Emmy Winner's Advice: How to Be an Expert

Recently, I had the good fortune to meet Rob Blatt of Blattcave Productions. Rob is an audio engineer extraordinaire. He shares three Emmys, an Academy Award, and a Peabody Award with former colleagues. I asked Rob to share advice for job seekers who want to establish themselves as an expert. Given his background, it's not surprising that his first piece of advice is:

1. Start a Podcast that Shows Your Interest and Expertise

Talk about topics you know and have a passion for discussing about it. "When you share your knowledge and passion, your voice will give away your enthusiasm. That's an audience draw."

2. Don't Just Talk About It, Write About It

"Any proper podcast needs to be associated with a blog," Rob explains. "Between episodes of your podcast, you should share content related to your show...and advertise your podcast on your blog."

3. Don't Just Talk About Your Ideas: Share

Rob is a big believer in promoting other people; he says being magnanimous has side benefits.

Sharing ideas of others allows you to show that you are comfortable with your area of expertise.

It shows that you are an expert and know how to cultivate knowledge sharing and that you are not afraid to show that other people have knowledge as well. You need to build trust with your audience.

A special shout-out to Rob for sharing his expertise with us. If you'd like to learn how to sound better or are interested in learning more about Rob's work, visit his website.

Why "Fit" Should Come Before "Foot"

You may recently have noticed a new slogan for this blog "Put your best fit forward." It's the essence of my philosophy in four short words.

As I see it, any job search is a dance between the job seeker and the potential employer, and in the end, there are two decisions to be made.

From the employer's perspective, comes the first decision: Are your skills and experiences aligned with organizational needs, and will you fit into the culture?

Decision the second: Is the position right for you? Does the work involved align with your goals and interests? Does the workplace culture feel like a fit to you?

All too often, job seekers place far more emphasis on the employer's decision than their own. Certainly, employers frequently appear to have more power in terms of the first decision--after all, they are the ones who evaluate all the candidates and extend an offer...

But the choice of where you want to work is also very much on the table in any job offer. The economics of supply and demand and your own fiscal reality may make your workplace preference seem like less of a choice, but whether or not you want to accept an offer is virtually always your choice to make.

A bad fit can have many unintended consequences, ranging from simple incompatibility of work style to major philosophical differences and a lack of enjoyment for how you spend much of your waking hours?

Heather Huhman, a careers expert at the Examiner, is running a great series on how to evaluate employers for how well they fit your needs. Here's a link to the first installment. Read on, and share your stories of occasions when you put your "best fit" forward and when you didn't...

Propel Your Career in '09 with the Best of '08

As we welcome 2009, here are five must-reads of 2008 that will help you stay ahead of the curve:

1. It's tough to make a resolution that sticks if you're putting up with something that's always in the way. In I Hated My Lawnmower, author Jason Alba provides a lesson in the satisfaction that can come from fixing a simple but nagging problem.
   
2. If you're not on LinkedIn yet, you should be. Statistics on successful job searches routinely show that at least 60% of job offers come from networking, and LinkedIn is the granddaddy of social networking apps (some call it "Facebook" for grown-ups). Here are tips on how to write your LinkedIn profile for your future from social media whiz Chris Brogan.
   
3. If you're applying for a front office position--or seeking positions in a very competitive field-- you'll want to differentiate yourself. I recommend subscribing to Dan Schawbel's personal branding blog. (Note: If you decide your job search strategy should include starting a blog of your own, see his tips on how to do this.)
   
4. Do They Care About Your Personal Brand? As important as it is to differentiate yourself and stand out amongst other candidates in the actual job search, employers search and hires based on their own needs. This piece by Louise Fletcher, founder of Career Hub and Owner of Blue Sky Resumes, is a great reminder of the need for balance between branding and positioning yourself to meet employer requirements and mission critical demands.
   
5. 10 Ways You Stop Yourself from Getting the Right Job. In a tough economy, it's easy to shy away from the job market or feel overwhelmed. Don't. London-based Sital Ruparelia's tips will help you keep a stiff upper lip and keep your career moving forward!

To Your Success,
Chandlee

On Looking Focused: And the 30 Second Pitch

Yesterday, I had lunch with a recruiter for one of the only five investment banks in New York hosting MBA information sessions this fall. The circles under her eyes and weary gaze were troubling to me: Despite the relative good health of her company, she is clearly directly experiencing the fallout from the turmoil at Lehman Brothers, Merrill, and the rest of the "Street." Among her current challenges: an increased traffic in candidates from competing firms, many of whom are not exactly sure what they are looking for yet in terms of a new career opportunity.

