On PR Daily Becky Johns wrote Students: The 9 things that matter more than GPA

The comments are great, there is someone who has hired a lot of recent grads and she weighs in with a great argument… but I don’t want to focus on that.

The 9 points are awesome… go to the post to see what they are… and then figure out how you can incorporate them into your own stories.  Can you show how you learn (#1) with stories?  Can you help an employer understand how you tackle time management (#3) through examples?  Can you show a portfolio (#5)?

Read the post for the nine ideas. If any of these make sense to be a part of your brand, figure out how to create the stories so you can help people understand how strong you are in any of those areas.

BONUS: In JibberJobber, use the Interview Prep area to store your stories you’ll use in interviews…

Yesterday I blogged about working with recruiters.

Here’s another post of interest: The recruitment database is far from dead….

Peter Cosgrove says that his firm, the largest recruitment agency in Ireland, took their 20 last placements and lists where they came from:

• Only one applied through a job board
• Two came from a cv database such as monster
• 3 came from our own Cpl website
• 2 were found on Linkedin
• 12 were by referral or internally found by the recruiter on our database.

Read his short post for his thoughts.

My thoughts?

NETWORK!!!!

Network with recruiters, but NETWORK with people who can refer you!

Tomorrow (Tuesday, November 15, 2012) I am doing two awesome webinars.

At 4pm EST (Tuesday, Nov 15) I am doing an updated LinkedIn for Executives: Beyond the Basics, for Experts Connection.  The cost is $60.  I’m amazed at all the crappy LinkedIn advice floating around… rest assured, I won’t go into anything superfluous.  I’ve always recognized that my audience is busy, or feels overwhelmed, and needs to know what to DO to get the most value, and then move on.   Click here to sign up.

At 7pm EST (Tuesday, Nov 15) I am hosting Mark Hovind for our second “tell me about the economy” NO COST webinar.  The first one blew me away.  I almost-guarantee (I hardly ever guarantee anything) that you will learn a ton.  Is the economy going up?  Is it going down?  Disregard the crap you get from the media and check out Mark’s analysis, taken from current economic numbers and compared with the trends from the last 60ish years. Click here to register. (here’s the last one I did with Mark, in July of 2009)

Sign up for at least one of these!

Yes, it has significantly changed.

Technology has been one major catalyst of the change.  The economy has been the other major catalyst.

What has it changed TO?

Check out this post by Meg Guiseppi titled Today’s Executive Job Search Toolkit. Meg says you need these things for a successful job search (especially as an executive):

• A specific career target and list of target companies (read more)
• Research on each target company and the industry (read more)
• Target Contact List for networking (read more)
• Personal branding designed to renonate with your target companies (read more)
• Branded Career Documents (read more)
• LinkedIn (read more)
• Google Profile (read more)
• Recruiter Relationships (read more)
• List of References (read more)
• Online brand-building communications plan (read more)
• In-person and online networking strategy (read more)
• Interview Preparation (read more)
• Thank you notes (read more)
• Job search managmeent and tracking system (JibberJobber, of course!) (read more)

Check out her post for more info and links.

The job search is not as simple as it was.  Be proactive, take ownership of it, and excel!

I got sucked into Chris Broganville recently, reading a bunch of his posts, and posts from others about him.

One that stuck out was his post titled COMMUNITY ONLY MEANS SOMETHING IF YOU KEEP IT WARM

He talks about relationships he’s had with the biggies… Dan Heath, who he had a warm relationship with, and who he thought he could pick things up with.

Contrast that with other biggies who he hasn’t maintained a relationship with, including Keith Ferrazzi and Tom Peters.

Chris runs with the big dogs… he knows some serious people, and they know him.  But he’s not talking about knowing them from 30 years ago, or just dropping their name once… he is talking about THE STRENGTH OF THE RELATIONSHIP.

In JibberJobber there is a in important function that you should be using: ranking/stars.

When you put someone in JibberJobber you should rank them.  On the image on the right you’ll see the stars… you can change them on various pages, but the point is to monitor or measure the relationships you have with individuals.

