"Toto, we're not in Kansas anymore"

Imagine that you've spent hours and hours studying for an algebra test and that you feel reasonably confident that you're ready for the exam. You show up, take your seat, and the teacher hands out the exam papers to the class. You begin to read, and to your great dismay you discover that the exam is about history, not algebra.

How could this happen? You're reasonably sure that the teacher said to be ready for an algebra test, so that's what you studied. When you question the teacher about this surprising turn of events, you're told that sometimes things change unexpectedly and that you just have to adjust to the new circumstances.

This scenario is pretty much what has happened to a lot of people who are caught up in the groundswell of change that has occurred in the economy over the last year and a half.

Jobs and futures that we once thought were secure are now gone like a wisp of smoke from a campfire. That doesn't mean that new jobs and futures aren't out there, but they aren't going to come find you...you have to find them...and the rules for how to go about it are completely different than those you used to get and hold onto your former positions.

It's human nature to want to hold onto the familiar in our lives, sometimes even when the familiar is not all that good. It's also natural to grieve the loss of a job or any other big change in life. In my consulting practice, I tell displaced clients to give themselves a few days to a week to feel sorry for themselves, then put it in the past and focus on the future.

That focus, however, has to be properly directed and channeled in order to bear fruit. An old skill set, even if it's a skill set that still has value in the new economy, is not enough to get you in the door for new opportunities. No matter how good you were/are at what you used to do, there are a lot of other people who are also good at that task and you're competing with them for fewer positions than there used to be in your field.

The economy will turn around again, but employment figures are a lagging indicator. Expect that it will be another year to sixteen months before you see significant hiring again...and some fields are not going to come back at all. Employers will generally try to get more productivity out of the remaining work force before they will consider adding new people. In the meantime, unless you have the resources and the patience to wait it out, you would be advised to adjust your focus to the new standards required for re-entry into the job scene.

Getting noticed, nailing the interview, and negotiating the compensation package require different skills and knowledge than what worked in the past. Don't be a victim to your own reluctance to recognize that "we're not in Kansas anymore."

The Only Stats That Matter

Are you getting interviews?

Are you getting job offers?

Nothing else counts. OK, you can tell yourself that it's a number's game (and it really is) and that if you just send out enough resumes you'll eventualy get an interview. But is it THE INTERVIEW that you want, and is "eventually" soon enough for you? Would you like to reduce those numbers and increase your chances of getting the interview, sooner rather than later?

If you do get an interview, but you don't get a job offer, that opportunity is gone. Do you ever leave an interview thinking to yourself, "I wish I'd said...."?

In this economy, you can't afford to send out less than the best representation of who you are and what you have to offer, and you can't afford to blow an interview opportunity because you were not prepared for the experience.

If you're fortunate enough to get the job offer, have you experienced the "winner's curse"? That's the feeling you get when you're dealing with someone and they immediately accept your terms, which makes you think, "I was too low...I could have done better."

All of these experiences are common, mainly because most people so rarely have to go through them. These are people who are very good at what they do but who haven't had to market themselves in a very long time and don't really know how to do it, especially in this buyer's market where the rules are totally different than they were during the booming economic times of a couple of years ago.

Unfortunately, we don't get "do-overs" in the job and career search process. Each opportunity is too valuable to waste. Knowledge of a few "do's and don'ts" in resumes and interviews can make an amazing difference in your effectiveness in the job and career search. Take the time to get it right.

If you were going to take some kind of important exam or engage in some demanding physical activity in the near future, would you study and prepare your mind and body for what you knew was coming? Of course you would! Don't let something as important as your job and career opportunities go to waste because you were not ready. It's not that hard to do, and it can make all the difference between failure and success.

Watch out for job scams

Following a disaster, such as a hurricane, flood, or some other havoc-wreaking event in people's lives, there are some who would take advantage of those who have been affected by these events. The current economic climate, while not as sudden or violent as a natural disaster, has nonetheless had a devastating effect on many who find themselves unemployed. These circumstances make some people easy targets for the scam artists who are only too happy to separate them from their money.

Here are a few "watch out!" tips to consider if you're one of the unemployed statistics:

1. Don't pay anyone any money who says they can find you a job. Reputable executive search professionals ("headhunters") get their fees from the companies who engage their services. They don't charge candidates. You should never pay for "exclusive" or "confidential" job leads.

