I also highly recommend all the "Guerilla Marketing" job hunt material by these authors including their book:
http://www.amazon.com/Guerrilla-Marketing-Bulletproof-Career-Opportunities/dp/1600378153/ref=sr_1_7?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1336908573&sr=1-7
Read on (it is lengthy but worth the read) to see if Guerilla Marketing might be something for you to try in your job search.
The techniquies are designed to enhance networking by focusing on getting in contact with people with hiring authority regardless of whether they are advertising job opportunities or not,
Studies say that 20% of our nation's jobs turn over every year regardless of the economy and many job opportunities thru the back filling of vacated positions remain in the minds of employer's because of the time and effort to advertising them. Bottom line, good unadvertised positions are out there to be found.
Transcript:
Recession-Proof Guerrilla Job Search Secrets: Transcript
Kevin
Donlin: Good morning, everybody. I’m Kevin Donlin, joined by David Perry.
Say hi, David.
David Perry: Good morning.
Kevin: Mark Haluska, you’re here too?
Mark
Haluska: I’m here as well. Good morning, everyone.
Kevin: What we’re going to do today is a round robin format. The working
title of our audio is X Ways to Find a Great Job Even in a Recession,
where X is an unknown number. We don’t know how many tips we’re
going to come up with.
We’re going to go as rapidly, as clearly, and as quickly as we can
around and around and around. I’m guessing five, ten, or fifteen tips
will come out of this that folks can use to find a good job, even in a
recession.
David Perry is the author of Guerrilla Marketing for Job Hunters. The
second edition is soon to come out. We’re going to tap his huge brain
for ideas.
Mark Haluska is a seasoned recruiter and a contributing author to
Guerrilla Marketing for Job Hunters. Between the two of them, I’m
sure we’re going to come up with some excellent stories from the
trenches on job search tactics that work in good times and bad.
I’m Kevin Donlin, author of 51 Ways to Find a Job Fast – Guaranteed
and a contributing contributor to the Guerrilla Job Search boot camps
that David and I put on this year. We’re in our third iteration right
now, so we’re going to give you some tips that you can use right away.
David, I have a question at the outset that I want to ask you. Mark,
chime in if you can contribute. What would you say is the mindset of a
Guerrilla Job Hunter that sets him or her apart and leads to success?
What is that mindset?
David: They know what they want and they’re willing to go after it.
Mark: They’re doing things everybody else is not doing.2
Kevin: That’s good, guys. I think you’ve just encapsulated it. It’s about
knowing what you want and then not doing what everybody else is
doing. I think that’s a terrific encapsulated version of the mindset.
That’s what you need to do, folks. You need to be clear on what you
want and don’t do what everybody else is doing. When in doubt, go in
the opposite direction. That’s one way to look at it.
David, do you have a tip you want to lead off with: a great way to find
a great job even in a recession?
David: Yeah. As I said, know what you want. Most people have no clue what
they’re looking for before they go out looking for a job. If you
understand what the title is of the position you want to hold in the
industry you want to work in, you’re already 99.9% ahead of the rest
of the pack.
Do you agree with me or disagree with me, boys?
Kevin: I totally agree.
Mark: Absolutely.
David: Let me just chime in and add the next thing you have to do. In all your
correspondence, whether it’s a Guerrilla resume, an e-mail, or a voice
mail – and I get hundreds of these voice mails a day – you have to be
relevant.
Don’t tell me who you are, give me your phone number, and ask me to
call you back, to e-mail you back, or to schedule a meeting. Tell me
what’s in it for me. Be relevant to me, whether as an employer or a
headhunter. You’ve got to be relevant. There’s got to be something in
it for the employer.
Kevin: Exactly.
Mark: Address your headhunter or the employer by name.
David: Absolutely.
Mark: There are many ways to do that. There’s one thing that I would like to
add to what David had said. So many job seekers are guilty of this,
even high-level executives. 3
We all know this; although they may use different boards. If you’re
just posting a resume to the job boards, that is not looking for work.
That’s sitting around and waiting for a job to find you.
Kevin: You’re not only being reactive, but this leads to another tip I want to
get to later. We’ll do it now, I guess. Answering ads for posted jobs,
zapping your resume out by e-mail, or doing anything else that doesn’t
require meeting someone face to face probably won’t help you find a
good job in any economy, especially when times are tough.
I think that there are a couple of ideas here, Mark. The topic I was
going to get to later was going to be: How Can I Humanize This? In
everything that you’re doing to find a job and in every tactic that
you’re using, always ask yourself, “How can I humanize this?”
The inhuman part is just using the Internet. For example, instead of emailing your resume, how could you humanize that? First, you could
snail mail it: send it out in a paper letter. That’s better; or you could
hand deliver it to the person. That’s best, I think.
Mark: I’m going to share a story later on where I just had somebody do that.
Kevin: Do it now. Humanize everything.
Mark: I know a young lady who just went through a miserable divorce; and
she had been laid off a month before all this happened. The divorce
was overnight.
Here’s what happened. She’s in retail: junior retail management, but it
doesn’t matter because what she did applies to anybody. She had
contacted me and said, “Mark, here’s my situation. I got divorced
overnight so we’re separated. I have no income.”
She had just lost her job, had lost his income, and was in retail. She
said, “What can I do to expedite my job search?”
Here’s some advice I gave her. I said, “First, let’s get your resume up
to snuff.” She did it and I looked at it. It wasn’t anywhere near perfect.
It looked like everybody else’s resume: boring.
