Leveraging Technology to Land Your Dream Job

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What’s the best kind of Advertising?

Word of mouth right? What I'm going to talk about today is how to accelerate word of mouth - how to see the rumour mill and speed up your progress toward landing that dream job. Some of these tips involve technology, some don’t, but my main objective in this presentation is to Hopefully, we can successfully marry word of mouth with technology in the hopes of producing an offspring that looks something like your Dream Job.

Times are tough. Everybody is walking around like it’s the end of the world and the media tell us every day not only how bad it is, but that it’s gettting worse. Hundreds of people wait in line for just a sniff at a few jobs. Not very good odds, huh?

How do you look for a job? How do you allocate your job search time? What percentage of your time do you spend on each of these four broad categories?

If you’re spending most of your time on the first one, that is NOT how you look for a job. At least it’s not the way some people look for a job...

How would you like to have a job like these guys have? If they were all fired tomorrow, how long would it take them to find work again? How would they do it?

Networking, right? But how can YOU break in, especially if you don’t look like these guys? If you’re looking for me to tell you how to get just any old job, one of the jobs you line up for, you can leave the room now. I’m more interested in helping you get to get a GOOD job, the kind that is virtually recession-proof, jobs like these guys have.

Well, we’re going to talk about that, but first I have a question...

What percentage of jobs are advertised? 20%

How much of your time do you spend looking for advertised work? Are you spending the majority of your time looking for 20% of the jobs? Does that make sense?

How do you break in to the other 80% If it really is about “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”, where does that leave you. Especially if you don’t know those bankers...

Before we start, I’m going to tell you what I think is a truly inspirational story, about a networking superstar

If you needed to illustrate the idea of nineteenth-century America as a land of opportunity, you could hardly improve on the life of Albert Michelson, the first-ever Nobel Prize winner from the United States. Born in 1852 on the German-Polish border to a family of poor Jewish merchants, he came to the United States with his family as an infant and grew up in a mining camp in California's gold rush country where his father ran a dry goods business. Too poor to pay for college, he travelled to Washington, DC, and took to loitering regularly by the front door of the White House , through the sleet and rain, so that he could fall in beside Ulysses S. Grant when the President emerged for his daily constitutional. (It was clearly a more innocent age.) In the course of these walks, Michelson so ingratiated himself with the President that Grant agreed to secure for him a free place at the US Naval Academy. It was there that Michelson learned his physics, and also got in touch with Alexander Graham Bell and convinced him to fund the development of the instrument, the interferometer, that would win him the Nobel prize for Physics.

(reprinted from “A Short History of Nearly Everything” by Bill Bryson, a great book on the history of science).

The same principles still work, with a little ingenuity and absolutely no money.

Like Albert Michelson, you need a plan. Where do you start?

The first thing you need to do is to map a path. The first important thing to know about the path is where it’s supposed to end up. I’m not talking about a career path necessarily, or even the path to that dream job. Without getting any more Zen than the picture already is, the destination should be a state of mind and a skill set rather than a particular place or position.

So, you now know the last step. What are the stepping stones in the path - what do they represent?

If you don’t know, think about Albert Michelson...

The stepping stones in the path are people.

They are your Ulysses Grant.

A young entrepreneur recently asked me about how to raise money. I think it’s a relevant question here because raising money is for a company what looking for a job is to a person. He had all kinds of great plans and models, but my advice was to start with those he knew well, and those who those he knew well knew. In the end, people would invest not in his idea but in him, in his passion in the idea.

So, find your five. If your 5 don’t have a job for you, get something else from them, like a recommendation or an introduction. They believe in you and they will do whatever they can to help you achieve your goals. Of course it can be a lot more than five. Or fewer. Maybe you only have two. It’s the quality, not the quantity.

I’m not talking about your five best friends, by the way. The point is that these are people at the intersection of your personal and professional lives who will champion your cause. This isn’t your uncle Fred, unless Uncle Fred happens to be in the same line of work you want to be in, in which case it is your Uncle Fred.

Ok, so you’ve got your five, now what do you do.

The first thing has nothing to do with technology.

Get as many meetings as you can, especially with your 5 and those to whom you are referred by your five, whether or not they are prospective employers.

You don’t need to have an excuse for a meeting. Just make up an excuse that’s good enough to get you meetings. In fact, let’s think of some excuses now...let’s say you really wanted to get a meeting with someone, what would be a good excuse for a meeting...

By the way, you know that trick of collecting as many business cards as you can at an event and then following up with all of them. Well, networking isn’t just about meeting people. It’s about finding common ground with them and then trading value. I’d always rather make one or two meaningful connections at such an event than 50 who I won’t be able to spend as much time with getting to know.

To that end, always find an excuse to follow up with a personal meeting, especially with someone you think can help you.

As a side benefit, meetings and public speaking will also hone your interview skills

Many people want to be able to offer some value when asking for a meeting. So what can you give that person you really want to meet in order for them to give you something in return?

