Posts Tagged ‘Facebook’

How To Really Screw Up You Next Job Search

Thursday, April 1st, 2010
Image Credit
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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Cheap & Easy IT Management: How To Use Social-Network Analysis To Boost Team Performance

Thursday, December 17th, 2009
Image Credit How Your Team Is Wired Can Make All The Difference In The World

How Your Team Is Wired Can Make All The Difference In The World

No budget, no special training, and yet you are expected to do more with less. How can you go about fixing what’s wrong with your IT team during tight economic times? It turns out that there is a simple way for you to identify where you are having issues and how you can fix them. All you need to do is to learn a about a new management tool called social-network analysis…

It’s Not Facebook

These day’s we’re reading so much about social networks that when we hear the phrase, we automatically think of web sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, or MySpace. Well, we’re not talking about those, but there are similarities.

Instead, what social-network mapping is all about is finding out who your team talks with in order to solve problems and get information. This is the type of information that everyone always knows, but never spends much time thinking about — it’s basically invisible.

Once you’ve collected this information from your team, you will then be able to create a social-network map that shows the communication gaps, related information bottlenecks, and team members that are not being fully utilized.

The immediate payoff for you as an IT Leader is that you’ll be able to improve collaboration within your team as well as perhaps uncovering some star performers that you simply didn’t know about.

How About An Example?

This kind of management tool just begs for an example, so let’s take a look at one. Let us pretend that you are an IT manager who is in charge of a team of 16 workers as shown in the following figure:

Example: You Are In Charge Of A Team Of 16 IT Workers

Example: You Are In Charge Of A Team Of 16 IT Workers

You create a questionnaire for your team that has only one question: “Whom do you go to in order to get answers to your technical questions?”. When you get the survey forms back, you lock the door to your office and get busy creating a social-network analysis map. Let’s say that you come up with something that looks like this:

The Result Of Your Social-Network Analysis

The Result Of Your Social-Network Analysis

Now you have to interpret what you’ve discovered. Clearly worker A is one of your star problem solvers — did you know that? It also looks like you have a hidden problem with worker H, they don’t seem to be seeking help to solve problems and nobody is asking them for help. Additionally, with only a couple of exceptions, your department seems to be divided into two groups that really aren’t talking with each other. Once again, did you know this?

For IT Leaders who are managing a team that is spread over multiple sites, this kind of social analysis can be even more valuable. If we sent our questionnaire out to all four sites that our team is located at, we might get the following results back.

Social-Network Analysis Of Workers At Multiple Sites

Social-Network Analysis Of Workers At Multiple Sites

What this is showing us is that although there appears to be information flowing within each of the four sites, there is very little information that flows between sites. A little more digging might reveal that the only people on your team who are talking to each other are the managers. If so, then you’ve got a problem that needs to be addressed.

What All Of This Means For You

In order to get the most value out of doing a social-network analysis, you are going to have to carefully pick the questions that you ask your team. One great question to include is to ask how interacting with a given team member affects the responder’s energy level. This can be a good way to uncover the energy vampires on your team.

The result of making the effort to map the social structure of your IT team should product tangible real-world payoffs. The most valuable of these is that once you know who has the most valuable information, then you can work to make sure that everyone has easier access to that information. This should result in a decrease in the number of steps that are required to solve issues.

Ultimately understanding the flow of communications within your team and then taking steps to improve and facilitate it will boost your team’s ability to innovate. Now that’s something that we all would like to have more of!

What Do You Think The Most Important Question To Ask In A Social-Network Analysis questionnaire would be?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

There is probably no way that you’re going to be getting more funding or headcount in the immediate future. Yet at the same time your senior management keeps talking about the need for the IT department to start showing some innovation. Sounds like you’ve gotten yourself into yet another bind. How about if we take a look at how you can exceed your expectations using what you already have…

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Web 3.0 Is Coming – Are IT Leaders Ready?

Thursday, July 30th, 2009
What Is The Web 3.0 And Are CIOs Going To Be Ready?

What Is The Web 3.0 And Are IT Leaders Going To Be Ready?

Oh Web 2.0, it seems like only yesterday that you arrived – is it possible that already you may be getting ready to be replaced? The answer is not quite yet, but the outline of what the Web 3.0 is going to look like is starting to firm up. IT Leaders need to start getting ready for this change now so that when it arrives they can take advantage of all that it will offer…

What Was Web 2.0?

Before we run off and start making predictions about the future of the Internet, maybe it would be a good idea to take just a moment and make sure that we are all on the same page as to just exactly what the Web 2.0 is / was.

