A Search Firm Insider’s Tips for How to Use LinkedIn for Career Visibility

Almost everyone maintains a profile on LinkedIn to advance their career visibility. But very few people are being coached by a search firm insider like Kelly Dingee.

Now you can get the inside scoop on how to create your profile to attract more career opportunities.  Just click the play button to watch the entire series on how to use LinkedIn more effectively.

Or, click here to watch the entire series on YouTube.

A Step By Step Guide to Landing Your Dream Job (Part Two)

For most people, job hunting is uncomfortable, unfamiliar, and haphazard. It’s really common for people to accept a mediocre job offer simply because they couldn’t bear the thought of one more day of job hunting.

Job searches benefit mightily from following a methodical process, but most people don’t know all the important steps. (Sorry, it’s a bit more complex than 1: write resume, 2: interview, 3: get job).

That’s why I’ve started to publish a series of step by step posts in The Washington Business Journal. You can read a summary of Part One here. Part one reviews what kinds of jobs to look for, and what kinds of jobs to avoid in your search.

This installment covers:

• How to write your resume so it will not be overlooked. This includes what to put in, what to leave out.
• Why having a career network is important.
• How to start your job search networking.

And two related posts to consider before you start your job search:

• How to know when it’s time to quit your job and move on.
• How to know when it’s time to get out of your industry.

Being Digitally Approachable in Your Job Search

 Job searches rely on making lots of great first impressions. And once upon a time you could control your first impressions, by actually being there when they happened. It may surprise you to learn that, a long, long time ago (back when I was 40), humans introduced themselves to one another in person. Face to face, not on Facebook or Facetime.

Those days are long gone.

Today, job seekers make most of their first impressions online. You can’t get through a dinner out with friends without someone pulling out a smart phone to look something up. When I recommend a restaurant, or movie, or a beer, where do you go to check it out? You go online. In the office, when you mention you are looking for a solution to an IT problem, and I recommend my IT vendor, what do you do? Do you leap to the phone to call them … or do you check them out online first?

When you Google your own name, what do you see? There is your first impression. Google is the new business card.

Every time someone refers a candidate to me, I check them out online. If they are on the hunt for their next position, I assume they paid some attention to their digital first impression. And I’m often disappointed.

If you are a business professional about my age, and your LinkedIn profile is bare bones, you are sending the message that you are behind the curve with technology. It is assumed that you either don’t understand it, or perhaps you are afraid of it. Like it or not, that’s your first impression, and it is darn hard to shake. The fact that you have not yet found social media relevant to your work, or that you find it a silly waste of time only confirms the suspicion.  You may think that not having a robust online profile confirms that you are a mature, secure, serious professional who has no time to waste on YouTwitFace. But among people who use Google to form a first impression, rest assured, that’s not what they think.

Conversely, if you are an early career business professional, and your LinkedIn profile is bare bones, it is assumed that you know your way around social networks because you are young, so the absence of a professional profile means you are either lazy or perhaps you just don’t understand how things work in the real world. Not good.

So if your current job is quite secure, and if you have no interest in being contacted about a new job, then by all means, feel free to remain digitally anonymous. Put out a big old “Beware of Dog” sign online. No problemo.

But if you are even thinking of making a first impression with someone who is in a position to help you, like an HR professional, or a headhunter, or someone who is well networked … well then, you would be wise to make yourself more digitally approachable.

A Step By Step Guide to Landing Your Dream Job (Part One)

If you haven’t looked for a job recently, you might find that a few things have changed. Slapping together a resume and shotgunning it out to positions you saw posted online will usually result in … nothing at all. Really. Don’t bother.

One thing about job search has not changed much; job hunting is still a miserable experience. Everything you do in a typical job search makes you feel like you are the only person in the world who is going through it. When you are sitting at home in front of your computer, you feel alone. When you scour the job boards and see very few jobs, and they all require some skill you never learned, you feel dejected. And after you write a thoughtful cover letter and spend an hour applying online, only to get no response … well, then you feel rejected.

Yeah, the one big change you will notice right away is that employers are far more rude than ever before. Your resume goes unacknowledged, and even after an interview, you rarely be told that the position was filled…even getting a rejection letter is harder now.

The other big change is harder to see; you have access to better information now. You have better ways of connecting to your dream job than just sending resumes. In fact, sending resumes to strangers is now one of the worst ways to introduce yourself.

Access to better information can put you in control of your job search. If you want a better job now, you can precisely target jobs that closely align with your strengths, in organizations that have a bright future, and then find a way to get yourself introduced by a real person. You know, a human introduction?

But, of course, almost nobody knows how to control their own search for a dream job, most people are too busy being the victim of applying for any job.

That’s why I’ve started a step by step guide to landing your dream job. It is being published weekly in The Washington Business Journal. The series is designed for mid to senior level professionals working in large urban job markets like Washington DC. (That’s the kind of job market I’ve spent the last twenty years studying).

I’m including just one action item each week. Here is a summary of the first three installments:

• The first step toward finding your dream job is knowing your strengths so you can find a work environment that places a high value on what you do best.
• The second step is knowing what kind of work is like kryptonite to you–activities that drain your energy. Kryptonite work may be necessary, and you might even be good at it, but it leaves you tired, irritated and bored. Grinding away at the wrong work–even if you think it’s currently marketable—is a recipe for failure. But instead of leaving this kind of work behind, and actually making their next job better, most people unwittingly write their resume in a way that makes this kind of work haunt them, following them from job to job.
• The third step is finding a work environment that puts you in control of your destiny. People who have built successful careers know how to find work environments that encourage high performance, and have the courage to leave work environments that make doing your best work impossible. So what should you look for in your next job? What factors will give you the greatest job satisfaction, and what factors will give you the most job security?

