Increase Social Media Visibility to Get a Job

Some researchers claim that 95% of people engage in soft job search techniques at least once a year. "Soft search" means updating your resume, browsing LinkedIn or Glassdoor, as opposed to "hard search", which involves active contacting of recruiters and going to interviews. In either case, you would want to be visible of the labor market, unless you deal in things that criminal or tax authorities would be keen to investigate.

For the last couple of years we grew accustomed to three accounts that were organizing the communication streams of our lives:

• Facebook - to make sure that our friends tag us in most unseemly postures and situations;
• LinkedIn - to maintain contacts in the work space, and
• Twitter - to link the two together and KISS (Keeping It Short and Simple).

Recently the humanity has acquired Google+ as well, but so far I do not see a lot of activity there, but definitely there is lots of potential there, given that the search capabilities are much greater than those of the competitors.

A lot of my friends have accounts in all of those social networks but rarely use them. This is most unfortunate, because search algorithms love recent activity, links and powerful search phrases. Hence, the least you can do to stay afloat and visible in the job market is to follow these simple recommendations on various social engines:

Facebook	5 Facebook Tips to Increase Your Visibility
Twitter	General tips: 6 Ways to Increase Your Visibility on Twitter Twitter Hash Tags: Using Twitter Hash Tags to Boost Your Visibility and Credibility Twitter Lists: 11 Ways to Use Twitter Lists to Increase Brand Visibility
LinkedIn	5 Simple Steps for Improving Your LinkedIn Visibility
Google+	Google+ People Search. Improve Your Visibility.

And here are a couple of articles specifically about job hunting through social media:

• How To Use Social Media in Your Job Search

• Top 10 Social Sites for Finding a Job

Good luck!

How to Trick the Applicant Tracking System?

Getting through the online assessment tools may be the only hurdle you'll face on the way to the job of your dreams. Unfortunately, the ruthless and unyielding to pleas or flattery ATSs (Applicant Tracking Systems), keep their watch at all times to make sure that only those who KNOW how to play the game get through.

The Ladders have unveiled the ultimate checklist of proper resume submission to gain personal attention of the recruiters.

Read it here: Resume Checklist

More posts on resume writing:

• Resume stuff
• Unique tips to help Executive Recruiters find your resume

Interview Places: Always Ready

Recently I have run a small bit of research on interview situations some people have found themselves in. The results came in as expected - varied - still some of them are hard to believe. Take a look for yourself:

Having a job interview over coffee seems to be a regular practice. What is the MOST UNUSUAL place that you've even had a job interview in?

• hotel room
• petroleum depot
• trattoria
• in a park because the fire alarm went off in middle of my interview at the hotel
• in the Presidential Suite in the GrandWest Hotel in Cape Town
• aeroport
• at a theatre

 Without being too philosophical about the topic, the moral is,I hope, clear: you need to be prepared all the time for whatever outcome and never miss an opportunity to have an interview right then and right there. Hence:

• make sure you always have a copy of your CV with you, either in hard copy or on your smart phone/iPad/laptop;
• have an ample supply of business cards (consider placing a QR code linked to your uploaded CV on it);
• unless it is absolutely impossible, do not try to postpone the interview (later... in your office... etc...). Demonstrate your flexibility and ability to deal with unpredictable situations!

Thank you all those who have replied to my survey on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Career Fair - still more about the fair than the career

Today was the last day of my exams (Term 2) and the first day of the Career Fair at IE Business School. The preparation for this exceptional event started a while ago and our Career Services were working extra hard to schedule the events, invite the companies, sort of prepare the students to face the enemy and create the buzz with all other resources possible. Well, the tent is up, the recruiters are there, there are some students roaming around, asking questions and lavishly distributing their CVs, but will it be any use?

How successful are career fairs for candidates anyway? For the companies? Who benefits at the end of the day? The trust is that, when it comes to business schools, the companies presented there are all known to the students through the numerous cases we have brushed through. Today, talked to a Dell representative I had a feeling that I had more background knowledge on the Dell operations management practices that she did. So, the candidates know what companies there are, which industries they represent and what opportunities there are to be offered... generally.

Second point: the recruiters are there only to paint the broad picture and present no more information than is available on the company website. Have you ever witnessed a situation during a career fair, when a recruiter told you, "We have the job just for you!"? True, there are opportunities, which are not obvious and the company representatives can point you in the right direction, but snatching a job offer just like that is improbable.

Next, if you are a star candidate, you are already known to most companies through the headhunting network. Best business school students are known and are on the market. Thus, unless you want to get loaded on company leaflets, pens, calendars and other usual paraphernalia, think why do you need to be there?

Finally, if you have decided to attend --- SHINE! Wear your best smile, make sure your make-up isn't flaking, print your CV in color and on quality resume paper and employ all the charm you have. It's 80% presentation, 10% talent and 10% luck. You must get noticed.