When the web first showed up (Web 1.0), everyone rushed out and created static web pages. That was a great start, but it got a bit boring because nothing changed without a great deal of effort. Web 2.0 extended what we had by adding blogging, Wikipedia, social networking (MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) and even microblogging (Twitter). This changed everything because all of a sudden things could be easily changed – and they were!

What Is Web 3.0 Going To Be?

IT Leaders who are trying to keep their teams on track and on top of new technologies need to be asking just what is going to make up the Web 3.0. Dr. Jim Hendler at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has been spending some time thinking about this and he’s come up with some interesting ideas. Dr. Hendler points out that the next version of the Web appears to all be based on Tim Berners-Lee’s (you know, the guy who invented the Web) vision of a semantic web.

In this next iteration of the web, what we’re going to see is more and more complex mashups of data from different applications being used to deliver data in more useful ways. Dr. Hendler believes that the read-write abilities of Web 2.0 applications will be used to build Web 3.0 applications that operate at the data, not the application level.

What’s Going To Make The Web 3.0 Happen?

Before the Web 3.0 can show up, a few critical pieces need to drop into place. Ultimately, what needs to happen is that it has to become easier to integrate web data resources. This is exactly what IT Leaders need to be staying on top of. Here are the emerging technologies that are going to allow this to happen:

  • Resource Description Framework (RDF): provides a means to link data from multiple different websites or databases. Uses the SQL-like SPARQL query language.
  • Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI): We already have these – this is how you merge and map data that is found in different locations on the web.
  • Web Ontology Language (OWL): allows relationships to be inferred between data that is stored in different parts of the same application.

Final Thoughts

IT Leaders have many different responsibilities that they have to juggle at the same time. Keeping up on new and emerging technologies is part of the job. The Web 3.0 will be at least as significant of a change as the Web 2.0 was. If they move quickly, IT Leaders can position their teams to get in front of a significant change before it happens. Right now they have such a chance – Web 3.0 is not here yet, but it’s getting ready to arrive.

IT Leaders need to have their teams spending time time to understand what problems that the company is facing today will be able to be solved once you have a better way to unify all of that data that is available on the web. A critical first step is assigning staff to learn and become experts on the new Web 3.0 technologies early on. If you can prepare for the future AND accomplish your other IT tasks at the same time, then the Web 3.0 will have provided you with yet another way to transform yourself from an IT manager into a true leader.

Questions For You

What is the level of adoption of Web 2.0 technologies in your department currently? Is anyone currently studying the new technologies that Web 3.0 will be built on? Is anyone on your team studying how Web 3.0 abilities can be used to help your company? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Have you ever heard the phrase “When senior management doesn’t know what to do, they reorganize”? I’m not sure if this is always true, but it sure seems as though when times are tough reorganizations, restructuring, and even re-engineering are things that can happen to any department in IT. What’s an IT Leader to do about it?

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Posted in information technology | 2 Comments »

Alternate Reality Games: Games That IT Leaders Know How To Play

Thursday, July 23rd, 2009
Alternate Reality Games Offer IT Leaders A Way To Solve Difficult Problems

Alternate Reality Games Offer IT Leaders A Way To Solve Difficult Problems

As an IT Leader, you’ve got some challenges facing you. You’re managing a diverse and potentially distributed work force of highly skilled and talented IT professionals. You need to find a way to keep them challenged, and yet at the same time enable them to find ways to work together. Have you considered Alternate Reality Games?

Leave The Real World – Visit An Alternate Reality

As IT Leaders we have been taught that most problems can be solved with the application of some math and a whole bunch of data. However, most of us have learned that the real world is much more complex than that – there are a number of IT problems that can’t be solved this way.

Jane McGonigal has been looking at big problems like this and she’s got a solution for us: Alternate Reality Games (ARGs). ARGs are immersive games that provide a massively multi-player experience. What makes them unique (outside of their size) is that the game-play unfolds in the course of their players lives over time spans that can range from days, weeks, or even months. This isn’t your father’s Wii.

Tools Of The (Alternate Reality) Trade

Ok, I can hear you saying, so just how do you play one of these ARGs? Well, it turns out that you don’t really play it – it plays you! You already probably have some hard-core gamers working on your team, so why not? The folks running the ARG show, known affectionately as “puppet masters” are in charge of distributing potentially thousands of pieces of information that contribute to telling the story of the ARG. These pieces for the puzzle can be distributed via websites set up for the game, email, cell phone text messages, online audio podcasts and videos, etc.

The players in the game don’t play by themselves – there is no way that they could solve the puzzle if they did that. Instead, they need to collaborate in order to share and gain information. They do this by using social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace, etc.), wikis, chat rooms, and blogs to talk about what clues they have and what they might mean. This interaction forms the narrative of the game.

Sounds Like An Effort – Why Bother?