I hope you find the series helpful.

You can read part two here.

Job Search / Interviewing / Negotiating Salary and Managing Your Career

If you haven’t noticed that red logo over there on the left side of your screen, you might not realize that I also write a weekly post for The Washington Business Journal.

So, in case you missed it, here are links to a few recent posts:

Money:

• How to Handle the “Desired Salary” Question When You Apply for a Job Online
• How to Answer: “What Are Your Salary Requirements?” in a cover letter
• How Top Performers Negotiate Salary

Job Search/Getting an Interview:

• How Long Will Your Job Search Take?
• What Your Resume Can’t Do For You

Interview Advice:

• How Was Your Interview?
• The Important Attribute Job Seekers Rarely Demonstrate
• How Are You Perceived When You Interview?
• How to Interview for a Senior Executive job

Career Advice:

• When is it Time to Quit Your Job?
• Are you Being the Invisible Man (or Woman) in Your Career?
• Why The Job Market Matters More than Advice from Your Parents
• Why Doing What You are Told Will Ruin Your Career
• When the New Job Doesn’t Work Out

I hope you find them useful. And please feel free to leave a comment to suggest future topics!

Advice to Graduates: “Lean In” to your Careers

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg gave the commencement address this year at Barnard College. 

Sandberg’s address inspired a blog post by Andrew McAfee for the Harvard Business Review. Predictably, he says, she took up the topic of female underrepresentation at the top ranks of government and business: “Of 190 heads of state, nine are women. Of all the parliaments around the world, 13% of those seats are held by women. Corporate America top jobs, 15% are women, numbers which have not moved at all in the past nine years. Nine years. Of full professors around the United States, only 24% are women.”

Then, not so predictably, Sandberg places the responsibility for this inequality largely on the young women themselves, rather than on external forces such as sexism and unequal burdens.  She encourages young women to be ambitious and self-confident, and to “lean in” to their careers, especially before important life choices loom. She says:

“Women almost never make one decision to leave the workforce. It doesn’t happen that way. They make small little decisions along the way that eventually lead them there. Maybe it’s the last year of med school when they say, I’ll take a slightly less interesting specialty because I’m going to want more balance one day. Maybe it’s the fifth year in a law firm when they say, I’m not even sure I should go for partner, because I know I’m going to want kids eventually. These women don’t even have relationships, and already they’re finding balance, balance for responsibilities they don’t yet have. And from that moment, they start quietly leaning back… So, my heartfelt message to all of you is, and start thinking about this now, do not leave before you leave. Do not lean back; lean in. Put your foot on that gas pedal and keep it there until the day you have to make a decision, and then make a decision. That’s the only way, when that day comes, you’ll even have a decision to make.”

McAfee says he finds Sandberg’s advice “refreshing, novel, and super smart.” And he says he echoes her advice, and expands it to all of this year’s graduates. “The rate of change and uncertainty in the economy is high and getting higher, and good jobs might well be getting harder to come by. The best way to thrive in this environment is to be excellent at what you do, and the best way to become excellent is to lean way in to your career as it starts.”

Job Hunting … Ughhh

If you have been happily employed for several years, just the thought of job hunting probably brings feelings of dread.   Looking for a job is lonely, depressing and very hard on your ego.  It also requires a whole battery of skills you probably never developed.   That’s exactly why this blog exists.  You’ll find lots of links below to help you get started.

First you have the discomfort of writing your resume - so many decisions, so much conflicting advice:

• One Page or Two (Our advice: 1 page for less than 5 years of experience, 2 pages for more .. but assume nobody will read page two)
• Bullets or Paragraphs (Our advice:  bullets, definitely bullets)
• Chronological or Functional Format (Our advice: chronological, hands down)

OK, once your resume is complete, what do you do with it? 

• Well, first you want to make you LinkedIn profile look like your resume – but there is so much more to using LinkedIn effectively. This is non-negotiable.  Learning how to leverage LinkedIn will open up a world of useful connections and opportunities, and it won’t take very much time to get it going.   
• Second, how can you get your resume in front of search firms?  This is actually simpler and less time consuming than you may think, but first you need to understand the rules.
• Third, everyone says to network, but there is so much more to networking than many people understand.  This is something you really do need to learn eventually, so you might as well start now.  Unfortunately it takes quite a while to master, and very few people are good at it.  
• Fourth, looking at classified ads on the job boards is time consuming and agonizing.  You are not qualified for 99% of the jobs advertised, don’t even want most of the jobs you ARE qualified for, and can’t even tell what the rest of the jobs even are because the ads are so badly written.  Then when you do apply, the employers don’t even acknowledge your existence.   Unfortunately, until your network and reputation are built, you are stuck with job boards – so learn how to use them effectively.

Ughh.  And I haven’t even mentioned interviewing or salary negotiations yet.

No doubt about it, looking for your next job is a daunting task. 

If you are left wondering where to start, here are a few more job search pointers you might find helpful.