Is Fishing like Job Search Networking?

Anna Farmery of the Buzz Networker put up a blog post the other day titled “Why Networking is like Fishing” that should serve as an important reminder to those conducting a job search.

Networking for Candidates

The funny thing about this title is that it is the opposing strategy for job seekers of the technique we teach in our “You’re NOT the Person I Hired” workshop for hiring executives and managers. We teach that you must be able to “fish in deep waters” to attract the best talent. Posting onto the various job boards a job description that is masquerading as an ad is rarely an effective strategy for finding great talent.

If the best technique to be found by recruiters and hiring managers is networking and the best technique to find great talent is through networking – the intersection of these two overlapping strategies by candidates and recruiters/hiring managers should result in great matches.

Seems obvious – right?

Why doesn’t it work most of the time?

Job Search Networking – Fact or Fiction

It doesn’t work because most candidates do a terrible job of networking, personal branding, and positioning themselves to be found. Most recruiters/hiring managers do a terrible job networking by fishing in the deepest ends of the pool for great talent.

So what really happens in most hiring situations? The recruiters/hiring managers revert back to pre-historic approaches to finding candidates by running ads and candidates devote the vast majority of their job search to responding to job ads. Is there any wonder why top talent fails to find great opportunities and companies fail over and over to bring top talent to their doorstep?

Brad and I will be releasing over the next week or two a self-assessment for you to determine if you’re networking plan needs a major check-up. Stay tuned for this release. Our surveys and research within our job search network on LinkedIn (which you can join by clicking here) indicate that less than 20% of executive and managerial candidates have an effective networking plan.

Here are a few questions to be thinking about while you await the release of our networking plan self-assessment tool:

1. Do you have a written networking plan?
2. What do you believe are the top 5 best practices in a networking plan of action?
3. Have you ever seen a formal networking plan with action steps, metrics, objectives, and tasks?
4. If you develop plans for projects at work – why wouldn’t you do it for your job search?
5. Can you list the top 20 articles/blog postings/content/books and other audio/video related content on job search networking that you’ve read within the last week and have taken 1-2 ideas from to incorporate into your job search.

Are these tough questions? Most candidates we’ve surveyed wouldn’t be able to answer them. If you can’t, your probably are facing a major need for a networking check-up OR the alternative is a prolonged period of unemployment that could have easily been cut in half.

Resources for Developing a Networking Plan

1. In our Book, “This is NOT the Position I Accepted”, we dedicate an entire chapter to the concept of Job Search Networking.
2. In our Job Search Home Study Kit, we have exercises, templates, and guidelines for developing a powerful networking plan that could help reduce the time it takes for you to find a job by at least 50%.
3. Brad and I have talked about networking numerous times – both about job search networking on-line and off-line – in our weekly Internet Radio Talk Show on LATalkRadio. We’ve taken all our Radio Show Broadcasts and put them in an audio archive for you to listen to and download.
4. If you’re in need of a “Networking Check-Up” for your job search, be sure to check out our Networking Strategic Plan Coaching to get an immediate boost over your competition.

Barry

Have You Assessed Your LinkedIn Profile Yet?

About a month ago, we published a self-assessment matrix by which you can assess the effectiveness of your LinkedIn Profile. In a recent research project/survey, we discovered that less than less than 10% of the LinkedIn Profiles we reviewed of active job seekers meet a minimum standard for effectiveness.

Are you missing an opportunity for personal branding, making recruiters and hiring managers aware of your capability, and falling short of being able to network effectively –  all because your LinkedIn Profile is at a minimum, average and mediocre level compared to best practices in leveraging LinkedIn for your Job Search.

Take the self-assessment today and then start rebuilding your LinkedIn Profile so that you can begin to have better success in your job search.

Bonus Tip: The effectiveness of your LinkedIn Profile extends far beyond just job hunting. An effective LinkedIn Profile can aid in sales, business development, career advancement, and marketing.

Download the Self-Assessment NOW to determine if you LinkedIn Profile is effective for conducting an efficient job search.

Brad and I also discussed using your LinkedIn Profile as an effective tool in a previous Internet Radio Talk Show. You can listen to and download all of our recorded Internet Radio Talk Shows on Job Search by navigating to our FREE Audio Library.

Barry

Upcoming Radio Broadcast – What’s Your Job Search Plan

Most candidates do not have a solid job search plan to conduct an effective job search – then they whine about their job hunt and the fact that it’s taking them 40% longer to find a new job than their peers.

Can you afford to be out work 6 months, 12 months, 18 months?

