Be Your Own Headhunter

The Life You Have And Want Depends On You Managing Your Career

This is not going to be some profound post with the top 10 illuminating and hot tips on how to do this. Those posts are all common sense but at times our common sense account gets bankrupt.

Here is the secret sauce, do it. Manage your career. It’s not the details you would read in some blog post it’s simply the act of taking care of your business.

Please, please, please let the last two years be a lesson to you (and really the 3 leading up to the recession) that you HAVE to be actively managing your career path, skill set and business/work relationships.

Career Amnesia

The following post is courtesy of the Recruiting Blogswap:

From: Peter Weddle

You may have seen the news story.  A teen was recently found in New York City with no memory of her name or personal history.  Her amnesia was profound.  Happily, however, the story ends well, as a CNN viewer recognized the girl’s photo and identified her as a missing person from Oregon.  She’s now on her way to being reunited with her family.

But think about what it would be like to be in her situation.  Not knowing who you are.  Unable to remember anything that’s important about you or to you.  It would be a horrible even desperate condition.  Without our self-identify, we are … well, that’s the point—without our self-identity, we aren’t.

How To Decipher The Meaning Of Interview Questions

The following post is courtesy of the Recruiting Blogswap:

From: Lorraine Russo

Interviewers ask certain questions for a reason. Some good...and some not so good. Like it or not, the same questions are asked just about every day during each and every interview in every company around the country. So if you understand the information an interviewer is trying to obtain from you, answering them will be all the easier.

Many, but not all, human resources personnel and hiring managers are experienced interviewers, so they typically know the “right” and “wrong” answers to questions. They also know what your answers say about YOU, both personally and professionally.

For example, if an interviewer asks you to discuss your strengths and weaknesses, do you know what he or she is looking for in your answer?

Protean And Boundaryless Careers

The following post is courtesy of the Recruiting Blogswap:

From: Amit Puri is the Managing Consultant at Sandbox Advisors. He has over 10 years of business and HR related experience, with companies such as Bain & Co, Morgan Stanley and Citigroup. Sandbox Advisors is based in Singapore and provides career management and HR consulting services in Asia.

Two trends have changed the world of work in many ways. The first is the shift towards a knowledge based economy that many countries are seeing and the second is global connectivity, interdependence and integration. The new career context that is emerging as a result of these trends has given rise to the terms - Protean and Boundaryless careers.

Not Enough Time To Network Becomes A $48,000 Mistake

Last year at this time I was telling a Minnesota IT Consultant friend of mine, “You have to start networking again. This market is starting to change, starting to slow and you need to be ahead of the curve.”

My friend is very talented and well connected but lazy when it comes to staying in touch with people. He has always has been but always had been able to get a new gig within 2 weeks of the previous one ending. With the market being good he would treat the 2 weeks as a vacation or a chance to do other things.

We knew his contract was coming to a close at the end of November after a 16 month run.

He kept saying, “Dude, I do not have the time or energy. I do not have time to attend industry events and my LinkedIn profile looks fine.”

He was right about his LinkedIn profile. It was and is still fine. But the issue with the logic is saying you are on LinkedIn and using LinkedIn, two very different things.

Even with the market slowing down he would have been able to get his next gig. He is that good. But then the slow down became a stall.

And then he started marketing himself AFTER his gig ended and slots were filled. Projects were planned and staffed. He found himself on the outside looking in.

One of our friends said, “I thought you would be at XYZ until after the 1^st of the year, why did you not say anything? You know we would have taken you on.”

So what did he lose? A lot:

15 weeks x 40 hours = 600 hours

600 hours x $80 an hour = $48,000

Here is the moral to the story, you need to manage your career the way you manage maintenance on your car, doctor check ups and your next family vacation.

Do not have time to manage your career?

You cannot afford not to.