2. Don't sign any contracts or agreements with any organization or individual who says they can help you tap into the "hidden" job market. There is no hidden job market. Recruiters and employers don't hide their positions...they try to make sure people know about them so they can fill them.

3. Be especially wary of those "work at home" scams that require an up-front investment on your part. I've never seen one that passed the "smell" test.

4. When dealing with a recruiter, don't share personal or confidential information that is irrelevant to the job search. Information such as your social security number and/or your date of birth are generally not part of the phone interview process. That information may be asked on a formal employment application, but that is generally done in person on the day of the interview.

5. If you think you may have given out confidential information to someone you don't completely trust, contact the credit bureaus (Experiean, Trans Union, and Equifax) and tell them to put a note on your file that you must be contacted in person before any new accounts are opened in your name. This is a good safeguard against identity theft.

6. When dealing with anyone who says that they can help you with your career search, get a thorough explanation of what they intend to do and what it will cost. The good ones will be glad you asked and happy to explain it to you.

7. Even though you may be tempted, stay away from the Internet "diploma mills" that offer bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees for "life experiences." They're not worth the paper they're written on, and most employers and recruiters will check them out if you list a degree from one of them on your resume. If it turns out to be bogus, your chances at the job vanish.

If you see or hear of other scams out there, let me know and I'll publish them.

Do you need a career consultant?

Maybe, maybe not.

If you're going from one job to another job that is very similar to what you've already been doing and you know the people very well, you probably don't need any help. Or, if you've had good career advice in the past and you know how to compose your resume for maximum effectiveness, how to avoid the "killer" mistakes, and you know:
*what questions to ask in the interview
*how to answer the questions they ask you
*how to effectively negotiate a favorable compensation package
*and, what to do after the interview,

You probably don't need any help.

However, if you're changing companies and/or trying to get into a new field, you could probably benefit from some professional resume and interviewing advice. The problem that most people don't realize until it's too late is that if you pursue a position through submitting a resume or even getting an interview and it does not go well, you'll never know if you could have done better had you been better prepared.

If you're comfortable acting as your own CPA at tax time, or representing yourself in legal matters, or giving yourself an annual physical exam, you're probably not a candidate for professional career advice. You can also try to fix your own golf swing, serve as your own financial/retirement counselor, and get educated by reading a lot of books...but it's not the same as getting professional help or getting a degree.

However, if it's been a while since you last put a resume together or were in a job interview, you can almost always improve your chances of success if you get professional help. Following the example of everyone else is a recipe for assuring yourself that you wind up like everyone else...still looking for a job.


The challenge is that we never see ourselves as other see us. A second set of eyes and ears, expecially if that other set of eyes and ears has dealt with hundreds of companies that have explained what they like and don't like to see and hear in resumes and interviews, can make the difference between success and frustration in the job and career hunt.

A qualified and experienced professional may also see strengths and talents in you that you had no idea you possessed. A good career advisor can show you how to market those skills to your benefit.

Is it expensive? Compared to staying unemployed or in a job that you don't like? No, not at all.

Four Seconds That Can Change Your Life

Four seconds...not a lot of time, is it?

Think of all the important decisions you can make in four seconds. If you like to read books, chances are that you can decide in that amount of time whether the cover is interesting enough that you would like to open the book and examine it more closely. It may be true that you can't tell a book from its cover, but the cover can make all the difference in whether you decide to open it and examine it further.

Resumes are no different. The first four seconds represents how much time recruiters and/or hiring managers spend deciding whether to look at most resumes. It doesn't sound like a lot of time, and it isn't actually, but that's the average amount of time that you have to get someone's attention with a piece of paper.

When I first heard that number I was skeptical, but then I noticed that as a recruiter that's about how much time I would spend on a resume to see if I wanted to pay attention to it. Anyone who does the same thing over and over develops a routine that works best for them in that task. People who look at resumes are looking for specific information that pertains to the position they need to fill in their organization, and if the resume looks too "busy"...too much "stuff" hiding what they want to find, they skip it. A practiced eye needs about four seconds to determine whether a resume is worth reading.

Why is this four second rule so common? One reason, and it's not your fault, but it is your problem. That is, most jobs have an incredibly high number of unqualified people who apply for them, and it takes just as much time to read a bad resume as a good one, so those who "read" them develop a routine way of perusing and analyzing resumes that allows them to separate the contenders from the pretenders. After the separation, they go back and spend more time on the "contender" pile. If your resume is not in that pile, you're not even considered for the position.


