Career Coach Office Hours: September 23, 2022 | JobSearchTV.com
By Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter
I answered questions about job search, hiring staff, management, career transition, as well as workplace issues. Join me at 1 PM Eastern on Tuesdays and Fridays on LinkedIn or YouTube (JobSearchTV.com channel). You can also message me on Linkedin before the show and I will answer it, too.
What is The Best Way to Start a Cover Letter?
04:10
Have you ever fired an employee who then retaliated against you or the company? What happened? I have not personally had that experience. I know there are employees who get fired who go out in what I call a blaze of glory with six guns shooting and firing every which way to try and damage the organization that they feel wronged by. This can happen with just a natural layoff where people get upset because they’ve been hurt by the fact that they’ve given so much to an organization and they feel as though they were fired or let go and undeservedly. It’s a sad occurrence. Now, again, I’ve never been retaliated against. But I know of a couple of situations where a person who was fired, acted out in certain ways. They went public. I don’t want to make it seem like they held a press conference and the media contacted the organization. Nothing like that. But, you know, there have been instances where I’ve been aware of in professional sports, where, we now have one public situation where a coach had a consensual affair with, a consensual relationship with an employee of the team, and has been suspended for a year. That wasn’t a retaliation. That was a rules break. How the story became public, I don’t know. I’m not sure that anyone really knows how that happened. Maybe it was retaliation because the other person was let go. Don’t know. But often, it’s about relationships gone astray. Often, it’s because people in one way or another feel wronged. And, unfortunately, unless there’s documentation to prove the case, there are people who’ve been hurt on both sides of this as either the employee let go, or as the employer or manager who’s been retaliated against, unless there’s some version of documentation to substantiate what’s happened. So I’ll just simply say I hope this never winds up being you on either side of the equation.
07:01
I lose my rhythm of self-study to switch to a new job. What should I do? Develop a discipline. I think that’s your best course of action. And now, when you’ve lost your rhythm, it indicates there’s been a change to a routine that you’ve developed. As a result, when you’re, you have to work on developing a new rhythm, a new pattern, a new habit. And you may need to be conscious of it. For example, and this has nothing to do with the workplace, but if you’re in a situation where you can’t exercise at the same time, as you previously have, it takes some practice to develop a new habit to deal with a different time of day. Shouldn’t be any different. You’ve had space in one place, and there’s space in another, but it’s a new habit and until you’ve established the habit, it requires conscious thought and effort. So I’ll just simply say, you have to practice and develop a new habit in order to get so what you need to do. I hope that’s helpful. Start today. If you still have time to your day, practice something related to the self-study that you want to sustain. Do something a little bit different. And get yourself back in the groove again.
Job Search Advice for Students
08:48
Should I invite a recruiter to connect on LinkedIn after just speaking to them for a position? Yeah, why not? You get access to their network. They get
access to yours. Most recruiter’s networks are much larger than individual networks. It benefits you. And you can simply say ‘Having spoken with you, I thought we could stay in touch. Whether you move my candidacy forward, I just thought might be a simpler way for us to be able to communicate than the phone or text or what have you. So you can always message me here.’ And it becomes an easy way. So yes, by all means. I remember years back, I was among the first 10,000 people on LinkedIn. And social media was very, very different than it is today. Thus, I’ll just simply say, in days of old, it seemed like an intrusion. Today, it is pretty normal. So go ahead, connect with him. There’s no harm in doing so. It will make communications easier for the two of you in the future.
10:09
How can we filter out irrelevant profiles and LinkedIn search results? I think the simplest way to do that is you have to add more criteria to your search results to eliminate more people. There’s no way to block because that doesn’t serve LinkedIn. What you can do is think of what’s called longtail keywords, as long as search string as you possibly can enter it, so that in this way, you have access to more of the right people that you’re really looking to find. So that’s really the best way to do it. Because LinkedIn is trying to get people to stay on the platform, if you’re inMailing, toserve up more inMails so they can charge you. So we can think of longer tail keywords or longtail keywords, in order to get more of the specific people that you really want.
