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Authors: Harvey Mackay

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BOOK: Use Your Head to Get Your Foot in the Door

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“My iPhone is
so
cool, and you’re going to freak out when you see the picture I took with it of my big toe painted up to look like Dumbledore. I just posted it on YouTube. Then I called around for an hour or so until I was able to bum a ride over to your place. Well, here I am.”

Or, you could answer Ms. Nantucket this way:

“Pretty routine day, I guess. Between seven and nine o’clock I jogged, showered, read the
Financial Times,
and tracked the key business links on the
Drudge Report
aggregation, scrolled through
Monster.com
for the embedded software engineering openings, and added some possibles to my list of prospects for my e-mail roster today. Between nine and eleven, I worked on my database and met my quota of making five renewed contacts a day. Between calls, I knocked off a couple of follow-up and thank-you e-mails on my notebook.

“By then, it was getting near lunchtime, so I threw some yogurt into a brown bag, met Angie and Paul for a stroll through the park. We’re all on the job market. The three of us role-play interview questions for forty-five minutes two days a week. Then it was back to the laptop for IT-programming trade journals and a great lecture on TED by the oceanographer Sylvia Earle. Next I took a read on Malcolm Gladwell’s latest piece in the
New Yorker
. I also reviewed the prospect company’s latest earnings release—stellar!—and was impressed as well with their new computer literacy initiative in Central America. And, Ms. Interviewer, here I am.”

We all know which answer you’d never give and the one you’d like to. The question is,
“Which way do you really spend your time?”
And which lifestyle has the best chance of getting you back to work?

Mackay’s Moral:
“How we spend our days is, of course, how
we spend our lives.”—Annie Dillard

Quickie—Million Dollar Baby!

Hilary Swank has won two Oscars—the first for
Boys Don’t Cry
and the second for
Million Dollar Baby.
She was also canned before her success blossomed. Following her appearance in sixteen episodes of
Beverly Hills, 90210
, she was written out of the series. Her apparent reaction to the setback was: “If I’m not good enough for
90210
, I’m not good enough for anything.”

Most young actors would have just retreated into depression and self-pity. Swank didn’t despair. Instead, she reportedly trimmed her body fat down to 7 percent. Her perseverance created the trademark svelte Swank shape. The training not only landed her the role in
Boys Don’t Cry
, I’m sure it also helped convince Clint Eastwood that she had the right physical tone and tenacity to star as Maggie Fitzgerald in
Million Dollar Baby.
For this film, she had the discipline to train in a gym almost five hours a day and to bolster her clout with nearly twenty pounds of muscle!

Beverly Hills, 90210
was not the first time she tasted a setback. Swank grew up poor—spending part of her childhood in a trailer park. She and her mother even lived for a time in her mother’s car.

She also savors the power and self-discipline of competitive sports. Growing up, Swank was a gymnast and a Junior Olympic swimmer.

It’s hardly a surprise that Hilary Swank was chosen for the title role in the recent film
Amelia
about the legendary Amelia Earhart. This breakthrough aviator had a kindred cockiness about her and once said, “Never interrupt someone doing what you said couldn’t be done.”

Let Swank’s
90210
experience be an inspiration to you—I don’t care if you’re eighteen or eighty. Use an intelligent, disciplined, and medically sound plan to get yourself back into shape after a setback, especially in your career. The rewards could put your name in lights.

Chapter 22

Getting a Job Is a Job

1.
Get a routine and stick to it.
Getting a job is not a nine-to-five job. It’s a sixteen-hour-a-day proposition, from the moment you get up until the moment you go to sleep. With that kind of workload, you need a daily schedule to manage that routine and organize your time. No employer is around to police your time management, and that means the control burden falls squarely on your own shoulders. This doesn’t mean you’re being sentenced to endless rounds of self-punishment and drudgery. If you’re going to be at your best, you’ve got to have some fun, too, so make room for a little downtime.

Start the week unofficially on Sunday night. You’ll want to scribble out a short list of things to get done the next week and check it against the list you had the previous week.

Set goals. To put them to work for you they must be:

M
easurable

I
dentifiable

D
ocumented

A
ttainable

S
pecific

And they need to be examined regularly.

