Opportunity Scanning: Key to Lead Development!

Have you ever been sitting in a coffee shop, minding your own business, when somebody at the table next to you mentions a word, or a phrase, or a name that has special significance to you?  And that causes you to look up, despite the fact that you weren’t even consciously monitoring the “buzz” of conversation all around you?

Believe it or not, I’ve found that this familiar experience has strong relevance to a powerful (yet little used) job lead generation technique I call “opportunity scanning”.  In a nutshell, this technique involves monitoring a bunch of different information sources on the web, hoping to stumble upon companies using the terminology most closely related to the types of problems you can solve and the types of assignments you’re targeting in your search.  It’s basically a form of intentional eavesdropping that relies on the same logic at play in the coffee shop scenario.  In other words, the reason my brain wakes me up when somebody next to me at Starbucks says “Juneau, Alaska” or “career coaching” or “ultimate fighting” (true confession time — I’m a fan!) is that it knows these specific words are almost always correlated with a conversation that would interest me.

In this same vein, no matter what you do for a living, a layer of language exists that is highly correlated with the problems, challenges, and organizational “ecosystem” that would fit you best as a professional.  Aggressively searching for companies or individuals using this specialized language, therefore, will help you uncover hidden opportunities to sell yourself that most of your competitors will miss.  It’s far more effective, too, than limiting your job search strictly to sending out your resume in response to the handful of explicit “leads” published on employment websites.  As most people have figured out, such a one-dimensional search is usually quite unproductive.

So as a starting point toward using the “opportunity scanning” technique in your own job search, you first have to sit down and create a list of the key terms, jargon, and language most associated with your particular career path.  Sounds simple, I know, but you may find this step trickier than you’d think.  Not only is it easy to overlook certain useful keywords, simply because you’re so close to them, but you also have to make sure that the words and phrases you select don’t have other meanings and aren’t commonly used in any other work contexts besides the one you’re targeting.

Here are a few examples:

Are you a Supply Chain Manager?  Your list of “opportunity language” might include phrases like logistics, bar coding, inventory, SKU, 3PL, APICS, PPAP, supplier rationalization, strategic sourcing, etc.

Are you an Organizational Development Consultant?  Your list might include phrases like change management, leadership development, systems thinking, culture change, process improvement, succession planning, human capital, etc.

Are you an Architect?  Your list might include terms like LEED, mixed-use, Revit, BIM, building information modeling, rendering, building codes, construction administration, pre-construction, etc.

Get the idea?

Once you have your list of language pulled together, you’re ready to roll, and can start using it to search through information sources such as Indeed, SimplyHired, Zoominfo, LinkedIn (people page), Puget Sound Business Journal, and other sites to see what contact and company names turn up, linked to your goals!  Better yet, for those sites that allow you to set up automatic e-mail alerts, you can program them to forward you any new job listings or articles that match your terminology on an ongoing basis.  Last but not least, you could even run your “opportunity language” through Google Maps (add a geographic limiter like “in Seattle” after your search term) to see which companies around town are speaking your language.

Used properly, the above techniques should greatly expand your horizons in terms of generating some hiring opportunities beyond the tired old landscape of the published job sites.  You just have to focus on the language that you’d share with your ideal target customer, then embrace the reality that most job leads, after all, are never published.  They’re developed by those people smart enough to identify (and initiate dialogue with) those companies around town working on problems and projects related to their field of expertise…

Rays of Hope?

Call me crazy, but after months of seeing the airwaves saturated with depressing developments, I was struck by the fact that I saw not one, not two, but THREE distinctly positive stories today on the news!

Stock market rallies
ACS is hiring 200 call center positions in Auburn
AT&T hiring 3,000 positions

I know, I know.  These little “glimmers of hope” may not be the harbinger of any huge economic turnaround, in the short term, but holy cow were they still refreshing to see — kind of like that one fragile little flower bud that’s poking out of the snow in my yard…

Keep in mind, too, that the condition of the marketplace is almost entirely based on consumer psychology, so if a few positive stories like these continue to materialize, we might eventually reach a tipping point that starts moving things back in the right direction.  The recovery has got to start somewhere, right?  It’s never easy to see such things at the time, but looking back, there WILL be a day (if not today, another day) that historians look back on and say “That was the day after things hit rock-bottom and the market started to finally turn around…”

So again, perhaps these three stories were isolated incidents, and possess no symbolic value whatsoever, but something in me still felt compelled to share them — because I know they made ME feel temporarily hopeful, and that’s a feeling I know has been in short supply as of late!

