Cold Cuts and Career Advice

Posted by Steve on July 19, 2010
Posted in: Uncategorized. 3 Comments

Like many who open themselves up to helping others, I see many – who for reasons undoubtedly born in their relationships with their parents – can’t seem to take my advice to the level required for them to see the method in the madness. I really don’t like hearing my voice – it must be the dang Jewish trombone, er, nose – and while I may be making a statistical faux pas, but within my sample size, this stuff really works.

But only if I do my part; when someone asks me for advice, for me the advice is only 80% of what I should be doing for someone. Advice fails when the givers neglect the final 20%; advice without action is what people who write columns do.

My friend Jon Hyland – LinkedIn, his blog – and a fellow Hofstra grad, called me a few months back and we met for coffee to discuss his career options. He sent me an update a few days ago…

I wanted to drop you a line to see how you’re doing, and also to share what I’ve done so far with my search.

I took your advice and got together a list of companies I would, ideally, like to work for. For most of June, actually, I was looking into how viable of an option it was for me to go to culinary school. I visited the French Culinary Institute and Institute of Culinary Education, and I realized that a) I do want to go to culinary school, but b) the financial aid isn’t there. However, visiting the schools did make me realize that I could definitely do a program of culinary study while simultaneously working.

So, I looked into food-related corporations and broke everything down in a couple of industry segments: Food Media, Equipment Manufacturers, Food Producers or Grocers, and Food Education. I came up with a list of ten, which is below:

Food Media

Food Network

Travel Channel

Food Education

French Culinary Institute

Institute of Culinary Education

Food Equipment Manufacturers

Cuisinart

Viking Range

Food Producers/Grocers

Boar’s Head

Fresh Direct

Whole Foods

Unilever (Skippy)

Since I’ve identified these companies, I’ve got some Google Alerts set up to follow news on those organizations/brands, and I’m going to use LinkedIn and Twitter to try and connect with the HR folks at them. If I had to tell you which companies I’d give my right arm to work for, they would be: Food Network, Whole Foods, and Boar’s Head. Food Network because, honestly, it’s inspired my love and creativity with food and I love their programming. Whole Foods, because of their dedication and mission to provide the best food to its customers. And Boar’s Head, because I LOVE their cold cuts – I seriously ONLY eat Boar’s Head!

Which is what I suggested Jon do – I really enjoy how he segregated his list: It helps me think about other companies or avenues of action to suggest. Obviously more work for me – but isn’t this what I’m obliged to do if tell someone I’m going to help them?

So I called a friend who works at Boar’s Head; where will it go? No idea but it’s part of my final 20%.

Advice is nice but action is better…

I Wanna Be the CEO of BP

Posted by Steve on June 21, 2010
Posted in: Uncategorized. 13 Comments

In a letter to the editor of that famed black-and-white-and-read-all-over, the New York Post, Ed from Manhattan offered the following in response to an article entitled,“Slippery Oil CEO Plays Dumb”:

Blankfein and Hayward are either the stupidest or smartest people on Earth.

If they get us to believe that they had no idea what was going on with Goldman Sachs and BP, we’re the ones who are dumb.

I think I can do as bad a job as Hayward has done as CEO of BP. Maybe I should send them my resume.

Dear God, please don’t; it’s tough enough letting everyone who’s reasonably qualified know where they stand. To spend time trying to assuage someone they’re not CEO material when their experience isn’t in the same galaxy is to siphon away energy from where it should be used.

I cannot recall the number of times a person so unqualified has “shown an interest” for positions I was actively recruiting: A cable technician applying for CIO, a bookkeeper interested in a Director of Finance role, or a social worker with their sights set on the VP of Human Resources.

While I always do my best to let them down easy, it’s not unusual for the person to be still convinced they can do the job. My questions then are:

Have you ever applied for a job so out of your range of experience that even you chuckled when your hit “Send”?

Out of curiosity, why did you do this?

Why do you believe people do this?

Polishing Turds

Posted by Steve on June 16, 2010
Posted in: Facebook, Social Media, Twitter. 25 Comments

Sometime during the past ten days I read a Tweet where the writer said that they had literally fallen out of bed. Literally. Which meant only one thing: She immediately felt compelled to tell her friends and followers that she had fallen out of bed. Big time news.

Of course there must have been some rationale for this, right? Perhaps her goal was to create a kinship among people who had also fallen out of bed. If enough people responded that they too had fallen out of bed she might have been compelled to create a Facebook fan page, a Twitter handle (@FloorFinders), a LinkedIn group for professionals who have fallen out of bed, and/or a blog detailing research conducted by leading universities on why people fall out of bed. What a great way to use social media tools!