My friend and I agree that one of the biggest challenges for job seekers and current employees is looking focused in a time of turmoil. It is natural to want to explore your career options but you need to look focused when you speak to potential employers.

If you need to develop your own soundbite for exploration with potential opportunities (and interview preparation), I recommend 15secondpitch.com. This site provides a free "Pitch Wizard" that coaches you to develop a focused pitch targeted on the needs of your audience. At the conclusion of the pitch, your pitch will be placed on a template of a business card--if it doesn't fit, you know you need to condense and refine your message. If it does fit, you can even purchase the cards--and add your picture to increase your chances of "total recall."

Kudos to 15SecondPitch.com. for an innovative product that makes preparation work easier...

Buying Time for Free: 3 Strategies to Optimize Your Effectiveness

Professional organizers often cite the omnipresent statistic that the "average American" will spend the equivalent of one year of life in search of lost items.

As I write this, I think of a childhood visit to my grandmother, also known as "GB". She greeted us at her door, notably flustered, "I can't find my glasses anywhere." I ended her search as tactfully as I could: "that's because they are on your head!"

My grandmother was full of irreverence; she sent me out to the backyard to play and said, "Now, go find our relatives--the pink bottomed hairy baboons." When I told her I couldn't find them, she told me that perhaps they'd all gone to the zoo--and to say hello the next time I visited.

It was years before I connected the dots at school and realized that she was passing along two life lessons: 1. her belief in evolution, and 2. her enduring philosophy that we all descended from primates and shouldn't think too much of ourselves...


I digress, but my intentions are good: The purpose of this posting is to share three online resources that can increase efficiency and allow you to spend more time enjoying life outside your job search...


1. JibberJobber (http://www.jibberjobber.com/)

A CRM for your job search, this site enables you to store contact information--and positions of interests--and provides you with career management tips and resources to boot. The origins of the site have become Internet legend: it was designed by Jason Alba, an out-of-work software programmer who has since gone on to write bestselling books on using Facebook and LinkedIn.

2. Del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/)

A social bookmarking system that allows you to save your bookmarks by "tags" so that you can find them easily, and access them easily on your site. Once you've created account, you can click on the del.icio.us icon on many websites and easily mark new items that you've read.

3. Google News Alerts (http://news.google.com/)

Google News Alerts are one of my favorite tools of all times, you plug in keywords for search terminology, allow Google to do a "news scan" for your keywords on your behalf, and tell Google how frequently to alert you of the findings.

Given that employers, friends and casual acquaintances frequently "Google" each other, I recommend that you monitor your online presence by setting a "Google Alert" on your name. While it may seem a little funny to "stalk yourself," by monitoring your web presence you can help maintain the integrity of your online profile: i.e. the only time I want to be able to find "Chandlee Bryan" and "hairy baboon" on the internet is through this particular post!

The 30-Second Relevance Test

A common rule of thumb for the job search: expect your prospective employer to spend 30 seconds or less reviewing your resume and cover letter!

Here are three 30-second self-reviews that can help develop strategic communications for the application review stage:

Resume:

Print out your resume, fold it in half, then open it back up. Think of the position you seek, and ask yourself the following question:

• Am I providing a short summary of my most relevant skills and experience above the fold?
  If not, consider a reorganization as this will be equivalent to what your prospective employer sees on-screen.
  
  

Cover Letter

Review your material from the employer's perspective. Imagine that the employer, has seven jobs to fill, and has just implemented a new advertising campaign to post positions. (This is a common scenario.)

• Does your letter include information on where you found the company?



• Do you state which position(s) you are interested in and how your experience fits the position requirements?



• Is it easy to tell why you are interested in the company?



• Does your letter make it easy to see your knowledge of the work that the company does?
  

Online Image

"Googling" candidates, evaluating LinkedIn and Facebook profiles, and reviewing website hits are easy ways for employers to conduct candidate research. Does your online presence communicate what employers should know about you?

(Also, is there any information on the web that might hinder your job search?)

One quick tip: Set a Google News Alert to send you an e-mail alert of any web mentions for your name--this helps you monitor your online reputation automatically.

When It's Best to Tweet

Several weeks ago, I wrote a piece on "when not to tweet" using the social networking site, Twitter.

Today, I am pleased to share a link on how Twitter can be useful to you with respect to your career. This article was written by my friend Deb Dib (aka "The CEO Coach"):

http://tinyurl.com/4bhjdk

I've pulled five nuggets of wisdom from Deb's tips for exploring the "Twitterverse":

#1: Provide useful information at about a 4 to 1 ratio--share a link or timely fact at least every 4th post.