What's the lesson here? Very simple...get your resume into a format that will catch the eye of the reader and that will put you in the right pile or the right electronic folder. Otherwise, your four seconds is the closest you'll get to that job.

The "Law of Unintended Consequences"

The law of unintended consequences has been around forever, but it derrived its name probably from a an article written by sociologist Robert K. Merton in 1936. Merton's Article, entitled The Unintended Consequences of Purposive Social Action, dealt with how actions, especially those on a large scale as by governments, may create unintended results. As true as this may be on a large scale, it's also true with regards to individual behavior.

Sometimes it's the most benign actions and behaviors on the part of an individual that may bring about large scale changes and/or consequences from those behaviors. These consequences may be good, bad, or neutral, but they diverge from the original intent of the action. They have happened to all of us at one time or another. Perhaps you went to the grocery store to get a gallon of milk and met your future spouse in the checkout line. Maybe you were thumbing through a travel magazine in the doctor's office and ran across an advertisement that told you about a place where you decided to take a vacation. We've all had stories like that that happened to us or those we know.

In the job game, the law of unintended consequences is a major player. I've talked to hundreds of people about their jobs and careers, and while many of them are the result of focused and directed effort, a sizeable number of them came about because of chance meetings, networking, a "friend of a friend", or some such innocent activity. While the jobs and the people vary, what all of their stories have in common is that they all happened while the person affected was doing something.

When you're involved in a job/career hunt, the worst thing you can do is nothing...sitting around the house feeling sorry for yourself. You have to put yourself in a position to get lucky. You never know when a chance encounter may take place that can open the door to your new career. I've talked to several people who were inspired to start their own businesses when they saw a need or an opportunity for something as they were on the way to do something else.

According to the US Department of Labor, the average person will change careers three to five times during their lifetime. Just because you may have had a particular field of study in college or may have been in a job for a decade or two doesn't mean that you'll be doing the same thing for the rest of your life.

In this economy, many have been downsized, laid-off, terminated, or shown the door because of company closures, mergers, reductions-in-force, or acquisitions...but none of those circumstances mean that you have to accept permanent "used-to-be" status. You know more than you think that you know. Chances are that many, if not most, of your skills are transferable to other industries.

What's the point of this message? Get out, get busy...volunteer...network...stay connected through whatever means...but give yourself a chance to get lucky. The chances of something good happening are much greater if you're doing something rather than doing nothing.

The Real Skinny on Getting Hired

It's a sad but true fact about life that most of us learn lessons best that are learned the hard way. One of the factors that makes "the hard way" so hard is that more often than not, there is no second chance, and that is particularly true in today's job market.

We're in a buyer's market right now, and there are no signs on the horizon that things are going to change anytime soon. One factor that makes it so hard for jobseekers today is that the rules that were in place several years ago when they were hired don't apply anymore. If you were hired into your job (or your former job) at anytime in the last 15 to 20 years ago, chances are very good that your skill set and/or your potential was enough to put you on the payroll. We were in a seller's market then, and most people had multiple offers and opportunities.

Things have changed.

Today, it takes a lot more than a skill set and/or experience. The unemployment rolls are filled with bright, industrious, qualified people who know everything they need to know about the job tasks, but nothing about how to market themselves to a potential employer. With the competition as stiff as it is out there, there are lots of candidates who know as much as you and who have as much (if not more) experience as you. In that type of competitive environment, if you send out a resume that is the standard name, objective, work history, education, and references format as everyone else, your chances of getting invited for an interview are incredibly small. And if you are fortunate enough to get an interview but go into it poorly prepared in any of several key areas, you'll likely be added to the pile of people who have been turned down before you.

The rules are a lot different in a buyer's market than they are in a seller's market. If you don't know and apply them, don't be surprised when you're still looking months from now. Job opportunities are too valuable to blow because you don't know the new rules and don't know how to present yourself. If your job search strategy is the same as everyone else's, don't be surprisd if your results are just like theirs as well.

Why Recruiters Are Not Your Friend

First, understand that I've owned and operated a successful recruiting business for ten years, so my perspective is one that comes from being on that side of the equation.

It's not that recruiters are hostile to you, as a jobseeker...it's just that you are not where they make their money. Most people have a misunderstanding regarding what recruiters do. I know I did before I started my business. The common perception is that recruiters are always on the hunt for candidates and resumes from anywhere they can find them. There is a small element of truth to that idea but it's a very, very small one.

