People

“Managing Your Career as a Business” sounds like something I’ve heard of before.  :)

Check out the article at New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/15/business/smallbusiness/15edge.html

It makes great points and adds credence to our exact same thoughts: “You are your own company.”

When times get tight with your employer, you are expendable.  You have to be prepared for the worst.  Think of yourself, your family, and your career first.  Manage all of that as if it was your company.  Because it is.  You and your wife/husband/partner make up your board of directors.  Your share holders are your children and sometimes your relatives.  If the worst has happened, be prepared to do whatever it takes.

One of my close friends works in the mortgage industry.  (He is a good person, despite that )  His coworker, Fred we’ll call him, was a very smart guy with a family and made very decent money.  In the summer of 2008, Fred saw what was going to happen to his company.  He immediately started looking for a new job.  But no one was hiring anyone with his experience.  If he was laid off, his savings wouldn’t last long.  What did Fred do?  He took a job at car wash.  I kid you not.  He started washing cars!  Fred was laughed at by all of his old coworkers.  Months later, when they were all laid off, without any jobs, Fred was still paying the bills.  And my buddy was jealous that Fred was humble enough to find work at a car wash.  Even those jobs weren’t available anymore.  This is a true story.  Luckily for my buddy, he is still young and doesn’t have a family.

Back to the NYTimes article, my favorite quote:

Then this year, Ms. Chen said, things changed. “Many companies noticed that after all the layoffs and uncertainty, skilled people were available at lower salary demands than in former years. And now business is very active.” The lesson of the economy’s ups and downs, she said, is that workers cannot let hard times or lower pay discourage them. “It’s a change in the market, not a depreciation of who you are as a person.”

That last line is super important to dwell on.  If you have been on a, thus-far, unsuccessful job hunt, you are no doubt discouraged.  Keep your head up and keep pushing along.

CareerBuilder just released the details on an interesting survey they gave.

Out of 2,600 hiring managers surveyed, 45% research your application on social networks.  Another 11% said they plan on starting soon.  What is also interesting is that that 45% was 22% last year.  The trend is growing fast!

All told, that means you have a greater than 1 in 2 chance of being facebook’d, twitter’d, myspace’d, friendster’d, etc on your next job search.

For us, this makes complete sense.  Your social presence helps define you.  Whether or not you use a tool that helps you define your professional social presence, you need to divide up your social activities into personal and professional “buckets.”  Make sure your personal bucket is protected from random searches.  For example, set your Facebook privacy/visibility to “Only Friends.”  That way, employers can’t see your personal life unless they request friends status.

Myself?  I keep my personal life on Facebook with “Only Friends” access.  Then I talk about my work and the industry on my blogs and twitter account.

Check out the CareerBuilder survey here.

Does this feel like your day?

Breakdown of Time at Work

An article over at Personal Branding Blog talks about predicting the end of the resume.  This is a topic near and dear to our hearts.

Dan Schawbel brings up some interesting thoughts on why resumes are not nearly as useful when compared to newer ways to promote yourself.  He then asks, when will resumes become obsolete?

“A resume, just like a press release, is what people have been used to receiving, viewing and analyzing for years, yet now, with the advent of social technologies, they’ve become less and less relevant to our global society.”

Well, our prediction is that the original concept of a resume will never die.  Like we talk about in Your Personal Brand, a resume is necessary.

Look at the fundamental parameter of a resume: historically, they were one page in length.  Slowly over the past three decades, they increased to two pages.  Sometime in the mid 90s, people started to push past that two page restriction.  I know, I have received hundreds of resumes in this decade that are more than five, if not 10 pages in length.  (Thanks, :/ monster.com)

Why is that?  It’s because resumes don’t give a complete picture of who you are.  People find that the only tool they have is a resume so they cram as much as they can into it.  Too much information renders it useless.  For my candidate searches, it ends up just being a gigantic business card with the number to call to schedule interviews.