#4: Use TinyURL or Snurl to shorten long links and keep more of your 140 characters free for your words.

#5: Be giving, not "salesy"--keep posts conversational and be a human; don't hound your followers.

#7: Consider having separate business and personal Twitter accounts if you want to keep your personal life personal.

#12: Follow experts of interest to you and comment on their tweets where appropriate even if they are high-profile leaders you don't know personally.

I highly recommend reading the full article, and would love to hear your thoughts!

To Twitter or Not To Twitter? (Or When It's Best Not to Tweet)

There's been a great deal of discussion recently about the impact of Twitter, the social networking tool in which users answer a perennial question "What are you doing right now?" in 140 characters or less.

1. In March, audience tweeting at the South by Southwest Festival led to a collective uprising against a moderator interviewing Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

2. In April, an arrested student twittered his way out of an Egyptian jail.

3. And today, an Australian postulated that Twitter would hasten the end of the "bad boss" as employees could share their experiences quickly, thus potentially ending their supervisor's tyranny: http://tinyurl.com/5rl66n

I think it's great that Twitter allowed the student to "get out of jail free," but it's never a good idea to bad mouth one's colleagues. In my opinion, given social networking tools and the ease of forwarding messages, e-mail and Twitter messages are as private as postcards. Use with care and the assumption that your thoughts are public knowledge.

I'd love to hear your experiences in "tweeting." Drop me a line.

Musings on the Elevator Story

Conversations on interviewing and personal branding frequently mention the need to develop an "elevator story," or self marketing pitch. 

Recently I read an entirely different kind of elevator story--a tale of stagnation. In the April 21 edition of the New Yorker, Nick Paumgarten discusses the "lives of elevators." He begins with the story of Nicholas White, a former Business Week production manager who worked in Manhattan. In 1999, White took a Friday night smoke break, and spent 41 hours stuck in an elevator on the way back to his desk. His friends and lawyer convinced him that he should sue for damages and he came to believe that "returning to work might signal a degree of mental fitness detrimental to litigation." The settlement was less than he had hoped, he lost a job he'd held for 15 years, and--according to the New Yorker, is currently unemployed. The article concludes "looking back on his experience now, with a peculiarly melancholic kind of bewilderment, he recognizes that he walked into an elevator one night, with his life in one kind of shape, and emerged from it with his life in another. Still, he now sees that it wasn't so much the elevator that changed him as his reaction to it."

To me, the story of White's career post-elevator serves as a reminder: there are aspects of our work lives that we can control, and that which we cannot.  Resilience is a must-have in handling unanticipated "delays" or stalemates in your career. One good source for strategies: Fighting Back: How Great Leaders Overcame Career Disaster (Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Andrew Weld, Harvard Business Review, 2007) . The book profiles the rise, fall, and resurgence (or not) of well-known C-level executives. Among the recommended strategies presented for career recovery: "Ignore the advice of friends to lick your wounds," identify what you've done well in the past, build on this and move forward...The authors advise, "No matter how dire the circumstances seem, triumphant comeback is possible as long as you haven't killed anyone."

On Questions Versus Answers (& SLEEP)

Some Mondays aren't so hard. Today was one such Monday: I scored free tickets to see James Carville, Anderson Cooper, Tucker Carlson and Arianna Huffington talk live at Radio City Music Hall.

The focus of the discussion was on the Presidential Election and on predictions for the Pennsylvania primary. That being said, two general comments are worth mentioning.

1. One of the pundits (and I believe it was James Carville), said, "There are no bad questions, only bad answers."

The point being, you can complain all you want if you get asked a bad question--but it's up to you to spin it, and how you spin it says a great deal about who you are and demonstrates your ability to articulate for yourself.

2. Arianna Huffington talked about the effects that sleep deprivation has on candidates, and the human body in general. I've read that too little sleep for consecutive nights can have the same effect as being drunk (or worse) in terms of one's reaction abilities. This is particularly true among drivers who haven't slept in two days.

I can remember feeling this tired myself and hope to never have to repeat the experience.

Two points to think about with respect to the job search. I'd try to draw more parallels but I'm weary of providing you with a bad answer due to sleep deprivation...

The Job Search Equivalent of Feng-Shui

Last year, I took a class in "Value Stream Mapping," which is a technique used to analyze the flow of information and materials required to bring a product or service to a consumer. Initially developed by Toyota, Value Stream Mapping is a "lean" manufacturing technique which is now used in manufacturing and other sectors, including product development. Think of it as the Feng Shui for the business world.