An effective job search plan is one of the primary methods by which you can significantly reduce the time it takes to conduct a job hunt. Many candidates have used this approach, which is a core element of our Career Success Methodology, to reduce their job search time by 40%, 50%, and sometimes as much as 65% based on traditional projections of the length of job searches by level of position.

Join Brad and I on Monday at 11 AM PST on LATALKRADIO.com as we discuss, banter, and argue about what is a proper job search plan and how do you get started in creating one for yourself. Mark your calendar right now! We take your questions, comments, and ideas and put them on the air to discuss, debate, and challenge each other.

Be on the lookout for our upcoming FREE Self-Assessment 8-Point Success Matrix for a Job Search Plan, our audio program which you can download directly from Itunes or from our website in our extensive FREE Audio Library. Finally, we’ll have a video up shortly about the Top Ten Job Search Mistakes which you can download from Youtube.

Barry

Our LinkedIn Job Search Discussion Group

Are you a learner or a dunce when it comes to discovering how to improve your job search and reduce the time it takes to find a new opportunity. Do you explore every blog, tweet, and discussion group capable of offering new ideas and injecting renewed energy into your job search?

Learner or a Dunce in Your Job Search

Or do you feel you know everything there is about doing an effective job search. Is your attitude “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks”. The funny thing is that in my 25 years of executive search, I’ve discovered more 55 year olds than have a passion for learning than 25 year olds. Learning, growing, expanding beyond your immediate knowledge or bubble is not age dependent. It’s a life long attitude about personal growth and learning (this could be a entire blog post just by itself).

Job Search Discussion Group

Brad and I facilitate a vibrant community on LinkedIn that is rapidly growing toward being one of the most active job search discussion groups on LinkedIn and the Internet.

Some of the topics of discussion include:

Job Search Networking

Marketing yourself

Job Search Personal Branding

Salary Negotiation

Thank You Letters and Follow-up with Hiring Managers

How to Prepare for an Interview

Acing the Phone Interview

Classic frustrations, errors, and mistakes most candidates make in their job search

How to get a recruiter to call you back

Join the Discussion Group

We also make special offers to this LinkedIn Group, including participation in job search teleconferences, special white papers, examples, and first look at new templates we develop, such as the 8-Point Success Matrix for Assessing the Effectiveness of Your LinkedIn Profile.

Join us today and jump right in by throwing out a question to the group, posting a comment on another discussion point, or adding a news link about a site, article, or blog posting you reviewed and thought would add value to the group.

Here’s the link to join our discussion Group on LinkedIn: IMPACT Hiring Solutions Job Search Discussion Group

There are number of really good discussion groups on LinkedIn regarding job search. You should be on all of them, including ours. If just one idea you can glean from the groups helps you take an entire month off your job search, the investment of time would have more than paid for itself.

Participating in on-line job search discussion groups gives you an opportunity to benchmark your own job search activities and success, bounce ideas off of other peers, learn about ideas that others have tried and you’ve never considered, and obtain leads and ideas of how to uncover those hidden jobs within companies for whom you would love to join.

Are you learner or a dunce when it comes to improving your job search?

Barry

Become a Beacon in Your Job Search

Adam Singer, writing today in his blog, The Future Buzz, used a lighthouse with it’s powerful lens as an excellent metaphor for networking on-line, particularly in using on social media, groups, discussion boards, and other communities to draw attention to yourself in your job search.

Adam uses this powerful metaphor and visualization to call attention to the importance of establishing your own personal brand in social networking, for both your success, career, and job search. He states:

A beacon is an intentionally conspicuous device designed to focus attention on a specific location.

Visualize what image the word beacon conjures in your mind:  perhaps a lighthouse casting light onto an otherwise dark horizon, or a signal fire atop a hill illuminating the night sky.  In the physical world, a beacon is used to draw attention, act as a guide, or call to action.  Civilizations have long used them to rally citizens together, protect ships from coastlines, and act as signal points.

But the concept of a beacon is not limited to purely physical signaling points.  There are beacons on the web – they are people, companies, networks, blogs, anything that can direct attention.

You must become a beacon or you are essentially at the whim of others who point attention at their own discretion, perhaps shining the light on you for fleeting moments…if you’re lucky.

You can read Adam’s full blog post at The Future Buzz.

Are you a beacon to others in your job search. Is the attention of hiring managers drawn to the light you cast?

If you missed our last post about using your LinkedIn Profile to become visible in your job search, you can still download the 8-Point Success Matrix for Your Job Search LinkedIn Profile. Within minutes, this matrix will help you to improve your existing LinkedIn Profile to become a bright beacon and attract the attention of recruiters, HR managers, and Hiring Managers in your job search.