Resumes are like the basic questionnaire for that dating site that kinda, sorta works.  They are like the specifications on the side of the computer box or the ingredients list on a box of cereal.  It tells the reader, precisely and concisely, is this person in the same realm as our job position?  Just as an ingredients list doesn’t tell you how that cereal tastes, a resume doesn’t give you a feel for the true candidate behind the black, serif font. But it is completely necessary to have.

You simply can’t make a traditional resume more than it is. This is precisely why the concept of a resume is morphing into something more dynamic

Dan, nails it with:

“The fact that resumes need to be supported by an interview, a cover letter, references and other documents tells you that hiring managers use them primarily to sort through qualified and unqualified candidates only.  They aren’t decision making documents, which is a big opportunity for the next generation resume to fix that.”

I would only say that they aren’t “HIRING DECISION” documents.  But they are making an initial decision based on a resume.  What people need is a way for them to get further through the hiring process, further in the door, before that first interview.

As in all things in life, make sure when you open your mouth, something worthwhile exits it.

A certain Vice President of Ketchum Interactive did not heed that advice.  And he did so using a service we all have come to love and cherish for it’s “reach.”  That’s Twitter, of course.

It just so happens this Vice President, one James Andrews, was flying in to the world headquarters of one of his Agency’s largest clients, FedEx, for a department wide (150+ people) presentation.  The place is Memphis, Tennessee.  Apparently, Mr. Andrews found the chosen home of this $36 billion dollar a year company, not quite up to his standards.

Maybe he should have been more compassionate towards the people and geography of his client, maybe he should have kept his mouth shut.

He wasn’t and he didn’t.

This is what he said on Twitter:

True confession but I’m in one of those towns where I scratch my head and say “I would die f I had to live here! [sic]

Keep in mind the timing on this.  He just got off the plane.  He was on his way to *give* a presentation at his client’s world headquarters.

You can already see how this plays out.  Guess who was following him on Twitter?

Peter Shankman’s blog has the full email response from a, rightfully, miffed FedEx employee.  The response was copied to a whole bunch of people way more important than Mr. Andrews, including, FedEx Coporate Vice President, Vice President, Directors and all management of FedEx’s communication department, not to mention, key people at the agency… directly before his presentation to those very same people.

Mr. Andrews,

If I interpret your post correctly, these are your comments about Memphis a few hours after arriving in the global headquarters city of one of your key and lucrative clients, and the home of arguably one of the most important entrepreneurs in the history of business, FedEx founder Fred Smith.

Many of my peers and I feel this is inappropriate. We do not know the total millions of dollars FedEx Corporation pays Ketchum annually for the valuable and important work your company does for us around the globe. We are confident however, it is enough to expect a greater level of respect and awareness from someone in your position as a vice president at a major global player in your industry. A hazard of social networking is people will read what you write.

Click here for the must-read, full post.  The last paragraph is my favorite.

Lessoned learned, life moves on.

UPDATE (9/22):  You can find James Andrews’ response here:

http://www.thekeyinfluencer.com/channel/2009/01/16/twittersituation

Interesting quote from an article on ars technica about how Windows 7 is going to be much more successful then Windows Vista:

And if the beta is anything to go by, Windows 7 is going to fly. This is, by far, the best beta operating system the software giant has ever released.

So what they are saying here is that because Windows 7 is stable, finished, and more thought through, it will be very successful.

You mean that actually coming to market with a good product will do what a $300 million Seinfield ad campaign couldn’t? What a novel concept…

This is a great article in Wired on Microsoft’s Chief of Software Architecture, Ray Ozzie.  What I find very interesting is how he had to stop asking for permission and just started doing the things he needed to get done.  …Things like commandeer power for an entire computing grid from other buildings!

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/16-12/ff_ozzie

What’s the old adage?  ”Better to ask for forgiveness than for permission.”

I couldn’t agree more.