Welcome to the 21st Century. McGonigal points out that ARGs are an excellent way for IT teams to master those difficult collaboration skills that IT Leaders want them to learn. Two of the skills that she points out are cooperation radar – the ability to identify who can best help you, and protovation - the ability to prototype and test solutions quickly.

Oh, and by the way: ARGs are a lot of fun for everyone that is involved. Although they may be working through a simulation of a business problem that your firm is facing, it doesn’t seem that way – it feels like a game.

Final Thoughts

When an IT Leader is faced with a BIG challenge that doesn’t have an obvious solution, playing an ARG may be just what the CIO ordered. Although they are not easy to set up, an ARG may offer the best way to quickly test out different scenarios in real world circumstances.

Above and beyond the business benefits that ARGs offer, using this innovative way to stimulate and engage your team will provide you with yet another way to transform yourself from an IT manager into a true leader.

Questions For You

Have you ever used any form of game playing to help your teams sort through difficult IT problems? Do any of your team members play massive online games like “World Of Warcraft”? Would your business environment support part of the IT department playing a game to solve a business problem? Do you think that your IT team gets along well enough to work together in order to solve a complex puzzle? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental IT Leader Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Oh Web 2.0, it seems like only yesterday that you arrived – is it possible that already you may be getting ready to be replaced? The answer is not quite yet, but the outline of what the Web 3.0 is going to look like is starting to firm up. IT Leaders need to start getting ready for this change now so that when it arrives they can take advantage of all that it will offer…

For More Information

  • Check out the “World Without Oil” simulation that used an ARG to simulate a complex problem with no easy solutions.

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Google’s Staffing Problems Can Teach IT Leaders A Lot

Thursday, July 2nd, 2009

Google's Having A Common Staffing Problem - Will They Be Able To Fix It?

Google's Having A Common Staffing Problem - Will They Be Able To Fix It?

If you could go to work for any company out there right now, which one would it be? A lot of us would say Google – everything that we’ve read and heard about the company makes it seem like a great place to work. However, it turns out that even Google is not immune to IT staff problems…

Google’s Staffing Problem

Google is in the middle of what is often called a “brain drain” – some of its best and brightest workers are leaving the firm to go join other companies. In the past few weeks they’ve lost Tim Armstrong who was their advertising sales boss and they’ve lost David Rosenblatt who was in charge of their display advertising. Oh, and they are losing their top engineers to Twitter and Facebook…

What’s Google Going To Do?

Google’s plan to try to stem this exodus of talent is a typical Google solution – they’re going to try and solve it by crunching numbers. Unlike many IT firms, Google has both the data and the processing power to attempt this.

Google plans on using data that they’ve collected from surveys and peer reviews in order to discover which of its employees feel underused. This may sound a little far fetched, but Edward Lawler who works at the University of Southern California says that eventually all companies will be approaching HR issues this way.

What’s Gone Wrong At Google?

Using algorithms to find unsatisfied workers is clever and all that, but clearly there is something else going on here. Interviews with former Google employees reveal some interesting things about the day-to-day practical realities of working in this high-tech Shangri-La.

Former employees reveal that people are leaving because many employees don’t feel that their efforts will make the same amount of impact as the company matures from its startup days. Compounding the problem is the fact that Google does not appear to provide much in the way of formal career planning. Often these tasks would be addressed by a company’s Human Resources (HR) department, but it appears as though Google’s HR department is viewed by many as being quite impersonal.

So What Should Google Be Doing?

As amazing as it may seem, the answer to Google’s problems is actually very simple – hard to implement, but simple to describe. What they need to do is to put their customer first. By clearly communicating to the entire company that Google exists to serve their customers, a great deal of other staffing problems will fade away.

Final Thoughts

One of Google’s biggest problems is that they have not found a way to keep their employees engaged. This isn’t surprising because Google dominates its market and so it doesn’t have any big competitors to use as a rallying cry.

Making its customers first would allow Google to focus its staff on a single goal that would extend throughout the company All of a sudden every employee would have a way to measure the value of his/her work. Once again, this wouldn’t necessarily be easy to do, but it’s the right thing to do. If you can figure out how to do this with your team, then you will have found a way to transform yourself from an IT manager into a true leader.

Questions For You

Do you think that Google’s algorithm will be able to identify those employees who might leave? Do you think that it will make mistakes? Do you think that this type of algorithm would work at your company? Do you think a customer focus would solve Google’s staffing issues? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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The Accidental IT Leader Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

It may seem a little crazy to talk about how to handle promotions during an economic downturn, but they are still happening (hey, sometimes self-promotion yields results!) Additionally, once the world economy picks up again, there will be even more of them. What’s an IT Leader who was once “one of the guys” to do when he /she is suddenly their boss?

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Posted in retention | 3 Comments »