Chris Brogan: Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust
Reading this now, good stuff as well.
Dan Schawbel: Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success
Dan is the Man when it comes to this topic.
Jason Alba: I'm on Facebook--Now What???: How to Get Personal, Business, and Professional Value from Facebook
A great guide to getting the most out of this social networking site.
Jason Alba: I'm on LinkedIn--Now What??? (Second Edition): A Guide to Getting the Most Out of LinkedIn
The quintessential guide to using LinkedIn to assist you in your job search.
Keith Ferrazzi with Tahl Raz: Never Eat Alone
An absoute must read.
Tony Alessandra: The Platinum Rule: Discover the Four Basic Business Personalities and How They Can Lead You to Success
Great for personal relationships too!
Weekends are getting too busy to do much heavy lifting with your career and search but keep some focus. Look over your short–term goals and your list of angels.
Make a promise to yourself that you will reach out two several people you have been working up the courage to reconnect with.
The Holidays give you a perfect reason; just explain that this year you’ve gotten a little sentimental after seeing White Christmas and you’re trying to rekindle old connections.
When you really stop and think about it, the first social media job search tool was the resume and the first real effective method of delivery was an envelope (with a stamp of course).
Yes, it’s that simple. A couple of pieces of paper and a stamp. It took some effort and thought and probably almost always was looked at. Then came the fax machine, hugely expensive pieces of equipment back then. Remember going to Kinko’s and paying a lot of money to fax your resume to “the first black hole" created on earth (yes, showing my age today)?
Now you can send hundreds if not thousands of resumes with a click of the button. It’s easy and cheap. What do you get for easy and cheap? Nothing.
All the new social media methods of contact: Facebook, LinkedIn, Monster, other job boards, meetups, networking groups, etc. usually have you “set up” your profile. I have a tip for you, all those profiles are resumes and you should treat them as such. Don’t believe me? Check out dictionary.com then.
That’s right boys and girls, who are we to argue with the Random House Dictionary. Just because people treat a couple of pieces of printed paper differently than your Facebook page doesn’t mean they aren’t looking at both and drawing their own conclusions.
So let’s look carefully at those resumes profiles through the eyes of an employer. I’ve been talking about getting your message aligned for 2 weeks now. How many of you can answer these questions and do your resumes profiles reflect the message?
Don’t feel bad if you can’t answer yes to all 3, most people can’t and keep in mind that things change. Your 3 words from 4 months ago might not be the best ones to use today. The important thing is to start thinking in these terms:
Create ~ Clarify ~ Communicate
Here is some help from a couple of my friends. Chris Brogan has a nice article titled
Have a great Thursday and remember the 3 C’s.
I figure we have 2 weeks left to get anything constructive done with our job search. Today is a day of action.
A few days ago, I wrote about being positive and mentioned 3 goal setting sites worth checking out here on Day 19. Today I came across another great article my friends over at WorkAwesome titled…
You can bet I’ll be looking over all of them but if you have a favorite, please share it with everyone.
Remember a couple of days ago when I complained about how the media liked to make the worst out of any news because it sells? Well, here is an article that you have to dig for because the news isn’t bad enough.
Imaging that, last month 2 million people quit compared to only 1.8 million that were laid off or terminated. It might just be me but if things were as bad as some news outlets would like us to believe, I don’t think 2 million people would be that dumb.
If I was an employer, I’d be a little nervous about these numbers since it really means that many employees are seeing light at the end of a long tunnel and are ready to head for greener pastures.
On the flip side, the companies that have been turning their nose up at workers that are unemployed might want to assess that view. If they don’t they will miss some of the talent that is coming on the market.
Slacking off….
Everyone does it but if you are working to advance your career or in a job search, you don’t have the luxury to slack off.
Yes, I know things get busy around now but you still have to have some discipline and stay the course. If up until the holidays you were working 6 hours a day on your search, maybe you cut it back to 3 but in those 3 hours, try to become more effective. more efficient and better focused.
The absolute worse thing you can do is become silent.
I often help job seekers set up a site where they can show a little more about themselves, display their resume and links to other networking sites. Often, they start to write and post on a blog.
Then they stop. So when a prospective employer goes to their site and sees that their last post was 1 or 2 weeks ago, the employer gets a picture of that person and it’s not a good picture.
I’m not even going to go into all the negative images which are conveyed but there are a more than the number of lights on the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree (30K) .
If you start making yourself visible, you need to keep making yourself visible. It takes 15 minutes a day to write a couple of paragraphs on a blog. When you are motivated, write 3, save them in drafts or publish them to a future date.
The last thing you ever want to do is give a prospective employer a reason not to consider you and lack of follow through is a big one.
In these times, it seems everyone likes to make a big, negative deal about everything. It’s how you sell magazines, papers and air time. We live for the moment and when that moment delivers any news that can be spun in a bad light, today’s media outlets seem to have a great day.
The unemployment results are out and the news wasn’t good, particularly if you look at it in a very small time frame, a month. The sky is falling again and if you are jobless, the media wants to push you further into the depths of depression.
