Howard Stern has lost most of his audience. I’m not a big fan of his. I like public discussion of sex that is more interesting and productive than Howard offers. But I’m not above learning from him, and how can you not learn a lesson or two from a guy who has lost almost 11 million of his12 million listeners in just a few months?
Stern bet that his audience was so loyal that they would pay $13 a month to listen to him on satellite. Inside Radio reports today that most of Stern’s listeners are just plain too lazy to make the switch. (Though 13% don’t want to pay the extra fee.) The findings of this survey are consistent with the conventional wisdom that 80% of lost customers were not actually unhappy with what they were getting.
Each of us takes little gambles with our customer base all the time. Yesterday, for example, I told someone that I was changing our project specifications a little bit. I moved away from her vision and closer to my own. I made a bet that she likes working with me enough to put up with my change.
In this vein, an editor once told me, when I turned in a column late two weeks in a row, “People who write as well as you can be late. You just need to keep writing well.” That worked for a while, but then I really pushed his limits and he fired me. In this sense, I have empathy for Howard that he overestimated loyalty. Today I make more conservative estimates, and I bet Howard would do the same, if he could.
Once we all admit that we are all marketers, then we’re more humble about loyalty. Then we’re more careful to really get to know your clients and what matters to them — be they radio listeners, editors, consumer purchasers, or the guy in the cubicle next to you.
Howard Stern overestimated how dependent his listeners were on him, but perhaps he underestimated how beholden individual radio stations were to him. The trick, as a marketer, is to find out whose business is most dependent on you, and who you are most dependent on. Then you know where you have room to wiggle.
Here’s news in the category of good-looking people have better careers:
Now you can blame your co-worker for your tanking career and science will support you: A candy dish at work can make you fat. But a candy dish that is more than 6 1/2 feet away from you will be less tempting. Measure your co-worker’s dish. If it’s too close, move it every morning before she gets in. She’ll never notice.
Maybe there is actually some justice to the fact that thin people make more money than fat people: A study at Tufts University found that when rats ate foods higher in fat and sugar their minds were not as sharp as the minds of rats on a lean diet. (Reported by Self Dishes, which, if the editors are reading, should have more articles and fewer recipes)
Of course, there are some people who are never going to be in the good-looking category. And I am a big fan of self-knowledge, so I applaud anyone who can admit this. (Note of personal limitation: I could never admit this, and I would kill any worker who kept candy by my desk.) Here is some useful advice from Marty Nemko about how to improve your earning power even if you are ugly: Career Advice for the Unattractive.
Barry Bonds, the recently crowned home run king (and the less recently crowned king of steroids) was incredibly rude to the press for most of his career, and he is suffering for that now because the crowds are booing and the press is writing only parenthetically about his record-breaking performance.
You know the lesson here: You have to treat everyone you meet with respect because you don’t know who you are going to need later. The problem is that people use the lesson at work — they treat their boss and their underlings well. But they don't treat people they don’t work with well.
This is such a ubiquitous problem that half of American workers have been psychologically abused at their workplace, according the Handbook on Workplace Violence, a government publication. But the abuse is coming from people outside the workspace, such as clients, customers or, as in Barry’s case, third-party people you just have to deal with in order to get your work done.
Big-time journalist Patricia Sellers, in a lecture at Yale University, said, “The best thing, the smartest thing I’ve done is to be nice to assistants and secretaries. I believe you should be nice to everybody. As you rise, you will see the world gets so small.”
She describes, in fact, what happens to a guy like Bonds. When you are on top of the world, you stand on the part of the mountain that is very small. The number of people you really talk to at the top is small. It’s more intense than at the bottom, where there’s room for tons of people.
Extremely talented people can get to the top while being a jerk, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be celebrated. After all, the baseball writers are also the Hall of Fame voters.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.