My question is what do we do when the market is so hot that 1 professional service applicant can choose between 10 jobs? How do we balance the interviewing with the selling of what we offer? Would you modify the interview process at all?

Looking forward to your thoughts,

Kris

One good source to see unpredictable/ awkward/ funny/ out of the box question( that can come in interview) is to refer to the Linkedin Answers forum.
http://www.linkedin.com/answers?trk=hb_tab_ayn
Members post all kinds of questions there. Good to look at.
Karthik.
Bangalore.

buffer!oscillates Newbury yielding abandoning….

Books on tape, and the occasional podcast from other sources do move slowly. Executive Summaries reduces business books to an 8 page summary with subscriptions that have .pdf, ebook and podcast versions available.

“Whenever there is doubt, there is no doubt.”

Thanks for putting this guide to books together…saved me from reading some duds.

Recently discovered your podcasts and am loving every minute of them (and the forums too).

Love the new enhanced feature - one quick question (and sorry if this has been answered elsewhere) - with enhanced podcast feed, do I still need to subscribe to Members-only feed as well? I understand the difference about content (i.e. with enhanced you get the pdf slides, chapter splits etc) but I want to make sure I get all the podcasts without having to subscribe to two separate feeds.

Thanks
JD

I do have a problem though - the images (of the slides) are rendered using only about 2/3 the dimension of the iPod screen and so are too small to read the bullet point text. I have a 4th gen iPod (video iPod). It would be alright if the slide image stretched all the way across the screen.

Does anyone know how this can be changed? Is anyone else experiencing the same thing?

I am in the market for an iPhone so the problem will eventually go away, however I’m sure I’m not the only one…

Eric Monrad

I have worked as Administrative Assistant for 7 years with city govt agency. Six years in the same field prior with Hospitals, private org and staffing agencies. I resign last Sept 07 because I couldn’t take it anymore with not being able to move up in the organization. I am constantly signing up for training, staying on top of my computer skills and business skills and thought if I just continue those things I would be up mobility.

It was also getting difficult to work with my former boss because he was blocking me from other positions, constantly recruiting me to fix some of his senior managers mess and they get recognitions and raises. A lot of boundaries were cross and I tried to deal with it diplomatically and be a good employee and just do my job. It just wasn’t working anymore. During my time of working there, I have tried to look for work while employed and Nothing.

I am willing to say, its me or I’m not demonstrating strongly in my interviews. My resume I have changed 25 (no exaggeration) times to reflect my abilities and accomplishments, Nothing. Some places says I am over qualified and the rest are just not biting. I don’t want to hurt myself on the bottom end with low salary, boring work.

Honestly, I’m ready to work for myself I just don’t have any capital.

I need to finish my bachelors, for sure. What am I doing wrong at this point? What are employers today looking for? and how do I explain why I left in positive light?

Great timing on this cast.

I took a a new job at the start of June, working in a matrix organisation for the first time.
I thought it would be a good learning experience. )

Over the last few weeks I have been constantly frustrated, bemused at how anything gets done and amazed at how much time and resource is wasted.

I feel like a fish out of water, especially as an action orientated high D!

Your cast has been a godsend, and has given me insight into how I can take positive action to adapt to get results.

Thanks

Gordon

* It’s all about the CONTENT.
* Every word in a resume should be tightly constructed - should deliver a fact as clearly as you possibly can. (Write Tight, Tight, Tight).
* So evaluate each and every word to see if it needs to be there.
* Look for 2 and 3 word phrases which can be cut.
* Tell the truth, and make sure it holds up to your references’ recollections.
* Crowded (but otherwise very good) 1 page resumes can be given a little breathing room (some white space between different copy blocks), even if that means going to an additional page.
* It’s important that a resume can be absorbed at a glance, and if it’s jammed too tight, the reader might be reluctant to dive in.
* To do something superbly in more than a page or two requires a mastery of writing that most people don’t have.

Thank you. Very interesting point.

John

M&M - Great cast! Timely as always, reminding me to plug the “doughnut hole” I sensed was there but couldn’t really put my finger on.

Thanks,
Mike

I recently started listening to the podcasts. Excellent stuff.

I work in a matrix organization and all your advice and warning of the pitfalls ring true. I am puzzled though on how you would recommend to “non-matrix” it. Here’s the situation:
- global IT support, previously run separately in a center in each region
- now a global organization. People are still in each region so they can be the face to the countries in their region in their timezone.
- operationally they report globally. e.g. the PC Division leader in each center reports to a global PC Manager, but on the matrix they report to a regional service manager who is the main lead to the internal customers and is their HR / salary boss.

