Having been a recruiter/coach for 20 years, I am shocked at the degree to which it is true in this recession. Fear is an emotional stumbling block common to most executives who are “stuck.” After sending resumes to job portal after job portal and getting no response, the strategic part of their brain freezes. They fail to try new strategies and accept their fate as beyond their control.

Wrong!

The correct response is to ignore the bad luck happening to others. Be more strategic. Campaign smarter if you expect to beat anyone to the finish line.

Don’t use the phrases and tactics from the popular $20 resume book or follow what was suggested in the networking meeting with 700 other attendees. Avoid tactics every one else quotes as tried and true. They are guaranteed to work poorly in a crowded marketplace (or any other time.) There is a reason if you are being treated as a commodity!

Do more homework on the target company, customers, and the competition. Invest your efforts a campaign that truly sets you apart. Give me a truly compelling reason to pick you out of 25 (or 400) resumes for people with the same title.

Not getting anywhere on your own? Call me.

1. In the Twin Cities Metro there are 4K LinkedIn listings with “marketing communications” mentioned, 59K with “sales,” and 31K with “engineer.” 65% social media participants users use to stay in touch with friends, 47% use social media “for work” and but only 26-28% use it for “career search.” # That means you need to develop strategies to be appealing to all kinds of networkers who will find you there and you need a very well written profile and customized communications to rise above the clutter.
2. The average reader spends 8-10 seconds with a profile. Your full resume does NOT belong in LinkedIn. The correct profile is closer to an executive bio in a corporate website.
3. LinkedIn should not be viewed as a stand-alone tool especially by those of you who are uncomfortable pairing LinkedIn activities with networking done in-person or by phone. Using LinkedIn exclusively can actually damage your professional image if your best means of reaching out to someone is the pre-written and highly superficial messages available by default in the system. Aim for a small, high quality network of people you can vouch for and whom you can trust to recommend you effectively. Consider that you will be judged by the quality of relationships you exhibit there. When you suddenly need a strong recommendation, a large quantity of poor quality contacts in your network will dilute the credibility of someone who really has considerable knowledge of you, especially if they use the standard messaging and tools to recommend you.
4. Hide your contacts. You want to manage how, why, and when others are reaching out to your best contacts and clients. The social media are mechanical software tools that encourage use without much thought which may be good as a strategy for the company LinkedIn, but bad as yours. Approximately 1/3 of the requests I receive through electronic social media I consider inappropriate to someone else in the relationship. The sender did not think hard before sending the request because it was easy to do so. If they had to make the same request in person they would have thought about it a lot more carefully. I think it is also happening more because people are in a panic over job security.
5. Hiring managers prefer people who are currently employed and can buy access to all 40 million names. There are many ways to reach potential hirees without buying a job ad in LinkedIn and most hiring managers are not bothering to. Ads on the 2 big job boards declined 5-44% last year depending on industry.
6. You are judged in LinkedIn as much by your EQ as by your IQ. An ExecuNet study (12/08) showed:
   • 86% exec recruiters search online for information beyond resume
   • 70% say their opinion of job seeker improves if find positive info on internet
7. We know that being active and engaged in LinkedIn activities improves your rank in LinkedIn searches:
   • Include a picture
   • Participate in discussion groups and Q+A with others
   • Answer InMail queries from others and pass profiles onwards if and only if you can vouch for the recommendation
   • Give and get recommendations
   • Name corporate, academic awards, boards, associations, biz charities
8. Remember that what you post in social media is VERY public and available to be scrutinized and commented on by many critics. A recent survey by Career Builder and highlighted in the Wall St Journal stated that 35% of employers report they found content on social media sites that caused them not to hire a candidate. ##
   • Candidate showed poor communication skills – 29%
   • Candidate lied about qualifications – 24 %
   • Candidate shared confidential information from previous employer – 20 %
9. If you think about the experience of the person searching for a resource in LinkedIn, he/she is confronted with 100-500 profiles (depending on subscription level) with similar titles or search criteria. The first profile the seeker will reach out to will demonstrate:
   • Better accomplishments than their peers
   • Good communication skills, and transparency of skills
   • Candor, warmth, accessibility, and ethics
   • NO Political, racial, religious, marital status, or sexual preference mentions because Hiring Managers will avoid downloading it for fear of an EEO lawsuit

So, invest some time and effort into your LinkedIn strategies. Don’t use the software as your only means of networking. Don’t settle for its default messages. Think about the paradigm of the other people in the LinkedIn network and what they might want from you when they are looking at your profile. LinkedIn has huge potential but can be more damaging than helpful to your career image if used too casually.