Barry

Photo courtesy of Adam Singer at the Future Buzz

Job Search and LinkedIn – Is Your Profile Visible?

Your profile is like an on-line resume. If you’ve not taken the time to develop an in-depth profile on LinkedIn, you might be invisible to the searches that recruiters, human resource professionals, and hiring managers are conducting searching for people JUST LIKE YOU.

I recently dedicated one of our weekly Internet Radio Shows to this subject. Studies show that over 95% of all recruiters, human resources professionals, and hiring managers are using LinkedIn as a PRIMARY tool for finding and sourcing top talent.

All our past Radio Show Broadcasts are available in our FREE Audio Library.

1. Is your profile powerful enough to stand out on LinkedIn and grab someone’s attention in a search, let alone even fall into the search parameters? Are you beige – do you fade into the background? Are you making your job search much more difficult by being invisible?
2. Let’s do a check-up on your LinkedIn Profile:
3. Do you include all your significant projects from prior jobs?
4. Do you include all your major quantifiable results and outcomes?
5. Is every leadership role, committee chair, group membership listed?
6. Have you identified all your skills and competencies and then backed them up with concrete examples in your LinkedIn Profile?
7. Have you loaded short PowerPoint Presentations through the Slideshare Application to convey your successes and accomplishments?

If you’re interested in the complete checklist for determining if your LinkedIn Profile is complete and capable of being found in a search to fill an open position, you can download our 8-Point Success Matrix for your Job Search LinkedIn Profile. This is a self-assessment scorecard for job search networking that will immediately indicate whether your LinkedIn Porfile is effective for job search and being visible to recruiters, HR managers, and Hiring Managers.

MOST IMPORTANT for your job search on LinkedIn: You’ve got to make it very easy for people to contact you by including your email address and phone number. As an executive recruiter, if you make me hunt on-line for how to contact you – I’ll just give up and move on to the next candidate.

Check out my profile or Brad’s profile. Join our LinkedIn Group for Job Search and check out the profiles of other great candidates that have already gone through this exercise.

Review our book titled “This is NOT the position I Accepted” – there’s a wealth of great information about leveraging yourself on-line and becoming visible. Our Home-Study Job Search Kit has audio programs, templates, the workbook, and a variety of tools to help you begin to improve your visibility in searches by hiring managers searching for people JUST LIKE YOU.

All these tools that LinkedIn makes available as part of your profile help you to become visible in the searches that recruiters, human resource professionals, and hiring managers conduct to source and find candidates. STOP being invisible – STAND OUT on LinkedIn for your job search.

Barry

Do you stand out in your job search on LinkedIn?

I recently wrote a blog post for our Hiring and Retaining Top Talent Blog titled “A Baker’s Dozen of Techniques for quickly finding top talent on LinkedIn” When you review this list of the best practices of how employers and recruiters use LinkedIn to find top talent, are you guilty of not using all the tools LinkedIn provides for personal branding, networking, differentiating yourself from the competition?

Next Steps: Listen to our Home Study Job Search Course and work through the exercises to learn how to network on line and leverage LinkedIn, explore the FREE audio recordings of our Internet Radio Talk Show on using LinkedIn in your job search, or join our LinkedIn Discussion Group and focus on the topics related to using LinkedIn to “stand out”.

Tell us about a few of the stories of how you’ve landed a job or received a great job lead based on one of the Baker’s Dozen of Best Practices?

Barry

photo credit by Jill Murray

7 Steps to end Job Search Voyeurism

In my last post on Job Search Voyerism, I mentioned that I would explore each of the 7 Steps in more depth. In future posts, we’ll jump into even more detail about each of these steps.

Step 1: Join the LinkedIn Group for Job Search which my Partner, Brad Remillard and I facilitate. Click here to join this vibrant and active group.

Step 2: You have my permission to “lurk” or “kibbitz” for two weeks. After that, you must promise to become active in the group. There are approximately 1500 members in this group who network with each other in their job search, share ideas and strategies about jobs, interviewing, networking, salary negotiations, and much more. Many members of the group also pose questions for help, such as asking who knows someone in a particular company, how to overcome a negative in the interview, or how to prepare for a homework assignment.

Step 3: Start to comment on job search articles and sites in the news tab that other group members have shared. Start to comment on the discussions that other group members have started. Start your own discussion point, ask a question, and make a request for help on some element of your job search.