Creative Resumes

A couple of nice companies are coming to the campus a week from now, and I was thinking of making something special for a couple of them, like - preparing a creative resume. After all, I need to stand out from the crowd of job-eager throat-cutting crowd of mighty MBA candidates. The question is how far do I want to stand out.

I started searching for creative resume templates, and stumbled across this web page: http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/05/30-artistic-and-creative-resumes/. Some of those are truly awesome and would definitely catch my eye if I were hiring. 

Has anyone had experience with people sending you out-of-the-way resumes? How did you go about it?

More Electronic Resources for Landing the Best Job

After a second session with Mr. Daniel Porot on job search and career management, it has become clear that:

• best resume is no resume and CV is a curse word
• postpone salary negotiation until the recruiter is ready to pull out the torture instruments
• you are not selling, they are buying

I don't know if I am fully convinced by these approaches, but definitely they would work, perhaps, in the majority of the situations. Not if you are dealing with a professional recruiter though. That's why Porot is an ardent advocate of targeting the hidden market and approaching anyone but HR.

Some of the tools that I find particularly interesting (or at least unorthodox) in the process of job search. I do not promulgate their use - simply alerting you to their existence...

Free Mind. A mind mapper, and at the same time an easy-to-operate hierarchical editor with strong emphasis on folding. These two are not really two different things, just two different descriptions of a single application. Often used for knowledge and content mgmt. Downloadable from many sites, for instance, this one. Alternative software: NovaMind, xMind. These easy-to-use tools will help you understand better your strong points and make connections between your past work experiences, which might result in unique combinations, making you a unique professional in a particular area.

WORDLE. Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends. Why is it useful? Simply take a couple of job ads of positions/industries you are interested in and put them into Wordle. You will get a list of key words, which should be incorporated into your CV, making it stronger and more attractive to your prospective employers. 

WebMii. An interesting toy to discover your popularity index. Use WebMii to find out how frequently you are mentioned in the world wide web. "Sergey Gorbatov" returned a pitiful 2.9 score, and I am sure you are going to do much better. WebMii will help you see if there is anything on the Internet that you are unhappy about - references, pictures, links, etc., which might raise an eyebrow or two of a recruiter who will be doing background checks on your candidacy.

123People. The idea is largely similar to WebMii, but the outcome you are getting provides more information. Log onto 123People.com and find out (sometimes surprising) facts about yourself: blog, documents, videos, pictures, links, new, IMs, microblogs and others. Be particularly careful about this one, as it captures bits and pieces of your IM conversations.

Suicide Machine. The essence of this web service is best described in an article from Time magazine:

Need to disappear from Facebook or Twitter? Now you can scrub yourself from the Internet with Web 2.0 Suicide Machine, a nifty service that purges your online presence from these all-consuming social networks. Since its Dec. 19 launch, Suicide Machine has assisted more than 1,000 virtual deaths, severing more than 80,500 friendships on Facebook and removing some 276,000 tweets from Twitter.

 Happy experimenting!

Of age and cheese

Career session today. Main takeaway: do not provide any information about yourself that is revealing and can impede your chances to get closer to the coveted position. In practical terms:

• No references to your age
• No mentioning of nationality, race or religion. Instead of wiring "Sergey Gorbatov" write "S. Gorbatov" (well, in my case is sort of obvious but if you have an Arabic name or don't want to disclose your gender, think of creative ways to disguise it)
• provide info only when asked for!!! --- make them interested.

From this perspective, job search is like screening potential marriage partners, you flirt a lot. Unfortunately, the reverse it true. If you played your cards wrongly, the consequences are ghastly to contemplate...

How I got to DHL Inhouse Consulting

I am not sure if my career is going to be dominated by yellow and red (remember my previous company was Shell), I just keep my fingers crossed it is not going to be McDonalds in the future.

As you remember, last week I went to Bonn in Germany for an assessment center with DHL Inhouse Consulting. Some of you even sent me messages to find out what that was all about and how to apply, so I figured out I'd rather make the details of the trip public; hope someone finds it interesting and useful.

Everything started on Monday in Bonn with my crude misconstruction of German behavior. Take these three things into consideration: Germany, Monday morning and Germany. Everyone in the office was smiling and greeting me!!! How weird is that? I mean... on a Monday morning it is generally a very BAD idea to talk to me before I had my first cup of coffee. In Bonn people on the streets were greeting me - huh? Well, I allow a possibility that was because I was wearing an awesome Calvin Klein linen suit with a tie and a fresh haircut - still, I was not prepared for that.

What I WAS prepared for is that everything will be measured to the dot and it was. The process ran smoothly according to the schedule, not a minute wasted. I have always admired German punctuality (not when you live with one of them, though), but in general you can check your clock by the German schedule.

