Category: Jobseekers
I have some real talk about resumes and how they are really, really a bad way to get yourself into the job you love. They are a part of it, but relying to heavily on your resume is a rookie mistake. As we used to say where I grew up, “Let me learn you some about it.”
Pull up a chair.
I wrote a tweetstorm about why resumes suck so bad at helping people get jobs and how you can step out of the hamster wheel and actually get attention from employers for who you are.
Just a note: Recruiting and Hiring is intensely biased by nature. It’s very hard to do well. Many great recruiters and people leaders spend all their waking hours trying to solve this problem and curb the risks of institutional bias in what they do. That being said, it’s out there. Everywhere. Being aware of what you’re up against doesn’t make it fair, but at least you know a little more about your enemy, which is understanding the reasons people hire versus the process companies tell you to follow when applying for jobs, which, spoiler alert, are completely opposite each other.
If you hear nothing else from this, remember this one lesson: “Standing in Line is for Suckers”.
(While you’re waiting to get a call back from that intern screening resumes, someone is connecting with the department VP right now, and they will get hired in the next 3 days)
Stop following “the rules” when going for your dream job. Do w.h.a.t.e.v.e.r. it takes to get noticed. That gets you hired, and promoted, and respected.
On to the tweetstorm…
Bottom-Line Up Front:
☝? Hiring is based on feelings not facts.
✌? Getting referred gives everyone that buzzy feeling about you.
?? You get to show up and be your authentic self. They already like you.
?? Spend 80% of your energy getting REFERRED for jobs
Come along for the ride, below:
Looking for resume feedback?
Here the real talk: jobseeking is marketing.
And resumes suuuck at marketing you. Your vibrance. Your passion. Your drive. Your dreams.
The REAL you.
Proof resumes are the worst marketing tool:
- Ever bought a smartphone because of the resume they put in a commercial? No.
- Ever went to that trendy restaurant because of the resumes they sent you? No!
You did those things because of something you FELT about them.
Because no matter how much someone will tell you otherwise, hiring is an EMOTIONAL decision.
Not fair? Yes. True? Also, Yes.
In fact, the most emotional decision any manager will make is who they hire.
? Use this to your benefit and encourage them to feel interested in talking to you.
The reason recruiters/hiring managers respond to the person who submits a resume or not is based on how the resume makes them FEEL. (Usually a more logical feeling, yet i argue still a feeling)
Lots of us are trying to make this less biased but it’s still how it is today.
Why You Didn’t Get Called Back
And the reason you didn’t get called back after that interview, even when they said you have all the skills, is either you didn’t make them FEEL whatever they felt about you at first or someone ELSE they interviewed gave them that feeling they were looking for.
Stop Gambling With Your Career — with a PDF!
Waiting on a boring text attachment in an email or submitted online to give an accurate portrayal of the fullness of YOU—your fiery passions and talents, lifelong dreams and skills, even fears and struggles—is a terrible, terrible gamble.
Get on the referral gravy train! ?
Meanwhile, research shows “88% of employers said referrals are… the best source for above-average applicants.”
So companies drain precious money and resources into employee referral programs and tracking their success.
The combination here is perfect for you:
An employee you actually know (not a recruiter) referring you to a company is the BEST and easiest way for you to show off your WHOLE self.
AND companies trip over themselves to incentivize & reward employees for referring candidates.
This is what Steven R. Covey was picturing when he said “win / win”
Linkedin, as a social network, is different than others in that it was created around connections and networking, and the purpose of it, generally speaking, is to connect people together professionally.
To that end, since people go there to ‘Network’, there is a tendency for people to be willing to help you professionally, if you ask for it correctly.
There’s three ways I can think of to immediately ask for help on Linkedin:
- Give 10x more than you receive
- Ask for specific, actionable help
- Go out of your way to be thankful
Give 10x More Than You Receive
Nobody likes a beggar. Especially a persistent one. The old rule in networking is to give ten times before you ask once. My friend Jason Alba taught me that principle and he turned me down when I offered him a job 12 years ago only to create his own company (JibberJobber) literally helping people get jobs (his amazing 6 week Job Search Program currently is on sale at more than 60% off with this link—and a JibberJobber subscription is included!) . He’s also an accomplished Pluralsight author if you’re a member of their great program.
His advice, to give 10x more than you receive, has been a cornerstone of my personal and professional philosophy. As I have built my company, and my network of thousands of hand-picked first level LinkedIn connections, i have tried to maintain this posture of helping 10x before asking once. It focuses my efforts on being good and kind as well and that helps in the most challenging times.
