When In Doubt: Hire the Best Writing Skills…

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Kris Dunn has a great blog postover at The HR Capitalist entitled “When in Doubt: Hire the Best Writing Skills…”.

In his post, Kris states that a person’s ability to write well is strongly correlated with their ability to communicate verbally.  Kris goes on to write that with the large volume of email communication that occurs in Corporate America, strong writing skills have never been more important.

Image Courtesy of Creative Commons by © Peter Lindberg http://ow.ly/UuCS6
Image Courtesy of Creative Commons by © Peter Lindberg http://ow.ly/UuCS6

And Kris clarifies what he means by writing skills:

“When I say hire someone with writing skills, I’m not talking about someone who can write term papers, because let’s face it, no one reads those. I’m talking about the ability to write down some thoughts in an engaging, personable, influencing manner.  You know it when you see it.”

I definitely concur…

Over the years I have noticed an extremely strong correlation between the ability to write well and overall job success. The people who write well tend to speak well, and in turn, tend to do their jobs well.

Like everything else in life – there are exceptions to the rule.

But bottom line –  the connection is definitely there.

 

How Long Should A Job Search Take?

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Liz Ryan has a great article over on the Forbes website entitled, “How Long Should A Job Search Take?”.

Liz writes:

“I hate to think about the number of times I’ve sat on a panel and heard a fellow panelist say “As a job-seeker, you have to prepare for the long haul. It could take months and months to find the right job.”

Every time I heard that I kept the fake plastic smile pasted on my face, because I’m an actress. I was raging inside.

I am sick and tired of hearing standard brainless job-search advice repeated like it was gospel, including the line ‘Expect to spend months looking for your next job.’ “

She goes on to say:

“When you teach people to be passive and wait patiently for a broken system to grind its way along, you disempower them.”

Image Courtesy of Creative Commons by © Jan Ramroth http://ow.ly/TVvvF
Image Courtesy of Creative Commons by © Jan Ramroth http://ow.ly/TVvvF

Liz is absolutely right.

It’s funny how we routinely defer to the advice of the so-called ‘experts’ – and often to our own determent.

I learned early in my career not to listen to the ‘experts’.

At the first Recruiting Firm I worked at, I remember returning to the office after the long Thanksgiving Holiday Weekend.  I was surprised that the office lacked its usual buzz.  It seemed like no one was on the phones.  The office was quiet.

I walked over to Dan, one of the Sr. Recruiters and asked him what was going on.  Dan looked up from the newspaper he was reading and said to me, “Kid, it’s the Holiday Season.  No one is going to be hiring between now and New Year’s Day.  Everything is going to be quiet. You’ll just have to sit tight and wait for hiring to pick up again after the Holidays.”

Unfortunately, at that time I was broke and had a young family to support. I did not have the luxury to sit around and wait.  So I did the only thing I knew how to do – I got on the phone and just “smiled & dialed”.  And you know what – that December was my best month billing as a Recruiter.

And – going forward – for every year thereafter – I found that December is always one of my strongest months for the year.

After that experience, I decided that I would ignore the advice of the so-called experts. I wasn’t going to sit around and wait for business to pick up. I was always going to go out and make something happen.

And my experience as a Recruiter mirrors Liz Ryan’s advice to job seekers.

In the article, Liz advises job seekers that they should not just sit around and expect their job search to last a certain predetermined amount of months because some so-called expert claims that is the case.

As Liz writes:

“You have way more influence on your marketability, your job search and your career than you think you have.“

Facing Challenges

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I was interviewing a candidate of mine recently – and during the course of the interview – it became apparent that she had faced a number of challenges during the course of both her career and her personal life.

I asked her about her approach to facing the various challenges / obstacles that we all inevitably face in life.

She replied simply that; “Challenges are where experiences are born.”

Image Courtesy of Creative Commons by © Daniel Wetzel http://ow.ly/OSCHj
Image Courtesy of Creative Commons by © Daniel Wetzel http://ow.ly/OSCHj

What a great answer – and what a great approach to life. Most of us prefer to take the “easy road” and prefer a path where we are most likely to avoid any obstacles.  And when we are faced with an obstacle – we mutter and curse our “bad luck”.

