Looks Like We Made It – Happy 27th Birthday CPIBN

CPIBN was the first outplacement firm established in Western New York in 1986; for two primary reasons the firm has realized continued success and growth for 27 years…

First, the focus on the firm’s core business and principles. We have always been the “high-touch” provider of outplacement services; believing that personal interaction, one-on-one support and instruction in small group settings foster the best results for those doing a career transition. By providing consistently high quality services, over time, we have developed a loyal and diverse client base that trusts CPIBN to help their professional and executive employees find the right direction and destination for their career.

Second, establishing a culture of change and new ideas. In the outplacement business, that includes embracing new technology and adjusting our training to include new job search technologies. But a key to the growth of CPIBN has been the ability to diversify into related talent management businesses including Recruitment, Management/Leadership Training, On-Boarding and Coaching; providing more “turn-key” solutions for our client base’s talent management needs.

Our reward is enriching the lives of those we serve; seeing them land “the right position”, helping them to be better leaders, helping them to succeed in a new role, or preparing them for retirement.

We thank all our valued customers for their support over the last 27 years; and we will continue to use these pillars of our business as our foundation while serving clients, job search candidates, and the Western New York community in the coming years.

Feeling Stuck?

If you just can’t get past that feeling of being “stuck in a rut”, check out this article that was published a few months back in the New York Times. A Career Coach may be just what you need.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/jobs/from-career-coaches-unfiltered-feedback.html

What is a resume?

Before you create your resume; it is important that you understand exactly what a resume is. I ask people this question “what is a resume?” regularly and rarely do I get the best or most accurate answer. Too often the answer is “an introduction” or “a career summary” or “a list of skills and experience”. While all are partially correct; they certainly don’t answer the question completely.

In order to best answer the question; you need to understand that you as a job seeker are in reality a salesperson. Successfully job seekers do exactly what successful salespeople do; effectively market a product to potential clients and get those folks to buy your product. The only difference is that the product that you are selling is yourself (rather than a car, an appliance, or a widget).

Once you understand that a job seeker is in reality a salesperson, the answer to the question “what is a resume?” comes into focus. A resume is most accurately described as a two page marketing brochure. A document that talks about the best features of your product, how your product is better than other products out there and why someone should want to buy your product.

Think of your resume as a marketing brochure and you’ll be able to create a more powerful document.

The Most Important Questions

 Too often job seekers spend their time looking for answers to the wrong questions. The wrong questions are “What have I done in my career?” and “What might someone hire me to do?”. Though both these questions are relevant, they are secondary in the job search until you are worried about next month’s mortgage payment.

Having worked with hundreds of professional and executive job seekers in career transition, I can without hesitation say that the majority of those who are happiest in their next role spend very little time on those two questions. Instead, they spend a majority of their time on the most important questions, “What do I want to do next?” and “Who do I want to work for next?”.

Once you have answered these two questions, you can be pro-active and reach out to those companies. In essence, to get the best job, where you will be happiest; you want companies to know about you before they post a job, not after they post a job.

Why? Because once a job is posted, your level of competition goes up exponentially. Just over 50% of jobs filled every year are never posted (including the job that I am in now), so depending primarily on posted jobs is a terrible strategy.

If you could have a job at any company, what would it be? Make your top 10 companies list. Then actively pursue contacts at these companies to land a job. All is takes is one of the ten and you are at one of the best places for you as opposed to a place that has a job opening.

The Seasonal Nature of Job Search

I think that most people are aware that ice cream shops do better sales in August than in March; it is well accepted as a seasonal business. Not as well known is the fact that job search (hiring activity) is also a seasonal business with predictable peaks and valleys during the same months each year. Knowing the season nature of hiring can help you understand why job posting and interviewing seem to be slow at certain times and abundant a month later.

Predictably, there is not much hiring activity the first week of the year as employers return from the Holidays. However, starting in mid-January and running through the rest of the first quarter, hiring is at its highest level of the year (37% of hiring is done in the first 25% of the year). Starting in April there is a small but steady decrease through May and June.  July and August are the worst two hiring months of the year, primarily due to vacation schedules but also due to the fact that positions posted early in the year have been filled by now. After Labor Day and all the way to mid-November hiring activity again jumps significantly, September and October are almost as good as January and February. As you would assume, mid-November until the end of the year is the slowest time for hiring other than the “summer doldrums”. Even in slow times there is always some hiring activity, so never stop the momentum of your search.

