Archive for the ‘it careers’ Category

How To Really Screw Up You Next Job Search

Thursday, April 1st, 2010
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You May Be Damaging Your Job Prospects And Not Even Know It

You May Be Damaging Your Job Prospects And Not Even Know It

IT Leaders may be very good at managing a team of IT professionals and harnessing their skills to accomplish challenging IT goals; however, all too often we do a really bad job of looking for our next job. I’m not talking about poorly formatted resumes or even answering questions incorrectly during a job interview. My point is that it’s all the other actions that we take during a job search that really end up shooting ourselves in the foot. Still confused? Maybe I should explain myself…

The Problem With Black Lists

When you are in the middle of a job search, it’s pretty easy to start to think about the firms that you are trying to get an interview with as being these big, impersonal “things” . In reality, you are really dealing with a small group of people that can include recruiters and members of the company’s HR staff.

Working in IT has conditioned all of us to view the world in pretty narrow terms: things either work or they don’t. We have a bad habit of bringing this view to our job search. This is what can get us into hot water.

It turns out that all of the people involved in the hiring process, recruiters, HR staff, etc. all talk to each other. When we tick them off, they’ll put our name on their personal “blacklist” and then life just got a lot harder. This is something that we tend to forget.

Reasons That We Screw Up

When we think that we’re being clever and trying to get a job interview with a company by going in through the front door (job postings on their web site) and the back door (with a recruiter) at the same time, we end up making everyone mad at us.

Recruiters don’t like it when you’ve gone direct because they don’t make any money if they place you and the company already knew about you. HR staff don’t like having your name show up multiple times for the same position. What can happen very quickly is that your name gets place on a “blacklist” .

Once your name is on the unofficial black list, you’ll find that recruiters won’t return your calls (they talk to each other also) and the company won’t acknowledge your emails.

How To Fix Problems That You’ve Made

Getting off of a black list once you’ve landed there is very difficult. First off, you need to understand that it’s going to take time to get off of the list. It took time to get on the list, it’s only fair that it should take time to get off of it.

Your first action should be to stop doing whatever got you blacklisted in the first place. Just because you soured your relationship with one recruiter doesn’t mean that you have to compound the problem with other recruiters.

Next, you need to find ways to be a giver, not a taker with the recruiter / HR staff that you’ve offended. This doesn’t mean sending them gifts – those look fake anyway. Instead, you should look for ways to make their jobs easier. One way would be to send them highly qualified candidates for their open positions (no – you can’t recommend yourself). Also, acting as a good reference for someone that they are considering can also win you points.

Things You Should Never Do

We are living in the 21st Century and that means that the number of ways that you can hurt your job search efforts have multiplied. Here’s a quick list of other things that you should never do:

  • Don’t post anything on Facebook or MySpace that you wouldn’t want your mother to read / see.
  • Don’t bend the truth in your resume.
  • Don’t spam the world with your resume.
  • Don’t submit the same cover letter for multiple positions in the same company.
  • Don’t send your resume to multiple recruiters and HR hiring managers at the same company.
  • Don’t apply for jobs for which you don’t even meet the basic requirements.
  • Don’t send your resume to the same recruiters over, and over, and over again.

What All Of This Means For You

Looking for your next job has always been a challenge. In today’s online hyper-connected world, some things have become easier while others have become much more difficult.

It’s all to easy to become too eager when looking for your next IT job. If you work with too many people or send your resume out too far and wide then you risk being black listed by recruiters and hiring managers.

Keep your job search focused and stay honest with what you tell people about yourself. You will find that next job but only if you treat the people who will help you to find it with respect.

Question For You: Do you think that you should apply directly for jobs even when you are working with a recruiter?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

As IT Leaders we are always looking forward to our next challenge, the big project that looks impossible at the beginning, but which through our superhuman efforts turns into a technical and business success story. This is all great, but we do need to be careful because there’s one big project out there that could do us in – governance, risk and compliance (GRC).

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Posted in it careers | 2 Comments »

A New Way To Think About IT Talent Management

Monday, August 11th, 2008

Talent Management problems are very similar to supply chain problems

So hopefully we can agree that most firm’s approach to talent management is at best broken, and often missing-in-action. What’s an IT manager to do? Well, let’s first look for a process that actually works in the modern corporation and then let’s see what we can do to model it for talent management. That can’t be that hard to do can it?

