against their best interests the company won't have any employees! Read on for a variation on this theme. Don't accept a job offer on the spot. You love the company and have been stalking it for months. Fine, but don't allow the euphoria of the moment cause you to overlook some considerations that will pop into your consciousness about 4:00 a.m. tomorrow morning. For instance, the salary the hirer offered is at the low end of the range or various other benefits seemed less-than-generous. Unless you have done your homework on the market value of this job, and debriefed former employees about the boss, the culture and general working conditions, you will be not be able to properly evaluate the offer. This is true whether or not you are desperate for a job. Don't be eager to point out someone's failings. Your ego bleeds from minuscule nicks of criticism, so why do you think other people are made of Teflon? Nobody forgets having his failings pointed out publicly -- or fed to the grapevine -- nor does he forget who the perp was. When you are seized by the temptation to "straighten out" someone's thinking, work style, life, or career, stop! There is a big difference between criticizing and offering help, support, or solutions. Don't ask for a promotion without doing your homework. Your boss is in a mellow mood as the two of you are having a drink after work. It seems an ideal time to bring up your career plans, including your goal of becoming a manager. Stop! You're winging this, hoping to use your boss's alcohol-induced mellowness to your advantage. That is a terrible tactic which will come back to bite you. You haven't written a job description for the job you want. You haven't researched the salary it should pay, looked at the possibilities of an internal transfer, or even updated your resume. Your boss will resent being blind sided with a vague request and will be harder to convince -- based on your spectacular lack of judgment the first time -- when you do make a formal pitch. Use this opportunity to talk about ways to do things better, listen to the boss's ideas, and bond. Don't decide to join a trade or professional networking group after attending only one meeting. Dues, and monthly lunches or dinners are expensive and getting more so. Based on one experience, can you be sure this group is going to be most useful to you? There may have been something special about that one meeting that attracted more members than usual or people who ordinarily don't attend. Attend a meeting with a less attractive program before you ante up. Sort the members into groups by their skills or organizations. That takes more than one meeting. Don't risk the expensive shock of discovering, after you've paid a year's dues, that most of the members are not potential employers or mentors but potential competitors. Competitors are fine to network with but they're unlikely to help you as freely as someone older or more experienced might. Don't fail to return phone calls or emails on the same day, even to people you don't want to talk with. Few other business behaviors are remembered as negatively as unreturned telephone calls. The neglected ones will not only be miffed, they'll tell everyone -- including the people you'd like to hear from -- that you don't return calls. Many older people still consider the Internet black magic so they may not be surprised when they don't get a return email but nobody under 45 can be duped in that way.. They expect an immediate response. Don't neglect to smooth over difficulties with co-workers instantly. Only fine wines benefit from aging. Tiny miseries become full-scale dust ups as they age. They rivet the grapevine with accurately-repeated detail and you always lose, even if you can prove unintentional harm. Say, "What can we do to fix what's not working?" If the other person doesn't respond say, "Nothing is more important to me than a smooth working relationship with you. Let's work this out." If you persist you'll be off the hook, leaving the ball in your adversary's court, because the grapevine will punish a co-worker who doesn't respond favorably to reasonable peace overtures. Your co-worker will be in touch as soon as he figures this out. Don't fail to adjust to new realities quickly and gracefully. Some people are still fighting technological change. They will not attend training classes unless forced at gunpoint. Bucking electricity would be more productive. Ditto when faced with new forms of group process, even if you regard this year's management fad as a re-hash of a failed experiment from the 80s. Is anything more boring than fiftysomethings saying they've been there and done that? Instead, startle your younger colleagues and boss by your enthusiasm and your willingness to get as much training as possible. The inconvenience is worth the political gain. TOP WHAT'S IN YOUR PORTFOLIO ? People in service businesses who have staff jobs have the hardest time showing how the work they do made a difference to the organization. Who can prove that your revamp of the company newsletter or editing the donor awards program did much for anyone? You can if you rethink your portfolio. First a few rules. Portfolios aren't scrapbooks. They're about before-and-after scenarios. That is, you can't expect anyone to understand how you made a difference unless they see what you changed, added to, revised, etc. Most people want to show what they did but they give an evaluator no benchmark from which to understand or rate the work they did. This means the hirer's decision is based solely on the outcome. That's not what you're selling. You're trying to sell how you improved something. Portfolios should show a variety of work but show only things you are willing to do again. If you loathed doing spreadsheets, even if you were a whiz, don't put samples in your portfolio. If you struggle with Adobe or PhotoShop don't include work samples that could only be done with these programs. Don't include ten copies of one kind of assignment. Be sure to include