Book Review: One Person, Multiple Careers (Marci Alboher)

Ever heard somebody describing themselves as having a “slash career” before?  Mark my words, it might become part of the standard business lexicon now that the author of this book, Marci Alboher, is championing the adoption of this catchy phrase to describe the growing number of people who split their time across two or more different careers, simultaneously!

Why the “slash” part?  It sounds so violent, at first, but simply describes anybody who would tend to have multiple job titles listed on their business card, separated by a slash character.  You know, kind of like that neighbor of yours who is an attorney by day and teaches cooking lessons at night (i.e. attorney-slash-cooking teacher) or that flight attendant who moonlights as a real estate agent (i.e. flight attendant-slash-real estate agent) when they’re not up in the sky pointing out emergency exits.  Previously, I’ve seen such people described as having “composite” or “portfolio” careers, but “slash careers” is definitely a more distinctive way to put it, so it might very well catch on in the days to come.

At any rate, Ms. Alboher’s claim is that such careers are becoming much more commonplace, stemming from the growing desire of many people to diversify their income streams, as well as find a way to exercise multiple passions in a professional context.  Certainly, there do seem to be many more people out there these days who fit this description, and the author does an excellent job of outlining this emerging career option in tremendous depth.  Throughout the course of the book, she profiles dozens of different people who are holding down 2 or more different career roles, concurrently, and she also provides excellent advice on how people can successfully plan, manage, and balance this rather unique career choice.  In this sense, she’s provided not only a book full of inspiration, but also of very practical insights and  recommendations.  The chapter-ending “key points” summaries she wrote, in particular, were some of the best I’ve ever seen, in any book!

At the same time, Ms. Alboher certainly doesn’t claim that a dual-career track is for everyone, and I appreciated the frank chapters near the end of the book that talked about how such careers can be harder for people who are the parents of small children — and that outlined some of the other hidden stresses that can come from needing to be on top of your game in two totally distinct areas of expertise.  Additionally, she provides an array of useful websites related to the “slash career” concept, as well as a number of actual resume samples from the people profiled in her book, ranging from the Rabbi/Stand-Up Comedian (tagline: “the world’s only practicing clergyman doing stand-up comedy…intentionally!”) to the gentleman who is a gardener by day and a police offer at night.  The name of this person’s gardening business?  “Lawn Enforcement” of course…

So if you’re feeling that your talents would be too constrained by devoting your days to just a single occupational path, “One Person, Multiple Careers” might be a great read for you!  Without question, we’re going to see even more “slashees” in the days to come, given the changing nature of today’s world of work…

Are You Adaptable? Are You Sure?

I can’t resist penning a few thoughts today about the subject of adaptability, since it’s been on my mind a lot lately in terms of the current economic conditions these days — and how people are responding to them.

For starters, I’m going to throw out a definition of adaptability that I hope most people would agree with.  To me, the concept can be boiled down to: “Changing one’s behavior in response to changes in the environment.”  This definition can be applied effectively to a wide number of situations, whether one talks about the small, furry mammals that outlived the dinosaurs (hiding under rocks apparently was a great adaptive strategy!) or the fact that certain viruses are able to mutate (i.e. adapt) in order to develop resistance to antibiotics.  Everywhere you look, in fact, you’ll find examples where the people, animals, or organisms that change their strategies in response to their changing environments survive–and those that don’t, or who turn a blind eye to the world around them, perish.

This is what has me concerned.  From my vantage point as a career coach, I think we’re now past the point that we can write off the current economic conditions out there as “just another” recession or market slowdown.  There are clearly a number of factors that are making this downturn more severe than the others we’ve witnessed in the past, and even if the current government stimulus measures end up working as advertised, it seems certain that the economy we’re going to see on the other side of the trough will still be fundamentally different than the one of the past.  Health care benefits are going to be handled differently.  Consumer spending habits will change.  And Americans will be looking at their retirement planning needs in a whole new light, given the recent performance of the stock market.  So whether we like it or not, I think it’s utterly safe to say that our environment is changing, drastically, and that the time for people to start adapting to it is now.  I’ve seen too many “Tyrannasaurus Rex” candidates lately (people who have been top performers in their field for decades) getting their butts kicked by the conditions out there and having little success finding new employment by solely relying on the traditional methods that have always worked for them in the past.