Meet someone at a networking event the night before?  If you don’t think you have anything in common, or a reason to pursue the relationship, then don’t give them any stars (leave it blank).  If you think there is something there, though, and you want to pursue a professional relationship, rank them as a 2 or 3 Star.

As you develop the relationship, increase the ranking to 3 and 4 and 5 Stars.

If I rank you as a 5 Star, that means I think we have an awesome relationship… perhaps you’ll interrupt a meeting to take my call, or at least you’ll respond as soon as you can when the meeting is done.

In JibberJobber I can track how STRONG my relationships are, not just how BIG my network is.

Are you doing this?

I think many are disillusioned by those who say “my network is THIS BIG!!”

Really?

How many of those contacts will actually respond to what you have to say?  How many care about you, or will help you?

Go read Chris Brogan’s post, to get a sense of where you want to be with your professional relationships… and then jump over to your JibberJobber account and make sure you are using stars to rank the strength of the relationships.

I got a link to a terrific post from Manny Otiko, a PR professional in Southern California.  Manny is like an industry watchdog, sharing good stuff for all PR professionals.

The post is titled 20 things every PR pro should know how to do.

Almost every single point here could be applicable to job seekers…. that’s why I retitled it: 20 things every JOB SEEKER should know how to do

Why?  Because the job search is about communication.

Learn how to do many of the things in that post, and you’ll be a much better job seeker.

Go read the post, on PR Daily.  Excellent stuff.

Check out this short 4 minute video from Dice.com’s Cat Miller shares ideas on How To Build Your Business Network.

At minute 2:35 she says “… so we need a personal equivalent to a customer relationship management program.  My favorite is JibberJobber.” Here’s an image (video below):

Yippee!  We agree!

Check out the video, and take notes – Cat includes a lot of gems in the four minutes.  You might know a lot of it, but are you doing it?  Take notes, then see what opportunities you have for improvement.

Here’s the video from YouTube… you can go to Cat’s post to comment or tweet

Last month I wrote about How to Blog Without Blogging.

I’ve also created a video series on how to use blogs in a job search.

When I speak, it’s one of the tactics I always talk about, but I don’t spend much time on it.  It’s scary for a lot of people.

My friend, James Dean in East Bay, finally started his blog, though!  Check out his first post, titled I’m on LinkedIn – Now What?

He writes:

“…the real answer to the Now What question is the web application that Jason wrote. LinkedIn is for building your profile and connecting with others. But once you do that – now what? The answer is Jibber Jobber. It’s a great tool to assist with a job search, should you be looking for one, but it’s really so much more. It’s a contact relationship management tool for maintaining relationships between contacts, jobs and companies in your network, as well as some other important things.”

Isn’t that awesome?

I love that… Jim has been teaching JibberJobber classes in the East Bay area for a while.  He knows LinkedIn, and he knows JibberJobber, and I’m flattered he chose to wrote about JibberJobber on his new blog!

Should you use a blog in your job search?  In most cases, YES.  You just have to figure out how to do it right and well

I found Kristin Lenander last week on Twitter when she responded to something a tweeted, and then I kind of got sucked into her blog.  The post from September 13th was great: Finding an Internship.

I’m going to give you the list of 10 places to look for internships, but you HAVE TO click over to her post so you can see her explanations on each one:

1. College job and internship boards
2. Professional association websites
3. Linkup.com
4. LinkedIn
5. Industry blogs
6. Email listservs
7. Find recruiters from companies where you would like to work
8. Follow people who are leaders and connectors in your industry
9. Search popular hashtags
10. Participate in Twitter chats (not my favorite)

These are good places to look for an internship, or for a full-time job!

Thanks for the great post Kristin!

I wrote this post within a year of launching JibberJobber.com. I had been blogging for about 10 months and was totally consumed with it.  I had seen considerable value out of my blog, and was actively encouraging others to blog.

March 7th, 2007 I wrote How to Blog Without Blogging, which was for those who were afraid of the commitment you get yourself into when you start a blog.

The gist of the post is to leave real comments on relevant blogs… it’s a great networking strategy.

Check out the post, and the 33 responses.