A few months ago, I was interviewing this guy, Ben Casnocha.
The first thing you need to know about Ben is that he started a company when he was fourteen. And it’s still around today, four years later. Ben doesn’t run it, but my point is that it’s a real company.
But no, wait, that’s not my point. This next paragraph isn’t my point either, but I’m going to tell you anyway: Ben’s company, Comcate, helps governments do stuff online. Nothing particularly notable about that except that it’s exactly what my second startup did. So while my own governments-go-online startup was going bankrupt in the dot-com crash. Ben was in his sixth grade classroom making a success of that very business.
Ben does not know this. I nearly fell on the floor when I was on the phone with him, and it was all I could do to keep the interview going. But now, whenever you see me grandstanding about my three companies that I started, you can recall that I’m also the one who was outmaneuvered in my business by a kid in junior high school.
But anyway, I digress. Ben is a very humble and interesting guy, and he’s hard to not like. So during the interview, I asked him how he meets people to mentor him. This is what he said, “Mostly face to face. Not through the more traditional ways like blogging.”
TRADITIONAL? I had to pick myself up off the floor again.
But you know what? That was eight months ago. And I’ve been blogging for a while now, and Ben has a point. It is very, very easy to meet people through blogging. And it’s very efficient — you never have to leave your computer.
Some of you are thinking you have no idea where to start. So look, here are the easiest instructions for starting a blog. Some are you are thinking it’s too time intensive. But you can grow a useful network efficiently from a blog that you post to only once or twice a week.
I think the networking benefits should be enough reason for you to be posting twice a week. After all, if you can’t afford two hours a week for networking, your career is in trouble. But here are three more benefits to blogging — these are goals you should have for your career anyway, and they’re goals you can reach by blogging only a handful of times a month:
1. You will force yourself to specialize.
You can’t really write a blog about everything. Well, you can, but it will suck. So you’ll need to pick a topic and stick with it. And just the act of doing that is good for you because specializing is good for your career. After all, you can’t be known for something if you are not specializing in something. And once you are known for something you have a lot more leverage to get the kind of work you want to be doing.
People who want flexible work schedule often think that being a generalist will give them a lot of wiggle room. In fact, it’s the opposite. A generalist is easy to find, so no one needs to bother giving you a flexible work schedule to keep you. But if you specialize you are not so easily replaced, so you can ask for more flexibility at work.
2. You will let people know you have good ideas.
One of the biggest complaints people have about their work is that no one listens to their ideas. Everyone wants to be a creative thinker, but not everyone feels like that sort of work is open to them.
With a blog, though, you show people your creativity. Got a lot of ideas? Good, because there are a lot of days in the week for you to fill on that blog. And instead of you running around the office complaining to people about your stifled potential, you can show people your potential by broadcasting your ideas. The best way to get hired to spew ideas is to spew them and get people interested.
3. You will show passion and commitment.
There is a lot of evidence to show that, all things being mostly equal, we have a proclivity toward hiring people we want to have sex with. But we also have a proclivity toward hiring people we like. And after all the Ford Models are out of the interview cue, the most appealing people are those who have passion and commitment.
Of course, if you have read any how-to-interview advice, you know you should always say you have passion and commitment. But people who have it exude it. And if you are a blogger, and post at regular intervals, you don’t need to tell people about your passion and commitment – it’s right there on the page.
Hannah Schufreider may seem an unlikely person to be teaching you how to manage your career. She is a 12-year-old autistic girl living in Haverhill. Her days are spent being a little bored in school, reading Manga comics, watching Hannah Montana on TV, and going to fencing class on the weekends. Sounds like a typical adolescent’s schedule.
But in one of those odd convergences of circumstances, Hannah’s successful strategies for dealing with her disability could be adapted by adults having trouble in their professional lives — particularly those who can’t seem to connect with others at work.
Think this is a bit much to swallow? The link between the two is socials skills. Is there always one person at the office who acts rudely during meetings? Do you shy away from interacting with colleagues because you’re not good at office politics?
Maybe that colleague, or you, have trouble reading social cues. Here’s where Hannah can help. People with autism usually have poor social skills. She has a form of it called Asperger’s syndrome, whose sufferers often have well-above-average intelligence but troubles with social interaction.