copies you can leave behind. Include letters, memos, and emails of congratulations from anyone, including co-workers, bosses, and internal or external clients. How can a hirer know how important a particular piece of work was to its audience unless you tell her? Why should she care if the work was well done unless you position why it was done as well? Hirers tell us that this is the heart of the portfolio: how the work was used and what the end user thought. If this seems obvious, you don't see the same portfolios we do, full of unlabeled, unexplained stuff whose value we can't begin to understand. Use a plain black cover for the portfolio. It should be zippered plastic with three-hole binder inside. An expensive leather portfolio looks good but it's heavy and you'll soon get tired of carrying the weight. It's useful to carry a small stapler so you can staple your resume to your samples. Don't imagine that portfolios are for new graduates. We've seen vice presidents in their 50s do show and tell. Consider this: If your organization has been bought out, merged with, renamed, reorganized, or otherwise been through massive changes, a portfolio can help clarify how your role evolved and why what you did made a difference. Your resume, especially with various name changes for the same organization, can confuse someone who hasn't been pinpoint focused on the organization. That would be almost everyone who's not employed there. Finally, it can't hurt to carry back up with you. How many times have you been in an interview when it became obvious the interviewer had run out of steam ? or you had, hopefully less obviously. Wouldn't it be great to be able to say, "I brought my portfolio with me so I can show some of the work I'm especially proud of." New energy flows into that interview. TOP ARE YOU TEETERING ON THE BRINK OF "HAVE NOT ?" Have you been tracking your salary and benefits package since 2001 relative to your spending history? If you are not earning more in inflation dollars than you were 10 years ago, you are working harder for less money. This is undoubtedly true if your company has been through downsizings and salary freezes in the past four years and you consider yourself lucky to have stayed on the payroll. If the market continues to improve -- the Feds just raised the interest rate one-quarter percent -- will your under-compensation accelerate even more? We recently met with a couple of marketing managers whose combined income was $100,000. They were both in their mid-forties, both worked for old-economy package goods companies whose markets aren't expanding and whose customers are aging. They have lost about $30,000 in buying power in the past ten years, maybe $15,000 in just the past four years. Teachers, nurses, bankers, and most people in Fortune 500 companies -- except CEOs -- are now experiencing the effects of low growth or shrinkage and can expect a lifestyle shortfall as the cost of property taxes, fuel, food, and other basics continues to rise. How do you measure the erosion of your lifestyle, especially if it's very gradual and you know inflation has been "under control?" (If you're totally confused by this discussion you need a paid financial planner to spell out your status in words of one syllable.) Nobody really cares to compare statistics from 1989 and do regression analysis. Instead here are six questions that will give you an indication of whether serious number crunching is needed. FYI: 1989 was the beginning of the recession prior to the 2001 recession. 1. What percentage of your income now goes for taxes, housing, food, transportation, and medical care as opposed to 1989 and 2000? 2. What percentage of your income are you saving/investing now versus 1989 and 2000? 3. What kinds of vacations do you take now as opposed to those prior periods? 4. Has your gross income risen an average of seven percent a year versus 1989? 5. What kinds of expenditures do/don't you make now that you did 10 years ago? 6. What percentage of your income must service credit card debt or home equity loans or both? You get the idea so add your own questions. If you're over 40 please determine if your 401K or specific retirement investments have grown an average of 10 percent which is the number, historically, the financial industry believes should be your return on the stock market. We want you to think in sharp detail about the past four years. Here are the compelling reasons not to drift financially. If you're behind more than 30 percent you must rethink not just your present job but your present industry. There is no surer sign that your industry's future is guarded at best. If you're an accountant, customer service manager, engineer or HR professional, you could work for an outsourcing company that's growing 10 percent a year instead of working for a bank that's drifting into negative numbers or is ripe for a hostile takeover. Why are you in a shrinking or marginal industrial when you could be somewhere else if you had developed an orderly networking plan and exit strategy? Do you really want to be the one who turns out the lights? If you are between ages 59 and 63 and you're in a marginal industry you have a one in three chance, based on our experience with clients, of being laid off. You may get a good package -- if you have a good attorney -- but you'll still be unemployed and facing a job hunt from a standing start. The ego damage, once you finally realize how far behind you are, is major. Monitoring how you're doing financially against your past track record may cushion that blow and spur you to reassess your economic prospects in a job you are otherwise happy with. If you want to experience true misery, compare your progress with someone in a prosperous industry. The decision to trade comfort for money won't be difficult once you've faced the facts. Still, none of these facts can force you to leave a job you love. You can say, and we'd agree, that nothing is more important than job satisfaction. However, we're up against a very cold