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Guest Blogger Liz Ryan is a member of the Glassdoor Clearview Collection and a former Fortune 500 HR executive; she is the Workplace Expert for Business Week Online and the Networking Expert for Hot Jobs. Liz’s advice columns reach 50 million readers per month. Ryan leads the 25,000-member Ask Liz Ryan online community, where she shares business, career and life advice with members every day. She authored the book: "Happy About Online Networking: the virtual-ly simple way to build professional relationships" and is a sought-after keynote speaker. She has addressed a wide range of audiences including the United Nations, CEOs, HR leaders, and entrepreneurs.
Other ways to follow Liz: http://www.asklizryan.com | @AskLizRyan
For years, people have been asking me for help with their networking Elevator Speeches. And for years, I’ve been saying “When are you going to use that Elevator Speech?” In regular old human conversation, there just aren’t that many opportunities for us to launch into a thirty-second diatribe about what we do professionally – not if we want to be polite, anyway.
Regular conversation doesn’t happen in thirty-second chunks. A typical networking conversation tends to flow more like this:
Dear Liz,
I’ve been at my job five years, and there are aspects of the job that I love and others I hate. It’s a job I could do in my sleep, and there aren’t really any opportunities for advancement. At the same time, I’m well paid and the benefits are fantastic. The leadership team is great and my manager has been very good to me. On the other hand, salary increases have been tiny for the past two years. It’s a family-owned company and the business is about as recession-proof as you can get, so I’m grateful for that. For the first few years in the job, I was learning a lot, but I’m pretty well versed now and the learning has tapered off dramatically. I basically drift through each day, dialing it in and doing what the job requires and no more, since the opportunity to get a significant pay increase is basically nil. Part of me wants to look for another job, but another part of me says “You’re about to vest in your 401(k) matching contribution, and why leave a stable environment for an unknown one?” What is your advice?
Thanks,
Fred
Lots of job seekers are on the edge right now. Employers are taking forever to make hiring decisions, they go into radio silence mode for weeks, and the job-hopeful are left wondering whether there’s even a real job opportunity to hope for or not! Some of the most freaked out people who are looking for jobs are the over-fifty candidates, who feel as though the deck is majorly stacked against them. Not only are they seeking work in one of the toughest economic climates since forever, but their advanced age is a huge barrier to employment for them – right?
[Hope For The Over-Fifty Job Seeker?] That’s what we’ve all been told (and told, and told again).
My friend Angela called me. “Do you find me a risk-taker?” she asked. “I’ll be honest, Angie,” I said. “I adore you, but the first word that springs to mind when someone mentions your name has never been ‘risk-taker.’”
“Exactly!” she said. “I lay low. I follow orders and keep a smile on my face. That’s my deal.”
“So what’s going on?” I asked her.
“Listen to this,” Angie said. “I’ve been at my job for six years, working hard, trying to please the boss.
I love employment-related legal issues, especially the cutting-edge ones that make the papers. It isn’t that I like to see people in conflict. It’s just that when we read about these cases, it’s usually because their issues fall close to the line between what we know for sure about employment law, and what we truly don’t.
This is surely the case in the matter of Imane Boudlal vs. the Walt Disney Company. According to the LA Times , Imane was hired to work at a Walt Disney theme park, where every employee who deals with the public is seen as a cast member. Each cast member is issued a costume (uniform) and required to wear it on the job. Two years after she began working for Disney, Ms. Boudlal asked for permission to wear a hijab – a headscarf – to work, and when her request was denied, she sued the company for employment discrimination on religious grounds.
Dear Liz,
I’m a call center manager in a small but busy company. I’m completely on my own when it comes to hiring. I have to place the job ad, screen resumes and interview people. I’m pretty much relying on my gut right now. What are some good interview questions I can ask the call center rep candidates to help weed out the people who couldn’t hack our high-volume environment?
Thanks,
Marty
If I could change one thing in the typical job seeker’s mind, I’d get a crowbar and pry out (and incinerate) the goofy idea that a job seeker has to grovel and beg to get a job. There’s no question that the economy is struggling. There aren’t as many jobs around. But if we focus on the idea “Too few jobs! Too many people!” we lose sight of the other side of the equation. When employers are in trouble, they need brilliant people who can solve their problems. It used to be possible and even easy to get a job just by fogging a mirror. That isn’t true today, but people who show up to an interview ready to talk about business pain and its remedies are more in demand than ever.
One of the flavors of dangerous job search Kool-Aid making the rounds has to do with career change. This Kool-Aid gets people to believe that they have to give up massive amounts of salary by changing careers. Now, in some cases this can be true. If I’ve been working as the head of Obstetrics and Gynecology at a major research hospital and I decide to buy a pushcart and sell gourmet popcorn, I’m going to take a salary hit. There’s no question about it. For most people, though, changing careers is not an automatic ticket to the end of the salary ski-lift line. Here’s the thing to keep in mind: you’re going to send a resume, and the employer is either going to interview you or not.
A woman called me from out of state. “I want to apply for this call center manager job I found,” she said, “but I don’t have call center experience.”
“Do you have another kind of leadership experience?” I asked. “I ran an animal shelter,” she replied.
Hurrah! Now we were in business.
I saw the funniest job ad. It said “Office Manager needed. Must be willing to work hard and juggle numerous high-pressure tasks. Overtime mandatory. Pay is not great to start but will improve as our company grows. No complainers.” I appreciate the hiring manager’s candor, but I don’t think the phone in that company’s offices is ringing off the hook right now. Low pay! Hard work! Overtime! What more could an Office Manager ask for?
That job ad is an over-the-top example of a phenomenon that’s abundant everywhere you look. Maybe the rough economy is to blame, but way too many large and small employers seem determined to beat talent away with a stick. Their job ads are unfriendly (“Candidates lacking two or more of these qualifications will not be interviewed or contacted” where we can interject the missing words “you vermin,” undoubtedly left out by mistake). Their careers sites are like stone-walled fortresses. Their interviewing manner is cold, and their overall hiring processes signal to candidates, “Go away and die.”
Corporate recruiting is broken – it’s dysfunctional and ineffective, and sucks time and money employers could be using to make better products and services. If you need evidence of the sorry state of the recruiting process at essentially any large or medium-sized employer, just talk to a job seeker — or a hiring manager, for that matter.
Hiring processes are too slow, too cumbersome, and too stuffed with red-tape bureaucracy to allow employers to make thoughtful decisions about the people they’re evaluating. The typical recruiting process is full of unnecessary steps and pointless slights and insults to job-seekers. None of this does an employer any good, but it preserves order (or the appearance of order) and keeps bureaucrats busy, so you don’t find many organizations willing to scrap the broken process and start over. Still, if a CEO were inclined to re-design the recruiting process to make it work for living human people, here are five ways he or she could go about it:
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Anger Management: How To Keep From Losing Your Job by FINS from The Wall Street Journal February 9th, 2012
The Hiring Process May Be Flawed, But You Can Still Land Your Next Job by onTargetjobs February 8th, 2012