Be sure you are helping others more than asking for help. It’s good for your soul and your reputation.
Ask for Specific, Actionable Help
The biggest thing you need to do is ask for something specific. If you just yell out “help!” but you don’t provide some kind of direction, you will hear nothing but crickets.
Ask for something specific, depending on where you’re posting.
On your feed, asking for leads on a new job is totally appropriate. Or perhaps “anyone know companies that are hiring?”
In a private LinkedIn group, you can do the same but be more specific, and know that your request isn’t public for the world (or your employer) can see.
Finally, in a personal one-on-one message, you can also directly ask for a connection to a specific person or company. For example “Hi, Mary. I hope you’re well. I am looking into this role (link) at your company. Do you know who I should talk to? My resume is attached.”
Also, Say Thank You!
Finally, go out of your way to thank those who help you. Publicly or privately, let people know you appreciate any help they provide.
Paying it forward by helping others and crediting the help you’ve received along the way is a great way to show your appreciation as well.
Pro tip: If someone gets you that dream job you wanted? Surprise them with $200 gift card to their favorite restaurant or store once you get your first paycheck or signing bonus. If they don’t want the money, ask to donate it to their favorite charity in their name and send them the receipt for tax purposes.
Categories
Let the Adventure Begin
I have a mug that says this on the side in cute, right-aligned, lower case serif letters:
let the
adventure
begin
The alignment, the blatant disregard for conventional spacing, capital letters and punctuation give it a playfulness I love and I find makes my heart smile a little each time I read it.
Does ‘work’ feel adventurous to you?
In a small way, isn’t this what work could feel like, too? I can hear the voices of droning mall-store bosses lecturing well-rehearsed ted-talks on the merits of hard work and thats-whats-wrong-with-your-generation speeches, but aside from all of those sounds, let’s just ponder for a moment.
What if work actually did feel adventurous?
I think, if you look around at the people you admire in your field*, the ones who make it look effortless, I think you will find one thing they have in common is, almost a sense of wonder that they get to do what they do and, perhaps, a sense of awe as if the things that seem to just “go right” for them, they never would have expected.
*Side note: If you don’t see anyone in your field you admire, that might be your sign ?
Now Is the Best Time to Have an Adventure
The world is freaking out right now, and, well, they should be. There are some seismic shifts happening in the world today.
But you don’t have to freak out and wring your hands
Let me show you why:
As I write this, the world is trying to re-awaken economically from the COVID—19 pandemic. We still don’t know what will happen and, in the United States, with official unemployment numbers topping 14% (as of May 8, 2020), people estimating the real number is much higher and could climb as high as 25% before this is said and done, there is a lot to be mindful about. The first part of that is it means we are undergoing a once-a-century forced reset of how our economy works at all.
During this unprecedented time when, in the US, many people are earning more on unemployment than they were at work, what this strange, strange time in history may become is the perfect seed ground for whatever it is that you want to do next.
Many of the great companies of our time have come about during times of economic downturns. Facebook, Microsoft, Disney, Trader Joe’s… its a long list. And, look, you don’t have to be the next Warren Buffett to see an opportunity to work on something you feel passionate about and, since some of the people you trust to work with you are also out of work, why not!?
Passion Doesn’t Mean Travel OR Entrepreneurship. It Means Being On Purpose
Don’t get me wrong, there’s something deceptively alluring to packing your bags and moving to Taiwan for a year and hoping everything works out financially, but you don’t have to start a company or go traveling the world to match your work with your passions.
If you can choose, purposefully, the things you will do and will not do in your life from this day forward, you will have a singular advantage over every other person working for a buck in the world who does whatever they’re told, won’t say no, then complains to everyone about how their life feels soul-sucking and useless.
Your advantage? You will be doing things on purpose.
But—that doesn’t mean glamorous, either.
But it does mean actively choosing.
I know plenty of people who purposefully do very difficult things today so they don’t have to do those things forever.
I also know several who gladly give up certain perks and benefits of a cushy white collar lifestyle so they can have other things more important to them, like family time or being able to volunteer when and where they want.
So… What Do You Love?
For me, this question surfaced recently in a raw and powerful way. I made the choice in 2005 to fully dive into recruiting as a way of life and I have not looked back.
Now, 15 years and recruiting for fantastic companies and meeting thousands of incredible humans later, I find myself asking what is next? The next job req? The next placement? Those things still bring passion and fire in my belly, but I find myself scratching at something more… something just beyond that which I still have not quite uncovered but it has me, and this is critical—
It has me CURIOUS.