I too have fallen out of bed – but I’m an edge sleeper. But Twitter about it? Then shoot tweets back and forth – some RTs, DMs, and lest we forget about those tangential vectors whose base is in these idiotic meanderings but now have morphed into Obama, BP, and American Idol – to further add to the social septic pool? No way…talk about a demon seed.

Writing a blog post that includes mentioning falling out of bed is bad enough but I’m only using it to make a point…it’s different.

That anyone would even remotely care about someone falling out of bed is anathema to me; nowhere in all my brain synapses are there any individual synapses that feel the urge to tell the world that I have found the floor with my body. This is worse than Seinfeld and Barcelona combined; “falling out of bed” is a poster tweet that epitomizes the word banality. It is about nothing.

There are 16 billion plus Tweets out there, 400 million active Facebook users, and obviously a collective of hundreds of millions of other items associated with other social media platforms…and it all reminds me of the “social” game “Post Office” where “communication” replaces thinking. Very “Fahrenheit 451” in that the utopia of clear, free human thought is being replaced by a hidden dystopian movement where followers parrot out the messages of people whom they believe to be influential.

Yet it is important to write about it because “information” like this – really nothing more than orts of shit hanging around one’s bumhole – has clogged up our conscious airways and found its way into social media platforms and labeled – by the writer and their lemming followers – as items that are worthy of mass broadcast or scholarly discussion.

We LOL and ROFLMAO upon reading about people’s foibles and FMLs and send these morsels of the mundane to our friends, all the while claiming we are social networking and building relationships, brands, and goodwill towards men. We’ll find an article that claims something and post it as a paean to our prowess of cutting and pasting then implore our friends to retweet, digg-it, reddit, or generally speaking, stick it up their asses and let it ferment until it eventually turns into a sweet tasting wine.

There are 80 million or so people on Farmville who believe they’re cultivating pig shit when in fact they’re part of a lead generation scam. Did I write “scam”? So sorry – I meant social networking and relationship building.

Where is the value in all this? Why is it so difficult to tell the “world” what you really think or feel about an issue?

Why do you insist on polishing turds?

thanks to WU for the inspiration

Memorial Day

Posted by Steve on May 31, 2010
Posted in: Heroes, Memorial Day, Veterans. 6 Comments

Some know that on the weekends during the summer, I’m a Jones Beach Lifeguard; it’s the “job” I would do for zero pay (you know the question I ask – What would you do for the sheer joy of doing it? – this is my answer). I wrote this piece for our Union newsletter back in 2004 and had forgotten about it until I saw Brothers (I won’t debate the inaccuracies of the movie) two nights ago. The message holds equally well if you’re at your own beach enjoying the day, or watching your local Memorial Day parade, or shopping in Home Depot. You’ll see plenty of veterans today.

What are you going to do when you come face to face with them?

As you walk down the beach this weekend – or any day for that matter – take a long look around; listen to the banter, the radios blaring, and the crashing of the waves. Some might think to themselves, “It can’t get any better than this.” Now imagine yourself doing the same thing 60 years ago, but instead of walking down to the stand, you’re one of 176,000 soldiers – nearly as many people who watched the Memorial Day air shows at Jones Beach. Most of these soldiers were your age – or younger. Saddled with nearly one hundred pounds of gear, they waded in from amphibious landing crafts while bullets whizzed by and mortar shells exploded.

Gold, Juno, Omaha, Sword, Utah – innocuous names for beaches on a grand military plan. These beaches, (today they are beaches as beautiful as ours), determined the course of the next 60 years. When our crowds become large and unruly, when beachgoers leave their garbage buried in the sand, when drunkards become brash and boorish, remember the words of Pvt. Charles Neighbor, 29th Division, who landed on Omaha Beach, “As our boat touched sand and the ramp went down, I became a visitor to hell.”

By nightfall of June 6, 1944, the beaches were secure – the bullets had stopped but more than 9,000 Allied soldiers were killed. If you visit these beaches today, you would never know such carnage took place if it were not for the remnants of German bunkers and many American flags. The sands are soft to the touch and the waves often role in hollow. My Dad, 21 years old at the time, was part of 10th Mountain Division who defeated the Fascist armies in Italy one year later. He recalled how the defeat of the Nazis in France served to bolster the confidences of soldiers fighting Axis armies in other campaigns.