I think Kevin and David can both agree. When you do get a resume
from somebody the first time around, are they terrible or what?
Kevin: Yeah, beyond terrible.
David: Generally, yes.4
Mark: What I did was work with her. We made her resume as perfect as it
could be. In fact, it was an extreme resume. I said, “Can you tell me
what you want to do?”
She said, “I want to stay in retail.” Even though retail is in the tank
right now, she wants to stay in retail. Okay. That’s where her interests
lie.
I said, “Okay. List ten companies where you want to work.” She did. I
said, “We’re going to try an experiment on the first one. I think this
might work. If not, it could get you a referral.”
Here’s what I had her do. I said, “I want you to go to this big-box store
and I want you to introduce yourself to the store’s general manager.
He or she can make things happen.”
She said, “But I don’t know his name. How can I introduce myself to
him if I don’t know what he looks like?”
I said, “Go to the back of the store near where the bathrooms are. They
usually have a picture of store management there: who they are and
what their title is.”
Have you guys ever seen that in some of these big-box stores? For
whatever reason, they’re near the bathrooms; a little hallway you go
down.
She went back there, saw who the guy was, and had his name. She
said, “Now I know who it is. I know what he looks like.” She came
back and called me.
I said, “Now I want you to put on a nice business suit. Look
conservative. I want you to do two things: put your Guerrilla resume in
there and also put in a ten-dollar gift certificate for the local “old
buffet.” Are you familiar with those, Kevin?
Kevin: Yeah, I’m familiar.
Mark: They’re pretty good and it’s right near the store. She put her Guerrilla
resume and a card inside the envelope. I said, “Go back to the store
dressed up in business attire. Find him. Don’t leave the store until you
find him. 5
“When you do, walk up there, say his name, introduce yourself, give
him the envelope, and say, ‘I’d like you to take a look at this over
lunch, whenever you have the opportunity, in your own free time.’”
About three days later she gets a phone call. She’s now working there
as an assistant manager.
David: No way.
Mark: Yes way. This is one of those places where you go in and human
resources of course have their little computers where you can sit down
and type your application. That’s what she thought she would do.
I said, “No, no, no. Go to the person who can say ‘yes.’”
She did it. It was in less than three weeks that she was working.
Kevin: She humanized the whole thing.
Mark: She humanized the whole process there. He called her within three
days. The only reason it took almost three weeks is because once she
was in the system, HR did have to do their due diligence, which we
understand: background check, drug tests, and so on.
She said, “I cannot believe this happened so quickly. Thank you, thank
you!”
I said, “No, thank yourself. You’re the one who did the work. All I did
was advise you.”
Kevin: There’s always a way. This illustrates two points. One is humanizing
the job search. The second is not doing what everybody else is doing.
If you go into any major retailer now, they’ve got a computer terminal.
It says, “Apply here.” That’s what they want you to do. It makes their
life easier.
However, you’re not making their life hard by meeting with people.
Instead, you’re saving them a lot of time. What if they get your
resume, like it, interview you, and decide that you’re not a good fit?
They’ve wasted a lot of time just getting to that stage.
However, if you meet with somebody up front and they decide, “Yes,
you’re good,” or “No, you’re not,” you’ve saved both parties a lot of
time.6
Mark: I think two things happened here, though. The humanization part was a
big part of this, Kevin, but she did two things. Firstly, her resume was
a knockout. That I did assist her with greatly.
Then, she had the fortitude to just walk up to him. He’d never seen a
resume like a Guerrilla resume, so he was blown away. It’s a
marketing piece. I think we can all agree that’s what a Guerrilla
resume is. He’d never seen anything like that.
Then she walked up, introduced herself to him, and knew exactly who
he was. I made her walk around that store until she found him.
Kevin: Good. This leads to a totally unforeseen tip, which is what’s going to
happen here, I think. It’s the idea of getting off your “buts.” Get off
your buts.
David and mark, how many times do we give out advice and the first
word out of the person’s mouth is “but”? You just said, Mark, that you
gave her advice. You told her to go see the store manager. What did
she say? “But I don’t know his name.”
Mark: Yeah. That’s when I sent her back near the bathrooms. That’s where
the pictures usually are.
Kevin: Maybe instead of “Get off your buts,” we should say, “Replace your
‘but’ with ‘how?’”
She should have asked instead, “How can I find his name?”
David: That’s a good analogy. I like that. “Replace your ‘but’ with ‘how?’”
Kevin: Yeah. We have to fine-tune it. This is why we put three heads together.
Mark: I have another saying for it: “Everything after the word ‘but’ is bull.”
Kevin: There you go! She may have come up with an even better way,
perhaps; or a different way. She just could have said, “I don’t know his
name. How can I find his name?”
You save yourself so much aggravation. Everyone else is saying “but.”
This is another way to not do what everybody else is doing. Replace
your “buts” with “how?”
David: Most people don’t realize that they can leverage the fight-or-flight
center in their brain. That’s the one that says that when there’s a fire,
you run, as opposed to standing there and watching it.7
What I mean by that is that job hunters never find a job until they
absolutely need one. Do you know what I mean? The unemployment
insurance is about to run out or has just run out and then from heaven a
job appears in their hands and they take it. Or some other catastrophe
forces them to act quickly. I’ve seen this done.
In fact, you were gone on one of the seminars when I did this, Kevin. I
said to one of the guys who’d been looking for a job for six months,
“Grab your wife – gently – tonight and get around the kitchen table.
Pull a calendar off the wall and ask her to circle the date that she’d like
you to find a job. On that date, you’re going to accept a job. Just tell
her straight to her face and then tell the kids that that’s the day Daddy
is accepting a job.”