Understand that the networking community is a marketplace

Cash is king, but it’s not the only form of payment. Here are three others...

Let’s start with services

Find out something you can do that will help others, and then figure out who could use those services. What, you mean do work and don’t get paid?

You will get paid, just not in cash. For example, offer to do a seminar or consulting on your area of expertise, even if you don't get paid for it, and then get a recommendation for that. That recommendation is like gold, especially when leveraged through a technology-enabled marketplace (more about that in a minute).

Remember one thing. Don’t talk about or even imply payback when you offer the service. In most cases, it will come to you. When it doesn’t, and if you really need it, figure out a way to use your network to have someone else ask for the quid pro quo.

Next tradeable community in the marketplace is knowledge.

Where do you get your news?

If I want to be an expert at something, I have a secret. Know what it is?

RSS is a way of monitoring updated content from the Internet platform and distributing it in bite-sized readable format. It's represented by this little orange icon. Anywhere you see it, which is pretty much everywhere, that content can be syndicated. This has many applications for companies and organizations, but it has implications in your job search too.

With effective use of RSS, you can become a recognized expert on just about anything really quickly.

What you’ll need for that is a knowledge management system, a routine that you follow. This could be as simple as setting up an RSS reader, finding some feeds relevant to your desired area of expertise, and commiting to a certain schedule. For example, spend 30 minutes every morning reviewing the headlines in your reader. When you see one that is instructional and has valuable information, bookmark it. That’s where most people leave off, but what you also need to do is to keep your bookmarks organized in folder that relate to your areas of expertise. Then, commit to sorting and reviewing your bookmarks once a week and, before long, you’ll have more current information in your area than 95% of the people out with you in the job market.

Once you have the services and knowledge to provide, the most important step is to leverage those into your network. Trade knowledge you have, because your knowledge has value. If being out of work has given you time, use that time to increase your knowledge, and then find ways to use and re-package the knowledge you have, and trade it in the “network marketplace” for something of value to you.

Which brings us to our third point - connections. We’ve already talked about your five. Just as there is a marketplace for services and information, there is a marketplace for connections. As the true stepping stones, it is the connections that can prove to be the most valuable tradeable commodities.

There is a marketplace online for all three of these things - services, information, and connections - where you can give and get tremendous value.

Where is that marketplace?

Who here is on LinkedIn? Who just set up a profile and not much else?

LinkedIn is the Facebook of the business world. Know how half the people in your circle of friends tells you you have to get on Facebook and the other half says “never”. LinkedIn is not like that. It is an absolute must for any professional to be on. You know all those questions you come to conferences and networking events with? There are groups on LinkedIn that exist to learn the same kinds of things you want to know, and teach those things too.

Here are some statistics from a Social Media Statistics survey:

* The majority (66%) of LinkedIn users are decision makers or have influence in the purchase decisions at their companies

* Users tend to be more senior (44% are management level, and 28% are director/VP level or above)

There are many ways to incorporate LinkedIn into your job search:

Include your LinkedIn profile on your resume and in your e-mail signature

Use Slideshare to make your resume compelling

Join groups and ask and answer questions

Get three recommendations, and recommend others

Update regularly (status, comments, etc.)

Enforce the quality of your network - Many people (including me) have a policy of not accepting LinkedIn invitations unless they have met you in person

How many of you think Facebook is a big waste of time?

If you are on Facebook, you know it as a great online way to replicate your offline personality, and therefore spend more \"almost-quality-time\" with people you care about. The trick with it is to limit that time to people you don't.

For example, type in “Workin It” on Facebook search and you’ll get a great Microsoft page that can get you directly linked to Microsoft recruiters, telling you how to get a job with Microsoft. That is just one of thousands of examples.

I’ve heard people say they don’t read blogs or use social networks because they don’t see any value in them. Albert Michelson would have definitely disagreed. The great thing about them is that they are an open community - you can by your thoughts alone become acquainted with exactly the kind of people who can help you with that dream job, or at least know someone who can.

But I don’t want my potential employers to see my Facebook profile, that’s too personal. Well, you don’t have to. They can’t see that unless you let them, and I don’t think I want to be working for anyone who wants to see my personal Facebook profile as part of the interview process...

Anybody know what a Facebook page is? You can set up a “business” personality separate from but connected to your individual personality, and use that to “build your brand”.

And it’s not just where people are sharing info, it’s where they are getting it too. Why should you care if this is where people are getting their information?

Because it’s where they are also getting their information about you.

So, let’s go back to leveraging those services and all that knowledge.

The Rumour Mill has you in it, whether you like it or not, especially if you’re out looking for work. You can let it run its own course, or you can get in there and help to direct it.

Everyone knows the difference in credibility between an editorial and an advertisement. When I’m hiring, a job interview to me is like an advertisement. I want the editorial.

