Job-search clients often ask me whether they should mail or email their cover or followup letter. I tell them to default to email unless there is a compelling special case for sending a traditional letter. The reasons I recommend email:More
Most of my job-search clients get interviews by tapping into the hidden job market; they are both reaching out to their network and cold-emailing/calling people they don’t know. You, too will want to prioritize efforts that will allow you to bypass the glut of applicants going through the “front door” – job postings. This strategy is especially vital for my executive-level clients – since roughly 80% of these jobs are landed through networking or even cold outreach, including networking with retained search firms. So, focus your efforts on the hidden job market. The goal is to land lots of informational meetings with hiring decision-makers that could lead to interviews via referrals or your keeping in touch. Here are four ideas to get you started.More
LinkedIn, accessed for free at www.linkedin.com, enables users to keep in touch with and expand their professional network, get introductions to others outside their network, and join groups of professionals organized around industries, professions, and associations. Recruiters routinely use LinkedIn to scan profiles for viable candidates.
LinkedIn has become essential to conducting an effective, productive job search! I hear from clients almost every day about how they got an interview or informational meeting via LinkedIn. Below I’ve included a few success stories culled from my clients’ experiences, to help generate ideas on how you can use LinkedIn. Read More
I’ve created a podcast from the mini-talk that I gave on January 17th as part of my weekly Monday seminar series, “Ask A Career Coach“. You can access the podcast HERE. FYI, the Six Keys are: 1) The New Goal is Marketability, 2) Manage Up, Down and Across, 3) Develop a vision for your Career, then a Plan, 4) Build and Maintain a Network, 5) Know when it’s Time to Move-on, and 6) Demonstrate Leadership.
I recently received a couple of questions about the most appropriate resume format, and whether a friend’s comment is true that all experience older than 10 years should be left off the resume. Here is my response:
1) You need to put your resume in “reverse chronological order”, meaning most recent experience first, because that is what hiring mangers are used to seeing. Try something different and they will either a) not take the time to figure out your format (given the More
Here’s a technique that many clients have used successfully to land interviews. A prerequisite is that you have a list of target organizations ready that your network contacts may have heard of. The idea is that you don’t have time to email every single person individually in your hopefully very broad network of 200+. So to save you time, send an e-mail out to a large portion of your network – say 100 of the 200 people to whom you want to reach out.
The people who would receive this message are perhaps those you think are less likely to come through for you, or those who you don’t know well enough to put on the spot with an email request sent just to them. Often, family, friends, your dentist, acquaintances, or those outside of your profession or industry might fall into this category.
Details of the email:
This email works because 1) you don’t attach your resume – doing so screams “please hire me,” while your strategy with this email is to get meetings with the “right” people – those who can hire you or may know of hiring leaders – regardless of whether there’s an opening now, 2) you make it clear you won’t put your network’s contacts on the spot by asking for a job, 3) you include a powerful pitch that can substitute for a resume, and 4) you show appreciation, and even offer to help them
A client of mine took this approach when including her neighbor, who she didn’t know well but whose email address she happened to have, in a similar mass email. It turns out that this neighbor’s husband’s brother’s wife worked for the CFO of a large global media company where she was looking to land finance executive role. She ended up getting an interview with the CFO.
I have many similar stories. In fact, there’s a whole science around the power of “weak ties” (Google it) that says the people you least expect are the ones who often come through for you.
Indeed.com, an online job-search engine that aggregates job postings from across the web, released an analysis of employment trends by industry and geography. Their findings could be helpful to those of you who are looking to develop job targets– I recommend checking it out. My observations from their data:
Many (or most) of you are probably on LinkedIn to some extent (if you’re not you should be– www.linkedin.com). LinkedIn is an awesome tool for getting results in your job search. But are you really getting the value out of it that you could be? Use LinkedIn to advance your search in three ways: More
Performance Reviews, Part 1: What Managers Should Know
by Robert Hellmann • On-the-job Success, Org. Effectiveness
This post first appeared on the Five O’Clock Club’s website
Performance reviews are widely used in organizations, yet are implemented inconsistently and are often controversial: Do they work? What’s the best way to implement them? Don’t unfair grudges or favoritism, or other forms of bias, fatally compromise them? I’ll begin to share with you a few thoughts on each of these questions in this first of a two part blog post.More