Chapter 22
Getting a Job Is a
Job
1. Get a routine and stick to
it. Getting a job is not a nine-to-five job. It’s a
sixteen-hour-a-day proposition, from the moment you get up until
the moment you go to sleep. With that kind of workload, you need a
daily schedule to manage that routine and organize your time. No
employer is around to police your time management, and that means
the control burden falls squarely on your own shoulders. This
doesn’t mean you’re being sentenced to endless rounds of
self-punishment and drudgery. If you’re going to be at your best,
you’ve got to have some fun, too, so make room for a little
downtime.
Start the week unofficially on Sunday night. You’ll
want to scribble out a short list of things to get done the next
week and check it against the list you had the previous week.
Set goals. To put them to work for you they must
be:
Measurable
Identifiable
Documented
Attainable
Specific
And they need to be examined regularly.
Note the first letter of each word spells Midas,
and I call this approach giving goals The Midas
Touch because it turns goals into gold.
How many new contacts did I make last week? Did I
stretch out geographically into new areas? Explore new job
descriptions? Improve my presentation or appearance? Grade
yourself, and don’t be too narrowly focused. A week without getting
a job is not a week of failure. You may have accomplished other
goals last week, things you’ve never had the time for or put in the
effort to achieve in the past.
Think of what you are doing as a new do-it-yourself
skill, like crafting a fine piece of woodworking or raising and
grooming a bonsai plant. Why? Because you are going to need to use
the same job-finding skill set twelve to fifteen times in your
working life. You can and will become expert at it. So good and
efficient, in fact, that you will be able to methodically get a new
job in your off-hours while you actually have one during the
working day.
2. Get back in shape.
Companies have always hired according to subtle, hidden values. We
like to believe that discrimination in the marketplace has been
largely eliminated. Not so. Even though we have legislation that
forbids hiring on the basis of race, religion, age, and gender,
there are still millions of Americans who have no legal protection
against job discrimination. Prejudice against overweight people
seems to be the only form of discrimination that hasn’t been made
illegal, and it’s practiced with a vengeance. All things being
equal, studies have shown that the overweight have a much poorer
chance of getting a job than people who are not overweight.
Under any circumstances, take huge pains with your
grooming, hairstyling, and wardrobe. And not just at interviews,
either. Looking good is the rule every time you poke your nose
outside the door. If you’re serious about getting a job, you’re
going to be visible in a number of ways where your appearance will
be observed and can work for you or against you. This is yet
another reason for keeping visuals of the mugging, cavorting you
off social Web sites like Facebook.
We’re not all perfect tens, but there’s a lot we
can do to catapult ourselves up the scale. Appearance has always
been 30 percent nature and 70 percent cunning artifice, so we can
all be at least sevens if we try.
3. Read. Until newspapers
and magazines go out of business or they install pay walls on the
Internet—and that may never come to pass—your problem is not going
to be a scarcity of information. I used to recommend reading the
local paper and the Wall Street Journal for
starters, but that may have been fitting advice for an era when
Jeeves was buttering your muffins and pouring your coffee. The
Wall Street Journal and Financial Times charge for their services, but a
subscription to the Journal in particular
is well worth the investment, since it is so influential across the
board in business. A good argument can be made that if your
recruiter or your prospective employer takes a daily read on the
Wall Street Journal, so should you. You can
also use Web sites like Bloomberg.com and the New York Times to get a ton of business news.
As to job listings, today, according to Wikipedia,
“Monster is the largest job search engine in the world, with over a
million job postings at any time and over 150 million résumés in
the database (2008) and over 63 million job seekers per month.”
Then there are the Craigslist entries. Again I turn to mighty Wik:
“The [Craigslist] site receives over one million new job listings
each month, making it one of the top job boards in the world.” The
local classifieds? What are the chances that your next job will be
a local find? If not moving is key for you,
there are regional Web sites springing up every day that can help
you focus your search.
The Internet has redefined our information diet. In
this creepy, crawling cyberspace world, you better be snacking on
three levels of the food chain: breaking news—especially in your
business and professional specialty; career opportunity postings;
and high-nutrition management journals and mind-stretching essays
and lectures.
It’s not uncommon for an interviewer to ask the
“friendly” and “casual” question: “What have you been reading
lately?” Have a good answer. Current business books and e-zines,
trade and technical journals in your field, thoughtful books of any
kind, fiction or nonfiction, qualify if you can discuss them
creatively and analytically. Be able to recite your bookmarks on
Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox. By the way, I hope your search
engine is at least as good as either of those.
