If your hat’s in the job-market ring but you won’t risk or bother to define what’s right about your candidacy (i.e. right background, outfit and moment), then why indeed shouldn’t outfits waffle about you?
That’s a fair question so maybe the problem’s back at square one, your thinking. No, you’re not irreversibly flawed…just your “candidacy” and that’s fixable. While preaching “due diligence”, you’re probably forgetting to do it in your own behalf and can’t see beyond the tough times. So how do you fix the failed politics of job-search and make the business case why your candidacy's the right one, at the right moment, with the right enterprise?
Back at square one, audit your thinking. If you're an "outside-the-box achiever", how does that square with staying "inside-the-box" of job-search dogma popularized by a “careers” literati whose track record’s challengeable on its merits?
Job transitioners, by elevating “recruiters”, for example, to
literati status, stiffly preserve a politics of career governance that’s flawed
but as revered as those stone tablets down from the mount. Ask yourself what
the last fresh insight was from those politics that you took to the bank? And
ask AT&T shareholders whether the “job” commandments work. Take the top-gun
recruiting outfit probably involved in Michael Armstrong's placement as
AT&T CEO. Here’s a recruiting outfit who vetted the candidacy of a guy who
presided over the meltdown of billions in vaunted shareholder value. Armstrong
was the wrong guy, in the wrong moment, for the wrong outfit. The recruiting
outfit can’t deflect all accountability for that unless they’re also conceding
they’re just high-buck pimps doing what they’re told. Which is it for
“recruiters”? Pimps out for a buck or commanding “authority” deserving of
enshrinement for the AT&T and a host of other clunkers?
What about the “authority” of the HR departments, another
revered member of the literati, who advanced the candidacies of the poster boys
indicted for book cooking shenanigans vaporizing $100+ billion of shareholder
value? And
didn’t these same HR departments vet and promote the poster boys’
lemming operatives who did what they were told? And then get rewarded with $2+
million “go-away” severances like Tyco’s board voted to give its HR czar? Do
you think “do-what-I’m-told” meekness stops the operatives from putting grand
statements in their resumes about "making a difference"? Some
difference. And we only know about the high-profile cases. What’s your bet
there’s a lot more cases that just didn’t make it to show time like the vetted
and promoted investment bankers who turned “pump n’ dump” into an art form and
the big cigar consultants who took “conflict of interest” to
“what’s-in-it-for-me” heaven as trillions of dollars of shareholder value
evaporated?
Bottom-line, the case is strong
against flawed career governance politics. Yet many “experts” slavishly
champion it, which puts their fingerprints all over bad hires, the breakdown in
corporate governance and the rise of the "chief shenanigans officer"
and “make-a-difference” followers. Puzzling is job seekers fondness for HR and
recruiter operatives as being in-the-know about “resumes”. C’mon, their
“expertise” is over rated. A super majority of such documents are lemming
look-alikes. Consuming a steady diet of junk documents makes an “expert”? Does
serious “food critic” leap to mind in describing a person whose diet’s limited
to bland “hold everything” Big Macs? Then why are HR/recruiter types “expert”
when their diet’s limited to the resume equivalent of junk food dittoed for
consumption from San Francisco to Charlotte?
In this very tough business era, the
flawed thinking contributes to the quiet indignation and rising apprehension of
job seekers. When they turn to the Internet they discover high-profile “jobs”
venues that marginalize job seekers down to eyeballs and “clicks”.
High-performers who’ve never had to “look” for a job till now are led down the calf
path by the literati’s bankrupt counsel and an Internet whose
something-for-nothing illusion is priced right for what’s delivered in career
governance value.
Is there a better way? How is “old”
career governance politics replaced? And what replaces it? There’s hope if
you’re ready to radicalize angst into assertive action.