By doing that you force yourself into a deadline. It enables your
reticular activating system. All of a sudden, everything you do is
focused on that one goal which is now not necessarily getting a job,
but not looking bad in front of your wife and kids. I’ve done this with
a number of people over the years, including quite a few friends, and it
always works.
I remember phoning a friend who had been unemployed for two years.
I’d been listening to her complain. I finally said, “Listen. I’ve got
some extra secretarial work that will keep you busy for the next two
years. I’d like you to come and work for me.”
We hemmed and hawed and she finally agreed. We negotiated the
compensation and I gave her the offer on a Monday. I said, “I’ll see
you next Monday and you’ll start in my office.”
She calls me on Friday and says, “I’ve got good news and bad news.”
I said, “What’s the bad news?”
“I’ve got to turn your offer down.”
All I could think was, “Oh, here we go again.” I said, “What’s the
good news?”
She said, “I got a job working for the county paying twice as much.”
I said, “Oh! Okay, great.” That was good because my wife turned to
me after I’d made this job offer and said, “We don’t have money to
pay her.”8
I said, “Don’t worry about it.”
When it rains, it pours; and I was just leveraging that.
Kevin: The deadline tells your mind that you’re serious, among other things.
It’s a way to push and pull at the same time. You’re pulling yourself
towards that target date and you’re being pushed away from the
negative of looking bad by not meeting the target. There’s an upside
and a downside, kind of subconsciously. Deadlines are terrific.
I’ll get back to the reticular activation system. I think people can
Google “R.A.S.” or “reticular activation system” and find more
information.
Let’s get back to David’s very first point about being absolutely clear
about what you want. We teach people that you need to have a list of
20 companies – your Top 20 employers – where you want to work. We
call this a “job shopping list.”
It goes back to what David said. When you have 20 potential
employers in mind, you’ll recognize opportunities today where you
were missing them yesterday.
It’s the same principle as when you drive a car off the lot and all of a
sudden you start seeing it on the highway. It turns out every fifth
person is driving a Saturn or a Ford F150. You didn’t recognize them
before because it wasn’t so prominent in your mind.
When you get very clear on the title of the job you’re seeking, and 20
employers where you’d be happy working, opportunities will pop up
all over the place where you were missing them yesterday. You didn’t
see them yesterday. They were there, but they just weren’t burned into
your mind in terms of a goal.
David: It’s because they didn’t matter for you.
Kevin: Yes. Thank you.
David: That’s exactly what you’re talking about. When it matters, you pay
attention. It’s like looking for snow tires in the summer newspaper.
Forget it. Advertisers don’t advertise snow tires in the summer, even if
they’re 50% off because no one is looking for snow tires. At the first
snowfall, though, the advertisers all pay full pop to advertise for snow
tires because it now matters.9
That’s the same thing you have to do as a job hunter. You have to
decide what job you want and make sure that it’s important to you and
it matters in your brain. We’ll do the rest in the background.
Mark: This is so fundamental but it’s true. Too few job seekers – no matter
how dire their situation may be – do not take ownership of their job
search.
This gets back to “I’ll post my resume on job boards; I will apply
through Web sites to H.R.; I’ll call a headhunter and make the mistake
of saying, ‘When are you going to find me a job?’”
None of those things is taking ownership. Of course, that’s the reason
for the Guerrilla Job Search Home Study Course. We show them how
to take ownership. We make them take ownership or they don’t last.
Kevin: Mark, people are either thinking or saying, “No one will give me a
job.”
I can’t tell you how aggravating that is to hear and how completely
wrong-minded it is. Am I wrong here? They’re thinking, “No one will
give me a job.”
David: Nobody is entitled to a job. They have to turn that thinking inside out
and not look at it as “Nobody will give me a job.” It should be “How
can I earn my way into a job? What things do I need to do to be
proactive and take responsibility for my future?”
Kevin: I was reading an article just yesterday. I think it was in a newspaper in
Pennsylvania or Dallas. It was from a recent college grad who says,
“I’m now an expert on the job search.”
She managed to say just about everything possible wrong in one short
span of about 500 words. She was saying, “I’m now an expert on the
job search. I’ve been looking for months and no one will give me a
job.”
I said, “Stop. You’re not such an expert because you aren’t hired.
You’re an expert on doing it wrong, perhaps.”
She was saying, “Employers have to come together and even if it
hurts, you’ve got to offer jobs.”
From her saying all these nonsensical items, I was thinking, “You’ve
got a head start on a really bad life if you’re 22 and thinking that.
Companies don’t owe you anything. It’s like getting angry at wolves 10
because they’re carnivores and kill deer in nasty ways. That’s just
nature.”
David: Would you send me the article so I can respond to it?
Kevin: I’d like to find it. I’ll do that, David. I’ll find it. It was just sad, really.
She was saying, “I know that times are tough but employers have to do
what’s best for our city and offer jobs.”
I was thinking, “They don’t have to give you anything.”
She’s not alone. A lot of people are thinking, “No one will give me a
job.”
As Mark said, that question just leaves you powerless. The other way
to say it is, “Why won’t anybody hire me?”
People are thinking that all day every day and your brain is just going
to go on in a long monologue from dawn to dusk. Your brain is going
to tell you why no one will hire you: it’s because you’re old; it’s
because you’re young; you’re fat; you’re skinny; you’re short; you’ve
got too much experience; not enough experience; the wrong
experience; you’ve got gaps in your work history. I could go on. Your
brain will tell you.