#   http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Adult_social_networking_data_memo_FINAL.pdf
## http://online.wsj.com/article/PR-CO-20090819-902554.html

Here are important tips for a successful relationship with a recruiter, when you are the candidate.

• Interview the recruiting firm. A firm may cover many roles, such as Sales, Marketing, IT, Engineering, Senior Finance and Accounting, Training, Organizational Development, Human Resources. Individual recruiters have industry specialties like medical device, durable goods, etc… The recruiter needs to assess whether one of the recruiters in the group is likely to have jobs that fit you. Most great recruiters have hands on experience in the field they cover. For instance, I have 10+ years as a VP of Marketing and I recruit marketers and others. A good finance recruiter might have a CPA and experience in one of the Big 4 accounting firms.
• Understand the recruiter’s world. The recruiter’s time is driven by clients who contract with the recruiting firm to find many different kinds of candidates. For this reason, recruiters do not know which searches they will work on next week or if they will have jobs that fit your background in the near future. However, when recruiters do fill job in your area during the course of a typical year, the recruiter definitely wants you to be in the candidate database. Then the recruiter can call you when those jobs show up and see if the time is right for you and if you are interested in the particular job the recruiter describes. Importantly, your resume and name are not shared with any hiring manager unless you say you would like to it be submitted to that client and that job. A great recruiter takes that very seriously, because a recruting firm with several recruiters and an excellent reputaton  has far more to lose than gain by violating that policy.
• Optimize your communication with your recruiter. Be smart. This is a free service to you, so you are expected to follow a particular etiquette.
  • Be available for questions.
  • Answer all questions honestly.

  If a recruiter is not getting cooperation during the process, the recruiter will gravitate to another candidate. Note that many hiring managers have also worked with the same great recruiting firm as candidates, so great recruiters are very used to keeping those relationships straight and your information confidential. Recruiter income depends on maintaining positive relationships both on the candidate and client side.

• Choose a great recruiter and feel honored when you get homework. A great firm has more connections, locally and nationally, and a more rigorous process for getting to know you. It costs the clients more and they get what they pay for. This means a great recruiter will spend a little more time with you than other firms demand. This means when your great recruiter introduces you to a client, it is more likely be a good fit for both of you.
• Be ready when your recruiter interviews you in person. The process of talking to a great recruiter usually starts with an email or phone call and a discussion of your resume and marketability to the firm’s clients. When your great recruiter has a job that he/she thinks fits you, your recruiter will ask you to visit in person. A great recruiting firm’s clients expect them to deliver the best culture/personality match as well as a skill set match.
• Trust your great recruiter to negotiate for you. Once your recruiter has shown your information to a client, the next step is to arrange the interviews and negotiate dollars on your behalf. Since your recruiter negotiates dollars on the behalf of candidates many times a week and recruiting fees are based on a percentage of your expected compensation, your great recruiter is interested in obtaining a high but reasonable salary for you and can usually negotiate a higher offer for you than you can on your own. The client expects a great recruiting firm to manage the salary and interview process.
• Wait for the call. When you are active in the candidate database, you do not have to call once a week to check in. Because a great recruiter will not send your information anywhere without asking you first, you will get a call with a position description when your recruiter has a job open that fits you.
• Stay active in the database. Send an email 1-2 times/month. It keeps you top of mind if you send an email to your recruiter every 2-4 weeks. This information and all of the notes on you are stored in a database for the entire team of great recruiters to see. In each email, be sure to mention:
  • you are still available
  • where you have been interviewing so the recruiter can expand on your own efforts
• It matters where you’ve been. Sharing where you have been interviewing is important because a great recruiter cannot show you to a client where you have already been submitted in the last 6-12 months (depending on how long a client keeps resumes.) The list also helps the great recruiting firm understand what kinds of roles and companies appeal to you and how flexible you are. Telling your recruiter what went well and badly in the interview (even if your recruiter’s firm did not arrange the meeting) helps your recruiter understand where you will be most salable. It makes all the recruiters at a great recruiting firm more willing to go out of their way for you.
• Support your recruiter’s reputation and you support yourself. Share your whole network. Contribute to everyone’s success. Recruiters find candidates names through a variety of sources. Most placements come from candidates recommended to the recruiters personally. Great recruiters pride themselves on knowing people who are very good at what they are doing whether that person is looking for an opportunity or not. Clients expect great recruiters to provide the candidates who are great. The client not only does not care if that candidate is looking, they also want the recruiters to find the people they can’t on their own. So clients do not want recruiters to provide people who are in databases like Monster.com. They expect the recruiter provide an added value not found in those public sources. That means your great recruiter will ask you who you know who is great at what they do, whether that person is looking or not. Even if your friend is not looking they may lead your recruiter to a very good candidate who is. (Eagles hang out with eagles.) This networking is one of the courtesies a great recruiter expects of you in exchange for looking for opportunities for your career for no money fee. This networking process is how the great recruiter gets leads to jobs to fill, so it may lead to uncovering a job you can fill. And when you help your recruiter to be better connected, your recruiter has an easier time attracting the kinds of clients you want hire you.
• Ask about how the recruiting process works. The better educated you are, the more effectively you can negotiate the process to your advantage. The better educated you are, the easier for your great recruiter to place you. Please ask questions!

