Magic Pot of Jobs

Now that I’ve taken Glenn Gutmacher to task over at RecruitingBloggers about his opinions about what a blog should be vs. what a portal should be, I figure I ought to put my money where my mouth is.

So far, I haven’t found a satisfactory way to integrate this into my blog (found lots of crap ways to do it, though), but here it is. I’ve been tagging things I think might be of interest to you MagicPotHeads with “mpoj” in my del.icio.us links, so here’s the page where you can see them. You can also grab the RSS for them there.

What I’ve been trying to do was to set up an auto-post like I’ve got at my personal blog but which would post just the links with that tag, but that’s not supported yet, so I’ll be settling for the link roll in the side bar. Which I’ll integrate as soon as I can sit down at home and spend the time dinking with my template. (Pain in the neck. You’d think WP could have support built-in to the interface for adding scripts like this. It’s the only thing that TypePad does better, and even their implementation kind of sucks.)

I got tagged for a meme a while back by someone I don’t know, so it took me a little while to get around to doing the meme, but it’s Christmas, the office is quiet, and I’ve got a little time to fool around. Besides, as recruiters it’s important for us to get to know the people in our networks. So, I present:

5 Things You Might Not Know About Me

1. Not only would I rather hang myself with the phone cord than talk on the phone, I can’t stand the sound of a ringing phone. My cell phone is always on vibrate, and my number isn’t on my personal cards because I don’t want to encourage people to use it.

2. Similarly neurotic: I am really uncomfortable when sitting with my back to a door or a wide open space. I always try to situate myself against a wall or other large barrier-type object.

3. Blogging is like breathing for me. I have had a blog in one form or another since October 2001. I’m a dinosaur in Internet years. I currently have a personal blog and a recruiting blog, I contribute to a local, DC-focused blog, I consult on a couple of others, and I have accounts at LiveJournal and Vox for the stuff that isn’t for public consumption.

4. My secret dream is to do standup comedy.

5. I don’t drink coffee or beer- I think both taste awful. My morning caffeine of choice is Diet Mt. Dew, and my adult beverage of choice is Jack’n'Coke.

What are 5 things I don’t know about you?

A friend of ours came in to town this weekend to see those of us who still live in DC. As we sat around talking about what’s been happening in our lives over the last year, he remarked on how far we’ve all come- just a few years ago, we were this bunch of early-career, slacker wage-slaves, most of us with jobs we hated, or companies that couldn’t get their acts together.

Now, just a few years later and only ranging in age from about 28-32, we are, as he put it, “scratching each other’s backs.” The guy at the event company is hiring the girl at the video production house’s company to make promotional videos. The guy with the IT consulting company is inviting the event management guy to bid on the AV for a conference he’s supporting for his client. I’m helping my friends to make connections for new jobs and new clients.

It occurs to me that there’s a turning point in a lot of people’s careers, where you go from being the peon to the person with either enough influence or enough juice of your own to be able to steer connections and business and buying decisions toward the people YOU know and trust, not just the people your corporate overlords know and trust.

I think about this every time I’m having to explain to some fresh-faced recent graduate that they don’t have enough experience for me to be able to place them. On one hand, I’m only 28 myself and I remember what it’s like to try to get experience when you don’t have any to start with. It sucks. Trust me, I hate being part of The Man Who’s Keepin’ You Down almost as much as you hate what I have to tell you. On the other hand, having recently reached the first turning point in my own career and watched it happen for many of my friends, I know that it DOES happen, far more often than not, for people who are smart and motivated, and that no matter how much those first 5 years of your career suck, you need them, and there’s nothing I can do to help you skip over the crappy part without paying your dues.

So what’s the point I’m trying to make? Eh, I don’t know, maybe that you should buck up and not take the indignities of your early career to heart? Maybe I’m just feeling all nostalgic and crap from having a friend come to visit? I’m not sure.

Checkout UK finance jobs on Accountant Careers.

You know what? I’m just going to say it, because this is getting ridiculous.

Hey, recruiting bloggers! STOP FREAKING SPAMMING ME! I’ve already voted, and if you’re the kind of person who is sending mass emails to bloggers you barely know to get them to vote for you, I probably wouldn’t vote for you anyway.

I’ve gotten multiple emails from people flagrantly violating mass email best practices, and voting has only been open for one day. I agree with Bob Wilson, that this is supposed to be a way to recommend blogs that are useful or worth reading some way. It’s not a schlong-measuring contest over who has the largest email list, and it frustrates me to see it turning in to one.