One still-employed job seeker took his efforts at
changing careers so seriously that each evening he was frozen in
front of his screen for hours to bone up for the next day’s
interviews. His little daughter couldn’t understand, and one day
asked, “Mommy, why does Daddy stare at those dumb articles all
night? I want him to teach me how to play Guitar Hero!” Her mother
explained to the tot, “Well, darling, you see, Daddy has so much
work to do, he has to log on and finish it at home.” “Well,”
responded the daughter, “why don’t they put him in a slower
group?”
4. Make those contacts.
Keeping your network alive means casting a wide net. Dive into your
files and give yourself a quota of, say, five contacts a day. Sort
your contacts between e-mails and phone contacts.
I know people who send mass barrages of the same
e-mail to twenty or thirty people at once. That may make sense in a
personal emergency or when you are communicating within your family
or a close-knit group of friends. Others are likely to see it as an
affront, that they are just one in a supporting cast of countless
others.
Make your phone calls brief, especially in the “AE
age”—that’s the next era after AD and it means After E-mail. More
and more people don’t want unexpected or extended calls unless
there is a very good reason for them.
E-mailing or phoning, your agenda is obvious: What
do you know that I don’t that might provide me some work? It never
hurts if you can carry your own weight and provide the people
you’re calling with some information that may be of value to them.
You might mention a hot sale they may not know about or some even
hotter business gossip you may have picked up during your job hunt,
like a major executive shuffle.
5. Do your homework. Stay
on top of new developments in your field, and that’s saying a
mouthful these days. There may be an art director somewhere who
doesn’t use or know how to manage computer aided design, but the
market for hieroglyphics is slim! An increasing number of art
directors have degrees in multimedia design or computer graphics.
Creativity is important, but so are precision and ease. Now is the
time to take those courses you never had time for, anywhere and
especially online. And be sure you find a way to mention how you
are clicking on to new skills during your interviews.
6. Know the company you
keep. Before you interview, check with anyone you know who
knows about the company: employees, customers, bankers, vendors.
But most of all, learn the art of good Googling! Before, you needed
to chase down facts like a Mickey Spillane gumshoe. Today, you swim
in oceans of detail, and the new skill is how to prioritize what to
look for and how to piece it together.
Point #1: You want clues to the company’s
reputation. Is it a leader in its industry? An also-ran? How does
it compete? Does the company emphasize price? Quality? Service?
Innovation?
Do you have any special strengths in any of these
areas that you can bring to the table? If you do, don’t forget to
mention them during your interview.
Don’t forget the flip side. If the company is in
the technological dark ages, emphasize what you can do to help
stage a cost-effective, low-pain, fast-acting renaissance. If the
business is a service laggard, and you were once the assistant czar
of service who helped redeem another company’s customer relations,
it may be high time to play that card.
Point #2: You want clues to the company’s values
and style. Be aware of the huge trend toward niche marketing, which
is the concept of dividing the marketplace into even smaller
segments in order to concentrate on a clearly defined target
audience. Because of niche marketing, there are a lot of companies
with highly idiosyncratic corporate styles, developed as a result
of their adapting to the styles of the niche markets in which they
sell their products or services.
Niche hiring has been a predictable outcome of
niche marketing. You’re going to find the best chance of getting a
job—and of being a success—in a company where you fit in.
In 2007, Elinor Mills did an interview for CNET
News with Stacy Savides Sullivan, the chief culture officer for
Google, perhaps the most coveted employer in the world. Tune in to
some of her comments:
• On the culture: “One that is team-oriented,
very collaborative and encouraging people to think
nontraditionally.”
• On the kind of question a job candidate might
be asked: “This is just hypothetical, but it could be ‘How many
bread boxes could you fit in an airplane?’ or something like that.
That’s certainly not going to show if somebody is adaptable or
flexible, but it’s certainly going to show someone’s thought
process and reasoning, the way they can rationalize a true answer
to something. Obviously, there’s no right answer.”
• On the kind of social behaviors that are
popular in the company: “We’ve done Google-wide ski trips since
1999. Different groups go up and we spend the night and there’s a
lot of team-building and bonding.”
Those three items have nothing to do with the
degrees you have, the schools you went to, the years of experience
you’ve stacked up; but they have a great deal to say about the kind
of person who would succeed at Google.
Then there’s the aggressive, rake-it-in avarice of
a host of Wall Street firms. That light-your-cigar-with-a-$50-bill
glint of the recent go-go years is gone-gone.
Checking out company culture on the Internet is a
piece of cake these days, though I can’t resist sharing a vintage
corporate culture classic.
Years ago, no male employee at IBM dared to wear
anything but a white shirt. One day, the boss, the legendary Thomas
Watson, came to work in a blue shirt.
“What do you think?” said one of the underlings to
another.
