I had a lovely meeting this morning with a friend of a friend who’s trying to get started in the business world. She’s bright, well-educated, personable, and kind of lost. As we were talking, I realized that she’s in a situation similar to lots of folks so I thought today I’d briefly share some of the things we discussed in the hopes that since you’re on one side of the hiring equation or the other (looking for work or looking for workers) you’ll chime in.
My first bit of advice was to be visible. The first thing I’m sure you do when you set up a meeting is search around the web to see what you can learn about the person and their company if they’re representing one. If you want to be found, and you probably should, you need to do a couple of things. One is to search for yourself and see what pops up. It’s not just ego, kids: it’s important to monitor what’s out there – all you need is a good friend with a camera and a strange sense of humor and you could have an issue.
If you can’t find yourself, that’s a problem as well. Make sure you control the privacy settings in Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other places to permit what you want out there to be found. You should also, where available, try for the “personal” URL – the one that uses the name folks would be searching. If something is out there that you don’t like, have it removed (email your friends since we know you’re not dumb enough to post your own nasty details).
If there isn’t much about you from a business perspective, and young people generally don’t have that, create it yourself. That’s what I’m doing here. From my perspective, your blog is less about what you write than about how you think. If it’s mostly for business (or to get you hired), then write about that – keep the really personal stuff elsewhere. It’s why I don’t write about politics here – too polarizing. If you can set up a private site to which you can point potential employers which has work examples, writing samples, and your resume, even better (learn how to use the “no index” tag). Finally, make sure all of this stuff is linked together so people who have an interest in you can move seamlessly from place to place.
Next, network like crazy. A huge percentage of the clients with which I’ve been fortunate to work have come via personal recommendations. Let folks know you’re actively looking taking into account that your current employer, if you have one, may see it too so be discrete. Email (not the work account!) is a great tool for this, as is the private mail in any social system.
Finally, take some time and think hard about why you’d hire you. What’s special about you? You can assume there are a dozen other folks with the same education and work experience but there’s probably no one with the same life experience, personality, and thought process. Define what separates you.
That’s the 500 word version of our chat. I could go on for another 5,000 but this is where we started. What do you have to add?
Consult Keith 