I’m going to take this a step farther:

If I receive a vote-begging spam from a blogger I’ve already voted for, I’m going to contact Jason Davis (who has been an absolute saint in putting all this together only to have it abused this way) and ask to have my vote stricken from that blog.

See also:

Recruiting Bloggers.com: Blog Awards: How To Solicit Votes

The voting has begun for Recruiting.com’s Top 10 Recruiting Blogs of 2006- they’ve done away with categories altogether because someone managed to convince Jason Davis that it’s his personal responsibility to make everyone happy. Whatev. But anyway, MPOJ has been nominated, so go vote! And be sure to check out the many fine other blogs on the list.

(I’m getting emails from people I met once, in passing, asking me to vote for blogs I don’t even read. My promise to you, MagicPotHeads, is that I have only voted for blogs I read and enjoy, and to not beg for votes. That’s embarrassing. But that doesn’t mean I don’t hope you vote for me. )

Let The Voting Begin!!! | Recruiting.com

Jim Durbin has a great post up about the way putting your life online changes expectations between employers and employees.

I pondered posting a comment to Jim’s site, but my thoughts on it got kind of complicated so I decided it deserved a blog post of its own. I think there are several key points everyone needs to calm down and think about before freaking out about someone’s MySpace page, or the employer’s use thereof.

Employers need to recognize that this kind of behavior (college student binge drinking, bitching about your job offer, whatever) has always gone on; it went on with their previous hires, and the only difference here is that they found out about it specifically. If you hire a lot of college students, some percentage of them will have engaged in stupid, juvenile, even dangerous or illegal behavior while in school. Just because you didn’t find it on Facebook doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. So if you’re comfortable with the kids you didn’t find out about, you need to get comfortable with the ones you did.

And Jim makes an excellent point that ought to be put on a banner across the top of every MySpace or FaceBook page. Do YOU, Mr. Hiring Manager, want to be judged on the stupid stuff you did in school? I didn’t think so. The kid with the 3.8 average who interviews well does so because he’s a smart kid with good interpersonal skills. People grow up. So will your employees, and if you’re concerned about their behavior at the company Christmas party, that’s the trade-off for hiring cheap entry-level employees. If the bar crawls aren’t affecting the quality of work being produced, they really aren’t relevant to the quality of the employee.

Gen Y employees, on the other hand, need to understand that the inherent conflict between desiring privacy and putting all your bad behavior out there for the world to see. Yes, maybe you put it up there for your friends to find, but they aren’t the only ones with access to the internet. Grow up and learn to be more cautious about what you put up there, or learn to live with the consequences. Employers check up on candidates to find out what kind of people they are. That’s how the world works, and it’s not going to change just because you don’t like it. As someone who has been putting her life online for years now, I am particularly unsympathetic to employees who cry about privacy violations when they’re the ones broadcasting their misadventures to anyone with an Internet connection. Learn to set some boundaries- the whole world doesn’t need to know about the particularly excellent weed you smoked last weekend.

Finally, for the sake of all that is right and good, develop a sensible, flexible policy about employee web sites. It’s perfectly reasonable to expect that employees not air your company’s dirty laundry on the Internet. It’s very sensible to ask that they not discuss their coworkers in such a way that could upset the team dynamic in your office. You can require your employees to respect your company’s brand on the Internet and not use your name or trademarks in such a way that could damage that brand. But beyond that, you’re starting to intrude into how an employee chooses to socialize (socializing online is still socializing) and that’s not a good way to develop a trusting relationship with your staff.

One of the things that surprised me most when I first started reading recruiting blogs (which was only shortly after I got into recruiting) was the vehemence with which my fellow bloggers bashed the functional resume. Being but a recruiting noob myself, I was still blinded by my college career center’s advice that it was a perfectly valid format, ideal for showing skills in a way that makes the most out of limited experience.

But in another few months, I realized, the functional resume DOES suck. I’ve only got one talent with a decent, workable functional resume, but he’s a technical freelancer and his resume doesn’t require tons of context. Every other functional resume I’ve ever seen leaves me feeling like I really don’t have any idea what the candidate has spent their career doing.

Even so, the functional format does seem better suited than the chronological format to the task of showing transferrable skills, especially for career changers or people who are trying to turn a scattered series of jobs into a coherent professional progression. So what can be done to fix the problem?