11:22
How can company leaders encourage employees to give feedback without making them feel attacked or judged? And it’s a wonderful question. I’ll just simply say really, it starts off with anonymizing the process in order to, number one, prevent a person from feeling retaliated against, or a person feeling the risk of retaliation. Now, I think one way to do that, again, the ‘them’ I’m going to treat this as the leader feeling attacked or judged–you are being judged. That’s what you’ve asked people to do is to judge the performance. So let’s not kid ourselves. It is a judgment that people have and they may not know what you know. And thus, that’s number one, a communications issue on the leader’s part, that makes them feel attacked, or that requires that the employees are mature enough to phrase questions in a particular way or phrase their comments in a particular way that is respectful. So if people are going to be rude or abusive, they’re going to be rude or abusive. And I frankly would have someone weed out those judgments without getting to leadership. But that’s really about rudeness and abusiveness because that’s immature, and it’s not designed to be helpful. It’s designed to be hurtful, and no one should be hurting people on their any set of circumstances. So how can you encourage it? How can employees be encouraged to give feedback? Well make it anonymous. Have it go to a box. Provide everyone with an email address that they can be sent from. There is not a personal email address. So there’s no way of tracking it back. Suggest to everyone that they set up a fake account and that they email it from that account. That’s going to be the simplest way to do it. Not ideal, but I want people to feel free enough to make comments, but not free enough to be abusive. No one should be abused, certainly not the leaders of an organization.
14:46
How do I reply to the recruiter when asked, ‘You first pay me for this job and I don’t have an investment.’ Okay, so if I understand the question correctly, this recruiter wants you to pay them for their work? And I would simply continue by saying, ‘and why is that? Are you not being paid by the corporation that you’re representing to fill a position, right?’ ‘Oh! But I may not be able to fill it with you, and I’m going to take time.’ ‘But you’re not going to take time if you can’t fill this position with me, and you fill it with someone else, you’re going to get paid. And if I don’t fit this job, you’re not going to do anything anyway.’ So make them talk first. So that they can say more things that demonstrate the idiocy of their position. So I’ll just simply say, the more they talk, the more idiotic what they say is going to be. And then you can smile and say, ‘I already know you’re being paid by a company to fill a job. And if I’m not the right person to represent for the job, or for any job that you’re representing, you’re not gonna do anything. All I’m gonna do is sit in your database until you have something. So why should they pay you again?’ And then be quiet and watch them slowly disappear. And if they continue to insist, ‘Do you really want me to go on to social media, and recount this story? Do you want me to get in touch with the owner of your firm that you’re trying to hit me up for money? Really, you want me to do?’ They’ll stop? It won’t do anything for you but, so what? They weren’t gonna do anything anyway. They were taking a shot at scamming you for money. Don’t fall for it.
Recruiters Are Not Your Friends
16:55
How do you know what issue you’re having, when you go on a job interview are always given praise over your interview skills, but never hired? How do you actually get the job? So let’s work with a couple of possible assumptions. One is that you’re being told the truth, and someone’s willing to work for us. Another one is they’re lying to you. Oh, this is fabulous. It’s the end of the interview, you stunk up the joint and you’re asking for feedback. And they’re saying ‘no, everything’s fine. Everything’s good. I gotta good idea of your background.’ And they’re not being committal. And so you’re interpreting this as praise, but they’re trying to be evasive, because you’re putting them on the spot where they don’t want to be. So I’ll just simply say, how do you get the job? Practice more. Connect the dots between what you’ve done, and what they’re looking for, in the way of a hire. What skills they need someone to have, and make the Fit obvious to them as though an eight-year-old is looking at your background, and trying to see how your background fits. So I’ll just simply say, you’re not doing as good a job as you think you are for getting the job. And they’re probably feeding you a placebo that’s designed to make you go away. So don’t buy their BS, you’ve got to get better.
18:36
Does reading a lot of leadership books help one as a manager? Yes, and no. reading the books will give you ideas of things that you could do better. Not putting any of them into practice basically means they will go in one ear and out the other. I must in almost candor speak from my own experience. I used to read a ton of leadership books. And eventually, I forgot them. I didn’t put them into practice right away and didn’t develop a habit of doing things differently. Or it was a short-term try. It didn’t work onto the next thing. That’s okay. It didn’t work under my conditions. But I’ll just simply say, no, reading books isn’t enough. Applying what you read in a timely way will help you far more.
19:40
Are job boards better than company websites? So I’m going to look at this from both sides– from an employee side and from the employer side. First, on the employee side. From the employee side job boards have more listings there than a company website does. You have to go the multiple company websites.
It’s just the way it is. Now, I’ll just simply say, from an employer standpoint, job boards get you more access to more people. That’s good and bad, because a lot of what you get in the way of response is spam, or a little more than spam. That’s if you’re posting. If you’re searching., again, you can use long tail keywords to really narrow down the response that you receive. So both have their benefits and their liabilities. If you’re a job hunter, remember, an employer has to pay in order to post the job there. An employer has to pay to be able to search the job board to look at resumes. Not every employer is willing to do that. Do not just focus on job boards. By all means, do go to company websites, because they may not post every job, because they’re being charged per job, or per slot. LinkedIn, for example, you purchase slots, where you can change out the jobs as you see fit. But still, it’s a pain. So their own site, some jobs are not going to be kept up to date. As a result, you may see something that’s older there, and they forgot to take it down and replace it. So in both cases, there are pros and cons. Do both. Go to company websites, go to job boards. Yes, it’s going to take you time to do this. But if you’re out of work, what’s the problem? If you are working, start with the job boards, then go to company websites. And by the way with job boards, I’m including LinkedIn.