On the playground, other moms might see these kids and say something like, ‘Oh, how cute! He’s a little Einstein.’ At school, teachers at school may comment, “He doesn’t listen to anything anyone says. I don’t know how he is doing so well in my class.”
Autistic people behave in ways that are out of sync with other people. “I make terrible jokes because I copy stuff that I see on TV. I think it’s funny but my parents tell me it’s not funny,” says Hannah.
Most people are born with the ability to read nonverbal cues. Hannah cannot, so when people don’t laugh at her jokes, she doesn’t understand it was because they weren’t funny. Someone has to tell her.
A workplace corollary is when a colleague who makes a coworker the butt of a joke is clueless that the coworker has a fragile personality. Another example: you’ve worked months on a big project, and after talking about it for an hour, a colleague says, “forget it, that will never work.”
In these situations, a manager should take that person aside and explain what was inappropriate, says Beth Howell, vice president of human resources for EBSCO Publishing, a provider of print and electronic journal subscriptions.
People who miss social cues naturally have no idea they are missing them.
“Often employees don’t agree with the assessment. So the person speaking with them tries to give specific scenarios,” she says.
For example, instead of saying, “I feel you were too aggressive in that meeting,” Howell would say, “In the meeting on Friday when you said ‘X,’ did you notice there was not a lot of conversation after that point? I think you might have been a little too strong.”
Teaching people to read social cues is very, very difficult. So instead of trying to understand how to say things differently in a meeting, it might be more appropriate for these people to limit the time they spend in large meetings. Instead, they should concentrate on having one-on-one conversations or using e-mail.
People who are bad at reading nonverbal cues tend to fare worse when there are more people around, because there usually is that much more nonverbal communication going on.
Back to Hannah. She is most successful socially being in a smaller group of kids than in her regular, larger classroom. It’s easier for her to connect with one person and block out everyone else.
Writing is another good solution because the nonverbal affect isn’t present. For most people, this makes communication more difficult, and we add emoticons to make up for lost nuance. To someone who does not have strong social skills, written communication has a flat, straightforward affect, making a grave misunderstanding between the communicants less likely.
Hannah’s connection to the written word is almost life-saving in its intensity. When she has trouble in a given situation, she reads, and when she grows up she wants to be a writer. So take a tip from her — if you are on the receiving end of the ‘you’re-offending-people’ feedback, try communicating via e-mail instead.
A lot of people who have poor social skills say things like, “I don’t do office politics” or “I just want to be left alone.” But it’s very hard to maneuver through the workplace with this attitude.
The point is that people judge your work skills as incompetent if you are not likeable — no matter what your work skills are. It may not be fair, but it’s what people do. So if you want to keep your job, you need to do enough politicking at work to make people like you. Instead of saying you do not like being around people, try creating scenarios where you find people more tolerable. For example, Hannah seeks out certain people and groups she knows she’ll be more successful connecting with — such as at fencing class.
For those not succeeding with colleagues at work, the key is to figure out what environment would help them become more successful, as Hannah has. For someone with poor social skills, so much of their ability to function is dependent on the environment — no matter how small or severe the problem.
But perhaps the most important thing we can learn from treating kids with autism is that they are most likely to succeed if we help them use their strengths to work on, or compensate for, their weaknesses. We each have strengths and weaknesses, and we can each use this approach to make the difficult task of self-improvement a more positive experience.
I have a new column debuting on Yahoo! Finance today. I’m very excited.
Yahoo contacted me in November, right after I moved to Madison. And right after I signed the contract, they were all about the head shot.
This makes sense. Yahoo wants everyone to look good. Totally reasonable. If nothing else, there’s the fact that good looking people are more successful at work than ugly people. (Thanks, Jordyn)
So anyway, I sent Yahoo the photo you see here, on the sidebar. And they were not impressed. In case you don’t know the seriousness that is Yahoo! Finance, you can look at the headshots of the other columnists and see that my photo would have looked really unprofessional.
Probably because it is: My aunt took it of me and my cousin, at a party, eight years ago. So it’s not just kind of old, I also had to chop the photo up to get rid of the party and my cousin.
