9 tips for quitting a job gracefully

, , ,

Quitting is not what it used to be. When a job was the sign of security, quitting meant you had a self-destructive streak. And when long-term employment was the only acceptable format for a resume, a string of quit jobs was a sign of an inability to get along with other people. Not so today.

Now, people have a new job almost every year before they turn 32. And with all the management-training courses about how to retain young employees, you can bet those young people are not getting fired. They’re quitting.

Today quitting is part of the process of finding your dream job, finding synergy between your home and work lives, and finding where you fit in. Young people have different expectations for work than older generations. A job today should feed one’s soul, ego, and sooner than later, family. It’s no surprise that you have to quit a lot of jobs to find the one that meets such lofty goals.

Yet with all the advice about how to get your dream job, there is a dearth of information on how to quit a job first. In a world where people change jobs constantly, and their network is the key to success, you have to quit as well as you hunt. Here’s a list of ways to quit a job well:

1. Go before things get bad.
Lynn recently left her accounting job. “I’ve been really good about quitting jobs amicably,” she says. “I realized I was hitting a point where I was going to start acting out.” Like Lynn, you need to know yourself and be honest about how you’re feeling on the job so you don’t let your emotions get out of hand.

2. Make a good first step.
“The very first person that you should tell you’re leaving is your boss,” says Alexandra Levit, author of They Don’t Teach Corporate in College. “Your boss will be insulted to hear it from someone else.” Also, get your story right the first time and tell the same, optimistic plan to everyone. Lynn, for example, explained that she wanted to give freelancing a try, which shows positive vision for her career.

3. Leave the door open a crack.
If you’ve done good work, there is no reason you couldn’t come back later, when things for you and for the company might have changed. Especially as you begin to specialize in your career and lay down roots, the pool of possible companies gets smaller. So don’t close any doors definitively.

“It’s very tempting to spill your guts or rant about the people you work with, but be careful what you say because you never know when you’ll want to come back,” says Levit.

4. Beware of the exit interview.
“If you trash the company during an exit interview, it will follow you everywhere. In fact, don’t even bother to do one,” says David Perry, a recruiter and author of Guerrilla Marketing for Job Hunters. “Just leave on good terms and let them know you had a wonderful time.” Even if you didn’t.

5. Resignation letter.
Try to get out of it if you can. But if you really need to write one for legal reasons, make it short and gracious. You are not the president of the United States. The world does not need a public record of why you quit or what your aspirations are. Just a simple end date and a thank you will be fine.

6. Trust that the company can continue without you.
“People think the world is going to end if they quit their job,” says Lynn. “In my last job, everyone who quit thought everything would go wrong, but it’s easily fixed and everyone’s replaceable.”

7. Set yourself up for a good reference.
Perry is adamant that any negative parting will haunt your job hunts forever. “You want to be sure the trail you leave is a positive one,” he says. And although the law discourages past employers from dissing you to future employers, Perry says a recruiter can circumvent this hurdle. “I have never, in my 20 years of recruiting, had someone not answer questions about references.”

8. Manage the in-between time carefully.
“Burn no bridges,” warns Brendon Connelly, author of the popular blog Slacker Manager. Sometimes quitting a job is as loaded as dumping a lover. “I have quit a few jobs and there has been tension because it’s always been for something else,” says Connelly. “You need to lay the groundwork ahead of time for the transition.” Tie up loose ends at the old job and get your files organized to pass on to someone else. “You don’t want to give the old people the shaft.”

9. Be conscious of the shift in the balance of power.
The moment you quit is when you go from being your boss’s underling to your boss’s equal. After all, you are no longer beholden to your boss for a job. At the point of quitting, any more work you do for your boss is out of kindness and respect for the custom of giving notice.

This is one of those times we tend not to see ourselves clearly, writes Daniel Ames, professor at Columbia Business School. Hitting the right note of assertiveness — not too much and not too little — is hard to do. We notice poor balance in our colleagues but rarely notice it in ourselves. So keep in mind that the bottom line of quitting well is assertiveness. Have enough to leave when you need to, but tone down your assertiveness enough to keep your friends and colleagues on your side even as you’re walking out the door.