Before rushing to the answers,
though, consider Rudy Giuliani, the 911 hero and Time Magazine’s 2001 “Man of
the Year”. As reported in the business news, he’s a WorldCom Chairman-of-the-Board
candidate. His candidacy can be an instructive model for fixing flawed thinking
even though he’s in a class of one. Analyzing his ripped-from-the-headlines
candidacy can spotlight a radicalized process whether or not Rudy goes to
WorldCom’s wheelhouse. Rudy’s “experience” in running a behemoth industrial
enterprise is zippo. And indeed his candidacy may fail precisely because of
that. But wait a minute; at this moment, is that WorldCom’s greatest “need”,
someone with impeccable industrial experience? Arguably, WorldCom’s greatest
need is to restore the enterprise’s standing among the 20+ million stakeholders
it purports to serve and whose trust was squandered. Hmm, maybe Rudy’s
candidacy has a powerful dimension.
Rudy’s situation’s instructive. In
the same way, high-performance job-seekers need to do the due diligence in
analyzing the moment and the enterprise to make a case for advancing their own
candidacy as the “right” one. And so what if you miss. So what if your
candidacy isn’t quite the perfect intersection with an outfit’s challenge of
the moment. Just means you’re a “no” closer to “yes”. Then put the cross-hairs
on other outfits in the cluster that your business acumen says face similar
challenges. What’s better, taking a shot or stuffing your quiet indignation
without trying? How many “jobs” can you hold at one time anyway? How many “best
practices” decisions have you made when the info hasn’t been ideal but you
still were under the gun to decide? Ask yourself why that kind of proactive decision-making
is NOT applicable to your new politics of career governance. Adopting a new
politics means you have to present a convincing case for YOUR candidacy and its
fit with THEIR challenge. Sometimes it means you have to be an evangelist
sparking (business) epiphanies in outfits.
Next time Part II continues
constructing a new personal politics of career governance.
Part II
Use your quite familiar resume to deconstruct what’s wrong-headed. More than a hodge-podge of scannable data, your resume’s the voice of your candidacy. That’s “voice” singular not plural. So let go of the notion you’re a Pavarotti talent scaled for “CIO”, “Chief Business Development & Sales” or a host of other job titles. Resume jiggling to accommodate such screwy notions produces croaky Karaoke not 200 buck-a-seat tenor clarity. Your audience has every right to know just what “mission” you’re singing. Fixing your resume to feign you’re a person singing one on key when you’re clueless is gaming the system. That what you’re up to…gaming?
Accept that your candidacy is probably the wrong one for a huge
portion of the outfits and jobs you think you qualify for. If that's not true
then why are 67% of new hires and promotions misfires according to Peter
Drucker? What are you ready to do to nudge more favorable odds?
If you've delivered "solutions", do you offer evidence
of the precise problems and challenges you solved? If you're a "strategic
thinker" and a purposeful, goal setter/achiever, are you applying your
"business acumen" (in your resume) and stating what the next
challenge is that your career evidence shows you're ready to solve? If you're a
"go-to" person who's "made a difference", are you crystal
clear about what the "difference" was? Or do you prefer the
literati’s mindless calf path, an incoherent (but scannable) grocery list of "achievements",
"keywords", and "skills" to land a job that may be the
wrong one, for the wrong reasons, at the wrong moment, ala Michael Armstrong?
At the end of the day, that's the reason for the 67% misfires. It happens at
all levels because of job seekers’ meek compliance with the literati’s failed
counsel and because of the blind calf paths outfits follow in vetting job
candidates.
If you're
a "risk-taker", how does that square with your enthusiasm for taking
a stand, being provocative, in your resume? Cobbling a mile wide, inch deep, patch
quilt candidacy that risks nothing and provokes nothing usually yields a
candidacy without traction. Naked stands the “entrepreneur” –that favorite old
resume chestnut- whose transparent finery reveals “risk averse”. Careers don’t
soar on the wings of chestnuts but they can slip, slide, and crash n’ burn
prior to take off from too many under a resume’s wheels.
Are you ready to risk having your
candidacy shot DOWN for a million reasons at the resume stage but NOT because
your targeted audience doesn't see its payoffs, coherence and relevance for
them right now? How many times in your past have you advanced propositions
whose “bullet-proofness” was on the line? Then why aren’t you taking the same
stance with the most important “proposition” you’ll ever undertake? Are you
ready to do the due diligence demanded to understand the trajectory of your
candidacy and position it for a solid connection with those outfits that need
what you can bring to them at this moment? If not you're a patch quilt fluff of
no compelling urgency to anyone but quite comfortable for the literati who
won’t let go of the rigid “holy foursome” of resume protocols or change the way
to vet candidates they treat like a herd of job supplicants.