But I really love the photo. Please notice my eyebrows. They’re perfect. This photo is from the time in my life when the only responsibilities I had in the world were to run my company, please my venture capital firm, and look hot enough to find someone to marry. My eyebrows were always meticulous.
Yahoo insisted on a new photo. I immediately went into panic mode, worrying that I wouldn’t get one I liked.
I do know a thing or two about head shots. I had one taken in New York City when I was writing a column for Business 2.0 magazine. Here’s what happened: I gave birth on a Friday and they demanded that I take a photo on the following Wednesday. I said, No. Forget it. I am too fat. I said, Run an illustration of me until I lose the weight. They still said no.
So I capitulated. The night before the photo session I was up nonstop with the baby, but at 8 a.m., I went, baby in tow, because I had just read about how reliable people are reliable all the time and I wanted to be one of those people.
I went without showering, I brought one, black, dirty shirt, and I had not slept well for weeks. I walked into the room and there were seven people there to take care of all the stuff I needed: hair, makeup, they brought clothes for me, they had a caterer; it was amazing. There was a person in charge of making wind blow my hair. And the photos were incredible. No one would ever know how crappy I looked.
So when Yahoo said I needed another photo, I knew I wanted another miracle-working photographer, but I knew there would be no one in Madison who specializes in wind for hair.
I became a lunatic. Thank god I had signed the contract already because I was literally calling my contact at Yahoo three or four times a day stressing about how to do a photograph in Madison. Or Chicago.
Tech columnist Eric Benderoff writes in the Chicago Tribune about how online photos are the new self-portrait and a form of digital self-expression, and how people judge you as soon as they see the photo.
All stuff that made me a wreck about scheduling the photo for my head shot. But at the end of that article there’s a quote from a photographer who says, “If you portray yourself with honesty, people will respond to that.”
That sounds true to me. And you know what? I had the pictures taken in Madison. There was no wind and no catering, and I brought my own clothes. But I really like the result: Check out the new, Madison me.
I write a lot about how effective job hunters hunt all the time, and how it’s important to integrate this project into our life with their other personal and professional projects. And I write a lot about how networking is the new job hunt.
So I got excited that there’s a new category of job hunting software that emphasizes relationships and project management. I decided to write a review of this software and suggest which one you should use.
But then I realized that reviewing software is a difficult and very detail-oriented job, and I am pretty bad with details. So I asked my friend, technology journalist Dylan Tweney, to review the three products that looked best to me: Isabont, JibberJobber, and Worksolver.
In case you think you’re about to read a software review, you’re not.
Here’s my summary of his summary: Ignore all this job hunt software. Instead stick with tools you already use for your life, or tools that could actually integrate your job hunt with the rest of your life, which is how things should be.
Dylan has a lot of ideas about this: “For instance, you could learn how to use Microsoft Project or Access to track your job-hunting process. Or you could become an Outlook whiz and learn how to customize this program through software add-ins, like the Getting Things Done add-in, that will make you more productive and organized. Or you could use new, Web 2.0 project management applications like Basecamp or Backpack to organize your job search project.”
I liked this advice because Dylan has a more holistic view of managing the projects of our life, and job hunting is just one of them. I immediately checked out the stuff he mentions.
But here’s the rub: Many of the same people who are not getting jobs have no idea how to use Dylan’s favorite software to manage any project, let alone job hunt.
This is what I have referred to as the second tier of job hunters, and what people on the second tier are missing is new-millennium job hunting philosophies that job hunt software can teach.
JibberJobber, for example, does a good job of helping you to understand how to make your network the backbone of a job hunt, and walking you through the steps. (Me summarizing Dylan again. And believe me, he was way more technical and elegant.) And Worksolver does a good job of helping you to find new ways to think through the inherently messy interconnectedness of job hunting in order to sustain strong relationships. Dylan says JibberJobber is for anal retentives and Worksolver is for creative types.
In what has, at this point, become a really haphazard reporting of Dylan’s review, I will now summarize Isabont: Better looking than JibberJobber but not as thorough. So if you look at JibberJobber and the interface looks too complicated, try Isabont.
But here’s the bottom line. (From me, not Dylan.) You need to make a serious, software-based decision about how to keep track of your jobs and your hunts and your contacts over a long period of time. Or you will drown in post-it-notes and orphaned documents on your desktop.