 

/35 Comments

Please, no more studies about getting women to the top

, ,

I hate to dis Catalyst because they have provided great research to support women in the work place. But here’s a bit from their most recent study: “Most large U.S. companies have made scant progress in advancing women…to leadership and top-paying positions over the past decade.”

DUH!!!!

It’s clear at this point that women are basically stuck on their climb up the corporate ladder. In general, climbing the corporate ladder to the top requires giving up your personal life in order to serve the corporation. And research has shown that if women are willing to give up having kids, (or at least have a stay-at-home husband,) they can climb as well as men.

But really, why fight to get more women up a ladder that is basically dysfunctional? We should, instead, focus on helping men to get off the ladder. And then helping both men and women to get meaningful and rewarding work both outside and inside the home.

The Third Path is a nonprofit that addresses these issues. It helps people “redesign work to better accommodate family, community and other life passions.” The interview I did with the founder, Jessica DeGroot , was truly inspiring and made me think about all the possibilities for being a social change leader with my own family.

Another way to address the issues of creating meaningful work inside and outside the home is to go to court. No joke. Lisa Belkin reports in today’s New York Times that a new category of discrimination suit being won is a suit in which plaintiffs claim discrimination at work because they are giving care at home. Mary Still, professor at University of California Hastings College of the Law, coined the term “family responsibilities discrimination,” and both men and women are winning their cases in this area: Hooray.

/11 Comments

Interview tip: Manage your image by telling good stories

, , , , ,

The way you talk about yourself is very powerful. Whether or not you are conscious of it, the way you tell stories of your life frames how people see you, and how you see yourself. So you may as well do this consciously, and also be conscious that people get the most tripped up in their storytelling when they are talking about uncertain moments in their career.

“The stories we tell make an enormous difference in how we cope with change,” writes Herminia Ibarra in the Harvard Business Review. Crafting good story is essential for making a successful transition to your next point. Yet most of us do it badly — we can’t figure out a story arc, so we just start listing the facts of our career. But if you can’t tell people why your prior path and your new path are part of one story, then you probably can’t see it yourself, and that leads to feelings of being confused, lost and insecure — all the feelings that are typical of an uncertain life but do not have to be.

“Creating a story that resonates helps us believe in ourselves. We need a good story to reassure us that our plans make sense — that, in [making our next step], we are not discarding everything we have worked so hard to accomplish. A story gives us motivation to help us endure frustration, suffering and hard work,” says Ibarra.

For example, when someone bugs you about how can I trust you to stay at this company when you’ve changed your mind before, you can come at that person with a story. Don’t hide things because coherence is important. When you’re telling a story about yourself, coherence is the key to making the listener trust you. If you can make your story of change and self-discovery “seem coherent,” writes Ibrarra, “you will have gone far in convincing the listener that the change makes sense for you and is likely to bring success — and that you’re a stable, trustworthy person.”

Most importantly, coherence goes a long way in convincing yourself. “Think of the cartoon character who’s run off the edge of a cliff, legs still churning like crazy, he doesn’t realize he’s over the abyss until he looks down. Each of us in transition feels like that character. Coherence is the solid ground under our feet.”

The first way to envision yourself in a new phase of your life is to tell people about it. But there is another benefit to meeting new people: You can see yourself in a different light. Ibarra writes, ” Strangers can best help you see who you’re becoming, providing fresh ideas uncolored by your previous identity.”

The best reasons for wanting to change what you’re doing are grounded in character — they talk about who you are, what you are good at, what you like. Bad reasons are external, like getting fired. Giving external reasons for making change make you look like someone who is a fatalist. You need to show that you are taking charge of your life, not just reacting to what comes along.

More is good, though: The more detailed and more varied your reasons are, the more acceptable your next steps will seem to other people.