22:06
Are job recruiters one of the most overrated jobs out there? They don’t seem to do anything special, I find most quite incompetent and annoying, and very shady characters. Speaking of judgmental! So every professional has better or worse people within it. You may be the top talent in your field. And there are people there in that same profession who do mediocre jobs. And the same is true of recruiters. They don’t do anything special? That’s your opinion. You find them quite incompetent. Why? Because they don’t get interviews for you? Maybe that’s about you and not about them. Why is it about you? Because you don’t have marketable skills, or you’re spamming them and thinking they’re supposed to work for you when they don’t. Remember, recruiters are paid by a company. They’re not paid by an individual. So the result winds up being there are some job hunters who misinterpret the role of a recruiter and that recruiters work to find people jobs. They don’t. They work to fill jobs from companies that are willing to pay them a fee to fill a position and have that person work for that company for a certain period of time. So you say they’re incompetent. Okay. And annoying. I don’t know what makes them annoying, and very shady characters. Oh, my goodness, this is like a bad movie plot. You have an opinion. You’ve had bad experiences. Sorry, your experience, some of which is shared by other people, some other people have that experience. That’s okay. And there are many companies and many individuals who have a very different experience than you. You’ve gotta remember that not every accountant, lawyer, engineer, data person, whomever . . . not every person is as effective as another. And as a result, you just got to keep plugging. Use recruiters wherever you can, because some of them have great relationships that will profit you. I’m going to do one more question and then call it a day. I didn’t set myself up with a beverage here. My throat is getting dry. So I apologize or do one more question today. Let’s see.
24:46
Why do job recruiters always want to call you before they even tell you how much the role is offering? Well, I’m pausing here to think about how to explain this. Well, they don’t want to tell you how much the position is paying right away because, well, I have to break this into two parts. One part is for those parts of the country where it’s not legal to ask about your current compensation. And the other part where it is still legal to ask what your current compensation is. Let me start with the second one–still legal. Let me pick simple numbers. You’re an $80,000 per year person. Their job pays to $130. And they know they can’t get your 130 so you’re probably worth 90, maybe 95. And why do I say that? Because a 90 or $95,000, a year person does something different than a $130,000 a year person. That’s just the fact of it, you may not see it that way. I worked in search for a hell of a long time. That’s my opinion. You don’t have to agree with it. So they don’t want to tell you, because if you hear the $130, you get locked into that. And if their client offers you 90 or 95, which is still a nice raise for you, you wonder why you didn’t get $130 and angry and turn the job down? That’s one reason why in the places in the country. Where it’s not a legal question they ask, they may know the answer but they’re not willing to share it right away. That’s different. And thus, they’re going to deflect, for fear that they’re going to insult you. Or you’re going to lock in on the number and they haven’t had a chance to evaluate you yet to see where you’d really price out. Again, they may know as much as what you’ve revealed on the resume. They may know as much as your LinkedIn profile. As a result, you wind up in a situation where the two of you are bumping heads. They want to have a conversation, evaluate and assess first before they talk about the money. You may be locked in on the money. They’re trying to figure out whether you’re worth representing to their client. They want to do that first before anything.
[svp]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZSa9xq9pXE[/svp]
Finding The Career That Fits You
ABOUT JEFF ALTMAN, THE BIG GAME HUNTER
Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter is a coach who worked as a recruiter for what seems like one hundred years. His work involves career coaching, as well as executive job search coaching, job coaching, and interview coaching. He is the host of “No BS Job Search Advice Radio,” the #1 podcast in iTunes for job search with over 2400 episodes.
Are you interested in 1:1 coaching, interview coaching, advice about networking more effectively, how to negotiate your offer or leadership coaching? People hire me to provide No BS career advice whether that is about a job search, hiring better, leadership, management or support with a workplace issue. Schedule a discovery call at my website, www.TheBigGameHunter.us
My courses are available on my website, www.TheBigGameHunter.us/courses The courses include ones about Informational Interviews, Interviewing, final interview preparation, salary negotiation mistakes to avoid, the top 10 questions to prepare for on any job interview, and starting a new job.
I do a livestream on LinkedIn, YouTube (on the JobSearchTV.com account) and on Facebook (on the Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter page) Tuesdays and Fridays at 1 PM Eastern. You can send your questions about job search, hiring better, management, leadership or to get advice about a workplace issue to me via messaging on LinkedIn or in chat during the approximately 30 minute show.
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