Absent laser relevancy, resumes showing “spans of
responsibility”, "achievements", "keywords", and
"skills" are to self-marketing what “unctuous” is to Garrison
Keillor…oily self-serving droplets on the calf path. Gaming and “unctuous”
groveling is the default refuge of those who fear the herders’ prod more than
being shot down. "Safe" candidacies (the ones that comply with all
the resume protocols and the literati’s prod) are the “right” ones 33% of the
time per Guru Drucker. Gaming and groveling. Is that what you’re about?
Like the vast majority of job-transitioners, you're probably a
niche solution not a mass patch quilt commodity. If you're ready to deal with
that and nudge the lousy odds, your flawed candidacy’s fixable. If candidacies
indeed are “solutions” searching for a challenge, doesn’t it make more sense to
point at the right business challenge than it does to broadcast generic
irrelevancies and be marginalized as a hat-in-hand “job” supplicant during the
business cycle’s jobless recovery “soft patch”? That’s not rocket science, it’s
Marketing 101, which even Chief Marketing Officers, Marketing MBAs and VP’s of
Business Development forget when they market their most important product,
themselves.
The electronic media know Marketing 101 and provide rich
examples for job seekers ready to deconstruct and rebuild. Cable TV’s edge,
“narrow-casting” (e.g. Discovery Channel, History Channel, Home & Garden
Channel), stole audiences from the “broadcast” networks. “Talk radio” is
another example. Some observers say it strongly contributed to the recent
rightward tilt of electoral politics. “Talk-radio”, dominated by conservative
points-of-view, has been far more effective, according to observers, in
galvanizing support for conservative political candidates. Liberals, the
analysis goes, have been far less effective in galvanizing support for theirs.
“Vast right wing conspiracy”? Probably not. Just more effective “narrow-cast”
branding and value proposition marketing by one of the major political parties.
While you’re deconstructing, jettison one more notion that’s
tombstone dead for the current era if indeed it was ever right. That’s the idea
that you want to connect with a “stable” outfit. Post-Enron who’s going to
argue that any business’s “stability” is but a prelude to uncertainty and its 1st
cousin instability. Find a corporate chieftain who’s not running scared…if not
from subpoenas then from a steamed Audit Committee, shareholders, global
competition and capitalism’s super specialty, the simultaneous killing/birthing
of businesses at frightening speed. Even Bill Gates runs scared, according to
his public testimony in Microsoft’s trial.
Accept that not only are you a niche solution but also one with
the expected shelf life of fresh spinach. Run scared. But you’re in high
company, baby, and the issue’s how much and how quickly you make business value
happen, whether you’re a power red ensemble or big cigar running corporate USA,
or aspiring wannabe.
An accident of history, not destiny or the demons of fatal
circumstance, placed you in capitalism’s shadow at this moment. A storm of
opportunities morphing at warp speed is what the shadow portends. It can be
energizing if you’re ready to seize the moment. Otherwise the storm’s just a
fearsome obstacle to a safe refuge.
A career’s quality can turn on a point-of-view, which is a
matter of choice. Is Allen Greenspan’s “soft patch” your obstacle or
opportunity?
Caveats are in order. The Niagra of “how-to” career info drowns
job-transitioners. Underneath the torrent is the foggy notion that pragmatic
career governance is a do-it-yourself proposition. Caveat #1 is it’s not. DIY
puts you smack in the middle of the calf path schlepping in lock-step with the
self-treating physician who has a fool for a patient. No publication’s
sufficient of itself to transform the path into wisdom. Article’s like this are
a launching pad, not a destination. Caveat #2 is prepare for disappointment if
you expect “samples”, the stock-in-trade of tons of resume publication hooey.
This is about mind-shifting not dittoing yourself in the image and likeness of
a “sample”. Part III describes how to launch it.