Mark: Absolutely. You should really take a good look at yourself in the
mirror and say, “Why don’t I have a job?”
Kevin: That’s the most unempowering question you can ask yourself because
your brain will tell you all those things I just said. Instead, you can
again turn it into a “how.” How can I earn my way into a job? How
can I convince an employer?
Mark: But there are three of us…
David: You have to find a problem. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to jump in, guys;
but we say this all through the boot camp and all through the books.
The three of us have lived this collectively for probably more than 50
years.
At the end of the day you have to find an employer who has a problem
that you can solve and tell them how you’re going to solve it. Solving
problems is what people have jobs for. Nobody goes to work because
an employer says, “I have too much money. I think I need to hire
somebody.”11
No, employers are in business to make money. That’s what employers
do; except for the government, but I won’t go there. You have to find
an organization that’s got a problem you can solve. If you’re solving it,
you’re making them money, saving them money, or increasing their
efficiency.
Kevin: Right. You’re saving them time which is saving them money.
David: People don’t look at it that way.
Kevin: To take your idea further, David, this is a tip I had in mind. Instead of
just telling the employer – which is great – we also suggest that people
prove to the employer that you can do the job you’re looking for.
That’s even better.
One idea that we teach is to start work before the interview so that you
can perform the work and prove your skills in the interview. Whether
it’s a networking interview or a job interview is immaterial. You’ve
got to be able to prove.
It’s like if you want to get on American Idol. Do you write a resume?
Do you tell everybody, “I’m a great singer?” No. You’ve got to put up
or shut up.
Mark: You have to audition.
Kevin: That’s what every interview you have is. It’s an audition. People have
to be clear that you’ve got to prove your skills. Of course, one way is
to put lots of specific facts, results, and achievements in your resume.
That’s a given; and that’s where most resumes fall short, by the way.
I’ve got a couple; but do you guys have experience with sales and
marketing people or accountants? What are ways that people can prove
they can do the job right there in the networking interview or the job
interview?
David: For me, personally, I remember getting fired the day after I got back
from my honeymoon. There’s no ounce of a lie there. The day I got
back from my honeymoon, $84,000 in business had closed with this
executive search division I had opened up from a temp agency.
The boss told me, “I can’t afford to pay your 50%. Besides, you just
got lucky.” We had an argument because he said he was going to pay
me something, but not my 50%. We had an argument and he fired me.12
I started looking for a job and I remember going to a company called
CouncilPro, which is where I ended up working. I’m telling this guy
about all the stuff that I’ve done, the deals I had in progress, and that I
got fired.
He just didn’t believe me. He finally said, “David, listen. No one in
their right mind would have fired a guy that brought him that kind of
money.”
I said, “You don’t believe me.”
He said, “Frankly, no. I don’t think you’ve got any of those contacts.”
I remember opening my little black book, picking up the phone, and
calling a guy named Brian G, who was at the time, President of
[company name]. This goes back 20 years.
I got him on the phone and talked to him about the candidates that I
had pitched to him two weeks earlier, before I had gone off on my
honeymoon.
I told him that I was no longer at the firm; that I was looking at starting
my own firm or coming to this CouncilPro thing. Then we arranged an
interview for the candidate and I got off the phone.
The guy looked at me and said, “That’s B.S. I haven’t been able to get
hold of Brian for two years. I’ve been calling and leaving messages for
him.”
I said, “Listen. Here’s his number. Call him back.”
John picks up the phone and calls him. He says, “Is this Brian
Greenleaf?”
“Yep.”
He asked him a couple of questions and hung up the phone absolutely
white. He excused himself, went down to the end of the hallway,
brought back the manager and two other guys, and introduced me. The
branch manager didn’t believe him, so he said, “Call somebody else.”
I said, “Name me somebody. Here’s the list of companies.” They
picked a couple of them and I said, “Fine. Here, listen. Sit down.”
I called those presidents and talked to them like we had been long-lost
friends. I did not know that I was not supposed to be able to do this.13
It goes back to your thing, Kevin: “Do the job in the interview.” That’s
what I was doing, in essence. I got hired on the spot. Though I thought
they were a bunch of hillbillies, I took the job anyway.
Six weeks later, five of the six guys were gone because they had
collectively billed $139,000 between the six of them the previous year.
I went on to become the Rookie of the Year at $99,000. That was just
depressing. The next year I billed $758,000. I went out on my own.
Kevin: Very good. So you did it. People always say, “I’m not in sales,” or
“I’m not in marketing,” or “I’m not outgoing.”
I had a client in I.T. and he walked into the company. He did a lot of
things right, which gets to an idea we’ll get to later about synergy.
Remind me.
He offered to drop off a portfolio of his work at the employer. He had
already e-mailed the resume and had already had a phone conversation
with the receptionist. He had kind of been smartly laying the
groundwork to come in and meet people. That goes back to
humanizing the job search.
He went into the front office and delivered a three-ring binder of past
records, achievements, projects, et cetera. On the way out the door he
met a bunch of software developers coming back from lunch. I guess
he recognized them by their pocket protectors or something.
He said, “I want to work for your company in software development.
You guys aren’t in software, are you?”
They said, “Yeah.”
He said, “Tell me: what are some things you would improve about the
software development process here?”
They unloaded on him and gave him about seven or fifteen ideas. He
furiously took notes, went home, went back through his e-mail
correspondence and the projects at previous positions he had held.