Note the first letter of each word spells Midas, and I call this approach giving goals
The Midas Touch
because it turns goals into gold.

How many new contacts did I make last week? Did I stretch out geographically into new areas? Explore new job descriptions? Improve my presentation or appearance? Grade yourself, and don’t be too narrowly focused. A week without getting a job is not a week of failure. You may have accomplished other goals last week, things you’ve never had the time for or put in the effort to achieve in the past.

Think of what you are doing as a new do-it-yourself skill, like crafting a fine piece of woodworking or raising and grooming a bonsai plant. Why? Because you are going to need to use the same job-finding skill set twelve to fifteen times in your working life. You can and will become expert at it. So good and efficient, in fact, that you will be able to methodically get a new job in your off-hours while you actually have one during the working day.

2.
Get back in shape.
Companies have always hired according to subtle, hidden values. We like to believe that discrimination in the marketplace has been largely eliminated. Not so. Even though we have legislation that forbids hiring on the basis of race, religion, age, and gender, there are still millions of Americans who have no legal protection against job discrimination. Prejudice against overweight people seems to be the only form of discrimination that hasn’t been made illegal, and it’s practiced with a vengeance. All things being equal, studies have shown that the overweight have a much poorer chance of getting a job than people who are not overweight.

Under any circumstances, take huge pains with your grooming, hairstyling, and wardrobe. And not just at interviews, either. Looking good is the rule every time you poke your nose outside the door. If you’re serious about getting a job, you’re going to be visible in a number of ways where your appearance will be observed and can work for you or against you. This is yet another reason for keeping visuals of the mugging, cavorting you off social Web sites like Facebook.

We’re not all perfect tens, but there’s a lot we can do to catapult ourselves up the scale. Appearance has always been 30 percent nature and 70 percent cunning artifice, so we can all be at least sevens if we try.

3.
Read.
Until newspapers and magazines go out of business or they install pay walls on the Internet—and that may never come to pass—your problem is not going to be a scarcity of information. I used to recommend reading the local paper and the
Wall Street Journal
for starters, but that may have been fitting advice for an era when Jeeves was buttering your muffins and pouring your coffee. The
Wall Street Journal
and
Financial Times
charge for their services, but a subscription to the
Journal
in particular is well worth the investment, since it is so influential across the board in business. A good argument can be made that if your recruiter or your prospective employer takes a daily read on the
Wall Street Journal
, so should you. You can also use Web sites like
Bloomberg.com
and the
New York Times
to get a ton of business news.

As to job listings, today, according to Wikipedia, “Monster is the largest job search engine in the world, with over a million job postings at any time and over 150 million résumés in the database (2008) and over 63 million job seekers per month.” Then there are the Craigslist entries. Again I turn to mighty Wik: “The [Craigslist] site receives over one million new job listings each month, making it one of the top job boards in the world.” The local classifieds? What are the chances that your next job will be a local find? If
not
moving is key for you, there are regional Web sites springing up every day that can help you focus your search.

The Internet has redefined our information diet. In this creepy, crawling cyberspace world, you better be snacking on three levels of the food chain: breaking news—especially in your business and professional specialty; career opportunity postings; and high-nutrition management journals and mind-stretching essays and lectures.

It’s not uncommon for an interviewer to ask the “friendly” and “casual” question: “What have you been reading lately?” Have a good answer. Current business books and e-zines, trade and technical journals in your field, thoughtful books of any kind, fiction or nonfiction, qualify if you can discuss them creatively and analytically. Be able to recite your bookmarks on Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox. By the way, I hope your search engine is at least as good as either of those.

One still-employed job seeker took his efforts at changing careers so seriously that each evening he was frozen in front of his screen for hours to bone up for the next day’s interviews. His little daughter couldn’t understand, and one day asked, “Mommy, why does Daddy stare at those dumb articles all night? I want him to teach me how to play Guitar Hero!” Her mother explained to the tot, “Well, darling, you see, Daddy has so much work to do, he has to log on and finish it at home.” “Well,” responded the daughter, “why don’t they put him in a slower group?”