You feel comfortable telling it and the other person gives you positive feedback in the nonverbal cues department. When you are practicing, the best people to try it on are people who don’t know you. They don’t bring any preconceived notions of who you are to the conversation, so you can tell them whatever you want. In the conversation with a stranger you can try out being your new self, and you can tell if you ruin your clean slate with a terrible story.

Storytelling takes practice, but everyone who is making a big change in their life has everything a good story needs. You are the protagonist, and there is intrinsic conflict in that something changed in your world to make you want to change jobs. The journey of your story is your search for your next job.

If you’re feeling lost on this read John Gardner’s book, the Art of Fiction. Maybe you think it’s totally over the top to read 200 pages about story telling so that you can tell a one-minute story. But this is your life. And you are going to get through all the tough parts of your life by telling stories, intentionally or not. So why not take control of things and get good at talking to yourself about yourself?

/20 Comments

Overrated: Cleaning up your online identity / Underrated: Cleaning up your offline identity

, , , , , ,

The idea of having a perfect online identity is not realistic. Instead, maybe you should focus on making your offline identity one that you’re proud of.

First of all, no one is getting away with anything online. Today recruiters are expert and tireless Internet researchers when it comes to scoping out candidates. I just read a story about someone interviewing for a job who was asked about his wish list on Amazon. I would never have thought of that. (In fact, I can’t even figure out how to find other peoples’ wish lists on Amazon.) The list of ways to snoop feels infinite. And the list of ways to fix snoopable problems seems very limited.

If there’s someone in your life who is glued to their computer each night, posting career-killing commentary, maybe you should forward a link to this Wall St. Journal article by Vauhini Vara chronicling one man’s struggle to get his page removed on MySpace:

“He emailed MySpace, begging the site to take down his old page. Nothing happened. He sent at least eight more urgent messages to the site, including a note to MySpace co-founder Tom Anderson. Finally, he received a cryptic email telling him to write his user name — “craigisanidiot” — and password with a marker on a piece of paper, to take a photo of himself holding it up, and to email it to MySpace along with a note saying, ‘I wish to be removed from MySpace.” (Note to the concerned: It worked.)

A pseudonym will not save you. A majority of bloggers use pseudonyms, but people will find out who you are. The first weekly column I wrote was about my job while I was in my job. I used a pseudonym and presumed I was safe. I wrote about my CEO’s pharmaceutical cocktail and diagnosed him (correctly, I still think) as manic depressive. I described the scene of my boss sexually harassing me. I documented my expensive and useless business trip. It turned out, pretty much the whole company had been reading my column.

If you are going to be anonymous, take a tip from Waiter Rant, who never reveals his restaurant but never disses it either, or Your HR Guy, who writes funny human resources scenes, but publishes his policy of not getting fired for his blog.

But don’t go to the other extreme. If you get too careful, you’ll be like college student Matthew Zimmerman, and find yourself unable to write anything. (Don’t worry, he got over it.)

The BBC News tells us How to Blog and Not Get Fired, but it seems much harder to give advice on how to blog and still get hired. When it comes to recruiters, a blog is like a lighthouse: You don’t know how many people have been repelled because they never show up.

At some point, you just have to be yourself. Figure out your best self and be that — online and offline — and then no one will be surprised.

The people entering the workforce today did not grow up posting every little thing that happened to them. But in five years, those kids coming to work will have no way to cleanse the Internet of their posting transgressions from when they were fifteen years old.

There will have to be new standards for what is okay to have online. It will have to be okay to say, “Oh, yeah. I remember when I posted that. Stupid, huh?” Interviewers will have to judge people by what they are doing right now, or else they won’t be able to hire anyone.

So for now, take a look at that wish list you made. Does it make you look like a moron? Instead of getting rid of anti-social items and replacing them with crowd pleasers, ask yourself why you want to read books that reflect poorly on you. Ask yourself who you are.