Recruiters work for client companies who pay their fees, period. They spend their time trying to get search assignments from these companies, and when they get such an assignment they begin searching for the candidate that best fits the profile given to them by their client company.

In the boom years of 2004 - 2008, I averaged receiving at least 40 to 50 unsolicited resumes per week, and quite often after I would get the resume via e-mail I'd get a phone call from the candidate who wanted to verify that I received it. They were assuming that once I received it, my immediate reaction would be to get busy trying to find them a perfect matching job. That type of thinking is the job search equivalent of a needle in a haystack.

Unless your skill set and experience are related to the search(es) that the recruiter is working on at the time, you're not going to get any interest or response from the recruiter. Why?? Because you're not paying them anything!

So, if this is how recruiters work, and you're in the market for a new job and don't know how to find one, what can you do to elicit any help from recruiters?

First, understand that most recruiters work in very narrow fields. Show me a recruiter who tries to be everything for everybody, and I'll show you a very skinny recruiter. Most of them recruit in a field that they worked in before starting their recruiting work. They have contacts, they speak the vocabulary of the industry, and they know the industry culture...all of which are very helpful to them in recruiting for that industry. If you want to send your resume to a recruiter, ask a recruiter you know (or get a referral from someone), call the recruiter, and explain what you want to do, then ask him/her if they know any recruiters who focus on the field where you want to work.

Most successful recruiters have networks of other recruiters that they work with or refer jobs to when it's outside of their particular field. If the recruiter you contact doesn't work in the field where you want a job, it's likely that they will know someone who does recruit in that field. I had a network of 4 or 5 recruiters whose chosen fields overlapped mine to some extent. When I had a search assignment that was a particular challenge, I'd sometimes call one of the others in my network whose expertise overlapped mine, and we would collaborate to fill the assignment and split the fee. When I'd get a search assignment from one of my clients who needed someone outside of the fields where I worked, I'd refer the business to one of the recruiters who worked in that field. When the other recruiter found the right candidate, I'd send them in for an interview. If the candidate got hired, we would split the fee.

The short version of this advice is that if you want to get recruiters involved in helping you, focus on those who work in and know about the industry that you want to join. They may not have anything at that moment that fits you and your skills/experience, but there is at least a lot better chance that they'll hang on to your resume and be able to find it if a good fit does come along. You're wasting your time and theirs if you send your resume out en masse to every recruiter you can find.

Get the Resume Right

For the first few years I was in the recruiting business, the biggest frustration was when I knew that I had a great candidate for a position, but that candidate was rejected out of the box because the client company didn't like the resume. The people I was recruiting were very well qualified for the jobs, but often they wouldn't even get an interview because the hiring manager at the client company just didn't get a good feeling about the candidate from the resume.

For a while I thought that the solution was to find candidates who had better resumes, but what I found was that most people were using variations of the same format. They would find a template somewhere on the internet or from the resume of a friend or relative, and then just put in their own information. They would send out these resumes "en masse" and wait for the calls to start coming in.

Finally, after enough rejections to fill a large barrel, I began to think that maybe the problem was that the resumes just weren't doing a good job of letting the hiring companies know who these people really were, and why they would be a good fit for the jobs. So, I began to ask the employers what they wanted to see and what they didn't want to see on these resumes. It was like the light came on in the darkness. That's when I began to fully understand something that should have been so simple in the beginning; that is, companies hire people, not just skill sets or experiences...and most of the resumes that I and these companies were seeing didn't say much at all about the people behind them.

The result was that I began to scrutinize the resumes very carefully before I sent them to employers. I'd ask myself, "If this is all I can learn about this person, do I want to meet him/her?" More often than not, the answer was a resounding "NO". What I noticed was that when candidates followed all the resume "rules", they were unlikely to get an interview. When they ignored most of the rules and told a little about themselves, they started getting interviews and job offers.

My business went up nearly 60% when I started reviewing and revising candidate resumes.

In this economy, job opportunities are too precious to waste. A candidate whose resume is rejected outright rarely gets a second chance. That's why it's so critical to get it right the first time.

At Austin Career Services, that's what we do. We help individuals who are very good at what they do, but don't know how to market themselves. It all starts with the resume. The only purpose of the resume is to help you get an interview. That's all it does. After that, there are other important steps in the job hunting process, such as the interview, compensation negotitation, and how to leave your current position in the right manner.

We will discuss those areas in another post.

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