The presentations and interviews are done by consultants and project managers, which instantly signals the level of commitment the company places on the recruitment process. As Jack Welch said, recruitment is the single most important activity in any organization. I think Goldman Sachs is another company taking it seriously with up to 60 interviews when you join them.

I have never done a case interview in my life and I should tell you, it's not something you want to go through every day. I used to run assessment centers at Shell, but that was somewhat a different experience... not so stressful I believe. With a case interview you need to think of your feet and lay out your reasoning and calculations there and then. The key (as I see it) is to reveal your thinking and show the ability to look at the problem holistically. Nobody expects you to demonstrate Financial Management knowledge - if that is your biggest asset, probably you should be doing this interview at Merrill Lynch or Lehman Brothers... no... hold on... scrap the latter one... Obviously, you need to pepper your answer with the typical MBA lingo, such as "sustainable development", "win-win solution", "leverage" and the like, but you can only do this much BS - you are expected to give a concrete recommendation at the end of your verbal torrent of business school profanities. The case studies turned out to be relevant real life problems, examples of which can be found on the DHL Inhouse Consulting website. I struggled a little with "getting my hands dirty" and digging deeper into the numbers, but I am aware of my preference to go for the bigger picture. If you demonstrate the ability to think on the fly, you are fine.

The feedback and decision was instant, so walking away from their office three hours later I was given the offer and the details. HR gets involved only at the final stage when it comes to figures and contracts, and it is all polished and smooth, which sort of can be expected from a worldwide logistics leader.

One concern that I still can't get my head around is: if they stress the importance of teamwork so much, why were all the candidates given only individual assignments? Or maybe it's merely because it is only an assessment for an internship, and the "real" assessment will be more grueling, longer and earth-shattering?

Now I have four months before the start and the personal question is what I need to do to get the most of that internship experience and weigh up all the other options. There are electives, there are long- and short-term exchanges, Venture Lab, and surely I can try getting into another company. They say that options are good, they give you the sense of freedom. But when there are too many of them, they give you a headache.

Tolerance Theatre and my CV

The first time I saw a theater production of the Laramie Project, it was at Otterbein College in Ohio, USA, where I was studying International Relations during my undergraduate year. The intensity of the play did not let me go for a while, and when a couple of years later a group of alumni of that undergraduate exchange program were discussing an idea for a community project, I suggested that we translate and stage it in Russia. The project evolved into a much bigger thing. We adapted the script to fit the Russian reality, so that we could appeal to our audiences on a deeper level and the actors turned into trainers after the performance and conducted facilitated discussions with the audiences on the topics unearthed in the play. I won't go into details - if you are interested, I have uploaded a newspaper article about the Tolerance Theater project, take a look (GoogleDocs does not always open it from the first time, just click "Refresh" if it happens).

What I really wish to discuss here is what impact that project had (still has and potentially might have) on my career. To tell you the truth, I have quite forgotten about that year of presentations, trying to gain support, searching for a director, keeping the team motivated, rehearsals, performances, exhilaration of the first successes... It was back in 2004-2005, between now and then there are a couple of years filled with other achievements: hiring people, firing people, implementing policies, designing learning interventions, etc. Many of them were noticed and recognized by big people in my company (and outside, I guess... otherwise, how would you explain multiple job offers? :) I never mentioned the Tolerance Theater project on my resume, considering it distant and not really relevant to work environment. Up until now...

I was working on a case study in Organizational Behavior with my classmate Jessica and I asked her to review my resume and provide any suggestions for improvement. In our discussion that ensued it transpired that, probably, Tolerance Theater is the most distinguished result I have delivered so far and it should be featured prominently on that piece of paper most people will request from you when you are looking for a job.

This proves the value a team can bring into your life. You will never be able to deliver on something of that magnitude on your own, and at the end of the day it has the potential to set you aside from the rest of potential applicants, because it has a kick, it makes you special, it gives you that notorious USP all recruiters are after (USP - not to be confused with UPS - Unique Selling Point). I am so grateful to Jessica for making me realize what I should genuinely be proud of. If you want to be a success, you need to be the best, the first or different (the credit for this maxim goes to my English teacher at school, Mila Paulsen). So I am not the best and I am not the first, but one thing you cannot deny me - I am different.

Job Hunting or Job Begging?