You correctly say the push to global companies increases likelihood of matrix organizations. Do you have a recommendation for companies wanting to have a globally consistent service across the regions without being a matrix ? Do you:
1. Stick to regional centres. You can have a global advisory unit to push commonality but really the direct reporting relationship stays regionally, or
2. One center - move everybody to one location and work shifts. (Very costly and disruptive obviously), or
3. Work globally. Just have the global direct reporting relationship and cut out the regional manager to avoid ambiguity. How then do you manage HR etc if the managers are in a different country.

I would appreciate your thoughts.

“Thank you, Susan. The problem with using social networking sites like “My Space” or its competitors is that the practice on a routine basis yields information that would never ever be asked of an applicant, such as photographs (race), national origin, religious belief, political affiliation, disability, and age. Once we acquire this information, it leaves the agency open to charges of discrimination and puts upon the agency the burden of establishing that these factors did not influence the recruitment decision. The question is whether the information on the social networking site is relevant to the position and whether the remote chance of collecting information that would disqualify the candidate (such as admission of current drug use or admission of misconduct with a prior employer) would outweigh the known risk of routinely collecting information that would not be proper under EEOC guidance. Once we acquire the information, it would become a record that must be retained, although it would not be available for public inspection unless the candidate was selected. Our selection files are reviewed on occasion by EEOC, . Content which would indicate a closeted discriminatory practice would be highly dangerous to the agency, exposing the agency to a broader pattern and practice investigation, something the agency seeks strongly to avoid.

A review of most scholarly legal publications and all reported and many unreported cases in the federal and states courts in this country, which I conducted through Westlaw prior to writing this e-mail, disclosed no legal authority on this question. After 25 years in this field in both private and public practice, however, I am completely comfortable in saying that litigation upon the very recent practice of some recruiters of using social networking sites as part of the vetting process will come. It is simply too new a practice for the undesirable second-order consequences to have shown up.

I think that such sites can be searched when the agency faces litigation or an unemployment claim or is conducting a personnel investigation of alleged misconduct. As a routine practice of vetting applicants, I believe the obvious risks of collecting forbidden information far outweighs the remote possibility of turning up material that would disqualify the applicant. ”

End of issue for my purposes, I guess.

Just like the podcast on how to give feedback about dress- your choice to participate in drunken debauchery is fine. It’s the behavior of advertising it that can result in corrective action.

Also, do you differentiate in this matter between posts on your MySpace home page (for example) and signed material in other public media, such as blog posts, blog comments, and letters to the editor? After all, anything you sign with your name in public will show up if someone googles you.

In this cast, or perhaps part 1, you mention a book called “Difficult Conversations”. There’s two books with this title available on Amazon. Any chance you could provide a link to the right one?

Best regards

Lincoln

Also, don’t think people don’t look at your address on googlemaps. On one occasion, there was a guy who said was very flexible with salary, location, etc. Then he kept on giving us reason for the delay in accepting the offer and start date. There was no way he was going to relocate. On googlemaps, he had a plane in his backyard. I am convinced that he was just hold on to us trying to get another offer in the area.

-Edwin

As for the question of what level of judgments are made based on friends, my thought is that I would not make much of a conclusion about one or two friends being outside of business-normative values, but I would come to a conclusion if I saw a pattern of behavior in a candidate’s friends.

I also agree with the point above that maintenance of one’s social networking pages is something to be kept strictly off-hours.

We are in the process of hiring three new persons and this podcast and the one about “how to prepare an interview” (and of course “set the bar high”) were of great help.

Thank you so much for that.

I translated and sent to the managers who were in the recuitment process a translation of your PDF and asked them to take 2 hours to prepare their questions. We then reviewed what they came up with for half an hour. And then had our interviews.
They were at first a little bit surprised to be asked to spend 2 hours on that.

Those 2 hours were in fact the best investment we could do. And they now agree on that!

- it forced them to be very accurate in what they were expecting from the candidates

- by creating 10 behavioral questions, we came up with what is the core of our “culture” (how we specifically work in our company and what it means in the day to day life).

- the interviews were professional, there were no dead time and we got a very detailed pile of informations from the candidates (they reported to the recruiter that they never had had such a professional behavior from the company they saw in their search)

- we could easily compare the candidates on the basis of their answer to the SAME questions

- at the end of each interview, our opinion about the candidate was about the same and it was really easy to say “yes/no” with real arguments (not “well I can’t tell why, but I think he is okay” - grrrr!)

