6 tips for job hunting online

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The job market is good, the Internet is buzzing, and optimism is high. Still, the best jobs require talent before you walk in the door — you need to know how to search. Here are seven tips to help you:

1. Big job sites cater to keyword-focused applicants.
Only three to five percent of job seekers find employment through online job sites. In order to be one of this small percent, you need to tailor your resume to keyword searches. “Sending a resume to a big company’s web site is like sending your resume into a black hole,” says John Sullivan, human resources consultant and professor of management at San Francisco State University. “In a big company, your resume is sorted by an applicant tracking system.”

These companies receive thousands of resumes a month and the tracking system sorts them by skill. Sullivan tells of a study where researchers took a job opening and wrote 100 perfect resumes for that opening. Then the researchers added 10% more information to the resumes. Of those resumes, only 12% were picked up by the tracking system as qualified. This means that even if you are the perfect candidate, if you submit your resume blindly to a large company, there is almost a 90% chance that no human will ever see your resume.

But you can increase your chances by knowing how to use keywords in your resume. “Recruiters locate individuals based on a certain skill set of the job they are looking to fill,” says recruiting advisor Matt Millunchick. So try to imagine how someone else would use a search box to find you, and be very specific about your skills.

These rules remain true if you post your resume to an online database also. The mass of resumes on job sites is so unruly that human resource staffs are paying people in India $20 an hour to sort through resumes to find the good ones, according to David Hanley, owner of recruitn.com. So, even in this case, keywords are your best friend.

2. Don’t depend on your resume.
The typical resume is linear which makes people without linear careers look like a mess. The resume highlights work gaps in a negative way and leaves little space for achievements and experiences that did not somehow contribute to corporate life.

“The marketplace is changing and the life experience that informs the work that people do is changing,” says Anne Burdick, information designer and professor at Art Center College of Design. The static, linear resume is not an effective way to convey this new experience, so don’t lead with it.

Dana Zemack, a publicist, got an agency job by abandoning the conventional resume: She wrote a letter to the agency about how she had been throwing large, elaborate chocolate tasting parties and charging admission. Zemack explained that at first, she publicized the parties to make sure she’d make enough money to pay for the party. But then she realized that she had talent as both a party planner and a publicist, so she started planning bigger and bigger parties. “I used my own endeavors as an experiment to see how far I could go as a publicist,” she wrote. On a second page, she listed the publicity she was able to generate for the parties.

It worked. She got the job. Which leads to tip number three:

3. Go local. Smaller companies posting on smaller job sites look for employees who may not have a resume optimized for a computer screening. This is how Zemack found her job.

Another way to go small is to join professional groups on MySpace. These are people who will know where jobs are. Also, Millunchick says recruiters search through these groups for marketing and technical people.

4. Focus on the referral.
Eighty percent of available jobs are not posted on job boards. But people who work at companies know what positions are available. And employers love referrals, because referral employees have such low turnover.

In fact, many companies pay employees tens of thousands of dollars for a successful referral. Pander to that carrot system by offering yourself up to an employee at one of those companies.

Find people to refer you by looking on sites such as MySpace, Friendster and LinkedIn. Do keyword searches to see if your friends of friends have jobs at companies that interest you.

Offline networking works, too. It’s just slower. There is no keyword search when you walk into a party. But once you’ve made the acquaintance, you can Google the person to find their connections.

5. Stalk your dream job. If you know your dream job but you have no connections, identify someone you want to talk to within a company and use the Internet to get in touch with them: Find an email address, phone number, a conference your target is speaking at. Then ask for an informational interview.

You are far more likely to get a job from an informational interview than from blindly sending resumes. Most people will be flattered by your request and will give you some of their time. Remember an informational interview is not when you ask for a job. But often, if you make a good impression, the person will help you get a job.

6. Make your own job.
Zemack’s career really took off when she created a job for herself: throwing chocolate tasting parties. She is still genuinely touched by each person who turned out for those early parties where she bet her credit rating on herself. And in the end, she discovered something that is not a new rule at all: That believing in yourself and creating avenues for your own success attracts a magnificent network of supporters.

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Snoop on other people’s careers to gain self-knowledge

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We are bad at predicting what will make us happy, so the best way to pick a career is to study people to see if you like what their life is like. If you do, then try their career.