Karen Salmansohn writes about the idea of congruence: “Be yourself wherever you are, whether at work, with your partner or with friends. When you compartmentalize yourself to be wildly different in different circumstances you can start to feel out of whack. Create a life that is congruent with the person you truly are.”

The impact of incongruence is big: You’ll have an online persona that conflicts with your work persona. You’ll have huge stress. When I was making fun of my co-workers in my column it was because I was a fish out of water in that office. When your impulse is to write mean things about the people you work with then you probably shouldn’t be there.

Research published in the Harvard Business Review (paid) shows that in order to be a great leader, you need to make your work consistent with your core self. When you can be authentic in your job and authentic when you blog that’s a step toward living congruently and you will be priming yourself for success.

/3 Comments

Career change: A (relatively) low stress approach

,

Since you know you are going to have multiple careers in your life, changing is not high stakes. Don’t make a huge deal about it and don’t spend five years searching your soul. Just start testing the waters — put a toe in the current to see how it feels. Then take a leap, and if you don’t like where you land, reframe your landing pad as just a stepping-stone. And start putting your foot in the water again.

But first, before you do any of this, make sure it’s time for you to change what you’re doing.

Here are some bad reasons to switch careers:

1. You hate your boss. (Switch jobs, not careers.)
2. You want more prestige. (Get a therapist — you’re having a confidence crisis, not a career crisis.)
3. You want to meet new people. (Try going to a bar, or Club Med. What you really want is to get a life. Pick up a hobby.)

Here are some good reasons to switch careers:

1. You want a role that is more creative, more analytic or more management-oriented.
2. You want to live in a location that does not accommodate your current career.
3. You want more flexibility or fewer hours.

Once you decide it’s time to try something new, you should act fast. Herminia Ibarra, a professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD, in France conducted scores of interviews with career changers that lead to her book, Working Identity: Uncovering Strategies for Reinventing Your Career. She concludes that career change is not so much about time spent philosophizing as time spent actually trying something new — anything.

Step 1. Conduct a perfunctory soul search. When you know you want to change, you need to understand what you don’t like about your current situation so that you don’t duplicate it. But don’t assume your current job is not right for your personality. And don’t assume that if you zero-in on your personality you’ll know exactly what you should be doing.

Daniel Gilbert psychology professor at Harvard University, says that in pursuing happiness, “we should have more trust in our own resilience and less confidence in our predictions about how we’ll feel.” Like Ibarra, Gilbert is a fan of jumping into the mix and just trying something.

In fact, Ibarra finds that finding our true soul mate in a job is not so important. There are many. “People have multiple selves. So changing careers means changing our selves, but this is not a process of swapping one identity for another. Rather, it’s a mater of reconfiguring the full set of possibilities. In any of us there’s a part that’s very pragmatic and there’s a part that’s very creative, and there are times in life when we give more time and space and energy on one side than the other. But if it’s in you, eventually it kind of bubbles up, and it wants some airtime.”

You can take personality tests till you’re blue in the face, but Ibarra thinks they have limits. In many cases, you can’t know what you love to do if you haven’t done it. And “all the research says that adults learn by doing.” So less analysis and more action will help you find the best change for you faster.

Step 2. Try it out. You’ll never know if you fit into the career environment until you try it. A baby step, like volunteering, or taking a part-time job will allow you to go back to your original career if need be.

The most effective way make a serious move in your life is to do it in a not-so-serious way. “Play with new professional roles on a limited but tangible scale, without compromising your current job,” says Ibarra. “Try freelance assignments or pro bono work. Moonlight. Use sabbaticals or extended vacation to explore new
directions.”

And by all means, do not enter a degree program for a career change until you are positive that you know what you’ll be doing with the degree. If you don’t know what you’ll be doing once you get the degree, then how do you know you need it?

Step 3: Take a leap. Getting your first job in a new career is hard, especially if you don’t want to work as the copy machine operator. So first try to make the change at the company you’re at, because they already know they like you; ask for a department switch.