You can use your current email folder system, to-do list system, and contact management system to achieve this task. If you do not have systems for this stuff, or the idea of it scares you, get your feet wet with job hunting software.
If you are comfortable with using standard productivity and networking software, then make sure you are establishing an expandable system for managing your job hunts and contacts.
Merlin Mann, who blogs at 43 Folders, once told me that what sets people apart at work today is their ability to manage information. So even if you do nothing after reading this post, just learning a bit more about software options for organizing your information is a big step toward making yourself stand out in the work you do.
A lot of people ask me how to become a syndicated print columnist (because I am one), and while I was answering someone’s questions the other day, it occurred to me that this is information that all bloggers can use as a way to make money from their blog.
Like publishing AdSense links or using affiliate programs, print syndication will not make you rich, but it’s another way you can add a bit of money to your coffers. And, even if you don’t need the money, you can use print syndication as a publicity tool by getting your blog name and URL in the newspaper so you can attract new readers to your blog.
Here’s how to do that:
1. Edit your post for print.
A column is 600-700 words. This rule varies, but it’s a safe one to start with. There are no URLs, and unless you’re writing an op-ed column, your best bet is sticking to giving people advice they can use. The same stuff that does well in the blogsphere — How-to’s and lists — does well in print.
2. Understand how newspapers buy columns.
Newspapers usually either promote a staff reporter to a columnist position, or the paper picks up columns from the syndicates they already pay to subscribe to. If you do get picked up by a paper, it is a risk for the paper, and the first two or three times you will probably be a test column rather than a weekly column.
4. Don’t bother with print magazines.
Magazine columns are more than twice as difficult to get as a newspaper column. There are fewer opportunities and the pay is often more than double what newspapers pay. Because of these factors, most magazines will not let you syndicate what you write for them — they want to hold all publication rights for themselves. Which means you can’t use your blog.
3. Don’t charge a lot.
My syndicated column runs in a wide gamut of newspapers. The large papers pay nearly a dollar a word. The small papers, which are most of the papers in this country, pay less than five cents a word.
4 Self-syndicate.
You can buy a mailing list of newspaper editors in your field (e.g. sports, travel, etc.) Each week, send a column with the headline in the subject line of the email. Write at the top of the email that if they want to print the column they should email you for pricing. This is how many syndicated columnists get started.
Keep in mind that in this situation the subject line of the email matters a lot. Study the headlines at CareerJournal to get a sense of how to write good headlines for an emailed column.
This is slow going, but you can pretty much automate sending your column out every week, so when a paper does run your column, it’s easy money.
5. Get signed with a syndicate and they do the work for you.
This might be your holy grail for syndication. There are three big syndicates: King Features, Creators, Tribune Media. These companies are famous for handling people like Dave Barry and Ann Landers. These companies pick up very few new columnists each year. They only pick up columnists who are already running in ten or fifteen newspapers. And in a lot of instances, you would have to wait for someone to die in order for you to get picked up.
Smaller syndicates will pick up writers who are not already well established as print columnists. You can send a place like that five or six sample columns, and ask if they will pick you up on a weekly basis. Then send one blog post each week.
6. Think in terms of publicity instead.
For many of you, the money to be made in print syndication is not worth nearly as much as the increased exposure for your blog. Many people offer columns to newspapers for free because it’s a great exposure.
You can ask that in exchange for giving the column to the paper for free, you want mention of your blog in the byline spot where the paper normally mentions the writer’s book or company.
Print exposure is a great way to expand an audience for your blog. I have written earlier about how to get print exposure for a blog via interviews with print journalists. But rather than waiting for a journalist to call you, syndicating is a little more proactive. And when it comes to personal success, it feels better to take action rather than wait.
One of my favorite topics is the science of happiness, which academia calls positive psychology. I love this topic because most of us think of our careers in terms of happiness. That is, we look for work that makes us happy. Positive psychology turns this hunt into a science. And then tells us to look elsewhere for happiness.
I was talking to Richard Florida, about his current research, which blends positive psychology and economic development, and he summarized what I have read in many other places as well: “Your level of optimism and quality of relationships impact your level of happiness more than your job does.” What this means is that asking a job to solve our unhappiness problems is asking too much of a job.
