Rebooting Your Career

May 12, 2012 By 1 Comment

Time to install your updates and hit the restart button.

The most frequently asked questions by unemployed readers of megadisrupter come from those who were laid off after holding a single job for many years. They held the job for so many years that looking for a new one feels awkward, foreign and terrible. They liked their old job and never even looked for a different one when they had it.

And while it is tough to get started looking for a new job, the hardest part comes during the search itself. People aren’t finding anything similar to what they were doing, and the few who do are finding the compensation to be drastically lower than what they were making. These folks are feeling too old to be taken seriously, too outdated and irrelevant to the professional world. Some have sent out over 1,000 resumes and gotten fewer than five responses.

Of course, on a long enough timeline the survival rate for all jobs drops to zero. At this point in our history, it is normal for people who have had the same job for 20 or more years to be laid off. If you haven’t evolved what you do and who you are, you cannot view yourself as a victim if you get the boot in favor of a cheaper person who does the same thing or a solution that replaces what you do entirely.

If you are in this situation, the good news is that you are still valuable. If you’ve been striking out in your job search, it’s not because you have nothing left to offer but because you are searching incorrectly. Here are a few problems to keep in mind about your situation and how to reboot your career to overcome them: [Read more...]

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Job Hunting: Move Past the Fundamentals

April 20, 2012 By Leave a Comment

You are expected to wear pants, so it isn't impressive to the hiring manager when you show up in them.

The result of any candidate search is that one or two dominant candidates crush the field. The candidates who are grouped together in the back of the pack are not bad candidates, though. In fact, these candidates are quite good – they fit the background requirements, have the right credentials and do ‘all the right things’ in their interview. The problem is that when you’re a good candidate, you are a lot like everyone else in the back of the pack. Meanwhile, the dominant candidates break out, uniquely connecting themselves to the position through their personal narrative with success stories to back it up. They leave the good candidates in the dust.

The mistake that good candidates are making is they are too focused on the fundamentals of the job hunt. The fundamentals are all the things recruiters and job search sites are telling you to do: how to maximize your odds of getting your resume noticed, getting selected for an interview and making the hiring manager take a liking to you. Since everyone is getting the same advice on focusing on the fundamentals, very few are focusing on their strategy to achieve dominance.

The fundamentals should sound quite familiar:

[Read more...]

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Job Hunting: You are the Prize

April 13, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Forget the rejections, you didn't belong there anyway. Find the place where you are prized.

There are many job hunters today and many of them are feeling desperate. Desperation can hit anyone, regardless of pedigree or past success. It hits us when we aren’t connected to something meaningful. The more we try to connect and then fail, the more hopeless and desperate we become. It is no mystery why people with a strong support structure and diverse interests are less impacted by negative events like job loss: they are connected in other ways.

Regardless of how connected you are to other people and things, though, failing repeatedly at job hunting delivers a desperation punch on some level and it will feed on itself and lead to more failure. When you’re desperate, you will take anything and this comes through loud and clear to recruiters and people you try to network with. Hiring managers? You probably aren’t even getting to talk to any of them anymore.

What you need to remember is you have no reason to be desperate, even if you have been failing. There are a handful of roles out there at great companies where you are prized. You’re the candidate they are rejecting all the others for. All you have to do is stop applying for every job you see and find these. Know who you are, target only a very few opportunities and dominate your competition; then it will be the hiring managers who are desperate, not you.

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Job Hunting: Dominate Your Competition

April 4, 2012 By 2 Comments

When a company conducts a candidate search, the results look like this:

or sometimes this:

There is usually only one candidate that gets serious consideration and wins the job easily. Sometimes there are two who are very close and dominate the rest of the field, and the company dives deeper with each of them to break the tie. This means that if you have been turned down for a job opportunity, you weren’t even close to winning it. You weren’t the close 2nd, because if you were they would have told you that. This might feel devastating if you have been job hunting for a long time because it means you have failed badly on many occasions. But take heart in the fact that you have most likely won a great job in the past, and when you did you were that candidate that they didn’t even think twice about hiring.

The top candidate(s) in the field exhibit relative dominance. [Read more...]

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Job Hunting: Finding Your Fit

March 29, 2012 By Leave a Comment

How do you find your fit? Get in there!

When you have a personal narrative, you have a strong sense of belief in who you are. You also have an idea of the type of place you belong, but chances are you still need to find that place. The tendency here will still be to search job postings in an effort to find a fit, but as is the case throughout the beginning of a job hunt, it’s not productive to even look at job boards right now. Your next move is to research and engage organizations to find those that best fit your narrative.

This is a time-consuming effort, but worth every minute. By finding and engaging companies that are great fits for your narrative, you build meaningful relationships. This foundation creates relative dominance for you over your competition in the job hunt when the time comes to apply for positions. Here are the key components to finding and engaging your ‘best fit’ companies: [Read more...]

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Have a Dead-End Job? You’re a Dead-End Person

March 25, 2012 By Leave a Comment

This is not a dead-end, it's an obstacle to overcome.

Most people are not working at the place that is going to give them the fulfillment they are looking for, and a very significant number of workers do not have a promising career-path inside of their current organization. But as far as career growth is concerned, it doesn’t matter.

All jobs, regardless of the prospects for upward mobility, serve as a vehicle for you to become a rock star, to lead your peers, and create value through disruptive change. The moment you believe you are in a dead-end job, you believe that the only value you can derive from it is your paycheck and that this will never change. If you believe this, then you can’t rock, lead or disrupt. You’re a dead-end person. [Read more...]

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Job Hunting: Targeted Opportunities

March 21, 2012 By 2 Comments

Intensely target only a few select opportunities.

Once you have performed a self-evaluation and have your concise narrative developed, you can begin the process of targeting opportunities. This is an exciting stage of job hunting because the self-evaluation will make you feel in control of your destiny for the first time. You now have a legitimate weapon to hunt with and your natural energy level is high. This is great! You are going to need all the energy you can find for tracking down opportunities, as there is a tremendous amount of research involved.

Your guiding principle is to pursue targeted opportunities. You are targeting very specific opportunities that fit your personal narrative extremely well. This is a big change for most people. Here’s why: [Read more...]

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Guts

March 21, 2012 By 2 Comments

"A lot of people run a race to see who is fastest. I run to see who has the most guts." Prefontaine

Consistently producing mega-value through disruptive innovation is the best way to live your professional life, and there is no doubt about that. Nothing will provide more fulfillment, upward mobility and compensation. But it is not easy.

Normal people naturally revert toward the status quo, which means you are going to face a lot of resistance on your journey. When job hunting, you will have gatekeepers who do not understand you and will try to block you from the hiring manager who does. When you are outperforming your peers, you may face derision over your rock star status. And when you are pitching disruptive ideas, you will most certainly face a mean combination of apathy, fear and politically based resistance that you must overcome.

This is why normal people stay normal. Most of them are intelligent and have great ideas, but ideas and smarts cannot defeat the evils described above. To be a disrupter, it takes guts. [Read more...]

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Job Hunting: Know Yourself

March 14, 2012 By 6 Comments

Now that you have stopped submitting your resume and applications to job postings online, it is time to discover who you are through a self-evaluation. This is not a trivial exercise, it’s serious.

You are doing this for two reasons: [Read more...]

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Job Hunting: Your Approach

March 9, 2012 By 1 Comment

Right now countless job seekers are flinging their resume at any and every job posting they find on job boards, getting ignored at very high rates of speed. If you are serious about not only winning a job but winning the job, then your hunt is not about exploring every option out there.

It is about focus. You need to focus on: [Read more...]

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