This is not very efficient, though. I mean, you can’t study that many people. So New York Magazine’s Watching the Clock is a gift for all you career searchers. You can read a minute-by-minute account of each person’s day.

Of course, it’s an account of their best day. No one reports anything like “1:36 pm put head on desk and worried about failure.” But still, you can learn a lot from reading about how someone really spends their day.

Also, you can learn about yourself by watching how you read the pages — you will read carefully what seems like the most fun to you. When I read, for example, I went first to the publicist, and relished every minute of his day. I even took pleasure the relentless pitching he did, within this piece, for his client, Bombay Sapphire. I skimmed the location scout’s day, and the contractor’s day. I read five scattered words about the chef’s day and they were all about food (who eats porchetta anyway?) and I couldn’t bring myself to read anymore. So no cooking school for me. Ever.

What if you like reading all of the profiles equally? Maybe you should be a librarian.

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Is it the weekend if the week never ends?

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A friend told me that most professional bloggers don’t blog on the weekend. I didn’t realize this, because every piece of advice on blogging that I’ve read says you have to blog very regularly to blog effectively as part of your business.

So last night — Friday — instead of blogging, I read blogs looking for weekend posts. I found it is generally true that big ones don’t post on the weekend. So I thought, okay, I’ll take a break. And I settled into the sofa to I spend a night reading blogs leisurely, with no pressure to post.

Then I came across Seth Godin’s list How to get traffic for your blog, and No. 43 was “post on the weekend because there are fewer new posts.” (No. 1 was “write lists.”) So here I am, posting on the weekend, to test out the rule.

It’s actually no big deal for me because I work forty hours a week spread over seven days, reflecting my love for uninterrupted routine. But I like the idea that the new frontier of work — the blog — has a large following of people who refuse to work nonstop.

I am a big fan of sitting around doing nothing. (As one who obsesses over routines, I build this into my daily schedule.) If you feel guilt over taking a break, check out Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers and Bums in America by Tom Lutz. Wait, no, instead of reading the book, read the review of it by the most hilarious columnist ever, Dave Barry, who wrote a very funny but true homage to the act of thinking titled, Inaction Heroes.

That’s all for today’s post. It is, after all, the weekend.

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Job hoppers have the best vacations

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The best thing about changing jobs is the vacation in between jobs. Most companies give two weeks vacation, which is about the amount of time you need to take off from work in order to keep your life running, e.g. flooded kitchen, dental appointment, weekday baseball games.

On top of that, most people aspire to the kinds of jobs where you are thinking about the job in the back of your mind all the time because it’s interesting to you and you’re passionate about it. So the only way to get a real vacation at most companies is to quit.

The New York Times ran a piece yesterday called A Life Between Jobs, which describes this trend as pretty much mainstream among Gen X and Gen Y: “Generations before them, studies have shown, valued tenure and career advancement. But this group sees the chutes in the world as interesting as the ladders.”

The best scenario, of course, is to quit and have another job lined up, because the stress of having to find another job puts a damper on the in-between-job vacation. But still, as long as you’re not in financial trouble, you can enjoy the time even without another job lined up as long as you trust yourself to get a job eventually. Which you should, because we are in a good economy for job-hunting right now.

Question the authority of anyone who tells you that this is a bad idea. There was a quote in the New York Times piece from a career advisor type about how, “Gaps in the resume are still a red flag.” But they are only a red flag if you spend your time sitting at home doing nothing.

No one wants to work with a person who does nothing with their time. That’s the sign of an uninterested person. But if you have gaps in your resume that you filled with fun adventures and rewarding projects then a gap in your resume is a red flag that you are balanced, interesting, and in control of your life. In this case, as long as you can explain the gaps in your cover letter, you’ll probably be fine.

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Me at the M-A-C counter: Timing is (almost) everything

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I was in Bloomingdales today, investigating possibilities at the M-A-C makeup counter, when one of the people there asked me if I want to be in a Today Show segment.

“We’re doing a makeover on TV,” said one of four tall blond women.

I said, “I’ll do it if you’ll mention my blog on TV.”

Apparently the scheduled model did not show up.

So they asked me to write down the name of my blog.