I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to focus on optimism and relationships so that we don’t feel so much pressure choosing our jobs. To this end, I was excited to see three different introductions to the psychology of happiness in the last month.
The New York Times magazine ran a long summary of the positive psycholgoy movement, titled Happiness 101 (subscription). For those of you who don’t know much about this movement, the article is a good primer.
Martin Seligman, founder of the movement and professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, says, “Postive psychology is not only about maximizing personal happiness but also about embracing civic engagement and spiritual connectedness, hope and charity.”
This is not small stuff, but it’s the stuff that is scientifically proven to lead to a happy life. So when you think about what job to take, realize that this list of things that affect your sense of well-being is not overwhelmingly connected to the idea of doing what you love at work.
One of the most interesting parts of the article is where Daniel Gilbert, the man whose book on this topic was a bestseller, disses the movement as cultish, “I just wish it didn’t look so much like religion,” he says.
It does look like religion, because positive psychology promotes things religion promotes, like showing gratitude at the end of each day. But really, what this tells us is that the things that make us happy are much more basic than doing interesting work with interesting people.
Sonja Lyubomirsky says being happy comes from the way we think at our very core – and that thinking shapes the work we do. Not the other way around.
The Economist jumps on the positive psychology bandwagon in the article, “Economics Discovers Its Feelings.” This report contains some very practical advice. For example:
The traits of work that makes someone happy:
1. stretches a person without defeating him
2. provides clear goals
3. provides unambiguous feedback
4. provides a sense of control
But don’t panic if you can’t find a job like this, because when these traits do not exist in a job, people will often figure out how to add them back in and give the job meaning in their lives. For example, “hairdressers often see themselves as the confidants of clients they like, and they will fire clients they don’t…And there are janitors at a hospital who held patients’ hands, brightening their day as well as scrubbing their rooms.”
Before you smirk at this rationalizing behavior, realize that Gilbert says it actually does create genuine happiness in a job. Check out this video of Gilbert speaking at the TED Conference (thanks, Dennis). Gilbert’s a fun speaker, so it’s worth watching the whole twenty minutes.
Gilbert also says that even if things are not going well, humans have a deep ability to make ourselves think they’re going well. Which is why Gilbert told me that people should not ask other people if they like their jobs, because almost everyone says they do and it has no bearing on how good the job it is.
However he says that this rejiggered feeling of happiness is just as deep and good a feeling as the happiness when something really is going very well.
One of his pet topics is that what we think will make us happy rarely does. (When I spoke with him he told me this is the reason we should not sit at home and try to guess what career to pick, but instead we should just get off the chair and start trying stuff.)
Gilbert’s research shows that while we think being a paraplegic would be very bad and winning the lottery would be very good, three months after the event, neither really affects your happiness. And this goes back to happiness being a result of how we think at our very core — what Seligman calls our level of optimism. (If you are not buying this, watch the video.)
So you don’t have to make yourself crazy about finding the perfect job. All that stuff about how you need to find a job that you love is overstated. “Some people don’t seek fulfillment through their work and are still happy in life. All options are legitimate and possible,” says Amy Wrzesniewski professor at the Stern School of Business at New York University.
You need to find a job that meets those four basic standards for a decent job. But our brain is hard-wired to figure out how to enjoy it once you get there. So maybe you can lighten up about choosing your next job. There’s good research to show that a wide range of jobs can accommodate you in a way where you can find happiness. And there’s good research to show that finding “the perfect” job will not be the thing to make you happy.
The first time I had my own company, we ignored Martin Luther King Day. And it felt really bad, like I was not living my own values. Now I am careful each year to do something to mark the holiday. So today I’m posting a piece I wrote a few years ago, before I had a blog…
My husband and I didn’t argue about my son’s first name. We argued about the last name. At first, I didn’t have a strong opinion, so we gave my son my husband’s name, Rodriguez, even though I can’t roll the Rs, which drives my husband crazy.
But then I got cold feet. I worried that our son would face discrimination for his name. My husband said, “Don’t worry, I get it all the time. He’ll get used to it.”
I was surprised to hear that my husband experiences discrimination. Part of seeing someone as a minority is seeing him as other. So, because he’s my husband, I don’t think of him as a minority.