reality: How well do you choose to live after retirement? Alternately, how long must you work full time -- regardless of your interests or health -- just to pay the bills? We're seeing too many people for whom retirement isn't a possibility, even if they don't get laid off first. Before you plan that job campaign, open serious negotiations with your boss. Our experience has been that people whose employers know they have done the math are more likely to be taken seriously. Don't threaten to leave. That's always best left implied but unsaid. Your boss will get it. She knows the coming labor shortage will devastate her area if every underpaid worker leaves. If it's known you will not hesitate to move for more money, you may get incentives to stay. If not, that's also an important message. Better to find out they really don't want you while you're still on the payroll and can search for a new job on your own terms rather than in panic. TOP BRING YOUR RESUME UP TO DATE You'd think, given the molasses-like movement of the recovery, that people would have time to keep tweaking their resumes to get them perfect. Recruiters say no. Surprisingly even stars get sloppy about their resumes, assuming no employer would dismiss them because they have great skills. They are wrong; there are a lot of stars available today. Here are the resume sins we see and hear about most often. Too much job description, not enough results. Many resumes parrot job descriptions, probably unrevised since the dawn of civilization -- or at least since the writer interviewed 10 years ago. Although you may have a very different role now, relying on something written years ago makes a resume shriek, "I'm obsolete!" Don't rely on your job description in describing the job you do now. A headhunter told us that she is continually surprised by the number of senior managers who spent between one and four inches of paper enumerating the most mundane tasks. If this is what senior management really does, the country is in worse trouble than we think. She said, "Why would anyone who ran a department or division talk about staffing or budgeting? Isn't that a given?" She wants to see resumes that list big growth experiences. For example, if you've executed two downsizings which doubled the department's profits, that's important. It's both a task and a result. If you've led an ever-changing team of people and still made important productivity gains, ditto. Create a pie chart of how you spend your time. That will reflect what you really do, regardless of title, compensation, or any other factor. Many a born-again job hunter gets a jolt after comparing his job description with the pie chart. They find, to their dismay, that everybody's time is being wasted. For your resume, use the information in the pie chart to describe how you spend your time, followed by the results you achieve. No explanation of unusual or vague titles. A corporate recruiter told us he fervently wished that candidates would give more details when a job title is either unusual or too common and thus open to speculation and misinterpretation. His least favorite title is "director." Of what? For whom? Why? He said, "A director position is like a vice president of a bank. It could mean anything. I wish resumes would include the basics: number of direct reports, budget, reporting relationship, and relative position rather than just a title. If someone also included the size of the operation within the organization I'd be in hog heaven." This request applies whether you are a part-time manager at Starbucks or if you manage a Fortune 50 division. For example, a director with eight departments, a $400 million budget, in the company's third largest division who reports to the COO is a very different candidate from someone who used to be a vice president of a $50 million company but ended up a director when the organization downsized. Never fail to include this information unless you want to mislead the organization and disappoint in advance. Resumes aren't PR releases; there's little room for puffery. No evidence of professional evolution. No long-term job remains exactly the same over time. Even if your job title didn't change, it's likely the job did. Show your professional growth and development by reporting how you've changed as the job requirements have. Did you become faster, better, more inventive? Give the details. Say, "Reduced the time to produce and distribute reports from six hours to two." "Led the company in online applications to reduce waste." Don't explain how. Let a recruiter call and ask. Even better would be showing how you caused other people to increase productivity, effectiveness, and profits. That really will get a headhunter to pick up the phone. Analyze your job in blocks of time. What did you achieve since you started the job? Just focusing on the past nine-year period gives you a chance to show your versatility and how you perform under extreme circumstances, two attributes important to most hirers. If you swear nothing has changed, you will have trouble getting hired anywhere. Even the federal government might reject you. No evidence of leadership skills. Management skills matter more than ever. Younger workers are increasingly difficult to motivate. Show how you broke out, took charge, got your group moving, motivated the team, or otherwise succeeded --or tried but failed. Were you willing to try the latest management fad? Was the experiment successful? If not, were you able to adapt any of it to your own needs? Why document a failure? Imagine you've been reading resumes for years. Every one describes a winner, a role model without blemish. Wouldn't you be suffused with skepticism by now? A headhunter told us that she reread -- it's difficult to get your resume skimmed, much less read twice -- any resume that included potentially profitable goals, properly executed that didn't work. "I'm more impressed with the candidate who did everything, win or lose, and can show what he/she learned even if the