I have followed Darren Rouse for a while on his blog, ProBlogger Blog Tips. Darren started a new blog, named FeelGooder and a few days ago wrote this
If you read nothing else today, read this and pass it along to your family and friends.
I particularly like the thought that the glass is always full, 1/2 full of water and 1/2 full of air, I’d add full of the two most important things to life.
It’s Sunday, take an hour today to plan out the week. Set some goals, make some changes and get out and meet new people.
If you need help setting and keeping goals, I recommend you visit 3 free, yes free places. Find the one or two or all three that work for you and start setting and achieving your goals.
I like lifetick because it uses the SMART process to help you set goals. I like Goalforit because it has an integrated to-do list.
Lastly, I like streak.ly because it is so simple but you have to get on the list first.
You’ve been working pretty hard, getting your message in alignment and collecting your angels so it’s time for some fun. If you’re creative, Polyvore has some career advancement uses but for today, we’re just going to make a Christmas list.
Actually, we’re not going to make a list, we’re going to look at one from my new friend Kris Senese, who blogs over at “Behold the Metatron”
Kris put her X-Mass list on Polyvore and you can too. Then you can send a really cool list to all your friends and family.
There are certainly other ways to use Polyvore and I’d love to see some of you more creative one’s use it to further your brand presence.
Today I lucked out and found Christopher Penn’s blog, “Awaken Your Superhero.” Maybe some of you know about it but I don’t think I‘d ever been there.
Christopher wrote back in February this,
The Reason Why Your Personal Brand Sucks!
It’s a long article but at the end he wrote something I found extremely profound…Christopher wrote…
“Once you figure out your essential quality, your personal brand will take care of itself. You won’t even need to name it or publicize it on your blog or Facebook page, because you’ll be so damn good at being yourself that your name will become your brand. Folks might not even be able to put into words why it is they like you or want to work with you. They’ll just know that they do, that they want to be around you, that they want to work with you, hire you, marry you, etc.”
Enough said, visit Christopher…
Have a great weekend…
Back to basics….
Although I am one to embrace everything new, sometimes looking back to the basics can open one’s eyes. It can become pretty easy to miss fundamental elements of a process, those elements that really rarely change, when everything around you is changing all the time.
I met with a client of mine yesterday and talked through her career: Where she was and where she would like to go. Afterwards, I realized that even though we were going to use a lot of new tools and technology, the basics were still the same.
In the old days, you often found your next career step by being recommended, being referred or being recognized. Your mentors usually had a lot to do with it. I don’t hear much about mentors these days but that’s another topic.
In the old days, if a company VP needed a Sales Manager, they picked up the phone, called their network and asked who everyone knew. If a company was downsizing the VP called their network to let them know a good Sales Manager was available. The talented Sales Manager was so good that their accounts raved about them to the competition and the Sales Manager got recognized and recruited.
Change your thinking….Instead of spending 70% of your time on Monster, spend 70% of your time looking for the network your boss should have but doesn’t. Seek out every person in the industry doing the job your boss does and make it your business to develop relationships with them.
That is the club you want to become a Junior Partner in!
Spend the other 70% of your time (yes I know that’s 140% but if you want to really get ahead, 100% doesn’t cut the mustard) becoming the person that other people rave about. It’s so much better when others promote you.
That is the professional image you want others to see!
Do those 2 things well, every day, over and over and watch what doors will open.
Yesterday I showed you how I use LinkedIn to locate and save potential networking partners. Now that we have this file of 30, 40 or more LI profiles and we have identified 4 or 5 that are “Hot Prospects” or HP’s, what are we going to do?
First, what is a HP? They can be a number of things but usually they are people that;
If you’ve read along for a while, you’ll know that I always talk about having a set of tools that I call arrows in the quiver. There are different types of bows and arrows depending on your objective. In warfare, some bows were designed to shoot a lot of arrows up into the sky from far away with the hope one hits something. It’s called a volley and it’s pretty much what you do when you send a bunch of resumes out over the internet, occasionally an arrow hits someone.
For our HP’s we want to use the cross-bow. They don’t really shoot arrows, they are called bolts but give me some creative liberty. The cross-bow is easy to use and deadly accurate. We want a tool that works the same way to target our HP’s.
Pick one HP, Google them, learn about them, look at their LI profile, see who they are connected with, what groups are they in, other companies they worked for. Study and learn, then reach out.
I advocate a direct and honest approach. When I reach out to an HP, I send a short note via email with a link or two that tells the person about me (don’t have an email address, explore Jigsaw.com).
I complement them, I tell them who I am, why I’m e-mailing them, what I hope to achieve and I ask for whatever assistance I’m hoping to get. Short, sweet and simple. Not everyone is going to respond but if you pick your HP’s carefully, you’ll be surprised at the number that will.
PS. I didn’t save my XMASS countdown for this post so I included a nice photo of FENDI in Manhattan to get you in the holiday spirit.