So this takes us back to my original question in the title of this post.  ARE you adaptable?  ARE you changing your behavior (particularly job search methods and spending habits) in response to the conditions out there?  From what I’m observing, there still seems to be a heavy over-reliance on sending resumes around, surfing job boards, and the like, versus people getting creative and trying out some alternate methods for finding work.  There are thousands of such approaches one could experiment with (read Guerilla Marketing for Job Hunters as one source of inspiration) and all of you are fully capable with coming up with some creative ideas completely on your own.  A few examples off the top of my head, however, might be:

– Injecting humor/creativity into your resume and cover letters
– Scheduling a day to drop by 10-15 suitable companies, directly, to introduce yourself (the smaller the company the better, obviously)
– Sending your resume via snail mail, or fax, instead of e-mail
– Starting a blog to trumpet your thoughts/ideas/wisdom about your industry or occupational field
– Partnering with other professionals in transition to bid on projects
– Forming a job search club, hobby club, or other social group to boost your networking reach
– Opening up your geographical or salary parameters
– Ignoring your job search for a day, or a week, or a month to focus on your authentic passions

Are these kinds of unconventional techniques guaranteed to work?  Absolutely not.  That’s the point, though.  If you’ve been trying the traditional methods of finding employment for months, and they haven’t been very productive, it’s time to start testing out some new approaches to see if you can find an “adaptive strategy” that will generate a higher response rate.  Again, the list above is just a small collection of examples.  The sky is truly the limit in terms of the ideas you might be able to come up with if you give yourself permission to think outside the box and experiment with some non-traditional ways of connecting with employers and decision-makers.

Adaptability = behavior change.  Think about it!

LinkedIn Answers: Straight to your Inbox!

For those out there who may not be familiar with LinkedIn’s “Answers” feature, it’s really one of the neatest things going on the Internet these days, at least in my humble opinion.  The basic concept is that you think up just about any business- or career-related question under the sun that you’re dying to get some feedback and advice around — and then you post your question on the Answers portion of the LinkedIn site to see what 31 million other users of the system might have to say about it.

Over the years, I’ve used this resource with my clients to solicit input on a number of tricky “gray area” issues, ranging from complex salary negotiations to niche career research to whether or not a job candidate should disclose a pregnancy that’s only three months along.  And in general, the advice that my clients have received back is incredibly valuable.  Even if you don’t always agree with everything that everybody has to say, it’s very interesting to see the range of perspectives that are out there, and best of all you can weigh the “credibility” of each answer based on the background of the people providing it — since each response to your question is listed along with the author’s name, job title, and current employer.  Post a resume-related question, for example, and within a day or two you’ll likely get a cross-section of useful advice from dozens of recruiters, career coaches, resume-writers, HR professionals, and functional hiring managers from around the country.

The impetus behind writing this post, however, wasn’t simply to toot the horn of this resource, since I suspect many of you out there are already somewhat familiar with it.  My main reason for writing, instead, was to let you know (if you don’t already) that you can have LinkedIn monitor certain key categories of “Answers” that get posted and then have these questions/answers automatically sent to your e-mail inbox (or other places) for ongoing review.

Personally, I find that this is a terrific way to stay current in your field and expose yourself to a steady stream of new thoughts, perspectives, and ideas.  For example, I’m set up to have any LinkedIn Q&A related to career issues automatically sent to my blog reading software each day, where I can review it at my leisure and harvest it for useful pearls of wisdom.  Many of my readers out there, however, might want to also track information from the dozens of other “Answers” categories and subcategories that are available, ranging from Green Business to Franchising to Mobile Marketing to Organizational Development.  It’s a lot cheaper than getting an advanced degree in these subjects, and honestly, at times I think the topics raised and answers given are SO incredibly current and on point, it can be equally as valuable!

So to build your own set of automatic LinkedIn Answers feeds, just visit the Answers portion of the LinkedIn site, use the category menu on the right side of the screen to find a category (or subcategory) that interests you, and then click on the “Subscribe to New Questions In…” button you’ll see on the right side of the screen, under the category menu.  At that point, a list of common RSS Feed readers will come up (e.g. Yahoo, Bloglines, Google, etc.) that you can select — or you can just copy the default RSS link shown and configure it to deliver the information to your normal e-mail inbox, since most modern e-mail browsers (including Outlook 2007) allow this functionality.

If you’re totally new to RSS feeds and how to use them, of course, you might have to search for the word “RSS” in the Help menu of your e-mail system for assistance, but all in all it shouldn’t take you more than a minute or two to get things configured properly — and to steer this valuable info to a place where you can review it, each day!

Personal Branding: A Recruiter’s Perspective

Having just sent out the March issue of my monthly career newsletter, I was pleased to receive an immediate positive response from my good friend Jim Krouskop, a Partner over at The Laurel Group recruiting firm.  Jim had written to compliment me on some of the recent thoughts I shared on the importance of personal branding, and with his permission, I’m reprinting the comments he submitted since I think it’s always enlightening for job hunters to hear certain key concepts validated both by career coaches like myself, as well as the recruiters who sit, more or less, on the other side of the desk.