- I realized a year ago that I want to be truly helpful to the world and one way I can do that is to help 1 Million People get Better Jobs in 5 Years. I am 9 months in and have not scratched that, it seems. But each Resume Review I do and each webinar or newsletter I send out seems to do a little more, and I expect the results to be compounding.
- I realized that I have mastered a series of recruiting behaviors in my career that can both help anyone become a master recruiter and can help any recruiting team do their best at keeping hiring more human, solving the problems of bias in their workplaces, being more inclusive, and welcoming.
- Finally, I realized that my true passions lie around recruitment automation and helping companies minimize the processes that computers can do and instead maximize the things humans are best at doing.
All of these things do not take me away from recruiting, and I will never stop having candidate conversations as often as I can to fill those interesting roles, but I do think I can have even more excitement in my work as I follow these paths to more adventurous outcomes than simply keyword searching for candidates and repetitively busting out linkedin messages will get me.
These are the things I love… now your turn
Perhaps you need to take a walk or a hike, sit on a mountain or in a quiet room and think about the things you want and the things you love.
How can you marry those things with the things you do?
When you step back, what is it about the things you get very excited about which you can replicate? Is it process management? The chance to be creative? Closing a deal? Seeing the balance sheet work out perfectly? Consider these signals and follow them closely.
Now What?
Follow my lead and work to proactively choose to say YES to the things on your list of things you love and NO to the things you don’t.
Write down your things. Each time you feel you are forced to sacrifice one of your long-term loves because of a short-term necessity, write it don on a sheet you can recall. Go back in a month, three months or six months. Have things changed? Ask for them to change again and see what happens.
If you consciously push on these boundaries of things you’re asked to do versus things you love doing, and do this for five years straight, you will be living a MUCH DIFFERENT LIFE than you are now.
Which is good, since the world has changed, too.
Welcome 🙂
—
Written by Robert Merrill 5/18/2020 from near Salt Lake City, Utah
#blog #askrobertmerrill
It appears that nearly 70% of Americans on unemployment are earning more than they did in their pre-laid-off jobs. Some as much as 150% more. What does this mean for recruiting and the economic recovery?
Making recruiting entry-level workers even harder than it has been in the past, many people are finding their unemployment benefits outstripping the amounts of money they would have earned had they not been let go.
This graphic, from the venerable 538, shows the distribution of benefits as a function of replacing the worker’s income, state by state in the United States.
They cite a report from University of Chicago economists which “estimate that 68 percent of unemployed workers who can receive benefits are eligible for payments that are greater than their lost earnings.”
What does this mean for Workers?
I believe there are three factors at play here which can be good and bad for things in the short run, but will end up as major factors in the long term.
The winners in these struggles remain to be seen, but history has a few lessons of its own to share:
- We’re in a once-in-a-lifetime reset of the economy
- These debts will come due sooner or later (and probably both)
- Recruiting & Retention will continue to be challenging in new ways.
Once-A-Century Economic Output Shift
First, I believe we are at the tip of a once-a-century shift in massive economic change. In fifty or seventy years, b-school textbooks will talk about the 2010’s like the last few years before refrigerators took over the ice box business in 1930s America. Those lectures will undoubtedly relate similar harbingers in our time of how none of the significant and profitable ice-trade businesses which boomed in the late 1800s ever made it as a significant player in any sense past 1950.
What does this mean for us? Booming industries that were safe havens for workers and owners alike just months ago may be gone in the next 5-10 years and, except perhaps for
Someone Has To Pay The Bill
The massive, crippling consumer debt problem is going to continue to cause issues in unexpected ways in the next few years.
Smart individuals will work hard right now to find ways to pay off debt and remove unneeded expenses. These short-term benefits in unemployment are intended to be a bridge over troubled waters, not a platform to build on. Mind you, the gravy train will come to the end of the line. Will you be clinging to the freight car when that happens hoping to eek out one more spoonful of gruel, or will you have taken your fair share and moved on to better things leveraging the economic boost for what it was intended for — to keep you from selling plasma to pay your rent — and instead contributing meaningfully to this new post-COVID-world of ours.
End of the day, someone has to pay these bills. Of course, those payments have to come from the backs (and pockets) of taxpayers. If the economic times turn around quickly as some hope, we may see a way to narrowly escape truly challenging times. However, even as it’s predicted these job losses will be felt far into 2021 and beyond, it stands to reason that, like grabbing the store credit card on your way out so you can save 10% on those jeans, as convenient as this all is, the whole world will be economically paying this down for a long, long time.
Recruiting & Retention is going to be harder for entry-level roles
Companies who value their entry-level workers will need to find ways, monetarily or otherwise, to compensate these workers and intent them to work rather than stay home, collect unemployment and “look for work” while golfing, watching NASCAR, etc.