He figured out ways to solve maybe five of those problems, based on
things he had done previously. He wrote a quick little white paper. The
title was How to Solve Five of the Thorniest Software Development
Problems at ABC Company. 14
It was a totally customized title just for this employer. Of course,
though, he could have repurposed it for a dozen other employers. He
did this white paper. Then he called up the receptionist again and said,
“I’d like to send a white paper to the president.”
She said, “What’s the title?” He told her and she said, “Send it.”
He e-mailed it and a day or two later the president called him back. He
said, “Did you write this?”
He said, “Yeah.”
He said, “I want to interview you.” He ended up getting hired for the
position about a week or two later.
He had humanized the job search. More importantly, he had proven he
could do the job. He was an I.T. guy. He wasn’t in sales. Instead of
creating a program for the employer, another way he proved he could
do the job was to say, “You’ve got these problems. I’ve solved them
before. Let’s have a conversation.”
He was hired. So that’s how that works.
David: That’s a great story. You asked about accountants. I know accountants
who can make an Excel spreadsheet sing and dance. We talked about
this a couple of weeks ago: bringing examples in of what you’ve done
as part of your portfolio – whether you’re an accountant or a sales guy
– is very relevant.
Now, with LinkedIn and the new interface, you can attach previous
PowerPoints and all kinds of material right there to your profile. That
gives you a leg up on everybody else.
Let’s face facts. Every recruiter knows that you start with Zoom Info,
you find people there, and then you go to LinkedIn. What most people
don’t realize is that most recruiters – including the corporate ones, not
just the headhunters – use LinkedIn and Zoom Info long before they
ever go to the job boards.
Can I talk about the job boards for just one second? Steve Rothberg
had a great piece that he put in the new book. The essence of it is
really simple. He owns a job board. What is it?
Kevin: CollegeRecruiter.com15
David: Here’s his advice for job boards: go, post your resume, set up your job
alerts, and then never come back. He’s absolutely right.
If you know what you want, put in your details as you want someone
else to find them, and do a job alert for the job or couple of jobs that
you want, there’s no reason to ever go back to a job board.
However, I have friends I talk to regularly who will spend two or three
hours a day on the job boards; the same job board! It’s insane. I think
they don’t listen because they know me too well. If I was some other
expert or somebody else they’d absolutely take this as the bible.
Mark: If they were paying you $300 an hour they’d be listening.
David: Exactly.
Mark: They’re saying, “That’s David down the street,” like I’m Mark down
the street or the relative. People don’t listen. They say, “I’ve known
him all his life.”
Kevin: It’s the prophet-without-honor syndrome. People won’t take free
advice seriously. This is a tip. Go to the library and it’s typically never
full to capacity. Yet almost all the answers to all the questions you
could ever think of are there in a book somewhere in that library; but
it’s free and people don’t take it seriously.
This whole discussion we’re having now could be probably avoided if
everyone would become an expert on job search; but people won’t
take the time to do it. The answers are out there. Because it’s free
though, people don’t pay attention to a lot of the best advice.
Mark: We’re talking about it being free or paying for consultants. We just
touched on that quickly. I had posed this question to David in an email the other day and we never did get back with it.
We were discussing the boot camp and people. I had sent David an email and said, “People save money for vacations; they save money for
golf outings; and so on.”
Do you remember this, David? I posed you a question. I said, “In this
day and age you’re not going to retire from the same company like
your father or your grandfather did. How many people are saving for
their job search?”16
What I mean by that is: How many people are saving to have that
resume done right; not to look good, but to turn it into a marketing
piece; to have an expert do it?
How many people are saving for things like a boot camp like we’re
having: the Guerrilla boot camp, the Job Seekers boot camp? How
many people are saving for that? People don’t. I think, in this day and
age, a layoff is inevitable.
Kevin: Few people save for their retirement and fewer still save for their
unplanned retirement. That’s what unemployment is. It’s an unplanned
retirement.
You’re absolutely right, Mark. That could probably take years and cost
millions of lives to convince people that they need to save for
unplanned retirements. You’re absolutely right. It’s out there and
people aren’t thinking of it.
Mark: We can go back to the 1980s, starting with the crash of steel. First it
was made in Mexico; now it’s being made in China. It’s the ripple
effect of steel.
Right now we have the fiasco in the stock market. We have the Big 3
looking for a bailout. Hopefully, it will be nothing more than a loan.
This is affecting hundreds of thousands of people when you consider
the ripple effect.
How many times do you run into somebody who has lost their job?
Maybe they had a very good job, but they don’t have X number of
dollars to invest in their next career move.
Kevin: Mark, to take this back to the practical aspect I wanted to pin you
down on something you said. You said, “People aren’t willing to do
pay or do the work necessary to get their resume to become a
marketing piece.”
David and Mark, how can folks fix their resume using Guerrilla
Marketing principles to make it stand out versus others? What are the
elements of a Guerrilla resume?
David: The first thing is a summary of who you are. By a summary I don’t
mean “A 15-year software developer with PMP” and 28 lines long like
most of these things. To me - if you’re going to do it – a summary is
what you’re going to do for the employer: increase revenue.17
Kevin: This hits off something I never really thought of clarifying like this.
Really, David, all summaries can start one of two ways: “I make
money by doing X, Y, and Z,” or “I save money by doing X, Y, and
Z.”
David: That’s brilliant. I never thought of that.
Kevin: People don’t care that you’re a “savvy professional.” The buzzwords
are just like plaque in arteries. They just clog up the thing and choke
you. You guys can smell resume-speak from ten blocks away as
recruiters, right?
David: It’s like all this is by the same guy.