Step 4: Follow Brad and Barry on Twitter. Check out the variety of tweets, useful job search articles, and comments we make about postings by candidates. Start tweeting about your job search.

Step 5:Sign up to receive our Career and Job Search Blog in whatever feeder you use to read blogs. I highly recommend Google Reader. Make sure to post comments on the blog articles Brad and I write.

Step 6: Now that you’ve joined our LinkedIn Discussion Group on Job Search and you’ve practiced and gotten the hang of being an active community/group member, start joining other groups that fit your function expertise (ie marketing or financial management), industry specialization, and alumni group. Become active members of these groups.

Step 7: Now that you’ve subscribed to our Career and Job Search Blog, you understand how to read blog postings in a feed reader like Google Reader, and you’ve started commenting directly on blog postings, start subscribing to a few blogs that are in your functional expertise, industry specialization, alumni group, and in the area of job search, job hunt, interviewing – basically anything to do with finding a job. Become an active contributor on those blogs.

These are just a few small steps in beginning to create a personal brand for yourself, improving your job leads and referrals, strengthening your job search networking, and starting to make your voice heard to “differentiate” yourself.

As a bonus tip, download a few of our recorded Internet Radio Show Broadcasts in which we talk about being active in your job search in social media, like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Tell us what you’re doing right now in your job search that is similar or comparable to the steps laid out in this post. How are you making your voice heard?

Barry

photo credit lintmachine

Stop being a job search voyeur – let your voice be heard

Many candidates join groups on LinkedIn, Facebook, Ning, Yahoo and on a variety of other platforms  to languish in “lurker” land. What’s the use of joining a group unless you’re willing to actively participate? Is not one of the major reasons for joining groups on-line or off-line  to network in your job search?

One of the most powerful methods of networking for job hunting is to become known to other group members through your posting of job search-related articles, sharing of informational links/sites (a major element of active Twitter networking), that might help other job seekers, and commenting on the posts by others. Learn about networking in our 5-Step Career Success Methodology.

Through your active “voice”, others in the group get to know you, trust you, and start to go out of their way to help you when you become a valued member of their community.

Not becoming active in sharing your “voice” in these groups you join is the equivalent of “being beige” – fading into the woodwork. See the blog post I wrote titled “Networking Failure –  Stop Being Beige”.

For those who are a little shy, reserved, and introverted, what better method exists to let your voice be heard?  You don’t have to engage in physical groups, you don’t have to formulate a response on the spot (you can think about it, analyze, and carefully craft your on-line message). and you don’t have to portray yourself as an extrovert in a live setting.

Allow me to offer a starting point for beginning the journey of letting your voice be heard on-line to improve your job search networking:

Here are Seven Steps you Can Take to end job search voyeurism:

Step 1: Join our LinkedIn Group for Job Search

Step 2: “Lurk” or “kibbitz” and then get active

Step 3: Start to comment on job search articles

Step 4: Follow Brad and Barry on Twitter

Step 5: Subscribe to our Career and Job Search Blog

Step 6: Join other LinkedIn Groups and become active

Step 7: Subscribe to other blogs and comment frequently

In my next blog post, we’ll explore each of these Seven Steps to ending Job Search Voyeurism.

Barry

photo credit by Stewart

Who’s Afraid of Job Search Personal Branding?

Why is it that so many people don’t get started creating their personal brand?

Is it lack of time, fear of failure, not knowing what to do?

I don’t get it! Story after story, case study after case study, success example after success example -thousands of stories, case studies, and examples have proven that personal branding works

So – we cycle back to the original question – Why is it that so many people don’t get started creating their personal brand? Brad and I cover personal branding for your job search frequently in our Internet Radio Talk Show. Check out some of the previous broadcasts from our Radio Talk Show Library.

What are known for? What subjects and search terms would employers use to find you on the web?

If employers typed a particular search phrase into Google, would you appear as one of the top 10 listings?

Trends are beginning to show that companies are using job boards less and search tools/social media sites to find candidates. Are you still conducting a job search like it’s 1999 or are you conducting a job search leveraging all the tools now available in 2009?

Tell us why you haven’t started your strategy of personal branding yet – here’s some tactics top talent candidates use in personal branding – are you doing any of these?

• Signing up for accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Delicious, Digg, Friendfeed, Google Reader, Google Profile
• Completely filling out the profile information on each of these sites
• Frequent updates and particpation in group discussions, answering questions, posing questions, offering recommendations and ideas
• Creating a blog and posting everyday about your subject matter expertise

What’s holding you back?

Barry