This is the best tool I have used for interviewing. Thats an incredible value added I got from you guys.

Thank you.

Ced.

PS : a DISC test will now give us more information about how they would integrate our team.

This series was the missing “adapter” that I was needing. Now I can plug all of the manager tools in and expect results.

Thanks very much!

Ryan

This is surely a main topic in managing your branch within the internet users: all the world!
Additionally, googling someone’s name might bring unexpected surprises – real or not - but this is something no one can control!

Always improving effectiveness ; )
Paulo

I understand your point and how you believe it doesn’t work.
I work in a matrix organization, and guess what: I fully agree with you!

I found myself behaving as you recommend on your cast and I am really loving it.
I believe you have just stated the way how to make the Matrix Org most effective!!!!

Nevertheless, at this point, it is not clear to me that the reasons you said it doesn’t work are valid. Lets wait and see.

Do you see any way to mitigate the Matrix Orgs risks that can leverage its power?

Thanks!
Paulo

Good point! Will do.

Mike

It’s been referred to as “the indirect approach” - the recruiter contacts people he thinks might be interested in the job he’s working on, but DOESN’T directly “recruit” by asking something like “would you be interested in this job?” Instead, the recruiter acts like he’s consulting with you: he describes the job and asks what type of person would be qualified, then he asks what you think the job should pay, and finally he asks “Who do you know how might be interested in this job?” You might give him some names, or you might volunteer yourself. Either way, it’s a productive call for the recruiter.

This is not a dishonest approach - it just employs a little pyschology and is structured to give the caller the upper hand.

I personally do NOT Link to recruiters or include them in my contacts until I’ve had a conversation with them, and they impress me as professionals.

I recommend you listen to the 2 M-T podcasts “How to Handle Recruiters” for more information. You can find them on the wedbsite.

Regards,
Hugh

Thanks for the kind remarks … we appreciate them greatly!

Best Regards,
Mike

ANISE

PS Still waiting to hear about November in Sydney???

Stumbled upon your podcast while browsing the iTunes store. I normally have 3-4 hours that are considered “dead time” that I spend commuting to and from work. Manager Tools podcast has converted my dead unproductive time into a classroom!!!

Totally love it and look forward to such amazing content presented in such lucid style. I have actually started looking forward to my long drive back home !!!

Regards,
Aakash

What a beginning. Cant wait to hear the wisdom from the rest of the 2 podcasts due. The biggest take away for me is ” Ask if the networks whom you had associated would act as your references for your job search. What a way to penetrate further the cause of your network as well as hit up on new contacts. Lateral thinking moment I should say.

My thoughts on the job search to complete is 6 months from the first contact to get the offer letter. That has been my experience in the last 3 attempts over 3 years. (1 accepted, 2 declined).

Thanks for taking your time to work this cast.

By the way ITunes Members access is now available in India, so I cant wait to post comments or voting in the ITUNES feed.
Regards
Karthik.

OK, I have figured it out. I had listened to the John Lucth Podcast, which does not have chapters.
Once I started the My Space podcast, I saw the Chapters option.

Thanks

At first I thought it would be useful to connect with these people for future reference, but now I’m starting to see these connection requests as spam. Does it make sense to add these type of people to your contacts?

Marv

I use facebook to keep in touch with Open University courses etc - the fact I have only 3 friends on it rather proves that! But as I’m nearing 50 I doubt the warnings here are applicable to me - days of drunken parties are long gone.

But the warnings of remembering what you publish on the net could come back to haunt you is timely. Blogs are all part of it. And so are the pages on your forums. The Internet is public - it’s how it works - so this is an excellent warning and reminder to us all no matter what our age.

On the Dutch-German border, Lansink? I recently was on business in Oldenzaal, also near the border. Wonderful place. A pleasure to visit.

Great to hear that you will include a reference to the power of search engines to also find cached info. There is nothing private on the net and harly anything gets lost. I am still able to find my newsgroup posts from the early years (1993 and onwards).

And yes, I will not invite a candidate (currently five open positions) whose Hyves-page (the hugely succesful dutch competitor of MySpace) proves that that person does not know how to behave in public. Would you want your organization to be associated with or even represented by such a person?

Finally some minor points. I had also never heard about Xing though I live next door to Germany where - according to the English custom - they speak a beautiful dutch dialect. And in the dutch (not deutch or german) language it is impossible to be anti-social in your own house unless you are attacking someone who is in your house trying to correct your asocial behavior.