Is there really a “stigma” in using LinkedIn for networking?

The more I teach the LinkedIn class at our career center, the more I hear about  how many individuals believe that there is a “stigma” to being on and using LinkedIn.  Only the unemployed use LinkedIn.  LinkedIn is NOT solely used for job seekers.  While it is an amazing tool that will help you in many ways to network into your next career I can’t stress enough how important it is and will continue to be even after you land your next job. 

The average length of job in today’s market is approximately 4-5 years.   So doesn’t it make sense to keep your profile current to help you be found by potential hiring managers?  We’ll never know when we could be that person again getting tapped on the shoulder and called into a meeting with human resources to let us know when we could be “downsized” again.  Keep your network in tact, your profile up to date and remain a passive job seeker for the rest of your career. 

Check out some excerpts from the attached article by Neal Schaffer that will give you some more insight into this subject.

The Stigma of “Social Networking”

Social networking may have been something that was not looked upon positively in the past.  After all, “Social networking was just for the unemployed, right?  And that is why everyone is on LinkedIn, no?  Just to look for a job?  As they say, you know when someone is looking for a job when they revise their LinkedIn profile.”  These are words that I used to hear a lot of in the past.

I believe this has been the prevailing argument until now.  But this recession, and the growth of social networking sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, where Gen X & Baby Boomers are joining the sites by storm (my 80+ year-old dad just friended me on Facebook yesterday), social networking is going mainstream.  Executive search firms like McDermott & Bull and career management sites like Netshare and ExecuNet are providing social networking “meetups” as an integral part of the services they provide to executives in transition.  All generations are starting to realize the inherent value in social networking of digging your well before you’re thirsty; however, it is often the case that they don’t realize this until they are unemployed.

The Social Networking Aspect of LinkedIn

With this in mind, there are many other things that you can do while on LinkedIn that will indirectly aid you at finding your next job: networking beyond just recruiters.  As many say, it is now what you know but who you know.  Obviously LinkedIn can and should be used to help you connect with others that can not only help you on your journey, but also lives that you can touch through sharing your experience and expertise by Paying It Forward, which is the guiding principle of Windmill Networking.  These activities include:

* Joining LinkedIn Groups in your industry or profession and participating in conversations.  There are hundreds of thousands of LinkedIn Groups, so I am sure you can find one that is relevant to you.  Here is my advice on what LinkedIn Groups you should join.

* Answering questions on LinkedIn Answers and sharing your expertise with others.  You may learn a few things along the way and meet some truly inspirational and remarkable people to add to your LinkedIn network.

* Writing LinkedIn Recommendations for all that you feel deserve recognition.  Even if they don’t ask you for one, I am sure they will be ecstatic to receive one.

The beauty is that all of these activities will lead to a greater presence on the social networking site, allowing you to kill three birds with one stone:

1. Be found by even more potential people as your “footprint” will now be seen by many others.
2. Pay It Forward in assisting others.
3. Solidify your personal branding. Your “LinkedIn Brand” will be defined by everything that you do or don’t do on the site.  Every Group you join, every question you answer, every recommendation you give, and even your profile language should be consistent and advertise who you are.  In doing so, you will be come better “branded” and differentiated from others in a positive way.

A presence on LinkedIn is an integral part of the Executive Job Search in this day and age.  Take advantage of LinkedIn and truly leverage your presence on the social networking site to the maximum.  It will help you not only find your job, but also aid you in building out your network for the next time you are in transition.  After all, your next job may not be your last one.  It is a fact of life that we should all better prepare ourselves for.  Why not start today?

LinkedIn vs. Facebook

Even Wall Street supports my theory that LinkedIn is a much more viable social media tool than Facebook.  Check out the article attached from Forbes Magazine. http://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2012/08/04/why-wall-street-likes-linkedin-more-than-facebook/

The Power of LinkedIn for your Job Search

For our August posts we will be discussing how social media sites can assist you with your job search.  There are so many out there; which ones are the best?  My personal favorite is LinkedIn.  It is an excellent tool for finding inside connections at your targeted companies, distinguishing you from being just another resume sitting in a pile of seventy-five plus!  How does LinkedIn help you do this?  LinkedIn embraces the “philosophy of relationships” and how to use those relationships/contacts to find the most influential individual that knows you—or knows someone else that knows you.  Since 75-80% of all jobs are found through networking, what better way to network into your next job than by utilizing LinkedIn?   