Part III Continues executing a mind-shift and embracing a new
politics of career governance
Sidebar
Candidate inertia and passivity are the biggest flaws of contemporary job seeking. By comparison, if cars were marketed similarly, we’d be expected as consumers to make an informed buy decision from a listing of engine size, colors, interior options etc., all computer scannable of course. What’s your bet that showrooms, sales reps and multi-billion dollar auto industry ad budgets are all going away? Ponder that as you make the BMW lease payment, plan your next cruise vacation, and slash your self-marketing costs with a “Big Mac” resume template or literati prodded knock-off resume, to market a product (you) in which your employer (total your W2s) and you ($50+ grand for a Wharton MBA) have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars and more in perhaps just the past few years.
Now add to that what you expect your cumulative W2s to total in just the next five years. That’s the economic system’s investment in you. What’re you doing to capitalize on it? And the answer doesn’t have anything to do with platitudes about contributing to some outfit’s profits. It has everything to do with the “why” of your candidacy at this moment for THEM. In job search lore, one of the oldest queries to prepare for is, “Why should I hire you?”…but job seekers and all the king’s horses and all the king’s literati STILL DON’T GET IT. Imagine that. What a great opportunity to go left while the rest of the job-seeking world blindly does squad-right down the calf path. Just the thing aspiring power red ensembles, for example, need to do to crack the glass ceilings of good-old-boy networks.
Avoiding the mistakes and leveraging the right job offers means first understanding and signaling your candidacy’s “value” proposition. But most job-transitioners, on a DIY fool’s errand, do a lousy job assessing their own candidacies. The reasons aren’t wafting in the pop-psych cloud of a Who Moved My Cheese? parable or an “attitude-determines-altitude” bromide. First, DIY job-transitioners make all the critical judgments in the assessment. When ego and objectivity dance, which usually leads? No cloudy pop-psych mystery there. Job seekers are typically the first to admit their skewed objectivity but ignore such trifles while praying they’ll be first among equals in the herd of job supplicants who are all busily slanting DIY resumes from slanted DIY analyses.
Second, despite hyping themselves as “change managers” and “thought leaders”, most steer their candidacies with Pit Bull tenacity, clenching old chestnuts in their resume jaws. Rather than grabbing change by the jugular, which their hype implies, they bark chestnuts over and over while expecting a different result. Enter quiet indignation, feelings of victimization, yearning for a safe refuge, and to hell with seizing the moment. Reaching for the Prozac’s more comfortable than, heaven forbid, straying from the calf path.
The first order of business is to get an objective appraisal of your candidacy that’s free of the old calf path thinking. Start with the “why” of your candidacy not with resume protocols. Every candidacy has a logical trajectory and critical path that needs identification as your value proposition and “voice” in the resume.
Sidebar
If you want “objectivity” but have no reliable source, contact the Center for Job Candidacy Assessment. The center’s aim is to change those lousy 67% misfire odds. If candidates do a better job of clearly marketing themselves, enterprises will be less inclined to hire them for the wrong reasons at the wrong moment. E-mail the center c/o john@yourjobfuture.com. Also checkout www.yourjobfuture.com.
Proving your “proposition” at the resume stage involves decisively answering key questions while letting go of rigid resume protocols that restrict candidates to offering shallow candidacies and no compelling solution to an outfit’s immediate pain.
1) How much and how quickly do you make “value” happen? Not “value” in the abstract or in a qualitative way but in bottom-line, quantified payoffs. The bias of the candidacy at the resume stage needs to be on quantified “payoffs” because there’s no measurable way to differentiate qualities such as “passionate”, “visionary”, and “dynamic”. The test of virtually every word of content considered for inclusion in a resume, for example, is how does it connect to a payoff? Like an investment grade bond, gold standard, “AAA” rated resumes show quantified payoffs. The outfits you’re targeting have a legitimate and clear interest in knowing whether you’re a $500 value creator or $5 billion value creator or something in between.
Does that mean that if you can’t show “payoffs” your candidacy’s toast? No. Not all investment grade bonds qualify for an “AAA” rating and neither do job candidates at the resume stage. That’s why there’s a range of investment grade bonds just like there’s a whole range of vettable job candidates at the resume stage. The big problem with the politics at present is that most candidates are triple “A” wannabes who can’t or won’t make the case. Instead they schlep the calf path hyping their resumes with patently empty rhetoric, which exposes them to coming across as “junk” candidates not investment caliber. The travesty is that superior candidates often look like junk. Try this test. Read your own resume. You get juiced? If not, how can you expect strangers to achieve even a modicum of interest? If you can’t get juiced over your own candidacy, how in the world can you expect anyone else to?
