January 8th Job Search Resolutions

Happy January 8th

It cannot be avoided.  It is the new year and talk of resolutions will abound.  However, rather than blog about new year’s resolutions in December when people are speaking of future commitments or January 1st when we are still buzzing with excitement that we survived another calendar year.  I waited a week out when the cloud has been lifted and the high has worn off.  Since it usually only takes about a week for most people to start breaking their resolutions, I felt that those who make it to January 8th are going to take their resolutions seriously enough to get something out of this post.

The following resolutions that I am going to suggest to job seekers are based on what I have heard from candidates on the market, from other recruiters, and from what I’ve witnessed of the way finding a job has changed.

1. Get active on LinkedIn.  I have asked so many candidates if they are using LinkedIn and so many of them answer, “I’ve been meaning to do that” or  “I don’t see the point.”  I then ask if they know that there are jobs posted on Linkedin.  Very often they don’t.  Here you have a recruiter asking you if you use LinkedIn and you don’t see the point.  Besides finding candidates on LinkedIn, I have been further educated by the benefit of engaging with others with broad perspectives on topics of interest.  If you are on the job market, I suggest taking 2 hours a week to get familiar with this platform.  Even if you don’t see the point, recruiters do and that’s who you are trying to connect with.
2. Know your value.  Even if you are not a dollars and “sense” kind of person, you need to know that you have something to offer an organization.  Many candidates that I speak to allow their worth to be determined by their W-2.  If you are such a person, without the confidence of having a job already, you are going to give a terrible sales pitch when you interview.  If you need to gauge your worth in money, use your last salary or desired salary to determine how much your time is worth.  Then when you go in for an interview, go in there like you expect to be paid for your time and service because ultimately you do.
3. Dare to be different.  There’s a quote that says something to the effect of, “If you want results you’ve never had, you have to do something you’ve never done.”  I talk to people all the time that won’t even try to extend themselves beyond their comfort zones.  I once had a candidate who would call me every week and just say, “Got anything?” One day I asked him had he tried doing anything different in his job search.  He said he hadn’t.  I gave him the homework assignment of doing just one thing different that weekend, even if it was trying a food that he’d never had.  I wanted him to tell me about it the next week.  He agreed.  A week later the phone rang.  “Got anything”, he asked. I asked him what he had to eat that was different in the last week.  He said he wasn’t able to do it.  I haven’t heard from him since.  In order to manage in this world you are going to have to embrace change.  If you can’t, resolutions aren’t for you anyway.

Rather than beat anyone over the head with other resolution ideas, I will leave you with this.  When we think of resolutions, we commonly think of this far reaching goal that can make us feel inadequte regarding our current position.  This is completely contradictory to the true spirit of what it means to make a resolution.  If you look up the etymology of the word you find that the word originally meant the “process of reducing things into simpler forms”.  In other words, resolutions are meant to make life easier, not harder.  It is a matter of perspective.  The reward is not at the end of the journey.  It is the journey itself.  Decide where you want to be and have fun learning how to get there.

Happy January 8th, 2010!

Cashing In On Psychic Income

Not that kind of psychic.

In our September 14 posting, Managing Your Emotional Investments In A Job Search, we talked about the gambler’s fallacy as it relates to job hunting and offered some tips on how to navigate the waves of emotion that arise as you look toward securing your next job.  In this companion piece, we discuss psychic income, why it can sometimes be more valuable than any other currency, and how to know when to cash it in for opportunities.

In their book, Groundswell: Winning In a World Transformed By Social Technologies, Charlene Li* and Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research discuss the phenomenon of psychic income–the intangible revenue or satisfaction that comes from participating in certain activities.  An example could be the feeling you gain from making a certain purchase or working on a project that calls upon your creative ability.   Because of my genuine interest in people, I derive psychic income from reading, writing, listening, and conversing on almost any topic.  So if it were not for bills, I’d do almost any job for free if it allowed for authentic engagement of some kind.  But because most of us do have bills, we’ll talk about the financial implications of psychic income.

In Groundswell, Jeff Stenski is attributed to have potentially saved Dell over $1 million simply by answering questions on Dell’s Community Forum.  Why has Jeff spent the equivalent of over 123 workdays a year on this forum answering questions about optical drives for free?  The answer of course is psychic income.  Jeff loves to contribute and this forum gives him an opportunity to do so.  As we mentioned in The Ultimate Interview Secret, there are rewards that come from seeking to contribute to your industry or area of expertise and these rewards can be cashed in.

For starters, as long as you are contributing, your skills will keep current.  This has tremendous value.  Added to this, in a depressed market, there is a definite value in engaging with people who have the ability to skillfully transfer their enthusiasm.  This is known as salesmanship and believe it or not, the purchases that we usually feel the best about are usually laden with the psychic income we earned from engaging with the salesperson.  In a world where we have global access to products and services, it is actually the psychic income embedded in those products and services that is the differentiator.  What do you think this information can do for your interviewing skills?

So knowing this, doesn’t it make sense to keep track of your psychic income just as well as you do of your financial income?  We think so.  That’s exactly why this blog exists.  As recruiters we know how taxing the job search can be for everyone involved.  With so many things to consider when making a hire, disproportionate amounts of psychic income can be strewn about with many feeling like they didn’t get the ROI they were hoping for.  Our goal with CareerAssist is to give back to the candidate pool for the time and energy they share with us when they talk to us about the opportunities with our clients.  It may not be the job they were hoping for, but we hope that it contributes in some way.

So if you take anything from this post–whether you are on the job market or engaging with someone who is–let it be this.  Psychic income is part and parcel of every relationship no matter how much time is involved.  So be wise in your deposits and withdrawals.

*Charlene Li has since become an independent thought leader and Founder of Altimeter Group.