Dad is now 80 and frankly not in the best of health. But he is no different than any other old geezer you see at the beach strolling on the boardwalk, their heads covered with a VFW beret that is adorned with campaign pins, miniature bronze stars, and battalion buttons. These graying reminders of WWII probably sponsored your Little League team when you were a kid or gave you your first job. When they returned from the war, they never asked for anything in return despite the facts that many of their friends didn’t return with them after dying on the beaches in Normandy.

These men are your fathers and grandfathers; many wear hearing aids and knee braces – it doesn’t matter whether they’re nearsighted or farsighted, many can’t see too well. They live on fixed incomes and have to make decisions such as buying drugs or food for the month.

But I’m not here to offer a maudlin commentary on the treatment of WWII veterans. I’m here to implore you to do something that is long in coming: When you see these regal figures of our past at the beach, don’t walk by with your head down. Introduce yourself and shake their hands. Thank them for their sacrifice; ask them how they’re doing. Find them a place on the shore and give them an umbrella for the day. Make them Honorary Lifeguards for the day. Listen to their stories of D-Day.

Then as they leave for the day, smile and wave goodbye then turn around and look at the beach where we are privileged to spend a significant amount of our lives. Then think about Gold, Juno, Omaha, Sword, Utah and the thousands who died on those beaches 60 years ago so we can enjoy our beaches today.

A Devilish Experiment

Posted by Steve on May 17, 2010
Posted in: Creative, Facebook, LinkedIn, Social Media, Twitter. 2 Comments

He’s loud, boorish, opinionated, and priggish but he’s still the SPCA’s poster child. In the same manner that turned a hoop star into an even bigger brand – Be Like Mike – the Recruiting Inferno is now at the forefront of social media experimentation…

Does “Being Mike” actually help your personal brand?

For instance, Brenda sent me a DM after she changed hers: “I’ve gotten about 10 new followers with animal’s avatar…hmmm? Which means mine must be a real turn off?”

Well Brenda, yes and no but let’s find out how much an influence Mr. Animal truly is.

To participate, all you have to do is change your Twitter avatar to one of these of the Recruiting Animal that most closely embodies who you are:

Clockwise from top left to right, we have Original, Bald, Blonde, Gay, Redhead, and Mohawk.

You know the drill: Save the picture you want to use to your hard drive then go into your Twitter settings and change your picture. Then sit back and watch the followers flock to you! Or not…

Just be prepared to deal with the shock when someone comes back to you with a message that sounds “right” but with an avatar that makes you wonder whether you mistakenly sent a delicious Tweet to a person who would have no problem with telling the world what kind of idiot you are.

Oh the heart palpitations!

GenL

Posted by Steve on May 11, 2010
Posted in: Baby Boomers, Careers, GenX, GenY, Human Resources, Learning, Social Media. 11 Comments

Marty Snyder once commented on an old blog post of mine (for once I’m asking you to please click the link and read my words) with a quote from Honest Abe…

In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares. The older have learned to expect it.

It’s no wonder that “Generation Y” is so dubious about us older farts; GenY’s are at the age of true independence and most of us simply desire to warn them about what’s coming down the road. But our words of warning are frequently viewed as meddling because they’re at the crossroads of independence – why listen if you believe your experience is sufficient to clarify your intentions?

When we were children and our parents told us not to touch the flame on the stove, we touched the flame and it burned. I know I touched it and my parents yelled at me; it was very unpleasant.

Back then, spankings and belts were, dare I say, common. I remember hearing those feared words, “Wait until your father gets home” after I tossed an eff bomb in my Mom’s direction. I stewed for nearly three hours and when Dad came home, I saw them huddle up, glancing my way every few seconds with stern looks on their faces. The outlook appeared very grim.

Dad called me over and said, “Go upstairs and get a belt.” I’m sure my lower lip was quivering but I turned and headed upstairs.

I came back with a very thin belt. Dad said, “Too small…go back a get a wider belt.” More quivering…

This took place three more times – “not wide enough” and me trudging upstairs to his closet. I later discovered that they were muffling laughs as I tried to “reason” my way out of a spanking or at the very least outsmart them.

In the end, I received a few swats with the BIG belt but they didn’t really hurt. I also received hugs and kisses and the words, “We’re doing this for your own good.” Sure.

What taught me a lesson was the agony of learning. But here I am at 51 getting my first real taste at parenting having stepped into a relationship that requires me to be more than a buddy. How do you folks do it on a regular basis? As I’m discovering now, teaching a lesson isn’t easy but taking shortcuts surely isn’t the way to do it. For their own good…

My parents viewed events like this as learning experiences – they wanted to prevent me from reaching out into the fire but they had a longer term belief that the lessons outweighed the pain and suffering. They let me fail…although I never truly appreciated being “burned.”

