Are you shooting yourself in the foot?

About two weeks ago J.T. O'Donnell wrote this piece for LinkedIn about job seekers taking advice from the wrong person.  Ms. O'Donnell is the CEO of CAREEREALISM a career coaching site on the web. In this article she sites a study by the non-profit Career Advisory Board that found that 58% of job seekers are not seeking professional advice, instead they are looknig for work on their own. She then links to a story she wrote about her own experience when she did this as well.

Now as the CEO of CAREEREALISM she has a vested interest in all of us job seekers using professional services for help in our searches. If we all did her company would get some portion of that business, a.k.a. her bottom line would improve. But I don't want to sound too negative, the advice is still sound... just consider all the professionals out there.

1) The workforce development office in your community (or whatever the name may be)
2) The career services at any college you attended
3) Professionals companies like the one MS. O'Donnell founded.
4) Librarians

Now the first three will make sense to all of us, but the last may take a bit of explaining... I have worked with the career service units at several colleges I have worked at. In every case I have heard the anecdotal evidence that they receive from employers: '...the students are academically smart/qualified, but they don't know about my company/industry...'

I have paraphrased here, but the sentiment has been expressed to me and others I have worked with many times. This is actually one of the reasons I started this blog, to try and write about ways the average job seeker can improve their research skills to improve their knowledge about the companies/industries they want to work for/in. With this increased knowledge it is easier to tailor your resume and cover letter to the job. This then increases the chances of getting the interview. Once you have the interview you can conduct additional research to find more information that will strengthen your answers to the interview questions.

For all these reasons I believe that most librarians can be a valuable source for helping the job seeker understand how to conduct quality research. My posts about research tips are a great place to start, but actually seeing them in action and having someone to walk you through the use of the tools can be invaluable.

Almost everybody in should live near a public library, and as I pointed out here 49 of 50 states have programs to either purchase these tools for all their citizens or help the libraries purchase the tools. My biggest caveat is that depending on the public library they may not make the connections I have made in my career. If you go in asking for job related help you may get pointed to job ads, or local resources for finding jobs. But if you ask them to teach you how to effectively search their databases to find information you can then apply that skill for any need, career related or otherwise.

Good luck, and let me know how it turns out.

Does your career Zig or Zag?

This piece (Does your Career Zig or Zag?) by Caroline Dowd-Higgins discusses the trend of more frequent career and/or company changes. She dubs this trend as becoming a zig zagger. It describes a phenomena I have highlighted before of the changing employment landscape. That is that the days of hiring into a company young and working for that company for a 30+ year career are over.  Several of the tips Ms. Dowd-Higgins suggests fall in line with the mantra of this blog: you need to be prepared with knowledge of the company before interviewing to help present yourself and your skills in the best light.

Even though we are moving away from the era where several jobs in several years is a red-flag, companies will still be looking for the potential to benefit from hiring you. Therefore you need to know as much about them as possible to help present your skills. This is especially true if you are coming from another industry. It is then up to you to present the skills you have acquired as transferable to their industry/business.

Dealing with long term unemployment

The Employable is an online community that seeks to fill the void for job seekers. This piece offers advice for dealing with long term unemployment. For the most part the advice in this piece are not radical, and things I have linked to in the past provide similar advice. My primary motivation to highlight this piece was the community itself. I like the idea on an online community with such a positive focus on this particular problem.

Hopefully it will be helpful for anyone out there that was unaware of it, and in this situation.

Fighting the Unemployment Stigma

Here is a post over at CareeRealism that offers some interesting advice for fighting the unemployment stigma. Now as I have mentioned before I was recently unemployed for very close to two years. There were many things about my situation that are likely unusual for the typical worker who is in this situation. The three tips from this piece are as follows (read their full post to get a better sense of the reasoning...):

• Stop looking for a job
• Press 'Play' on life
• Get a 360 degree evaluation

I agree with all of these, the second two are very good, and read well as stand alone tips. The first makes total sense if you read their entire description. There is always a reason you have been unemployed that long. Sometimes it is something you can control (being selective in you applications looking/waiting for a perfect fit, etc.) and sometimes they are things you can't control (living in an area with a high concentration of people in your industry, making the candidate pools very competitive, etc.)