My favorite Value Stream Mapping term is Poka-yoke (pronounced "POH-kah YOH-keh"). This is a Japanese term that means "fail-safing" or "mistake-proofing." The idea is that you can avoid inadvertent errors if you set limits on how an operation can be performed in order to force the correct outcome. In cars, examples of poka-yoke engineering include features that make it difficult for us to lock our keys in the car with the ignition running.

I'd love to say I could Poka-yoke your job search completely. But I can't. That being said, I'm a big advocate of research and of the concept of "test driving" your ideas for future career opportunities. The more you know, the more you can reduce the likelihood that you'll make the wrong move.

Here are a few resources that will allow you to explore your interests without commitment:

If you're only seeking a temporary escape you can try a brief stint as a rock star, an elephant trainer, or a Roman gladiator. Travel and Leisure Magazine has a feature on the "World's Quirkiest Adult Camps":
http://www.travelandleisure.com/articles/the-worlds-quirkiest-adult-camps

VocationVacations:
http://www.vocationvacations.com/

VocationVacations offers clients the opportunity to spend between one and three days test-driving a dream career (opportunities range from alpaca rancher and comedy club owner to chocolatier and cheesemonger).

Naturally, these trips come with a cost.

Cheaper alternatives include the more mundane jaunt to your local Barnes and Noble or public library. I also highly recommend the "Library Vacation" as recommended by "Ask the Headhunter" Nick Corcodilos: http://www.asktheheadhunter.com/halibrary.htm

Alternatively, if you're not afraid to ask--consider requesting a private "job shadowing" experience with someone who works in a field of interest to you--or live vicariously.

Sean Aiken, a recent college grad from Vancouver, has spent a year trying out new careers each week and he's sharing his observations with the world: http://www.oneweekjob.com/

Happy hunting,
Chandlee

On the Similarities between Applying for Jobs and Dating

The process of picking a new job or a career often resembles speed dating. A closer look at these stages.

Priming for the Hunt:
You spend several hours marketing yourself for the opportunity; you gather knowledge about the requirements and interests of your intended target. This typically includes dropping hints to your contacts to let you know of your interests in a transition while trying not to be too obvious to some (i.e. "nosy" people or--in the professional world--your current employer).

Putting Yourself in the Game:
Based on your research, you present yourself with your best foot forward: In the job application process, this generally takes place through a resume and a cover letter). In the dating process, it depends on how you intend to meet your interests...i.e. in person, through an introduction--or increasingly--online.

Making Your Presence Known: Knowing that competition can be fierce, you look for ways to follow-up without being too obvious.

Primping for the Interview: If offered a meeting time and place, you prepare accordingly. You do your homework on who you'll be meeting, prepare your list of questions to ask (based on your requirement) and dress accordingly.

The Interview or Date: Your eyes meet, you shake hands, and you make a quick assessment in two minutes or less (as per the research of most experts in both business and personal relationships). You spend the rest of your time together gathering information to either support or discount your initial impression.

Many questions are asked of you, and at the end--you have a chance to ask a few of your own and to assess your own opinion.

Here's where the comparison ends: with dating, most individuals approach the initial meeting as equals (i.e. the stakes are the same). With the job search, the stakes are much higher: i.e. the employer is deciding whether to financially support you on the basis of your work, and you are deciding whether you want to spend the majority of your working hours from this day forward spending time with this new group of people. The timeline for making decisions can be relatively short: just a few interviews before a full-time offer is extended.

The process of interviewing for positions and making career decisions is, in my opinion, the dating equivalent of going out twice--and deciding to move in together with a lease. It is about making a personal commitment. It is about making a financial commitment. And yet, unfortunately, it's commonly not a process that feels at the time like a decision among equals. Why not? Because as job seekers, we often feel like the employer has more of the cards than we do--if we don't have multiple interviews, we may feel like we have less options. And so, all too frequently, we approach our interviews with all the anxiety of adolescents or as if we are trying out for . We spend a great deal of time primping and not enough time asking ourselves all the right questions. It's as if we are trying out for A Chorus Line: we think to ourselves "I hope I get it, I hope I get it" and we pray quietly "I really need this job. Please God, I need this job. I've got to get this job." And when it doesn't go right, we turn to self doubt "God, I really blew it!
I really blew it! How could I do a thing like that?"

And yet, if we step outside of our situation: we should realize that the process of looking for jobs is one of mutual selection. My goal in my work is to help clients prepare for the process, so that they can gather information and present their own credentials in the best light possible--while also having enough room to honestly access whether a given position is right for them (irrespective of whether the position is offered or not).

I welcome your own observations and feedback.

Best,
Chandlee