Here’s what Jim had to say on the personal branding subject — i.e. the importance of professionals getting laser-focused on their goals and working hard to identify the unique points of differentiation they can offer over other candidates:

“Your newsletter is brilliant, as usual.  I was particularly happy to see a couple of articles re: personal branding.  As a recruiter, it has to be my #1 piece of advice to candidates.  Establishing a personal brand, managing and marketing that brand is so critical in getting a seat at the interview table and also ultimately getting hired.  I see so many resumes and meet too many candidates that have not grasped this concept and established their own brand.

I am a car enthusiast, so I like to use the analogy of candidates and cars.  First, we all have to decide what kind of car we are: truck, family sedan, sports car?  It is all very similar to the functional role that we can play within an organization.  Once a candidate figures this out, they can work on polishing their unique brand (reliable, sporty, safe, economical, etc).

So many candidates do not understand that an organization will not buy a pickup truck when they are shopping for a 4-door sedan.  Yet they try to sell the truck.  They wonder why they don’t get callbacks for a Director of Marketing role when they’ve been a Product Manager, Project Manager, and Analyst in the past.  Seems so simple.  But even if candidates understand what functional role they have, it is also important to differentiate themselves and the personal stories you told about Jill, Anthea, and Janice are spot on.

The disturbing trend I am seeing now is that candidates and resumes are trying to be all things to all hiring managers, otherwise known as generalists.  Most hiring managers do not shop for all-purpose cars, they always have a specific type in mind.  The generalists in particular are destined to set themselves up for failure going after roles that they realistically do not have a chance of obtaining.  This leads to a vicious cycle of rejection and frustration, which can be avoided.  If a candidate is a fully-optioned car, they need to understand to only market the options that the prospective buyer is seeking.  The rest is superfluous.

Please continue to emphasize brand management and marketing with your clients.  It is one of the best things they can do to increase their marketability, particularly during these difficult times.  If anything, employers are becoming even more particular with their shopping, not less.”

Great input — thanks, Jim!

Book Review: Getting Things Done (David Allen)

I’ve always been impressed by those people who have a sprawling, lifelong passion for a subject — be it venomous snakes, antique telephones, Celtic history, or blimps — and who are then able to communicate this passion in a way that makes the information approachable and that gets OTHER people excited about it.  David Allen has such a passion.  His chosen field of study is personal productivity, and in 2001, he wrote Getting Things Done to share everything he had loved and learned about how people can organize their workspace and work habits for maximum effectiveness.

Having had a number of people I trust recommend this book over the past few years, I finally picked up a copy to see what all the fuss was about.  And while I’ll confess, the organizational system I currently have in place tends to work pretty well for me, I was still impressed by the depth in which the author treats the subject — and how he not only teaches people a system for getting their affairs in order, but also explains the psychology behind his recommendations, which really brings the material to life.  This layer of underlying rationale is particularly useful in those cases when his suggestions are somewhat counterintuitive, like when he recommends against the use of hanging file folders or says that computer-printed file labels tend to become an obstacle, not an aid, in getting one’s office whipped into shape.

I also enjoyed the fact that this book included both high-level, strategic advice, such as a four-step process for deciding what projects to tackle first, along with very tactical tips such as not filling your file cabinets more than 2/3 full, lest you start resenting (and avoiding) the filing process.  This last point, in particular, rang especially true, since it exactly describes the love/hate relationship I have with my home filing cabinet!  Additionally, the author presents a “master plan” for getting organized that includes a step-by-step workflow chart and a set of seven final categories that ALL of your saved information should fall under.  Again, it’s pretty fascinating to watch somebody make a formal science out of an activity that most of us take for granted or tend to perform by the seat of our pants.

So at the end of the day, if any of you out there are struggling to tame your to-do list or to set your job search regimen up for optimal efficiency, Getting Things Done might be a worthwhile investment.  I can’t imagine there’s been a more thorough book on the subject that’s been written, to date, and I guarantee you’ll walk away looking at your daily task list in a whole new light!  And while we’re on the subject, those interested in getting more organized should also check out the highly-acclaimed 43 Folders website by Merlin Mann, or consider hiring local organizational expert Debbie Rosemont of Simply Placed (hi Debbie!) to come crack the whip and get your home and office workspaces running like clockwork.  Great resources, both!

Any organizational tips that any of you out there would care to share, especially that might relate to running a methodical, uber-productive job search?