If we allow ourselves to see the true reason for parental or generational inderdictions, perhaps we’ll see that these come from a place of love and not control. The younger element of the #jobhuntchat generation believes they’re ready to be CEOs – and while a few might be – most shouldn’t even be spelling CEO for a few years. There is so much to learn about the financial, operational, and organizational realms of business and crowdsourcing alone won’t help you compress 10 years of business experience into a six month learning session.

What impresses me about Corn, Guru, ImSo, and Mizlee is that they respect those who came before them and they listen to learn. That’s not to say that they probably believe they know better than others young and old – I know I sure did – but they’re not so caught up in their media-annointed uniqueness of Y that they simply block out words of advice and counsel from people like me.

And to be completely candid, I’m in awe of what they’ve already accomplished. How I wish the older generation to me took the time to reach out and offer advice and counsel as we do now!

Agony is part of growing and there aren’t any ways to sidestep its impact. Listening is learning; trudging ahead with blinders on to others than oneself or one’s generation is not.

It doesn’t matter if you’re Y, X or BB, we’re all part of Generation Learning – GenL – until we die.

Now get over yourself…

Your Cover Letter Made Me Wince

Posted by Steve on May 10, 2010
Posted in: Careers, Cover Letters, Job Search, Recruiting, Uncategorized. 8 Comments

I’ve blogged about this topic before on ERE and as a ghost writer on a former client’s blog (which caused something like a 1000% spike – albeit temporary – in the blog’s traffic). Given all the pablum-like advice on cover letters these days – folks, there’s something wrong when  a one-page resume is accompanied by a one-page cover letter – it is worth reposting this one specific letter in response to a Linus sysadmin opportunity…

I’ve been bouncing boxes for Uncle Sam 2.5 years now in some of the most god-awful places on earth. I’ve racked servers during indirect fire, maintained contact with a bird while our vehicle was shot up, mastered the finer art of the many uses of duct tape and how it applies to IT in a warzone.

I’ve put up racks in Namibian provinces while cheetahs and jackals watched me from 100 yards away, I’ve even chased an ostrich who tried to steal my CAT5 from the box. I’ve worked on military projects where the dotmil PM/leadership had a more difficult time making decisions than my wife. I’ve danced in the Red Zone with Iraqi locals after a support call to a Forward Operating Base.

I’ve mastered the chemistry of the ‘essential caffeine stack’ and I debunked the myth that if you untie your belly button, your butt will fall off (it won’t!). I’ve been shot at, shot up, blown up, broken and put back together again; from Baghdad to Namibia and from Sudan to Djibouti. I strongly feel that I have the skillset, experience and thick skin to take on the world of IT in the greatest city on earth.

This was so unique that I was dialing this person’s phone number the moment I finished reading. It was so compelling that I would have called him even if his resume experience and skills didn’t match the needs of the position.

Will your cover letter – keep in mind that most of us might not even read it unless your resume gives us a reason to do so – get my fingers to dial your number?

If you’re brave enough and want some feedback, post your cover letter here; I’m sure I won’t be the only person chiming in.

Do you have any questions for me?

Posted by Steve on May 4, 2010
Posted in: Careers, Creative, Human Resources, Interview, Job Search, Recruiting. 4 Comments

The only part of an interview where I hold my breath is the part that follows, Do you have any questions for me?

My expectations have always been low because all job search experts are using the same playbook to answer this one (although questions likes these renew my faith in the intelligent jobseeker) and the answers are almost always of Mad Libs quality.

  • Could you explain the company’s organizational structure? A house of cards…
  • What attracted you to working for this organization? They hired me…
  • From all I can see, I’d really like to work here, and I believe I can add considerable value to the company. What’s the next step in the selection process? You need to define value…
  • How do my skills compare with those of the other candidates you have interviewed? You asked me the same questions…
  • How are executives addressed by their subordinates? Your eminence…

At this point in the interview, most candidates simply want to exhale – rather than pull away from the field. Bad move. You need to separate yourself even more before the interview is over. In crew parlance, it’s time for a power ten…

I realize that for many the business and the balance sheet are foreign lands but I assure you that when people I interview come prepared to talk the industry, competitors, barriers, and opportunities, my job becomes more exciting. I mean it – when we can talk about business rather than a job, it is enriching for all.