4.
Make those contacts.
Keeping your network alive means casting a wide net. Dive into your files and give yourself a quota of, say, five contacts a day. Sort your contacts between e-mails and phone contacts.

I know people who send mass barrages of the same e-mail to twenty or thirty people at once. That may make sense in a personal emergency or when you are communicating within your family or a close-knit group of friends. Others are likely to see it as an affront, that they are just one in a supporting cast of countless others.

Make your phone calls brief, especially in the “AE age”—that’s the next era after AD and it means After E-mail. More and more people don’t want unexpected or extended calls unless there is a very good reason for them.

E-mailing or phoning, your agenda is obvious: What do you know that I don’t that might provide me some work? It never hurts if you can carry your own weight and provide the people you’re calling with some information that may be of value to them. You might mention a hot sale they may not know about or some even hotter business gossip you may have picked up during your job hunt, like a major executive shuffle.

5.
Do your homework.
Stay on top of new developments in your field, and that’s saying a mouthful these days. There may be an art director somewhere who doesn’t use or know how to manage computer aided design, but the market for hieroglyphics is slim! An increasing number of art directors have degrees in multimedia design or computer graphics. Creativity is important, but so are precision and ease. Now is the time to take those courses you never had time for, anywhere and especially online. And be sure you find a way to mention how you are clicking on to new skills during your interviews.

6.
Know the company you keep.
Before you interview, check with anyone you know who knows about the company: employees, customers, bankers, vendors. But most of all, learn the art of good Googling! Before, you needed to chase down facts like a Mickey Spillane gumshoe. Today, you swim in oceans of detail, and the new skill is how to prioritize what to look for and how to piece it together.

Point #1: You want clues to the company’s reputation. Is it a leader in its industry? An also-ran? How does it compete? Does the company emphasize price? Quality? Service? Innovation?

Do you have any special strengths in any of these areas that you can bring to the table? If you do, don’t forget to mention them during your interview.

Don’t forget the flip side. If the company is in the technological dark ages, emphasize what you can do to help stage a cost-effective, low-pain, fast-acting renaissance. If the business is a service laggard, and you were once the assistant czar of service who helped redeem another company’s customer relations, it may be high time to play that card.

Point #2: You want clues to the company’s values and style. Be aware of the huge trend toward niche marketing, which is the concept of dividing the marketplace into even smaller segments in order to concentrate on a clearly defined target audience. Because of niche marketing, there are a lot of companies with highly idiosyncratic corporate styles, developed as a result of their adapting to the styles of the niche markets in which they sell their products or services.

Niche hiring has been a predictable outcome of niche marketing. You’re going to find the best chance of getting a job—and of being a success—in a company where you fit in.

In 2007, Elinor Mills did an interview for CNET News with Stacy Savides Sullivan, the chief culture officer for Google, perhaps the most coveted employer in the world. Tune in to some of her comments:

• On the culture: “One that is team-oriented, very collaborative and encouraging people to think nontraditionally.”

• On the kind of question a job candidate might be asked: “This is just hypothetical, but it could be ‘How many bread boxes could you fit in an airplane?’ or something like that. That’s certainly not going to show if somebody is adaptable or flexible, but it’s certainly going to show someone’s thought process and reasoning, the way they can rationalize a true answer to something. Obviously, there’s no right answer.”

• On the kind of social behaviors that are popular in the company: “We’ve done Google-wide ski trips since 1999. Different groups go up and we spend the night and there’s a lot of team-building and bonding.”

Those three items have nothing to do with the degrees you have, the schools you went to, the years of experience you’ve stacked up; but they have a great deal to say about the kind of person who would succeed at Google.

Then there’s the aggressive, rake-it-in avarice of a host of Wall Street firms. That light-your-cigar-with-a-$50-bill glint of the recent go-go years is gone-gone.

Checking out company culture on the Internet is a piece of cake these days, though I can’t resist sharing a vintage corporate culture classic.

Years ago, no male employee at IBM dared to wear anything but a white shirt. One day, the boss, the legendary Thomas Watson, came to work in a blue shirt.

“What do you think?” said one of the underlings to another.

“Better not try it,” said his buddy. “It could be a trick.”

BOOK: Use Your Head to Get Your Foot in the Door

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