My colleagues and I put our heads together and found what we believe to be an excellent way to combine the very legitimate goal of the functional resume with the much more high-context and readable chronological format. I’m sure we’re not the first ones to come up with it, but we’ve never seen any of our candidates use this method, so it’s clearly time to share it with you.

Start with a chronological resume. Under your most recent jobs, write 1-2 unbulleted sentences to summarize what your job was. Then take all your bullets and divide them into functional areas like “business development” or “account management” or whatever is relevant. If you’re changing careers, make sure these functional areas are relevant to the job you want. The point here is to make abundantly clear to any hiring manager or overworked HR generalist how your existing experience relates to the new career you want.

For example, from my own resume:

[Recruiter] ~ [MISF] ~ Washington, DC ~ January 2005-present
In dual role as both recruiter and account manager, match qualified IT and Interactive Media professionals with client job openings for temporary and permanent placement at a variety of agency, association, and commercial clients in Greater DC.

• Needs analysis: Conduct fact-finding interviews with both talent and clients to evaluate goals, set expectations, and make recommendations regarding employment and staffing needs.
• Client service: Manage full lifecycle recruiting, candidate submission, interview scheduling, and rate/salary negotiation process for an average of 18 open orders concurrently.
• Business development: Negotiate fee agreements for recruiting and placement services. Build client relationships, promoting [MISF] as staffing agency of choice for recruiting solutions. Represent [MISF] at career fairs, networking events, and curriculum advisory boards.
• Professional development: Pursue expertise in employment law as relates to the staffing industry. Attain internal [MISF] certification for entire period of eligibility in addition to the Certified Staffing Professional designation.

You can see that this arrangement of my experience at the MISF would position me for an account management position in a variety of industries, not just staffing. At the same time, you have a good sense of what I was actually doing, and I have connected the dots for you on how it would relate to other types of work. It also demonstrates through the “Professional Development” item, that I am someone who is committed to learning as much as possible about my chosen field- a critical point if I were looking to make a change.

There’s more to say about this format, but for now, just go try it out on your own resume and see what you think.

Via Insourced, a new story in Business Week about Best Buy’s culture reorganization: Smashing The Clock. I’ve written about this before, and every new article I read about it just fascinates me more. My favorite ROWE “commandment” is the one that meetings are optional. My experience is that unnecessary meetings are one of the most frustrating, boring, wasteful parts of the workplace experience.

One of my previous jobs was with a small company- no more than about 15 people in the office at the time- and despite their small size, these people LOVED their meetings. Some of you think that having meetings to talk about what you’re going to discuss at the next meeting is an exaggeration, but I’m here to tell you it’s the truth. We had sales team meetings, marketing team meetings (never mind that two of the three people on each team were the SAME), customer management team meetings, company meetings, blah blah blah.

It wasn’t at this job where I developed my white-hot burning hatred of meetings, but this job certainly didn’t help matters. I could last about 15 minutes in one of these meetings, but then got more and more fidgety and agitated, trying to keep my ADD boss on task, trying to keep discussions from turning into dead horse-beating contests, before the meeting would finally end an hour later with my boss wondering, “What’s with Tiffany today?”

At my current job, I’m fortunate that my coworkers aren’t particularly big fans of meetings and when we do need to have them, are pretty good at keeping them short and productive. This is no small feat, since some of them are from creative fields and have a much more stream-of-consciousness work style. That said, my boss did go through a phase where her bosses apparently decided to have meetings and conference calls until they could figure out why no work was getting done. Those were a bad few weeks.

I firmly believe that even if the only ROWE recommendation a company can implement is to make meetings optional, there will be noticeable increases in productivity. And impatient people like me will be happier.

(Check it out! You can now also catch me at RecruitingBloggers.com with some of your otherfavorite recruitosphere personalities!)

I really hate it when people say, “Hi, how are you?” and then keep talking before you have a chance to answer.

Asking how a person is doing shouldn’t be perfunctory spoken boilerplate that you don’t think about. Say, “how are you?” and then listen for the answer.

In a brief conversation with someone you’ve never spoken to before, like calling a staffing agency to see how to apply to work with them, you won’t get a full and detailed answer, but pausing to listen will at least give the impression that you’re actually thinking about what you say.

The nominations are open for the Recruiting.com Best Blog Awards 2006. I fully expect people who post more frequently than I to be nominated and win, but if one of you MagicPotHeads is so moved to nominate little ol’ me, I think the category I would most fit into topically is “Third Party Recruiting Blog,” but I’m actually more tickled by the “Most Entertaining Recruiting Blog” category.

But, you know, only if you are so inclined.