The use of standard questions and approaches to interviews – and to a large degree the approach to job search in general – is predicated on the business environment remaining static. Hardly. 2009 and I suspect the next few years as well, will see a very different business landscape, one in which the status quo will become caught in time like a mosquito in amber. The actual problems people will be tasked with solving will directly relate to identifying growth opportunities that will trump weakened or less focused competitors. The key is for you to know as best as possible the answers to these questions; to the extent that the hiring manager doesn’t know these is indicative of how well the company may perform. Just as in real life caveat emptor…

  • What companies are gaining and losing market share and how are you positioning yourself to address opportunities?
  • Which company is bundling products and services in new ways?
  • Which companies are creating buzz that has made you take notice?
  • Which companies are viewed as marginal players and how have you positioned yourself to seek and destroy? Is it you?
  • Are you increasing your R&D budget? Is this increase customer driven or is it to play catch-up?
  • What innovative new products and services are you planning to bring to market over the next 18 months?

You have to finish strong. You had me at hello is lovely for movies but I’m assessing our entire time together.

Please – just don’t ask me to describe benefits on the initial interview. If this is the best you can do, then keep sending out emails addressed to “Dear Sir or Madam”…

I don’t see the resemblance…

Posted by Steve on April 28, 2010
Posted in: Creative, Recruiting. 3 Comments

HRMargo calls me Yoda…I just don’t get it.

GenWhiners, GenXcusers, Baby Blamers: Enough Already!

Posted by Steve on April 28, 2010
Posted in: Social Media. Tagged: , , . 8 Comments

Perhaps 20 or so years ago, I had a girlfriend come with me to my parents for dinner; it might have been some Jewish holiday (which would make the telling of this story more poignant as my mom is a classic Jewish mother). She always enjoyed bringing up such important facts like the size of my shmeckle when I was born or how she had my brother go inside the locker room after I had shaved my head for the first time prior to a championship swimming meet – with a box to place the shorn locks into (which she kept for 30 years). Walking on the deck on my way to a heat, I still remember her yelling from the stands, “Oh Steven, I can still see the fawcep mawks from when the doctah pulled you out.”

Still, there’s nothing worse than your Mom talking about sex when you’ve brought a then significant other over. It was on that day that she decided to turn to my Dad and say, “Dahling, it’s like I told yaw fawthah, it’s not qwahtity Steven, it’s qwahlity. Isn’t that right Chawlee?” My Dad sighed but the rest of us wanted to wretch…

Doesn’t matter how old you are, when your Mom says things like this, the reaction is always the same: Eye-rolling and slumping shoulders, followed by head shaking and the warmth of utter embarrassment.

Well clutch the pearls! GenWhine, GenXcuse, and the Baby Blamers actually have something they agree on…

I knew this already but Tru USA confirmed that we have so much more in common than we have differences yet for years we’ve read little more than what makes us different. People like Sarah White, Shauna Moerke, Rich DeMatteo, Ryan Leary, and Mike Notaro are as ageless as all the other generations in attendance in terms of their curiosity, sensitivity, and commitment to work as anyone else in AARP age territory. Some of my views on recruiting are younger than theirs and their views show the wisdom that older folks aspire to achieve.

The real issue is one of success or failure not generational differences.

Regardless of generation, when you don’t perform to expectations, failure ensues. How you respond to failure is telling: Do you learn from it or make excuses for it? Last I checked, whining, excuses, and blaming take place at every age.

Sorry all you writers of the helicopter parenting phenomenon, some of my friends’ parents argued with Little League umpires because their sons weren’t batting clean-up and made abject asses of themselves. No difference!

Consider Jennifer Deal of CCL and her research on generational differences. It’s been written that:

The Silent Generation (born before 1946) values hard work
Baby Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) value loyalty
Gen Xers (born between 1965 and 1980) value work-life balance
Generation Y (the generation just entering the workforce, also known as Millennials) values innovation and change.

Or, in terms of negative stereotypes, the Silents are fossilized, the Boomers are narcissistic, the Gen Xers are slackers, and the Gen Yers/Millennials are even more narcissistic than the Boomers.

Or in Levy terms, how the heck can anyone make money when everyone’s so screwed up?

Deal’s research seems to demonstrate that the generations are far more similar in the values that matter most. Seriously, who doesn’t want respect? Who doesn’t want their leaders to be trustworthy? Who truly likes change? Loyalty? Please. Who doesn’t want to learn? Who doesn’t like feedback?

Enough already! GenWhiners, GenXcusers, and Baby Blamers – hear this: Your mothers were hamsters and your fathers smelt of elderberries.

In the end, performance is ageless.