The makeup artist looked into the camera and said, “This is Penelope Trunk of the Brazen Careerist blog.” Then he worked his makeup magic.

“Contouring” is the makeup tip of the day, by the way. But that is not the big takeaway from this post. The important things are:

1. Always find the angle for self-promotion.

2. Luck and timing are 50% which means being ready for anything .

3. Be gracious. It seems like it would be really easy for the producer to edit out the Brazen Careerist part, but I didn’t say anything about that. We’ll see on June 22 when the segment airs.

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Hold CEOs accountable for their parenting

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Fortune magazine ran an article titled “The Welshman, the Walkman, and the salarymen,” which asked if the CEO, Howard Stringer, can fix Sony. At the end of the article, Stringer, who is married with two children is quoted as saying at company meeting, “I don’t see my family much. My family is you.”

GIVE ME A BREAK!!! I can’t decide which is more pathetic — that Stringer is living this life or that Fortune magazine is writing about it without any commentary.

How can there be no mention of the fact that he is neglecting his kids? What about the double standard we have in this country? If you are poor and you abandon your kids you are a bad parent. But if you are rich and you abandon them to run a company, you are profiled in Fortune magazine.

I now quote a government publication aimed at low-income fathers:

“All children need emotional and financial support from both parents. The campaign goal is to convey .. the importance of family life and to encourage fathers — whether married, divorced or single — to become involved in their children’s lives… Responsible fathers are men who actively share with the mother in providing physical, emotional and intellectual needs for their child.”

This standard applies to Stringer. Just because he’s rich doesn’t mean his kids don’t need to see him. How is he providing emotional support to his children when he is telling his employees that he has replaced his family with his employees?

Employees, beware: CEOs like Stringer have a negative affect on your own ability to keep your personal life in tact, because work-life policy starts at the top and trickles down.

When you are looking for a company to work for, look at the CEO. If he works insane hours, you can bet that you will be expected to do the same, on some level. And my gosh, if he refers to you as his family, run!

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The official announcement of my blog

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Today is the official announcement of my blog. I actually started blogging three months ago, when I was doing interviews for my recent column about blogging. It became clear that anyone who is very serious about their career should have a blog, and I didn’t have one.

It turns out, it is not that easy to blog. Well, it’s easy to write a blog for an audience of six best friends and your mom. But if you want to be seen as an expert in your field by making a significant contribution to the daily community discussion, then you need to think things through a bit.

Fortunately, I’m a person who loves to learn something new. Here’s what I did:

1. I called all the people I knew who were bloggers and asked them about their technique.

2. I spent two hours a night for a month reading other peoples’ blogs. I read hotshot blogs, like Lifehacker and smaller blogs like Communication Nation.

3. I started blogging furtively. I told only my blog mentor and my brother (who said “You should get a better picture of yourself.”)

Today is the last step: Announcing the blog to everyone else.

It turns out that I really love blogging. It appeals to three very big aspects of my personality: I love to write, I love routine, and I’ll read anything. This last thing is genetic, I think. My mom will read anything, too. My mom has an amazing memory, and she was on the game show Jeopardy. I don’t have her memory, but I’m a good synthesizer of information, and blogging is a great outlet for that.

According to the guys who wrote the best selling book Freakonomics, the idea of talent is overrated. What makes people stand out — concert pianists, Olympic athletes (and probably big-time bloggers) is that they love to practice. They love to do it day in and day out and so they get really good at it.

This is the reason that people should do what they love — because that’s what they’ll be really good at because they’ll do it a lot. So I’m happy to have found something I love.

For those of you who are still looking for something you love, you should know that I did not know that I would love blogging before I tried it. In fact, before I tried it, I thought blogging would be a daily pain in the butt. But I took a risk because I know you can’t find what you’re really good at without trying a lot of things.

Blogging is a very big time investment. And it’s not like I'm getting paid to do this. But you cannot get paid to do everything in life. I have made almost all my big career steps by doing something that I did not get paid for. I have written business plans with no assurance that they’d be funded (I got the money). And I have contributed time and ideas with no assurance that I’d get credit (I got a job).

In this case, I’m not really sure where the blog will lead, but I feel strongly that I need to be doing it, to contribute to the online conversation about work and life. Some days I worry about how much time I spend on the blog, but I tell myself that good things happen to those who take risks to do things they love. So, I’m doing that. We’ll see what happens.