However, the person I had interviewed has a much different approach. She does not shy away from obstacles – in fact she relishes them.  She saw the various challenges she encounters not as a negative or a thing to avoid. Rather she sees them as opportunities to learn, grow and get better.

With a philosophy like that – it is easy to see why she has been so successful.

The Perfect LinkedIn Profile

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Neil Patel is an expert in Online Marketing.  His blogs and websites are wildly successful.  But not only is he successful, but Neil routinely provides a wealth of information for anyone looking to market themselves online.

Image Courtesy of Creative Commons by © Sheila Scarborough http://ow.ly/MAU1H
Image Courtesy of Creative Commons by © Sheila Scarborough http://ow.ly/MAU1H

He wrote a brief blog post on How to Structure a Perfect LinkedIn Profile.  While the post is targeted towards people who are building on-line businesses, the principles of building and maintaining a strong LinkedIn profile apply to anyone in business, including job seekers.

You can read the post here.

How Managers Should Say Goodbye to Your Employees

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Kevin Chou over on LinkedIn Pulse has a wonderful post about how to say goodbye to an employee who is leaving for a position at another company.

Image Courtesy of Creative Commons by © Reynermedia http://ow.ly/LPaKq
Image Courtesy of Creative Commons by © Reynermedia http://ow.ly/LPaKq

Kevin writes:

“As founding CEO of Kabam, I take a certain pride in saying goodbye to my employees. But not in a Donald Trump-like “You’re Fired!” way.

When I do my job right, Kabam employees rapidly grow their skills and advance their careers. An unfortunate bi-product is Kabam employees also rise to A-list status with industry recruiters. Retaining high performers is almost as difficult as hiring them in the first place, and sometimes we lose people to other companies. When that happens, saying goodbye is bittersweet. I don’t like to lose valued employees, but I am proud to have given them the opportunity to grow in their careers and become even more marketable.”

Kevin’s words echo the sentiment of a good client and good friend of mine.  About 15 years ago, he said to me:

“Being a good manager is a lot like being a good parent.  A good parent spends time with their child preparing them for the future.  They teach them, challenge them and help that child to grow.  And at some point, the child will “leave the nest” and venture forth into the world.  While the parent will obviously has some degree of sadness when their child leaves – no good parent would ever attempt to stop the child from leaving.  Instead the parent will possess a sense of pride in the future success of that child and rightfully feel that they have helped play a role in their future success.

Good managers should act the same way.”

Sage advice indeed….

 

 

Resilience – The Key to Success

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There’s a great post on the Harvard Business Review by Rosabeth Moss Kanter entitled: Surprises Are the New Normal; Resilience Is the New Skill.

Rosabeth writes:

The difference between winners and losers is how they handle losing.

That’s a key finding from my ongoing research on great companies and effective leaders: no one can completely avoid troubles and potential pitfalls are everywhere, so the real skill is the resilience to climb out of the hole and bounce back.

Image Courtesy of Creative Commons by FMWRC - U.S. Army - Official Image Archive - Athens Greece - XXVIII Olympiad
Image Courtesy of Creative Commons by FMWRC – U.S. Army – Official Image Archive – Athens Greece – XXVIII Olympiad

One of the things I have noticed over the years in working with successful executives is that NONE OF THEM had a steady rise to the top.  They all experienced “bumps in the road” as they progressed in their career.  Some of these mistakes were self-inflicted.  Others were the result of factors totally beyond the executive’s control. But what these executives had in common was that while they all experienced adversity – they all possessed the ability to bounce back.  While less successful people would have folded under the first whiff of adversity – these executives just rolled up their sleeves and got back to work.

Bottom line: Successful people just don’t quit.

And Kanter concludes:

Potential troubles lurk around every corner, whether they stem from unexpected environmental jolts or individual flaws and mistakes. Whatever the source, what matters is how we deal with them. When surprises are the new normal, resilience is the new skill.

Adversity is to be expected – And change is the new norm.

Which is why in today’s world – the skill we all need most is Resilience.

Pay More For Top Talent – A Winning Bet

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Josh Linkner is a very successful entrepreneur, VC, and bestselling author.

He wrote a fantastic  article about the importance of companies paying top dollar to ensure they acquire top talent.

And here’s the thing to remember – Josh is not some academic theorizing about the value of top talent.  This is a man with a proven track record of building successful companies. He speaks from experience.