If that doesn’t work, use your network, which you probably developed during step two. Headhunters and help wanted ads are geared toward people who have skills in a certain area. People who change jobs probably do not have a lot of skills in the new area, so networking is the best way to get someone to give you a chance.

Sometimes there is room to sell your skills, during a career change. And if you can, you should. For example if you’re a teacher and you want to go into technology, apply for jobs at software firms that sell to the education sector. You’ll be worth a lot more to an education company than a video game company even though both sell technology.

A career change is a chance to address a change of heart by building on proven skills. Done right, this is a chance to show another side of your successful self.

 

/9 Comments

Five ways to do better in a job interview

, , ,

Most people who want career coaching from me set up an appointment. My brothers send random emails that they tag as urgent. Here’s one my brother sent at midnight last night:

“Why don’t you ever write about how to interview someone? What do I do when someone goes on and on about himself and I don’t care. Should I cut him off? I only have thirty minutes to do the interview.”

Answer: The most important thing to find out when you interview someone is if you like the person. You can teach someone to be competent in the skills you need, but you can’t teach someone to have an appealing personality. No matter what the person talks about for thirty minutes — really, much fewer than thirty— you can figure out if you like them.

Which leads me to the first thing you can do to be better at interviewing:

1. Learn how to conduct an interview.
You need to understand what is driving the interviewer and how he or she is thinking. So know enough about the interview process to put yourself in your counterpart’s shoes. If the person is bad at interviewing, you can run the show. If the person is good, you have to figure out how to meet their agenda, make your points, and still be likeable.

2. Learn from other peoples’ mistakes.
The best way to see people making errors in interviews is to interview them yourself. But you can also read about other peoples’ interviewing incompetence. Jobaloo shows how candidates misread a seemingly innocuous question. And CareerBuilder lists some examples of extremely bad judgment.

3. Know your agenda.
What is the image you are trying to convey in the interview? Match that to the kind of job are you trying to land. You should have three points about yourself that you aim to get across in the interview. Before I became a full-time writer, mine were: great at executing a plan, a manager who everyone loves to work for, very reliable. I wanted those points to come across because I wanted to be hired to a position where I would have a lot of responsibility to execute a visionary plan and manage a large team.

4. Practice.
You can find tons of lists about how to interview well. Take a look at them and you’ll notice that they are all about practicing: Avoid too much information, cut the puffy stuff, know your strengths and weaknesses. These are all things you can practice. If you think you can wing it in an interview, you’re wrong. There are no questions that cannot benefit from preparation, so any question you look unprepared for makes you look clueless about the interview process at best and lazy at worst.

5. Be comfortable with silence.
People who can remain calm during silence look powerful and comfortable with themselves. People who have to fill silence end up saying stupid things. Part of your interview practicing should be to sit, saying nothing, so you are comfortable when that happens in an interview.

The interesting thing about preparing to ace an interview is that most aspects of preparation carry over into the rest of your life. When you know who you are, and how to convey that to other people, when you are comfortable with a pause, and you are good at reading another person’s agenda, you will function better in all aspects of your life.

/2 Comments

Consider telling the truth when you are fired

,

Amanda Congdon, co-founder of Rocketboom, got fired last week. Congdon performed a fake daily newscast, which was downloaded by 300,000 people each day. Her audience was bigger than Connie Chung’s.

Congdon announced the end of her participation in Rocketboom in her last video blog. Her partner, she says, proposed many stories to offer up in place of getting fired. But Congdon declined and said, “The Internet is all about being transparent.”

I don’t think it’s just the Internet, though. It’s the post-boomer generation. Authenticity is important in the new workplace — not just online. And it comes naturally to most young workers except when it comes to getting fired.

But really, getting fired is not that big a deal, and I think we can all take a cue from Congdon and stop being embarrassed about it.

In 1950, when you stayed at a company like you were married to it, getting fired was a big deal; it was like getting kicked out of the house by your spouse and having your clothes strewn across the front lawn.