Sidebar
“Putting lipstick on the pig” is the way investment industry insiders describe the practice of securities analysts who privately disparaged a stock they publicly touted. Job seekers need to be sensitive about their resumes wearing too much lipstick. That alone can signal a candidate whose style trumps substance. There’s nothing on this green earth that’s wrong about “style”…in resumes or persona. The problem arises when misplaced priorities put “style” ahead of substance. Reportedly, some of the working wounded about to be cleaved from the employed class are spending 8 or 10 grand a pop for face-lifts to make them appear younger and less washed-out. Why? So they can look vibrant presenting a candidacy running on empty? Go figure.
2)
What were the key overriding business issues (challenges) that were the context
for the value contribution(s) made? Helping your audience understand your value
in the context of previous business challenges adds depth and transparency to
your candidacy. It anchors one end of your career trajectory and validates why
your candidacy’s credible going forward. High-performers’ career trajectories
are typically defined by key overriding challenges they’ve met or contributed
to meeting. Those are defining moments. They have more to do with the depth and
transparency of your true “worth” than does shallow, fuzzy “progressivity” (job
titles and promotions) absent compelling proof about the payoffs you made
happen and the challenges met.
3) Anchoring the leading edge of your career trajectory are the “mandates” (business issues/challenges) that your background says is right for you, right for this moment and right for the targeted outfit. This is where vacuous “business acumen” meets the hard pavement of reality. This is where you get in the shoes of your audience and go to the edge with your candidacy. You position yourself to let the audience vote your candidacy up or down by telling them what the “business challenge” is that your “acumen” says they’re facing at this moment. Unlike a political candidate, a job candidate doesn’t have to attract the majority of voters. Just a select few will do thank you. The strategy is to inform your “electorate” what you see are their business “issues” (challenges) of the moment…where you stand on those “issues” and what you can do to help resolve them…and let the “electorate” decide whether they want to take a step beyond the resume stage of your “candidacy”.
High-performance candidates have a couple of options. They can offer mushy candidacies-for-all-seasons wrapped in safe resume protocols and pray they’re among the chosen few, though the odds are against being the “right” hire. Or they can apply the “business acumen” many are fond of citing when they turn their resume spotlight on themselves and risk nudging the odds towards being the “right” hire. That means defining a candidacy and business “mandate”, doing the due diligence and making the business case why their candidacy’s the right one, at the right moment with the right enterprise.
Is this a tall order? Of course. Isn’t that the case you’re making…that you deliver tall orders? So do it, in your own behalf. Where’s the downside? Fewer “hits” than you’re currently scoring on the bankrupt calf path of career governance politics? Fewer insulting job offers? Less marginalization and devaluation?
But if this is too tall an order, then forfeit control to the literati and schlep their calf path. Instead of branding yourself, let the calf path politics brand you as a job supplicant in a vast herd. If you forfeit control, though, intellectual honesty demands that you stop absolving yourself of accountability for what happens. The person in the mirror is the one accountable. Not the economy and not the literati.
Self-respect says “go for it”. Radicalize and revitalize. Let it be your personal declaration of independence from the calf path. You deserve no less than anyone else to take a shot at liberating yourself and controlling your own destiny.
The upside potential’s far greater than the downside risk.
Excerpt from The Calf Path by Sam Walter Poss
A moral lesson this might teach
Were I ordained and called to preach;
For men are prone to go it blind
Along the calf-paths of the mind,
And work away from sun to sun
To do what other men have done.
They follow in the beaten track,
And out and in, and forth and back,
And still their devious course pursue,
To keep the path that others do,
They keep the path a sacred groove,
Along which all their lives they move.
But how the wise old wood-gods laugh,
Who saw the first primeval calf!
Ah! many things this tale might teach-
But I am not ordained to preach.
If a friend, relative, or professional acquaintance needs a wake-up call, send them this one…with the copyright intact.