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Image Courtesy of Creative Commons by © www.flazingo.com/creativecommons http://ow.ly/Isd6c

Josh writes:

As the companies in our portfolio continue to grow, the biggest conundrum for our leaders is hiring top talent. Many find high salaries hard to swallow, especially on a startup budget and when they’re not making as much money as the potential recruits they’re considering. Tough cookies. Paying more for A+ talent at your company is worth the investment many times over, 99.9% of the time.

He continues by writing:

While it’s easy to tally up your “savings” by settling for a B or C-level person, the upside that an A+ team member can bring will far exceed the near term cost difference. When you get down to it, the “risk” of paying up for the best and brightest is simply not a risk at all. Rather, it’s the way you’ll accelerate growth and ultimately win big.

Bottom line – when a person with a successful record of building companies preaches about the importance of paying top dollar to secure the best talent – we would all do well to listen….

5 Reasons to Consider a Lateral Move

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In my last post, Career Advice – Step Back To Step Ahead, I wrote about the advice I had received from a very successful Sr. Executive I know about the value of making a lateral career move.

Well, it appears that Megan Ragsdale, writing over at at the Career Revolution website concurs.

She recently wrote a post entitled, 5 Reasons a Lateral Move is Better than a Promotion.

In her post, Megan wrote:

“It’s human nature. We want to move up in the world, make more money, improve our social standing and even increase our power. In a world that’s so focused on being upwardly mobile, why would anyone waste her time making career moves from side to side?…..One common element among those most successful people is that they understand the difference between pay and promotion and career progression, and that you don’t need the first two things in order to achieve the third.”

Megan goes on to list the following reasons:

1) Lateral career moves can better position you for the future.

2) Parallel career moves demonstrate strong learning agility. 

3) Moving laterally improves your visibility with a broader group of leaders. 

4) It shows your boss and your leaders that you’re willing to do the work. 

5) Lateral moves can keep you better engaged. 

Megan’s complete post can be found here.

It is a good read and definitely provides some interesting perspective.

Warren Buffett’s Career Advice

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Warren Buffett is a legendary investor without peer – but the Oracle of Omaha can offer some sage career advice as well.

Image Courtesy of Creative Commons by Aaron Friedman http://ow.ly/HDTa1
Image Courtesy of Creative Commons by Aaron Friedman http://ow.ly/HDTa1

According to a post on the Lifehacker site:

“Fortune magazine drops in on a Q&A Warren Buffett offered to 150 business students, and the advice dispensed by the Oracle of Omaha on investing and money in general is elegantly simple. 

When one student asked Buffett how to best spend his free time to further his investing knowledge, Buffett avoided generalized advice and told him to stick to what he knows. Fortune paraphrases:

For most people, the bulk of their income is going to come from earning power in their chosen profession. Therefore, from the standpoint of building wealth, free time is better spent sharpening one’s professional skills rather than studying investing.“

Warren’s advice is prudent.

But how many of us actually do this?  How many of us actually spend our free time doing things that will enable us to get better at our jobs and make us more marketable?

As a Recruiter, I often hear people lament about how their careers are stagnant, or that they are not earning what they think they are worth.  But when I ask them what are they doing to invest in themselves and get better at their jobs, often there is no response.

Maybe – if we are really serious about developing our careers – we should follow Warren’s advice and spend more time developing our professional skills and less time following other pursuits.

Maybe we should all start investing in ourselves.

 

2014 – America’s best year of job growth since 1999

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2014 ended up being America’s best year for job growth since 1999 according to a post by Matt Egan and Heather Long on the CNN website.

According to the post:

“More than 2.95 million jobs were created last year, according to the latest figures from the Department of Labor.

It’s encouraging news as the U.S. tries to put the Great Recession and sluggish recovery solidly behind it. Many economists expect 2015 to be equally as strong, if not better, for job seekers….’American businesses are on a hiring binge,’ said Sal Guatieri, senior economist at BMO Capital Markets. ‘It clearly suggests the economy is on a much stronger growth track than the first four years of the recovery.'”

But the news wasn’t all good.

The article continues:

“While job growth continues to pick up steam, wages have not. The government said average hourly earnings fell slightly in December from the previous month.”

Nevertheless, while wage growth has been negligible, the overall jobs situation is still much stronger than it has been in years.

And that is good news for all of us….