Furthermore, I predict retention will be a killer subject not to far from now, as companies eek out some life, and things seem to have some semblance of settling down, I believe that people who were lucky enough to survive the unemployment cuts in the first place will pack their bags in droves as they realize, with some disdain, that all those glittery perks at their former companies was not, in fact, gold at all when it came down to what really matters to them in their lives.
Staying connected with recruiters during your job search is an important, but often overlooked part of a successful search.
Unfortunately, many candidates make at least these two mistakes in job searching, especially the more panicked they are that they are not going to get a job or they might not find one.
Mistaken Candidate Behaviors with Recruiters
- “Spray and Pray” by just applied to as many possible jobs that seem well-paying that you can.
- “Play the Field” approach by telling every recruiter that their job is the most-interesting job they are considering.
- “Hard to Get” by acting busier than you actually are so recruiters have to work to get ahold of you.
- Ghosting. Yeah.
A Mindset Shift
But may I submit that these behaviors are rooted in a scarcity mentality. The reality is that recruiters are trying to help you fill their jobs much more than, somehow, mercilessly denying candidates from perfect roles with maniacal laughter.
“HELP ME, HELP YOU!”
Here are three ways you can immediately get more value out of your relationship with your recruiter and, mercifully, make your transactions more human, too.
- Be straightforward and open about your roadblocks, challenges or concerns about the job.
- Have transparent and ongoing dialogue with your recruiter about the timing of other opportunities and your likelyhood of taking one of them
- Be realistic and upfront about compensation, relocation or visa requirements and any other non-standard requirements you might have.
Be Open With Questions or Concerns
I can’t stress this enough that leading your recruiter on about their job, telling them everything is fine and not bringing up concerns or questions is a bad way to go.
The recruiter’s literal JOB is to resolve concerns and challenges and they can be the best resource for you to get things that others will not know how to get for you. The recruiter is almost-always one of the most candidate-focused people at a company, and knows way more about benefits, features, perks and compensation than nearly anyone else in the company.
Leverage your recruiter’s relationship by first being real with them, sharing your own concerns and then asking questions when you have them. Help them help you.
Ongoing Dialogue about Other Interviews
If you are a skilled candidate, you are interviewing at multiple places. Pretending you’re not, beside being a lie, is a foolish and needless burden you need to carry.
You’re probably already feeling a little self-conscious about your employer finding out you’re looking (something for another discussion), but many candidates pile on the anxiety by also hiding the fact that you can’t interview tomorrow because you’re actually across the country at a flyout interview today and won’t be back until mid-day tomorrow.
Nothing blacklists you faster as a candidate than pretending you’re not interviewing anywhere else only to have a “sudden” offer come “out of nowhere” and it happens to be “with [your] dream company” and also an “offer [you] cannot refuse.”
Queue the excessive eye rolls. If you pull this move, your recruiter will say nice things to you and wish you luck while marking your candidate profile as “NEVER HIRE” and tagging you with “liesthroughtheir_teeth” in the company applicant system. That database will live longer than you. Don’t mess.
Being open with your recruiter about other roles and how soon you might get another offer is both polite and the right thing to do. Help them help you.
Talk About Comp and Any Non-Standard Needs
Finally, you should bring up any non-standard needs you have early in the process. The earlier the better, in fact.
On that note, while you should likely not be the first person to bring up compensation (topic for another time*) in the interview process, you SHOULD bring it up first if you often find out that your expectations are often much higher than what companies are initially expecting. You do NOT want to get into the process and find out they want to pay you 1/3 your value. Full stop.
Outside of this, if you have visa concerns, questions about relocation expenses, other perks or benefits, or you are expecting a leave of one kind or another, bring things up early — as quickly as you can in the process. Your recruiter is your sounding board here. They may tuck things away, or tell you “yes, we do that all the time.” But you do NOT want to get a juicy offer in your hands only to find out they won’t pay relocation or that there’s no commissions draw, or whatever.
Help them help you by being clear about your needs and expectations up front.
Summary
Summary, your recruiter’s JOB is to connect you to the right role in the company. This is their passion. Other than that one burger place, filling a role with the right person is their very favorite thing! Sharing your timing, roadblocks, concerns and needs early and often will help them help you land that perfect job, on time, with the right pay (or more)!
So, help your recruiters help you.
That’s what they call, “win, win.”
————————
Note: On compensation, while you should generally not bring it up first, you should enter every conversation, even the first, with an expectation they will ask you. Think of the batteries—your answer needs to be *ever ready! ?