If you very coldly view staff as “products” for just one fleeting moment, then you might be able to agree with me that one might be able to view talent management as some sort of soylent green supply chain problem. There has been a lot of work done on how to improve and optimize supply chains over the last 60 or so years and we can use this work to improve how we manage talent today. If you’ll allow me to extend the product analogy just a little bit further, then you’ll find that the nirvana of talent management would be if we could create a “just-in-time” delivery system that would provide the right employee at the right time to get the job done correctly.

Since inventing a brand new way to do talent management would be too risky, let’s take a closer look at what supply chain processes can do for us here:

  • The bane of talent management is forecasting how many people will be needed over time. Supply chain processes have exactly the same challenge; however, they’ve come up with a way to do it.

  • Reducing the costs of manufacturing a product is very similar to a company’s efforts to minimize the amount that they spend to develop talent.
  • The common practice of outsourcing parts of a manufacturing process is equivalant to hiring outsiders to do jobs.
  • The challenge of making sure that products get delivered on time can be thought of as being similar to planning for company events where succession is necessary.
  • Finally, supply chain management deals with how products move through a supply chain and eliminating bottlenecks that occur in that chain. Managing a pipeline of internal talent is very similar as you attempt to have employees advance through development jobs with different responsibilities.

In the end, there are four principles that can be drawn from supply chain management and applied to talent management. What’s interesting is that two of them deal with uncertainty that appears on the demand side (make vs. buy and forecasting) while the other two deal with uncertainty on the supply side (improve development ROI and how to protect that investment). We’ll discuss these four principles in detail next time.

What do you think? Is it too chillingly cold to try to apply supply chain principles to HR tasks? Should we not try to fix something that you don’t think is broken? Do you have another example of an existing process that would be a better model to use? Leave a comment and let me know.

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Posted in employee, it careers, retention strategies, supply chain | 2 Comments »

The Myth Of Talent Management: Why It Doesn’t Work

Thursday, August 7th, 2008

Just like the Chicago Bulls, IT managers have to find a way to manage their talent

Everyone who has lead a team, managed a department, or run a company knows that in addition to all of the other “keeping the doors open” jobs that they have, the task that can sneak up on them at any time is staffing. This coin has two sides: you don’t want to have too many warm bodies on your team if you don’t have the paying work to support them. At the same time, you don’t want to have to few or you’ll not be able to secure new work and that will eventually lead to your firm’s demise.

Two weeks ago I found myself in the wrong position on this issue. The project that a team that I was responsible for had run into some delays. This meant that the schedule had been stretched out and yet the funding for the staffing had not been changed. What this meant is that I had to start to shed project members. This ended up requiring me to to make several trips down to the cafeteria with team members to let then know that their time on the project was up. Needless to say this was not fun for me and it was clearly not fun for them. As I did this, I was wondering what’s a manager to do to avoid this type of poor talent management?

After the bloodletting was done, I started to do some research in order to find a better way to manage talent. A smart guy by the name of Peter Cappelli over at the University of Penn’s Wharton School has spent some time looking at this situation and he reports that things are pretty grim.

What is talent management? In a nutshell, it’s an attempt to anticipate the level of need for staff and then creating a plan for how you are going to achieve it. Dr. Cappelli says that he’s found that most firms fall into one of two groups for managing their talent: either they do nothing and run around when they have to fill a position or they have a staffing forecasting system that’s left over from the 1950′s which is now inaccurate because the world is moving so much faster.

Anybody remember internal development programs? When I worked at Boeing certain workers were identified as “Hi-Pots” (High Potentials) and they were placed on a career path that rotated them through multiple departments. This approach has pretty much gone the way of the Dodo. The few shining exceptions are at GE and PepsiCo that have their famous management academies that mangers attend as part of their job. While these are great programs, who cares since only a few managers in the world have access to them.

In the 1990′s hiring folks from outside became all the rage. It was possible because there were so many people who had been shed from other companies that the pool of available talent was quite large. Bad news – that pool’s all but dried up now. Additionally, as the pool got smaller, firms who had spent money training their employees started to see them leave and go to work for their competitors. This, of course, made them even less interested in investing in training their staff.

Ok, so where do we stand right now? Most companies / departments / managers don’t have any sort of talent management plan in place right now. However, the upper management is starting to realize that this is one of their key challenges. The ultimate question is how can your firm’s talent be managed in such a way that it will allow the firm to ultimately make more money (and spend less)?

I’ve got some thoughts on things that you can do, but first do you agree that things are as dire as I’ve laid them out to be? Does your firm have a talent management program? Are YOU being managed as part of a talent management program? Post a comment & let me know.

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Posted in employee, it careers, IT staff retention, recruiting, retention | 4 Comments »