But here’s an example he gave me: He worked with a think tank that researched solutions to homelessness. Sometimes when he met with leaders of homeless shelters, the leaders mistook my husband for one of the homeless. This never happened to his counterpart, Jay Alexander .
But my husband kept telling me it doesn’t matter. He said that to me once a week for nine months until I believed him.
What did I know? I have never had a name that identifies me as a minority, so I don’t know what it’s like. My great-grandfather changed the family name so that it would not sound Jewish and his sons could get through the Ivy League quota system. (The change worked, they got in.) In the family tradition of changing one’s name for one’s politics, I changed my last name when I was in my early twenties because I didn’t want to be part of a patriarchal naming structure. (In this case, I’m not sure if the change did anything.)
My husband always says, “It’s no big deal.” But now I am sure that it is a big deal.
A study conducted at the University of Chicago and MIT shows that people who have names that are typically from minorities are much less likely to get a job. In this study, hundreds of fake resumes with very similar qualifications were sent in response to entry-level job advertisements. A resume from a name like Amy Alexander was fifty percent more likely to get an interview than a resume from a name like Latoya Washington.
This shouldn’t surprise me – of course people like to hire people who are like them. And minorities are not running the show in corporate America. In fact, I am guilty, also. Even though I know that diversity enhances workplace success, I also know that managing someone like myself is a lot easier than managing someone who’s not like me; it’s so much easier to lead people who are already thinking in the same way that I am.
So I can talk until I’m blue in the face about race and discrimination, but I have to admit that I have preconceptions about someone with the last name of Rodriguez and someone whose last name is Alexander. I don’t want to have preconceptions, but we can’t always control those things. So I thought of changing my son’s last name, but then I thought, that’s a cop out.
I want to believe that we can control how we approach resumes so that we mitigate our preconceptions by reading resumes without reading names. Each of us is more likely to interview more fairly if we do not read names. It’s a simple process that will teach each of us something about our prejudices and ourselves.
So give name-blind resumes a try. See what happens. And who knows? Maybe one day, that resume you might have skipped will be my son’s.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about how I was overhauling my time management strategy. And believe it or not, things are getting a little better.
I have integrated my email and my to do list, which saves a lot of time moving information around my computer. And I have consolidated my work calendar and personal calendar so that I don’t schedule any more interviews during date night with my husband.
But it takes time to switch how you do something. And a certain level of self-confidence, too.
This reminds me of when I played professional beach volleyball. I was always working on something new — like being able to make my jump serve hit the left line of the court. But there was a saying, “Don’t practice in a game.” Which means, “You miss a lot while practicing, so don’t do it when it counts.” In fact, when you do something you don’t really know how to do in a game situation, you do it worse than you would do it if you were in a practice situation.
This is all true for work, too. The culprit of my time management situation is how much time it takes to write a good post and run a blog in general. But as I learn to manage my time as a blogger, there is no non-game time because I post almost every day. So I find that I have the stress of trying to do a jump serve I can’t really do, in a well-attended game situation.
What I find myself doing a lot is second-guessing myself about what matters on my blogger to-do list. How often should I link when there’s a blogger I like? How often should I comment when there’s a post I like? Do I need to chill out?
The problem with second-guessing oneself — in blogging and in volleyball — is that it wastes time and destroys focus. When you have a clear plan, you don’t second guess as much.
This weekend I’m going to do what everyone should do when they start a new job: Get very clear on what is important so you know what to-dos you don’t need to do. Instead of worrying all the time about the blog, I’m going to make a list of my blog priorities, and create a new blog schedule.
And I’m going to get some more sleep.
My husband tells me that last night, in the middle of the night, he said to me, “Wake up, wake up. Don’t you hear the baby crying?”
And without waking from my sleep, I said, “Yeah, yeah, okay. I’ll link to his blog in the morning.”
A reader asked this question: Would you mind writing a post about dealing with multiple job offers and declining some of them — politely and gracefully?
This is actually a question about networking. When someone offers you a job, they have identified you as someone they want to be connected with. That you have multiple offers for this type of connection makes you even more desirable. So when you turn down the offer, your number-one concern should be making sure this person stays in your network.
This means that you should remember networking tips that would apply to any situation. And, before I get to them, I want to tell you that Tahl Raz’s article in Inc. magazine about Keith Ferrazzi is one of my all-time favorite things to read about networking, and it applies to you no matter what your situation is.