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Visualize success like a major league all-star

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I read in the Boston Globe about this guy, Jim Fannin, who is a mental coach for hundreds of people, including twenty-two major league baseball all-stars. So I decided to interview him, thinking that I’d be able to implement his program for my own goals.

Most of what I know about mental coaching comes from my experience in professional beach volleyball. At the top of any sport, the difference between players is not physical skills because everyone has them. The difference is mental. Who can stay focused and believe in themselves during every game.

I couldn’t do that on the volleyball tour, and I know this shortcoming holds me back in my work today, too. So I was very curious about Fannin saying that he can teach people how to gain mental focus.

It turns out, that Fannin teaches people how to be top in their field by teaching one thing: Play a movie in your head of you achieving your big goal. For Alex Rodriguez it was being a top hitter. And he became the American League MVP. Not just in his own movie, but in real life.

Sounds easy, but for most people, getting to the movie is very hard. (Which is why Fannin wrote a book.) Here are the steps you have to take:

1. Know exactly what you want. A defined, very specific goal. Not “start a company” but “open a dog-grooming business in Portland.”

2. Know exactly what reaching the goal will look like — the steps leading up to the achievement. If your goal is to win a Nobel Prize, you need to imagine yourself making the great discovery.

3. Organize your life around your goal so that you can play your movie in your head before you go to bed and immediately when you get up. This means you need to get to some sort of meditative point where you can sit still, for maybe ten minutes, while you play your movie in your head.

4. Find optimism. Lots of it. Because you have to believe in yourself enough that you will actually do this exercise every day until you reach your dream.

I believe that this will work. It makes sense to me, and it’s worked for thousands of people. Not just athletes.

But this morning, when I woke up, I realized how hard it was going to be. I had no movie to play in my head and I had not set aside time in my schedule to day to plan what my movie will be. So I guess I’ll start tomorrow.

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Advice from my mom about job hunting

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Here’s an email I got from my mom, who is an information technology manager at a Fortune 100 company:

Sweetie,

I was reading through a pile of resumes that human resources gave me, and there was one resume that was so good, but the guy was too high level for what I needed.

Then I thought to myself, he’ll definitely get a job soon, and I’d like to have HIS job, so I should send my resume to his company right now.

You should tell this to your readers.

Love,
Mom

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Good negotiating skills decrease stress

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If you want to know the inside dirt on being a top-flight waiter, Waiter Rant is the blog to read. Yesterday he wrote about the stress of the Memorial Day crowd. I am always shocked by the insane and totally out of line antics this guy has to put up with, which is why his blog is so popular.

Some of the most stressful jobs are the ones where you have to negotiate among difficult personalities. You could be launching a rocket to the moon, but if everyone is getting along and working very well together, it’s might be less stressful, in the moment, than managing a room full of screaming airplane passengers who have been told their plane won’t take off that day.

My best negotiating lessons came in couples therapy, when my husband wouldn’t get his bike out of the apartment (we live in New York, in a tiny space). The couples therapist did not, as I was hoping, tell my husband to shut up and put his bike in storage. The therapist had us read Getting to Yes and then negotiate a solution we could both live with. (For those of you who doubt my negotiating skills, the bike is gone, but believe me, it was a lot of hard work, and I recommend that book.)

The most important part of negotiations is understanding the other person’s motivations. You could learn this by being a waiter, or any of a long list of service workers whose job is to read people in order to make them happy. (My friend is a hairdresser-to-the-very-rich and has the same types of stories as the waiter.)

But it takes a lot of years of being a waiter or a hairdresser to be great at reading people. You might do better checking out Speed Reading People by Paul Tieger and Barbara Barron-Tieger. These are people who have mastered the art of bringing the personality test to the masses. And in this book you learn how to apply the Meyers-Briggs principles to people you meet so you know how to communicate with them.

A lot of your workplace stress could be alleviated if you were better at negotiating — asking for less work, better projects, getting co-workers to stop annoying you, convincing your boss to listen — these are all negotiation points. So when you are feeling stressed, think about how to solve the problem through negotiation. And meanwhile be thankful you don’t deal with the customers on Waiter Rant.

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