Kevin: It’s the $50 adjectives where a five-cent verb would do better. Really,
all summaries can be started in one of two ways: “I make money by
doing these three things.”
You don’t have seven areas of expertise. You don’t have 15. You can
be an expert in about two or three things. Just pick two or three skills:
“I save money by doing X, Y, and Z,” or “I make money by doing A,
B, and C.” Then you’re off to the races. That would clarify the entire
rest of your resume.
David, you’re absolutely right. I think the opening summary of a
resume in Guerrilla Marketing principles is really kind of the bow of a
ship. You can change it just a few degrees and you can go hundreds of
miles in a different direction.
What else should there be besides a clear summary? What’s a good
length for a summary, David? I see some that are three lines; some that
are seven.
David: I’m really short. Two or three lines max if you can’t do it in one.
Kevin: I agree.
David: The old joke I always say is, “Size matters, but not the way you think.”
Ladies always laugh. In the first three inches of the top of your resume
you either catch my attention or you don’t. The only three things that
are going to catch my attention have to do with me, me, me, me, me,
me.
Mark: In other words: What’s in it for them? To add to David, what a lot of
candidates do is all about me, me, me: “Here’s what I want,” rather
than saying, “I have what you need.”18
How many resumes do all of us get that say, “My objective is to find a
company that will allow me to…..”? They use “me.” They don’t
mention the company at all. The company does not care what the
candidate wants. The company cares about what it needs.
Kevin: Exactly. I think the idea of a USP is bandied about all the time, often
by people who don’t understand it completely. USP stands for Unique
Selling Proposition.
Your resume should be one, long, unique selling proposition. It should
be written in such a way that the reader is going to want to call you
over and above every other candidate for that position.
That sounds very daunting but, in fact, everybody is unique, first of all.
No two humans in history are exactly the same. It’s just a matter of
sitting down and doing the work; writing and figuring out what is
unique about you. Is it your experience, your life’s experience, your
schooling, what you did in high school, or the problems you’ve
solved?
There are many, many things about you that are different from other,
typical job seekers. When you add them up, you get uniqueness. It’s a
matter of making that come out in your resume. People just aren’t
willing to do the work, unfortunately.
Another thing that’s going to excite readers – guys, I don’t think you’ll
contradict me here – are specific results. We just go back and forth
with people about how to get them to be specific about the results
they’ve produced.
What suggestions do you give to someone who says, “I was in I.T. and
I can’t put a dollar figure on that,” or “I’m in customer service”?
I have my ideas. Are there any shortcuts you give people to help them
get the results into the resume?
David: The first thing I think you have to understand is the employer didn’t
hire you just because you had a nice personality. They hired you to
solve a problem.
The problem had to be real or they wouldn’t have hired you. Most
employers know a problem is real when it’s costing them money: the
repairs, down time, or whatever. 19
If you’re in I.T. and you’ve been hired as a director of I.T. or a
manager of I.T. for example, you were hired to manage a bunch of
guys.
Why were you hired to manage that bunch of programmers? It was
because they were taking too long or because their revs weren’t
coming out on time. What was the impact that you had to effect?
There’s a value. You have to think about it, but there is a value there
somewhere. Maybe you reduce the amount of time it took to get out a
rev.
Kevin: Is a “rev” a revision on software?
David: It’s the revision of software. Maybe you increased the number of
cycles, if you’re in warehousing for example. You increased the
number of turns: how many times you turned over stock.
There’s a huge value attached to that because the more turns you have
as a retailer or an operations person, the lower your costs are and the
higher your profits.
I think the first thing people have to do is sit down and say to
themselves, “Why was I hired in the first place? What was the problem
I was hired to fix? Did I do that? What was the next effect of doing
that?”
Measure it and attach some values to it. If you saved 100 hours, it was
100 hours of what? How much were those hours worth? Do you see
what I mean?
Kevin: Yeah. People have to figure out what the person was being paid every
year to do the problem that you fixed. Just figure out how many hours
they were devoting to that problem and assign a wage value to the
hours. Divide their annual salary by perhaps 2000 hours in a working
year.
It’s dead simple, but it’s not easy because you have to figure out what
that person was making. I don’t want to belabor this because we only
have about ten minutes left. Who can people call to find out these
kinds of numbers? Do you call Accounting or the Marketing
Department? Who can you call?
David: Call one of us.20
Kevin: I’ve got a guy who’s been corresponding with me. He’s just defiant
about it. He’s trying to prove all this wrong: “I can’t get results. It was
a small company. I left and the boss doesn’t like me anymore.”
How would you respond to that?
David: I wouldn’t have taken him on as a client if he’s that negative; but that’s
just me. I don’t know.
Kevin: I’ve said, “Find out. Talk to the vendors.”
There are a hundred ways to skin a cat. Find out what they were
paying the company in terms of contracts to work with them. Ask the
vendor, “Were you angry? Were you going to leave if I didn’t fix that
problem?”
If they say, “Yes,” then ask, “How much was that annual revenue?”
“We were paying your ex-employer two million dollars.”
Then you can say, “Did I help retain a two-million-dollar contract by
keeping you happy?”
They’ll agree and then bam! There’s your money. That’s another way
to do it. People just can’t get it through their head that there are
specific dollars that you can attach to everything.
Guys, I want to go rather rapidly now. I’ve got some other points.
Mark, do you have another quick point that you’d like to share?
Mark: One thing I’d like to share with you as well is that I always advise
people in their resume to not just tell me how much you’re exceeding
sales by: “I exceeded sales quota by 20%.”