By stopping and re-examining your situation and what you have been looking for can help put things back into perspective. As a personal example I live in between two highly ranked programs that produce librarians. Add to that many people in this area tend to stay close to where they have grown up, so there are many qualified librarians in the area. I have been typically told that I am one of one hundred or more candidates for most jobs I was applying for (I don't think any employer has ever given the exact number, not sure why?)

By slowing my search and spending some time to re-evaluate I was able to finally come to the conclusion that I need expand beyond traditional libraries. I found employers in my area that needed research/instructional skills and was making headway. Now if you have read this blog long term you will know I have settled into a part time librarian position. But if this opportunity had not come about, I was seeing positive signs that the re-evaluation was producing benefits (i.e. getting invited for the next round of interviews at one of the employers outside of my industry.)

What do others think?

Preparing for the new job market

Here is some career advice from a blog that I am less familiar with, but it matches much of what I am reading elsewhere. The advice boils down to the three tips:

• Pay attention to your industry.
• Develop niche expertise.
• Learn to market yourself.

These are again tips that may career counselors and  career bloggers are giving. This makes me feel comfortable pointing my readers to a anonymous blog post. I also find it interesting because of the theme it is constructed around. The job market is changing.

Now I have blogged about this premise before:

Is Traditional Employment Dead?
Traditional Employment (part 2)
The new job interview?

These three posts all tackle the issue from different angles... but taken in total I believe that they are pointing towards a growing trend in employment. So back to the article that motivated today's post... the three tips fall in line with things I have been saying in most of my blog posts. By paying attention to your industry through business news sources you are performing the research necessary to keep sharp as a job candidate. In this post (Company Research - business news) I detail how to conduct the research in the business news sources to learn and keep current in your industry.

By developing your niche and learning to market yourself you can stand out in a crowded candidate pool. These are actually the reasons I started this blog. During a lengthy unemployment I received some advice that to stay connected and relevant it might help to blog about an area I felt was my strength. Since I had worked with students at a major university, teaching them how to conduct this type of research to prepare for job interviews I felt I could broaden those skills for all individuals hunting for employment.

I would love to hear from any of you who feel that employment is changing.

More interview question advice

Another piece from Forbes about interview questions designed to trip us up, in this piece Jenna Goudreau lists 10 of these questions. Notice that number three is very related to the theme of this blog, researching before the job interview. I was actually asked this question at a recent interview.

Being able to connect with their situation goes a long way, and being able to tie your skills and abilities to their situation gets you even further.

Her analysis seems very reasonable and helps dig into the intent that interviewers are trying to get at by asking these and similar questions.

I hope that these are helpful to anyone who is interviewing in the near future.

Salary Negotiation

Salary Negotiation is never fun, but this two step process from Julia Philips on the 4 Business Networking blog is sound advice. The only problem is the way she casually mentions checking Google to find out the salary range for the position type and experience level.

• First this is not easily achieved by a Google search...
• Second, you also need to account for your geographic area.

I have mentioned before several web services for salary searching. I have also talked about America's Career InfoNet, which is a subset of Career One Stop. The ACI is a nice site with a usable interface for BLS data. You can use it to find your job/title and your zip code; and then get high, median and low salaries for both annual and hourly rates. Factoring in experience can be much more difficult. The typical method suggested by many career counselors is to peruse job ads, but my problem with that is that most ads don't list a salary. When they do, they give a large range so that it is difficult to judge where you lie on an experience scale.

Now if you are lucky and the place of employment is something like a government position or other job where the budgets are a part of the public record, then you can look the info up online... but if you don't personally know people who hold positions to the one you are applying for (and their personal experience) then it is difficult to use this data. At best you can use it to calculate a local high, median, and low salary.

The morale of this post is, that while I totally agree with the importance to have an idea of an appropriate salary before beginning the negotiation. It is not just a simple Google search away. I hope my tips are useful for those of you preparing for such a negotiation.

Good Luck All.