But things are different now. People are averaging a new job every three or four years (one or two years if you’re under thirty-two) so getting fired is not such a big deal. You were probably going to leave anyway. And now you can take a long vacation.

Most people do not lose their jobs because they are incompetent. They lose their jobs because of some sort of personality clash. I have said a million times that you should try to get a long with everyone. But few people can do it all of the time.

So it seems to me that the new way to get fired is to let everyone know it. Congdon is not alone. Star Jones, for example, was careful to tell people she did not leave her spot at The View but was fired. Like Congdon, Jones says her boss wanted her to lie. And she thought it would be best for her career if she didn’t.

The most reliable way to get the kind of job you want next is to let people know what you want. And how can you be honest with people about what you’re looking for next if you are pretending to have quit a job you like? How can people help you if they don’t know what you want? This is why I like the idea of saying you got fired.

And, while I’m at it, what’s up with saying “taking time to be with my family”? That is absurd. First of all, only men say it. If women said it, which they don’t, people would think, “She’ll be out of the workforce for fifteen years.” When men say it, people think, “He got fired. He’s looking for a job.”

The most recent example of this is Jeff Jordan, who worked for eBay as president of PayPal, until he suddenly felt the urge to spend time with family this month. I am not buying that. And I'm not alone. Others are commenting on the credulity of the claim. And Jack Shafer disparages the phrase in his article: More time with the family – Right, and the check is in the mail.

So consider the bravery and forthrightness of Congdon and Jones. When you get fired, consider the idea that it is not a time to be embarrassed but a time to learn. One of the best indicators of how successful someone will be is how well they bounce back from crisis. So let people know the true you, and they will be more able to help you bounce back with more success the next time around.

/7 Comments

Get inside the head of a recruiter

, , , ,

Getting a call from a recruiter is like getting asked to the prom. It doesn’t matter if the offer is sub-par; it’s always flattering to be asked. But there’s a lot of advice about how to get a prom date and not very much on how to attract recruiters.

The best way to encourage recruiters to call you is to understand how they do their job. So I talked to a few recruiters and came up with five things you can do to look attractive to recruiters.

1. Post to sites with good search tools.
Recruiters like to visit sites that aggregate resumes and offer specific search criteria, says recruiter Matt Millunchick. Blogs are difficult to search but social networking sites like MySpace and LinkedIn facilitate keyword searches. Be sure to fill in profiles thoroughly on these sites so that your resume matches more searches.

2. Choose your friends carefully, and then monitor them.
Recruiters will put up with a little quirkiness in an online profile but don’t worry only about what you post yourself: “Be careful about what photos of you are available and what and your friends post about you,” warns Millunchick. Recruiters will find everything. Recruiter Mark Jaffe told me he has a full-time employee with a master’s degree who researches candidates. “The two of us work like the FBI looking at persons on interest.

3. Be a thought leader.
Recruiters use Google to find the articles you’ve published, says Millunchick. So write some. Many sites are eager to get well-written content for free. If you feel totally lost in the article-writing world, Article Marketing Niche Blog can show you how to do it.

4. Use the scientific method.
The importance of keywords on your resume cannot be overestimated. John Sullivan, recruiting advisor and professor of management at San Francisco State University, told me that he advises his students to post three different resumes in an online database and see which receives the most responses. This is a way to continually hone the keyword effectiveness of your resume.

5. Do great work at the job you have.
The higher up you get, the less likely it is that a recruiter will troll the Internet. Jaffe told me he relies on word of mouth to find senior executives. “We follow candidates like my sixteen-year-old son follows all the details of baseball players. We look at minor leaguers, we look at who’s coming up, and we track people who we see as nascent superstars.”

He adds, “If you’re doing a really, really good job at work, we’ll find you. Once you try to get our attention you are turning that dangerous corner where you start looking like a used car salesman in gold chains.”

/9 Comments

6 tips for job hunting online

, , , , ,

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.

/14 Comments

Job hoppers have the best vacations

, , ,

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.

/5 Comments