I also advise them to do a comparison with their contemporaries. “I
exceeded sales quota by 20%, 30%, or whatever, whereas the company
average for exceeding sales was five percent.” It’s the dual
comparison.
Kevin: It’s context.
Mark: It’s where you stood above the rest. I might be doing 20% more and
the company average is five percent more in sales increases, but you
can use it for anything. It can be for employee turnover, sales
increases, production costs, or whatever.21
When I show the comparison of me to everybody else, he says,
“Wow.” That’s as long as I can prove it, of course. It shows that I
stood above the rest. I think a lot of people don’t do that. There are no
comparisons on there. I advise candidates to always use comparisons
when it’s to their benefit.
Kevin: That’s just another way of finding a way to make yourself unique and
stand out. The context is everything. If you were always given the
hardest problems to solve; if you worked with the top clients; or if you
had the highest productivity among 20 people, that’s more information
that needs to be in the resume. That’s another way of getting across
that specific result.
Mark: It does make a big difference when employers look at that and they
start seeing comparisons. It makes a huge difference.
There’s one more thing, too, if I could just add it really quickly. I
always advise people before they lose their job, “Make sure you have
copies of your employee evaluations.”
That validates the things that you say. A lot of people will say, “H.R.
won’t allow me to have it.”
You’re not allowed to have your official personal folder – your OPF –
but you are entitled to copies of your evaluations. People just have to
demand them.
Kevin: Get them and put them in the portfolio. We touched on that earlier
when one of my clients was taking his to an employer. It’s a three-ring
binder. You make copies, as Mark said.
Then you get out a highlighting pen and highlight the best sentences
on every page. No one wants to read a five-page evaluation but they
will look at the sentence that you highlight. There, you’re controlling
the message even further and you’re proving your point.
Mark: That’s also documentation proving what you’re saying is true.
Kevin: This goes back to proving your skills. It’s one thing to claim them but
if the manager said that you’re the best and the brightest, you’re
proving it. It’s there in writing.
Mark: Otherwise you’re just saying it.
Kevin: I want to get to the idea of “How can I do this differently than other
job seekers?”22
People just get lost in the shuffle. They’re applying to jobs only on the
Internet. I guess we’re going to end up this discussion by touching on
things that prove you’re different. What sets you apart?
David, in the Guerrilla Job Search Home Study Course, has dozens of
examples. David, can you tell about the guy who was handing out –
instead of a business card – a round card with an offer of a pizza on it?
Do you want to tell that story?
David: When he lost his job, this guy knew exactly who he wanted to work
for next. Of course, he did what everybody does: he called up H.R. and
H.R. did what H.R. always does. We don’t mean Human Resources,
Mark; I know it stands for Human Resistance.
They said, “Thank you very much but we’re not hiring.”
Mark: Hiring Roadblock.
David: Yeah. Instead of arguing with H.R. he went and had pizza-shaped
business cards printed up. He printed his name, phone number, and email address on the back. On the front of it he printed a note that said,
“Reward: Extra-Large Pizza for the First Person that Gets Me an
Interview at this Company.”
He stood out in front of the doors of the building and handed these
cards out for a couple of days. A couple of days went by and he was
definitely the buzz of the building.
One of the managers took him up on it and brought him in for an
interview. He actually was truly outstanding. He got the job and has
been there ever since. It’s a great story, but thinking like that –
thinking outside the box – is what we teach people to do.
Can I talk about something quickly? I’d like to talk about the force
multiplier effect. I want to put it in terms that will make sense for
every American.
The force multiplier effect is really simple. It’s a way of using multiple
tactics with one strategy: the strategy to get interviewed. It uses
multiple tactics to get in to see a hiring manager.
We’re talking about e-mail, voice mail, resumes, and binders. There
are 100 tactics we have that we talk about in the program. People are
sometimes reluctant to do things like this. 23
Let me bring it all back to sports because we all love our sports in
America. In baseball, it’s three strikes and you’re out. In football in the
States, it’s four attempts to a first down.
Why then, do most job seekers think, “I sent them a resume,” or “I emailed them a resume and they didn’t get back to me. They must not
be interested”?
We all know that the average sale is made on the seventh attempt.
Most people give up after the first. A lot of sales pros may take it to
two; maybe three. Very few people will go to seven attempts. That’s
why I – being such a pest – make so much money. It’s the same with
Mark.
Mark: It’s called tenacity.
David: It’s called tenacity and it’s called resiliency. People should consider
themselves to be more like an all-American baseball player or an allAmerican football player and take three or four attempts at every
single company.
They could do it a little bit differently every time, much like Crystal
did. She went at that company five different ways before they finally
hired her.
Kevin: For those listening, Crystal was one of our star pupils. She got hired
after doing a lot of things right. She wouldn’t have gotten them all
right if she simply wasn’t doing a lot of things. It’s just as David is
saying.
David: If she’d given up after the first time they said “no,” she wouldn’t be in
the States anymore because they would have deported her. That was
her penalty for failing.
If people just think of themselves as a sports star, it’s okay to strike out
one, two, and three times. In fact, I give you permission to strike out
seven times before they finally say, “Mr. Perry,” like Donald Trump’s
secretary did, “we have rules about stalkers down here.” Then it’s time
to give up.
Mark: I remember that.
David: Until then, “no” really just means “not today.” Situations and
companies change by the hour. That’s not going to change over the
next 20 years. The velocity of change in terms of employment and 24
having to get new opportunities is just going to increase. It’s not going
to decrease as we all become professional, independent salespeople.
