Hands down the biggest issue I hear about from around the world is age discrimination.

Sometimes, though, your age is the least of your problems.

Julie Walraven wrote Is It Age Discrimination Or Your Job Search Strategies?

Go read it.  If age is your problem, read the post carefully.

Age discrimination is real. It is out there.  BUT, someone who will discriminate based on age will also discriminate on other things, including height, weight, color, religion, race, number of teeth, how you smile, etc.  You just can’t win with everyone.

Maybe you need to focus more on strategies and tactics, and mastering those, rather than blaming your age.

I know Tim and Dick and Nick and many other job seeker advocates would agree.  Don’t throw in the towel and admit defeat because you are old (whether that is 40 or 60 or 70 or 80).  Focus on what you CAN influence and change!

Read Julie’s post here.

You know networking is what you should do.  What if you are doing it but it doesn’t work?  Sam asks:

I am having very poor results on my networking efforts and feel very concerned by the overall situation.   Is there any useful advise you could share with me to help me turn things around?

Sam, I feel your pain. When I finally bit the bullet and started networking, I was doing it wrong.  My first guess was that Sam is doing it wrong also, but I had to ask her what she is doing. From her reply I see that she is:

“…using Linkedin heavily. I reach out to people inside & outside of my network. No one answers. Whether these are school alumni or personal friends or contacts of contacts. No one answers or sends me a laconic:”sorry I do not know this person” or “I do not have any contacts in this industry”"

I wonder what her outreach looks like to get ignored (see below for an idea of what the problem might be). She is also asking for people’s time:

“I try to set phone meetings by emails when I can not find the info of the person I want to speak to. I look them up on the web and find their email and just email them to avoid cold calling and either interrupting their day or leaving a voice mail that stays unreturned. “

Again, I wondered what her message/request looks like. Sam sent me an email that she would send to a prospect where she is asking for time on the phone (what I would call an informational interview).  The introduction, which I’m not including here for privacy, is very good.  She ends with this:

“I would very much welcome the opportunity to speak to you informally over the phone 10-15 minutes just to solicit your advice and exchange about the working environment at (company name) and the hiring perspectives at the moment. Thank you very much for your time and consideration. Sincerely,”

The biggest problem I see with this request is that she is not asking for time.  Read that last bit again.  There is no invitation or call to action.  The second biggest problem is that she is saying “I’m a job seeker… do you have any openings?”  I’m a lot more informal than Sam is (she is an executive)… I would personally rewrite it like this:

“I have some questions about your company and the industry in general and would appreciate your perspective. Can we get on the phone for fifteen or twenty minutes?  My schedule is flexible this week and next week.  Is there a good time that works for you?”

That (1) has a call to action and (2) changes the conversation from “help me, are there openings” to “I’m a peer and colleague, let’s talk shop.”

The “fix” to this problem might be that simple… what do you think?

I had a great call with Margaret Meloni a number of weeks ago.  She does “soft skills” training with professionals and organizations.  As we were talking told me she has a Congratulations You’re Out of Work program.

You can get her free audio and ebook here (scroll down to the bottom).  Oh wait, there is a signup form there.  She said if you don’t want to be on her list, you can download the goodies from this hidden page.  THANK YOU Margaret!  (everyone, send Margaret a thank you, and refer her stuff to project managers!)

I liked what I heard from Margaret because:

• Some people are out of work because they need to work on their soft skills, 
• Some people haven’t “needed” to but they have time to work on them now,
• Some people are having zero success in their job search because of their soft skills.

From her products page you can see she lives in the business world, helping people communicate better.  She has a soft spot for professionals in transition.

Check it out!

I like the Recruiting Animal.  A lot of people find him offensive but he brings out real issues and doesn’t let you hide behind rhetoric.  You can hear his show on Wednesdays.

Here’s something he wrote on Facebook earlier this month (I’m posting with his permission):

Yesterday, on The Recruiting Animal Show my guest was Chris Fields.

He wrote a blog posting in which he declared: “We all know that diversity helps make everything better.”

I challenged him on this. How is a Greek programmer better than an Italian programmer? How is a woman programmer better than a man?

What about a Dutch accountant? Better than a Russian accountant?

He hadn’t thought the issue through and all he could say was, “The teams I’ve worked on have always been better when they were diverse. I don’t want to work on a team full of me.”

But, in fact, he also said that people are naturally attracted to people like themselves. That’s why every minority needs affirmative action.

Because most of the hiring managers are going to be from the majority population and they are naturally going to favour people like themselves. Inotherwords, everyone in the world is, by nature, averse to diversity.

So, if people like people like themselves, how can teams be better when they are diverse? Chris didn’t tell us that either. He wants to come back on the show. And maybe he’ll have answers then.

When Ed Newman was a guest (here’s a less-than-three-minute clip), he said that diversity programs are just to prevent the standard bias in hiring. But they don’t promote innovation through the hiring of diverse thinkers.

There are a lot of things to hate about affirmative action, whether you are a minority or not.

It is an ingrained part of HR and hiring… so for now, how do you get around any decisions based on discriminatory hiring and focus on talents, skills, deliverables, etc?

Check out this post and video from Jill Konrath: How to Nurture Prospects Without Being a Pest

She is spot on.

Jill is a sales expert, training sales professionals.

You need to learn from her because as CEO of Me, Inc, you are also Chief of Sales.

If salespeople say “it often takes between 10-12 emails or phone calls before you actually connect,” and I say “you need to put your brand in front of someone seven times before you have brand recognition with them,” you should be getting a message loud and clear:

Networking is not a one-contact event.  It is something that happens over time, with continual communication.