So, drop little hints throughout various social networking tools that will build the editorial about you. Pick a central image and a strategy start dropping hints everywhere. Continuously refine your list of your five, who you want to know. You’ll find the people you meet as you go along will become more and more relevant to what you want as you get better at it and go further into networks. Identify people by their networks, and then become involved in those networks. Yet another reason why getting a referral from someone who likes you is better than getting nothing from that person.

Set up action items that remind you to write, call, contact, whatever - try using SocialFly on Facebook, a contact management system.

Make sure you link all your social networks together (ie. put your Linkedin profile on Facebook, put your LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook URLs in your e-mail signatures)

But some people are worried about sharing all that information, about privacy concerns...

Well, being active online is sometimes likened to living in a fishbowl. I like that analogy not only because you can see everything happening in a fishbowl but also because when you look at it in certain ways, things inside seem magnified. On the Internet, both your accomplishments and your failures are magnified. Both will take place whatever you do, but is there any way to manage this?

The naysayers are right about one thing - choose very carefully what you choose to show. It's always a great idea to take a very close look at privacy and application settings of any Internet service (especially Facebook!) before you do too much on that network. The good ones are very respectful of that, know how to store your information, and won't do anything with it without your permission. The sneakier ones are the ones you have to watch.

And once you’re in, there’s one very important thing to remember about any social network...

Because you’re in a fishbowl, you have to watch your own behaviour as well. You know how you always behave better when your parents are around? When you do things online, act like your mother is watching.

Use the draft function on e-mail, or put any comments in a potential comments document so that you can think about them before you post them.

Anybody know these guys? Don’t be a “network crasher”

Become a member of a group before you start posting to it so you can establish a reputation within the group. Once you have the group's ear, you'll have all the free advertising you want. Nobody likes a drop-in or a tourist who just wants to promote themselves. People don't mind you promoting yourself as long as you've established your credibility. Set a rule for yourself that you won’t “self-promote” until you’ve left at least three insightful comments.

People in social networks are much more interested in what you have to say about the world or about them than they are in what you have to say about yourself. Much better if someone else is talking about how wonderful you are...

You don’t need to tell people you’re looking for work, just become a person they want to know and let them find out “indirectly”, by seeding the rumour mill...

So let’s go back and take a look at this To-Do List. Good use of these “network as marketplace” concepts, whether offline or online, accomplishes three things at once. In other words, these things are worth spending time on, especially if you they put you into the 80% of the job market that is hidden.

Finally, how many of you have seen those \"work at home for $6000 a month\" ads? Are they scams? Well, for the most part they are, but not completely. If you're going to have time on your hands, you might as well use it.

When I do consulting for big organizations (the ones who ban access to Facebook at the office) that they should give their most valuable employees a mandatory work-at-home day to make them familiar with technology, provided they provide one idea per week as a result of that time online.

That applies here, too. You might find that you get so good at networking online, that you actually figure out some other things that you didn’t even expect, and don’t even need to work for someone else.

The bottom line? Don’t undervalue your own time. The more you strategize your own time, the more your time will be worth.

So, that’s my take on how big earners and industry leaders find meaningful employment. Identify the job you want, find the people you need to talk to get it, and get busy getting out and meeting those people. Chances are very good that within your five, there’s the first step in a path that leads to the job you want.

Who knows? It may even be someone in this room...

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Leveraging Technology to Land Your Dream Job - Presentation Transcript

Greg Nisbet Word of Mouth2 Using Technology to Get Closer to your Dream Job Toronto, April 7 & 8, 2009
Times are tough
How do you look for a job? Job Search To-Do List Get out and Apply for meet advertised people positions Professional Interview Development Preparation
How do they look for a job?
What percentage of jobs are advertised? About 20%
The American Dream • Albert Michelson • US Immigrant • First US Nobel Prize winner
Map a Path
The “My Five” Principle Thanks to... for the image
Get out there!
What to Trade When you Have no Money (Or...3 Great Excuses for a Meeting) • Services • Information • Contacts
I’ll Scratch Your Back... Now Please Scratch Mine
The Path to Expertise How To Become An Expert • Set up RSS Reader • Get Feeds • Create knowledge management system
Leveraging Your Assets
Where your employers meet online
LinkedIn Best Practices • Include your LinkedIn profile on your resume and in your e- mail signature • Use Slideshare to make your resume compelling • Join groups and ask and answer questions • Get three recommendations, and recommend others • Update regularly (status, comments, etc.) • Enforce the quality of your network
Where everyone meets
The Rumour Mill
Fishbowl Effect
Remember your Manners!
How do you look for a job? Job Search To-Do List Get out and Apply for √ meet advertised people positions Professional Interview √ √ Development Preparation
Time is Money
Who Are Your Five? ? ? ? ? ?
Where to Catch Up With Greg... www.orangelife.info gregn@mediazoic.com www.linkedin.com/in/gregnisbet