Below is a great article about how to Make LinkedIn Help You Find a Job.

Personality and the Job Market

The focus of July’s postings to this blog has been about personality and how it plays out at work.  We’ve referred to the WorkPlace Big Five Personality assessment and talked about the role this assessment can play in the selection process, in coaching, and the value that certain personality preferences can add to the world of work.  As I was thinking about what to write for the last post on this topic, I happened to get into a conversation with a candidate who was in the process of looking for a job.  He mentioned that he had two interviews coming up within the next week, which meant that he was interviewing the 2^nd and 3^rd week in July.  About an hour later he stopped me as I was heading to my office and mentioned that he had a 3^rd interview now scheduled, again for the 3^rd week in July!  July and August tend to be prime vacation months, but this didn’t stop this candidate from working the job market and working it quite well I might add.

 So, what does this have to do with personality and the WorkPlace Big Five? 

And, why do some candidates work the job market like it’s their full-time job and other candidates look at the calendar and decide they’ll wait until vacations are over?

 If I had to guess, I would say that the candidate who works the job market during the peak of summer vacations and lands three interviews is probably high on the scale of consolidation, the factor on the WorkPlace Big Five that alone can predict someone’s success on a job.  The higher the score, the more focused an individual is, the more goal oriented they are, and the more driven they are to achieve.  If scores on the other four traits are not aligned with the natural profile for a particular position but the individual has a very high consolidation score, they will likely do well on the job. 

 Another factor score that seems fairly easy to predict for this candidate is his Need for Stability.  He was not overly excited or impressed with himself for landing these three interviews, which made me believe his score was on the low end, known as resilient.  He could have had three rejections for interviews and I think his reaction would have been the same. 

 So what does all this mean?

 If you’re a candidate looking for work, work the job market like it’s your full-time job, and don’t pay attention to the calendar.  Also, if you know that you’re less focused and less resilient than the candidate I described above, find an accountability partner to push you out of your comfort zone.  Create an optimization strategy focusing on your key strengths, and one that minimizes your weaknesses.  If you’d like to learn more about your own personality type and the WorkPlace Big Five Personality assessment, send us an email at www.cpibn.com.

Personality at Work

Rick was a successful senior manager who had a knack for building highly effective teams with some of the best and brightest his organization had to offer.  He was well respected among his peers, admired byhis staff, and feared by those who couldn’t quite match up to his expectations.  He was aggressive, arrogant, and quick tempered, traits that seemed to serve him well in his male dominated organization.  He would leave a path of destruction if things weren’t going his way, but at the end of the day, he delivered results. The organization’s senior management would look the other way, pretend to not notice the dead bodies, ignore the statistics that screamed “Houston, we have a problem!”, all because he delivered results.   Then one day it all came to an end, he finally met his match!  He could no longer control the part of his personality that offended so many, even when that person was his boss!  Yep, he ticked off the wrong guy- a senior leader who had been growing weary of Rick’s ways – and his illustrious career came to an abrupt end.

Does this sound familiar?  Have you ever wondered why your organization would allow this to happen?  Do you want to ensure that this doesn’t happen in your organization? 

Managing personality in the workplace is one of the most difficult things to do.  When those salient traits in our personality become a weakness as opposed to a strength, it’s time to face the facts.  Managers and Human Resource Managers may want to consider bringing in an expert, someone who understands personality and the impact it can have in the workplace.  As someone who studied human behavior and is certified in a number of personality assessments, I can attest to the value assessments can bring to organizations facing similar situations as the one above.   One assessment that sheds light on potential areas of concern is the WorkPlace Big Five Personality Assessment.  This tool can shed light on one’s natural communication style, ability to handle stress, key motivators, and yes, those salient traits that tell us we may need to manage certain personality characteristics closely.  The WorkPlace Big Five is great for coaching, selection, team building and much more.  Once you raise awareness, the development can begin!  For more information on the WorkPlace Big Five Personality assessment, visit www.Centacs.com