Whether you need to communicate ten times or seven times is not point… the point is that you need to do it regularly.

NURTURE!

Check out Jill’s post and video.  Here’s the key to her post:

“The key is to be a ______ ________….” read the entire post here.

If you are not using JibberJobber, or some other relationship management tool, how in the world are you going to try to keep track of how many contact points you’ve had with your prospects and contacts?  IT IS TIME…!

JibberJobber is an online job search organizer.

WHY organize your job search?

• So you don’t miss follow-up opportunities.
• So when the recruiter calls you, you can speak intelligently about the job you applied to 3 weeks ago.
• So you can see the progress you are making.
• So you don’t lose track of contacts and companies that you initiated a relationship with a few months ago.
• Because this is a very complex process, with lots of data points.
• Because you are collecting awesome and powerful data that will help you in your job search, in your next job, and in future job searches.

HOW do you organize your job search?

The simple answer is get on JibberJobber, and sign up for the live weekly user training.

JibberJobber replaces the job search spreadsheet.  A spreadsheet simply can’t handle the complexity that you create in your job search activities.

JibberJobber complements your email system.  Especially with the awesome email2log feature.  Outlook alone will not manage the complexity that you need to manage.

JibberJobber helps you track the five most important things in your job search that you need to track:

1. Contacts: who you meet, who you want to meet.
2. Target Companies: companies you are and want to network into.
3. Jobs you apply to: whether you apply online or have found them in the hidden job market.
4. Conversations and important notes: about interactions with any of those (we call these Log Entries).
5. Action Items: to follow-up on any of those.

Want more “how?”  Sign up for the next JibberJobber webinar here.

I saw this on AOL Jobs: The Simple Truth About Finding A Job

The article says that leads come from four places:

• Your Network,
• Through directly contacting target employers,
• Answering ads (aka, job postings), and
• Through external recruiters and agencies.

I think that nicely sums it up.  What I don’t like about the graphic on that page is that it doesn’t show where you should spend your time.

In the Ask The Expert video with Nick Corcodilos, Nick talks about how to work with recruiters, and how to think about them as a job search tool or resource.  What he teaches you is totally different than what I did in my search (which was to rely on them for a lot of hope and results).

In my job search I spent more than 90% of my time in my job search on job boards but I was told only 14% of jobs where found through boards.  Nick said about 1.3% of jobs were found through Monster.  Do you see a problem here?  Even if I were to spend an equitable 25% (giving each of the four strategies listed above equal time and effort, I would have been spending way too much time in those areas).

Without thinking too much about it, I’m not sure what else to put on the list of things to do in your job search (at this high level), but I do know you can’t spend an equal amount of time on them.  Instead of 4 equal boxes, perhaps it should look more like this:

Note how SMALL the brown (job board) box is.

The green box is also small, although it is wide.  I didn’t know how else to represent the idea that for some people, working with recruiters (especially how Nick teaches you how to do it) can work, but you have to do it right/well.

The almost-thirty recruiters I had developed relationships with did nothing more than file me away. They weren’t working on openings that I could fill, so I was irrelevant to them.  But I didn’t understand that for months, and I spent way too much time chasing them.

So, there you go… the same four strategies, but the key is to know how much time and effort to spend on any of them!

Early in my marriage a word took on a new meaning: Risk.

Risking, in a close relationship, means that you might do or say something, or share something, that could be disregarded.  It could be hurtful to open up and share.

Since I learned about “risking,” and get to practice it regularly, I’ve found it applies everywhere.

In a job search we are in a vulnerable position where we get to risk all the time.

We put ourselves out there a lot.  We open ourselves up to criticism.  We get to a point where we think people are talking about us, and probably say similar things to the negative self-talk we feed ourselves.

In reality, people talk about us far less than we think, but we still can feel very vulnerable.  When you feel like a loser (lost your job, can’t get a new one, lost in the resume black hole) it’s easy to think that everyone is talking bad about you.

What I’ve learned is that we must continue forward.  Many times this means we must continue to “risk.”

Share what your needs are.  Share what you would like.  Ask for favors.  Accept favors that people give you.

Sometimes things won’t work out. People will say no.  Mean or unstable people might tell you why.

But don’t let that get in your way. Risk, share, and get yourself in a better place.

The alternative is to be quite passive, and take what comes to you.

What I learned in my job search, and as a business owner, is that what I can go get is much better than what I passively wait for.

Risk!

I had the pleasure of interviewing and chatting with Nick Corcodilos for last week’s Ask The Headhunter.  It was a blast.  I had questions for Nick but the audience had a lot, too.

Here’s the conversation, enjoy!

Note: Vimeo video.  To make this full-size, push play and then on the bottom right click the icon that looks like this:

I love meeting JibberJobber users. Here’s a note that one use recently sent me:

I’m a business lawyer who graduated the year they froze most of the transactional / real estate law jobs. I’ll say two things:

(1) most of the networking advice I got from my career services office was HORRIBLE; and

(2) after taking the initiative to re-educate myself years later, I (literally) cried tears of joy when I found JibberJobber.

This is such a well thought out and incredible service. Thank you for being passionate and obsessed enough with the idea of streamlining your networking process and generous enough to share it with the rest of us.

I wish you the best in all that you do!

I sure love getting emails like this.

I am, and have been obsessed, about the networking process, and making it better (or, as this person mentions, streamlined).

Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts and feelings – it strokes our ego and is fuel for our obsession!