Still being under the impression of the session delivered by Mr Porot this afternoon, I would like to share some general considerations on the topic of job searching, hunting, and sniffing. Basically, the dry remainder of an eight-hour session is that:

• you need to define (for yourself in the first place, because it might turn out to be terribly hard) what you really love. It means what makes you genuinely happy, why you wake up singing you favorite tunes and why you don't really need to smell coffee in the morning, because you are already jumping and kicking, impatient to get back to the colleagues, projects and admin issues. Hmmm... on the issue of coffee I stay to be corrected...
• think, what you are bloody good at. Now, this is now a tricky question - it is quite serious and dangerous, because many people confuse the two and are trying to make believe that what they would like to do is what they do best. The Tarzan interviewing technique (called so because you need to swing from "rope" to "rope" trying to find out what is the specific skill that differentiates you from the rest of the crowd of bloodthirsty job seekers) proved to be very efficient, however, only if you know how to use it right.
• marry the two concepts (like + can) together and the most difficult part of the job search process is done.

Let me quote something from my favorite book (one of the most philosophical and difficult for understanding and interpretation pieces - if you think I'm mad saying that, read it again!), Alice in Wonderland:

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?", Alice asks.

"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.

"I don't much care where –" said Alice.

"Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.

“– so long as I get somewhere," Alice added as an explanation.

"Oh, you're sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough."

Target (or focus) is another component of successful job search. If you are unsure of where you want this path of life to take you, most likely you will not get there, but will wander in the darkness, prone to labor market whips and euro fluctuations. Be specific, and your chances to land a dream job will shoot through the roof. Rules of flirting apply: an easy target is not that enticing.

I would question the statement that you should not send your CV (or resume) at all, but I am talking from my position of an HR professional here. I can understand the frustration of many, who send hundreds of e-mails to various HR people and never hear back. Challenge: is your approach right? After all, that is the right door to knock on (maybe not the most efficient in certain situations), but it is my accountability as a manager of human capital in a company to make sure that we get the best resources in. I even felt a little angry how HR was portrayed as a function and I wish to state that not all HR departments are useless paper shifters! More thoughts on the topic in my earlier posting: http://hrboutique.blogspot.com/2010/05/laundromat.html.

Leveraging networks is another key in securing a job and I would agree that those should be used for information mainly. Asking for too much favors will erode the value of a connection (unless you give sufficiently back) and also you might be putting the other person in a difficult situation, especially if you are using a personal relationship. Many of your friends have a limited view on you as a professional and often the view is skewed. If you are not doing well in the job they helped you to get, it will backfire at them as well.

Finally, what will make you a success in life:

• 50% - savoir etre: self-management skills - adjectives
• 35% - savoir faire: transferable skills/competencies - verbs
• 15% - savoir: knowledge - nouns 

This provides a fresh perspective on what one should be focusing on. Knowledge is not valued as much as it used to be even 10-20 years ago, and the emphasis is shifting towards emotional intelligence and the softer side of management, which immensely raises the profile of HR as a function responsible for building the organizational leadership capability and creating the learning culture.

CV - ¿more is less or less is more?

Now that the career day is drawing in, several classmates asked me to provide comments on their CVs. Having seen thousands of those in my professional life, I see that people are prone to make same mistakes over and over again: cramming as much information as possible into the limited space provided. Well, I am not entirely honest here. This is also market and culture dependent. In South Africa, for example, it is customary to have a cover sheet just indicating who the person is (or sometimes just saying "Curriculum Vitae") and then 5-10 pages filled with EVERYTHING that personal has been doing in their conscious life, nicely spaced and indented, but you just drown in the amount of information. In Europe and the US, if you are going over one page, that is most likely already too much, unless you have more than 6-8 years of professional experience.

Second point: if I am a professional recruiter, I deal with hundreds of resumes every day. If I am an HR in the Business, I might have much more important stuff to do than reading through pages and pages of other people´s accomplishments. Well, Dave Ulrich claims that talent attraction and selection is the most important HR activity possible, but let´s leave this debate for later. In any case, spending more than 30 seconds on a resume is a luxury I don´t have, so don´t make me angry and irritated either with numerous pages I have to go through or with blurred constellations of font 8 paragraphs, which numb my information intake instantaneously.

Third: as I have implied before, people who deals with many resumes professionally are highly irritable and prone to throwing paper products (or even more so, closing e-mail attachments) sooner than you can say "unemployment". So don´t risk your chances to get a phone interview (most you can hope for at the initial stage) by enraging them with spelling mistakes. Apart from you being unprofessional, it triggers something in their mind that sends a convulsive impulse to their wrist muscles - and there flies your inaply crafted written rendition of your academic and professional life into the trash.

There are numerous point (many of which are debatable!), but I believe the three mentioned about are a solid step forward. Among others are:

• Age (I strongly believe it should not appear on the resume, but there are counterarguments too)
• Marital status
• Resume layout
• Sequence of resume components
• Personal interests
• Special skills, languages and recognition, etc.

There are hundreds of books and reference materials available on the subject, most helpful probably is that one about the parachutes...

I am always happy to help those who need advice, so give me a shout, but bear in mind what I have mentioned, otherwise you are risking to get me into a fit, and that is highly undesirable.