“Better not try it,” said his buddy. “It could be a
trick.”
7. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you. Did you have a little chat with the receptionist or
with a secretary while you were waiting for one of your interviews
today? Write down that name and send a thank-you note recalling the
conversation. Of course, you can e-mail your appreciation, and that
counts for something. But, disregarding the fact that I hawk
envelopes by trade, a handwritten note really bursts through
today’s electronic clutter. It’ll help differentiate you from the
pack when you call that firm, and it won’t hurt your chances of
having those calls put through, either. And, of course, the
interviewer and anyone else you may have met at the company are
musts on your list, as are any of the contacts you made during the
day. For the past forty years I have strongly recommended you mail
your thank-you notes back to the interviewers the same day.
I can’t begin to tell you how many people I have
advised to use this tactic who have told me how it knocked the
socks off the interviewer! It was one of the main reasons they were
strongly considered for a job opening—and in some cases, actually
landed the position.
8. Keep notes. I harp on
this point because it’s so vital. You’re going to want to have a
record of all your day’s meetings and
calls, so when you follow up later, you know what was said, what
personal information might be useful in your next conversation, and
what your strategy is for your next contact. If you think I’m a nut
about keeping records, let me remind you that this is the first
generation that really has gotten out of that habit. Until
recently, everyone wrote everything down. When Napoleon wanted to
tell Josephine how much he cared, he didn’t say it with flowers or
send a Candygram, he wrote a letter (and used an envelope).
Why is post-interview debriefing so vital? We
forget 50 percent of what we hear in four hours. Entering your
immediate comments in your notebook is the only way to keep
reliable records of the experience.
No matter who you are, no matter what you do, you
need a system for keeping track of people. When I started in
business, I kept a well-worn business card file that I thumbed
through on a daily basis. When the backs of the cards were so
covered with smudges and chicken scratchings that they became
unreadable, I developed a system on paper where I could make
regular notations to my customer files. That evolved into the
Mackay 66, which you may be using now or have already read about.
My #1 piece of advice in this book, head and shoulders above the
rest, is to master the Mackay 66. You can
get the Mackay 66 form free at my Web site: www.harveymackay.com
Whether it’s a daily diary, an old address book, a
Rolodex, or most likely a computerized contact management system,
you need something to keep you organized. Start now and keep track
of everyone you meet, making note of when and how you met them and
what you learned about them. If you are unemployed, you’ll be doing
part of this from memory, putting together a log of everybody
you’ve ever known who you think can help you. If you are employed
now, you have a great opportunity to start your contact file. So
get started. And never quit.
9. Volunteer. Get
involved in a cause that means something to you, whether it’s
politics, the local soup kitchen for the homeless, United Way,
Alumni Fund Drive, Save the Whales, Disabled American Veterans, or
helping Alzheimer’s victims—what have you. I’m very active in St.
Vincent de Paul, for which I have delivered speeches to the
homeless and helped raise funds.
There are four strong reasons for volunteering.
First, when you make this sort of contribution, you’re keeping
actively busy during an emotional downturn in your life. Good for
the head.
Second, you’re improving your job-hunting skills.
Volunteering involves marketing, selling, time management, public
speaking, fund-raising, creativity. What could be more targeted to
your needs than learning, practicing, polishing your strengths, and
overcoming your weaknesses? I would never
have learned to sell if I hadn’t been a volunteer trying to raise
money for countless causes.
It’s the best sales training boot camp there is,
it’s free, and no one, that is, no one,
wants to do it, because no one wants to hear ten trillion
“no’s.”
Are you uncomfortable speaking in public?
Volunteering can provide you with the experience you need. Before I
became involved as a volunteer in building support for a domed
stadium in Minneapolis, I’d have been lucky to get asked to
introduce the introducer at a PTA meeting. I ended up making close
to one hundred speeches a year during the seven years we fought for
that project. Now, speech making has become the gravity center of
my professional life.
Third, depending on the organization and the role
you take, volunteering will put you in contact with some of the
most important people in your community. They’ll see you do your
stuff. (Do I hear you tickling the keys on your notebook
already?)
Fourth, and not least in importance, you’ll be
doing your community a service you can be proud of. And if
volunteering pays off in no other way than this, it’s well worth
the time and effort. It’s good for the soul. Potential employers
know that people who do volunteer work make loyal and dedicated
employees, so get that volunteer service into your résumé, and, if
you can, make offhand mention of it in your interviews, but don’t
boast about it.
10. Get ready for
tomorrow. Clothes in shape? Appointments confirmed? Schedule
set? Sign off. You’ve had a busy day.
Mackay’s Moral: It bears
repeating: Getting a job is a job.