project failed. Being part of a failed start-up isn't a deal breaker and neither should a failed project be. That person likely acquired skills that she could have acquired no other way." Finally, there's always the danger that you've underplayed accomplishments that others consider important. Feedback from former and current co-workers can help you surface them. Circulate your resume to former colleagues before taking it public. Ask them what you've left out. Are there things they remember that you should include? One small anecdote may spark the addition of a line that excites a headhunter enough to call. TOP MY ADVICE IS . . . "I just graduated from graduate school with an MS in Education. I have interviewed for a dozen public school teaching jobs but I can't bring myself to sign a contract. Deep down, I really don't want to teach. My parents think I'm crazy because I haven't committed to a job yet. I'm also in debt $45,000. Help!" If you tell anyone how you feel -- your parents in particular -- they are going to pressure you to at least try teaching and you are going to be seriously unhappy for the duration of the experiment. All is not lost. You have a Master's degree which means your resume is more likely to make it through electronic screening and into a pile to be looked at by a human. You do need a job objective on that resume, however. Brainstorm with your friends -- not your parents -- as to what you like and are good at. Do not look for a connection to your education. Once you have an industry or role that interests you, start networking, starting with alumni contacts from undergraduate and graduate school. This has got to be a sizeable pool. Use every resource from your school(s) and don't waste a minute explaining why you decided teaching wasn't for you. Say, "Here's what I'm looking for now. Who should I be talking to?" If you make 20 calls and callbacks a day you'll be employed in a few months. If you are completely at sea, do some temping. It has never failed to give people ideas of what they'll never do again or conversely, a fix on what they would like to do. It will also keep your family at bay since you will be earning something.. Whatever you do, don't bore people with how you made a terrible mistake. Be future oriented; talk only about what you'll do next. "I've had at least three full-scale careers in the past 10 years. I started out of college in accounting. I hated it. I switched to banking which was even more boring and uncreative. I got into marketing for the bank but that turned out to be sales which I didn't like either. I'm now managing the admissions department of an inter-city hospital. I've been promoted twice to even more difficult and demanding jobs. I'm burned out. What should I do next? I can't not work." Look at the bright side. At least you've found things you will never do again. Most people would urge you to go back to school. I'm against it. If you return to school before you make a realistic career choice you'll end up as a better educated but still undecided person. What you really need to do is discover what you didn't like about your jobs. Often it's a bad fit between the personality and the job that makes it untenable. You did not say that you couldn't do any of the jobs you've had, only that you disliked doing them. Did you get along with the people you worked with? If not, think about the kinds of people -- personality traits, skills, etc. -- you would like to work with. Network to find some of those people. Ask what they do. Alternatively, find an association that has people whose work sounds interesting. Arrange information interviews with some of them. Do you have an avocational interest? Deconstruct it. For instance, does anybody make money as a rockhound? (Hmm. Maybe that's not a good example.) Nothing that interests you can be put off limits without serious exploration. Richard Bolles of What Color Is Your Parachute? always counsels that a job exists anytime someone will pay for a service. Is there a not-for-profit that's doing something you'd like to do? Your experience might fit you for a management role in an organization that's making a difference in something that's important to you. Your varied background would appeal to any group trying to use multi-taskers and the multi-skilled to get the maximum from every dollar. Whatever you do don't victimize yourself. That's the beginning of the walk down ulcer alley. Since you're probably in your early thirties, all those Baby Boomers eying the exit will give you more opportunities than you imagine. "My father worked for the U.S. Postal Service for 35 years. He hated every minute of it. Still, when I graduated with my Master's in Fine Arts, he suggested I apply for a job with the Post Office so I'd have job security! I can't imagine anything I'm less interested in. What do you think? I do need a job and I live in a small town without any opportunities in my field." Your father is looking out for you interests but I can't imagine what he's thinking except that he doesn't appreciate or understand your degree and since he sacrificed job satisfaction for job security he thinks that's the best thing for you to do. Of course it's not. It's self-destructive. If there truly are no organizations in your town that you might work for, you are going to have to move. Get a part-time job -- or two -- and work to save money to relocate to an area that has some potential for you. Start networking immediately to help you identify jobs that use your skills.. Use any contacts you can unearth, including your alumni contacts. Don't even consider applying to the Post Office. Even if they had a job that used your talents it wouldn't be in your small town. It would most likely be in Washington, D.C. or at the offices of sub-contractors. The harder you work at finding a job that's right for you, the more likely your father is to understand your passion for your chosen field and approve of your course of action. TOP
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