But here are four things to keep in mind for turning down an offer:
1. Be nice.
When you turn down a job, thank the person for the opportunity. Tell the person that something about them or their company impressed you. Think of something, even if it’s small. Just make sure you are specific, because that’s the type of compliments that matter most to people.
Then explain why the job you are taking is a great opportunity for you. Don’t explain why the other company is a thousand times better than the company you’re rejecting, even if it is. Talk in terms of the opportunity, and how it will allow you make a big difference to the business and grow personally. The aim is to show that what matters to you is learning and contributing to the organization because that’s what you want the person to remember about you.
2. Follow up.
Do something a week or so later to let the person know you plan to keep in touch. This will make the person feel more like you rejected the job offer and not him, personally.
There are a lot of ways to follow up. You can comment on their blog, if they have one. Send them information you find that you know they’ll like. Or you can invite the person to lunch if you want to spend time together. Or, if time together makes you cringe, take a smaller step and send a LinkedIn invitation. (Introduction to LinkedIn. Advanced LinkedIn.)
3. Suggest someone else.
If you are someone who is specialized, and it’s going to be hard for the employer to find someone like you, you can really endear yourself by referring a friend.
Even if the friend doesn’t ultimately take the job, Ian Ybarra points out that introducing someone to someone else is a gift (list item #6).
4. Assess your own conduct.
Of course, none of this will work if you have been being very difficult and demanding during the interview process and stringing someone along for months and are dropping the ball at the last possible minute. In this case, you might think about how your slow and perhaps-incompetent decision-making process is giving you a bad reputation.
It’s hard to turn down a job offer in this situation without looking like a jerk. So if you have already gotten yourself in a muddle, turning down the job offer will be tough. Face the muddle and help yourself to not do that again.
And if you are not in a muddle, congratulations on the multiple job offers!
It’s hard to look at the job you have and the job you’re looking for and figure out if the gap between them is due to bad job hunting skills or to something else. The best way to get the answer to this is to understand what a good job hunter looks like, and see if you look like that, too.
It used to be that there was a two-tiered job hunt — one for knowledge workers who had college degrees and spiffed-up resumes, and the other for auto assembly line workers and people without college degrees.
Today it’s still two-tiered, but the tiers are different. The percentage of people who have college degrees is increasing to the point where it is the equivalent to what a high school degree used to be. Also, blue collar jobs are decreasing and knowledge worker jobs are increasing, so it’s harder and harder to divide the workforce by blue collar and white collar.
So where does the workforce divide today? Networked, nonstop job hunters and solo, just-for-now job hunters.
A good job hunter is always hunting for the next big thing because you don’t know when, exactly, you will need it, or what, exactly will come. So job hunting is not an event, it’s a lifestyle. And a good job hunter will do these tactics:
1. Network all the time. With genuine interest.
2. Blog and comment on other peoples’ blogs.
3. Use social networking software like LinkedIn.
4. Constantly craft stories to decribe oneself.
5. Write resumes collaboratively – with a professional.
Ask yourself how many of these you really do. You don’t need to be doing them all, but if you are not doing at least a few of them enthusiastically, then you will probably fall into the bad job hunter category, and you’ll probably have a tough time getting a job.
You need to connect with people. In most cases sending your resume to blind ads just doesn’t work, so the list of good job hunting is all about knowing what you want and making genuine connections with people to help that happen.
It’s a great market for job hunters. The unemployment rate is low, and businesses in many sectors are stressed about employee shortages. So if you are having trouble finding a job, you really need to look at what you’re doing. Ask yourself if you fit into any of the thought patterns on this list of job hunt sabotage:
1. Do you really want to get another job or do you want to stay where you are?
2. Do you resent how quickly the world is changing? Are you aiming to resist?
3. Are you looking for a realistic job?
At some point, if you are not getting a job, you need to force yourself to do something new. It might be to try things out on the first list. It might be to ask yourself the questions on the second list.
But when you are stuck, you have to change something. Curt Rosengren has a nice post on The Occupational Adventure called Getting Unstuck. So start there, and use the list of good job hunt tactics as a starting point for setting your goals.