Kevin: Exactly. People do need to realize that you’re not going to just do one
thing right to get hired. A force multiplier in military terms is tactics
that are used in combination to create synergy.
Here are some examples from the military, the world of warfare. I’m
getting this from Wikipedia.org, by the way. I’m not a military expert.
One idea is superior morale: all things being equal, if one fighting
force has higher morale than the other, they’re going to whip the
lower-morale force.
Weather, your training, your experience, and use of technology; all of
these things combined together can mean victory for one force and
defeat for another.
If you’re using multiple tactics intelligently you’re going to have a
tremendous advantage over other job seekers who aren’t. It goes back
to making your own luck. The busier you get, the luckier you get.
That’s an old business maxim, and it’s true in your job search. The
more things you’re doing to find that job that are just a little bit
different, the shorter your job search is going to be.
Mark: Just to add to that really quickly, this is about the story I had earlier
shared with everybody regarding the young lady in retail management.
A comment was made to her from the general manager. He said, “I
have never been approached this way by anybody who wanted a job.”
Kevin: That’s a great bookend quote here. I think – and David, you’ll agree –
when our clients find success a lot of the employers are saying, “I’ve
never seen a resume like this before,” “No one has ever approached
me that way before,” or “No one has ever done _____ like you did
before.”
Isn’t that correct? I think this is a good way to end our discussion here.
David: Probably the best example is Graham. He does a two-billion-dollar
transformation of the Bank of Scotland. Then he moves to Toronto,
Canada and can’t get a job for six years!
He said that by the time he had met the two of us when we gave that
presentation up in Toronto, he had done 32 resumes. The last six had
been done by so-called “resume experts.”25
Thirty-two resumes over six or seven years and he couldn’t get a fulltime gig. What did it take us? It took six or seven weeks to convince
him to do that one-page Guerrilla resume; and he never turned back.
He sent it out to people he had sent it to before. That’s what we did
with him. We said, “Just send it out to the guys you’ve already sent it
to.”
They were starting to call him. I don’t know if you know this, but he
has had multiple offers. From the first offer that he took – which was
the day we started the second boot camp – he has already moved on
because that got trumped by another, much larger firm. He’s now
working for a multi-billion-dollar pension fund in Toronto.
Kevin: Excellent.
David: He had 32 resumes and couldn’t even get an interview. Give me a
break!
Mark: He got one across the lake, to boot!
David: Nobody really wants to live in Toronto, but that’s another story.
Kevin: We didn’t have time to go into the specifics. It’s hard to give an audio
explanation of a Guerrilla resume, but we touched on a few things. It
needs to be focused on a brief summary at the beginning and you’ve
got to have specific results that you’ve produced in the past.
There are two things we didn’t touch on. All of our Guerrilla resumes
have at least two or three logos from past employers. They also have
two-to-three quotes from past employers or managers.
David: Those are endorsements.
Kevin: Exactly. It’s all been said before. It’s a written statement that you take
the quotes from. You’re not making stuff up here. The Guerrilla
resume is the idea of the force multiplier effect in a kind of
microcosm.
We’re doing a lot of little things differently than the typical resume
and the results are what David said with Graham: from no job in six or
seven years to a terrific job leading to an even better job in short order.
The Guerrilla resume is so completely different.
That’s good, David and Mark. I think this is a good place to end unless
you have any final, parting comments.26
David: We forgot to talk about this and we probably should. If people are
smart they’ll just go and Google the term “Guerrilla resumes.” That
will take them to one of the sites.
When we started off we talked about Allen and Darryl. That’s how the
second book starts off as well. Here were two guys who got fired.
Within five or six weeks when I was working with them, we
highlighted 38 companies. Of the 38 companies, we scored 18
interviews, 11 callbacks, and 7 offers. I think it was in five weeks, but
it might have been six.
Kevin: It was incredible.
David: That was in the middle of 2005 or 2006 when unemployment in their
town for people in their industry was 65%. It all had to do with
understanding what they wanted and who they wanted to work for. We
crafted a Guerrilla resume for each one of them and then we sent them
in a novel way. The results speak for themselves.
Mark: They were hired as a team.
David: Yeah. That was the most amazing part. It was 65% unemployment for
regular people; but we actually marketed these two guys as a pair and
found seven companies that would take them as a pair let alone as
individuals! They ended up with multiple offers each as individuals,
but they went as a pair.
Now – three or four years later – each of them has gone on to a couple
of different opportunities. Every time, they were stolen away from
somebody else. It all had to do with that original campaign we did
three or four years ago: the blog and website that we set up. All of that
took us about three or four days.
Allen has just started as a CEO for a fairly good company. Darryl is
VP of Sales and Marketing and acting CEO of another one.
Kevin: The mindset they adopted was that they marketed themselves as a
business would, using Guerrilla Marketing principles. They weren’t
looking for a job and waiting for a job to fall into their laps. They went
out and marketed themselves using multiple tactics.
They had press releases, white papers, a blog, podcasting, Web site,
incredibly cool cover letters, and Guerrilla resumes. Talk about
synergy! These guys literally hit it out of the park.27
Mark: That gets back to what I said in the beginning, Kevin. If you’re just
posting your resume on the board, you’re not looking for work.
Kevin: Exactly.
Guys, this has been really helpful. It’s going to make a terrific audio
for folks to listen to. I will close for now. David Perry and Mark
Haluska, this is Kevin Donlin. Thanks very much for your tips this
morning.
To learn more about how to get hired faster for the job you want, please visit -
The Guerrilla Job Search Home Study Course
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