Keep up the good work.

One of the great points he made was answering the question regarding “How long should it take?” to find that new job. His advice, as I understood it, was to be careful about setting ANY expectation about timeline because (as you both said during his answer) you risk beating yourself up when events don’t go along your predetermined timetable. GREAT advice.

Employers don’t do anything for YOUR reasons, and they don’t work according to YOUR timetable!

Looking forward to the next installment.

Again, great thanks for this series.

-Hugh

heatedly ambivalently replicate rented …

I am a Premium member. I have added the new link to my ITunes Podast List and can listen to the podcasts themselves.

What I cannot see is the Chapters menu option that is in the Blog Post above. The Chapters menu option is on the Menu toolbar between Window and Help options.

thanks

Frankie

Each of my references received a one page prep document, along with anohter copy of my resume.

There were common elements (background on the company, my impressions of the hiring manager, and an overview of the job). There was a customized portion for each of the three, where I suggested how my experience with them could be related to the job, and I excerpted bulleted accomplishments from my resume as examples for them.

In each of those cases, the accomplishments were ones that the reference was very familiar with. So yes, in my case, I DID select accomplishments to prep the references based on who the references were.

Think about it this way: you should know what the picture is that you want every reference to draw about you. What the “story” is: that you’re energetic, smart, resilient, whatever. And when you select 3 or so references from your list of 6 - 8, you’re selecting them because their perspective fits well with this opportunity. Then when you’re giving each of them specific suggestions on accomplishments to cover, you’re simply helping them tell that story about you. It all fits together!

-Hugh

Are you a premium member subscriber? If you aren’t, you won’t see the new format. And if yes, did you add the new link to iTunes to download the new podcast format?

*RNTT

cheers

Steve

As a long-time listener, I’ve always found your casts to be informative and entertaining. I hope I can return the favor, as you’ve bumped into part of my professional area of expertise. I work in new media/social networking/online community as the Online Community Manager for two major technology publications.

For me, having an account on social networking sites is not just personal — it’s also professional. If I don’t use or am not aware of all of these sites, I’m not doing my job. My professional colleagues feel the same, and I have a mix of bosses, co-workers, and non-work friends on my contacts/friends list. A few people earlier have mentioned that they’ve blocked social networking sites on their network, and that may be appropriate for their business. For me… posting content on twitter, Facebook, etc really is part of my job.

While there are probably some people who use MySpace still, most of the activity has moved on to Facebook, with a small but growing group on Twitter. I had a chuckle when you mentioned Friendster, as it’s been practically dead for a while. I agree that, at least here in the US, LinkedIn is the place for professional networking.

Facebook actually has extensive privacy settings that allow you to decide what is viewable to the public, or to just your friends. You can also go beyond that, and set permission on items for different groups of people. This allows me to set up a profile for my co-workers, and one for my personal friends. I do agree that extreme caution could be taken (after all, you never know who knows who, or who is looking over someone’s shoulder at your page), but the privacy settings are more extensive than you indicated in your cast.

Finally, I do agree with your suggestions. I do volunteer work with college-aged women, and I am always telling them that, as they graduate, they need to clean up their pages. I know many college advisors that simply print out a student’s MySpace and Facebook pages and hand them back to the student when they are asked to provide job references for the student.

I guess my point is that yes, you’re right — you need to be careful what you put of yourself out there. But at the same time, for some of us, participating in these things really is part of our profession, not simply a personal pursuit.

I understand that the accomplishments kept will have more to do with the position’s requirements than anything else. Should we strive to connect accomplishments and references as a way to make it easier for the reference to sell your skills?

Thanks for the continued great content !!

–Mark

Anyone found out where the two other shows are?

Thank

I added the latest members-only cast to Enhanced Premium Members Podcast Feed. I hope that helps and eliminates the need for two feeds.

Best Regards,
Mike

I added the latest members-only cast to Enhanced Premium Members Podcast Feed. Unfortunately, it’s a completely manual process on our end … so as hard as I might try, I’m sure you’ll keep me honest if I fail (forget) to add in the future.

Thanks for those who suggested this change … makes a lot of sense!

Best Regards,
Mike

Awesome … wonderful to hear. Congrats!

Mike

Are you subscribed to the Members-Only feed?

Mike

Can’t find the John Lucht interview on my Itunes Podcast Library. The last one I have is the MySpace cast…

Rowley