The simple answer? Don’t do it.

• I have seen national studies that claimed about 70% of resumes have “mistruths” in them.
• Other studies state 25-50% of resumes have “embellishments” (an exaggeration but not lie.)

The most common lies:

• Length of employment gaps
• Titles
• Degrees completed
• Salary
• Reason for leaving
• Not mentioning a job from which you were fired
• Taking credit for an idea developed by the team
• When career started (age)
• Size of business or projects managed
• Rank as a sales person or total revenue you represented
• Claiming to be “Consulting” when you were billing zero hours

I could quote more studies, but the point is: Recruiters and Hiring Managers EXPECT there to be many lies in resumes and in the interviews we have with applicants so we look and listen for them.

Easiest to detect

The one I hear most frequently is about salary/bonus. I ask people their current salary and bonus in a very deliberate way and listen to how they handle it. I can hear the long, pregnant pauses while the speaker is trying to figure out how much they can increase the answer since I gave them a chance to. The process varies if I called them versus when they called me. Rarely does the speaker need the same length of time to answer other questions. It is one of the lies that are easiest for the listener to detect. And it is a very good indicator of whether I should trust the other answers I hear will hear from the same source.

Legal penalties

I called a lawyer I know who specializes in employment law for his knowledge of possible consequences. There are apparently no formal legal penalties in Minnesota for lying in the job application process, but lying on a job application certainly is a ground for immediate termination (not that the employer necessarily needs grounds under the employment-at-will doctrine). Call me (anonymously if you wish) for a referral to him.

Situational stress

We also know that lying increases:

• In a recession as the stress of finding a job increases
• As age of the applicant increases because the stress of finding a job increases
• If an applicant was a poor fit for a job and it ended very badly
• If the applicant is not good at articulating their value to their past employers

So what do you do if you are tempted to lie? Don’t. Instead, take a few steps back in your process and analyze which hiring manager SHOULD want to hire you and why. Have you done enough homework about the companies you are targeting? Do you know for which roles you are most marketable? Have you done enough selling to show the hiring manager why you are a must-meet-applicant? Instead of applying to 200 companies, figure out the 15-20 companies for which you will be one of the most desirable applicants and tailor your pitch to discuss why you are indeed worth knowing for that role.

Illness

A woman who just finished with a long illness called me today and asked for advice on how to handle the gap in her resume. Illnesses and disabilities are complicated and deserve their own very long article but don’t hide the gap or offer a lie. On the other hand, don’t volunteer more information than is necessary, especially if disabled. Talk to a certified disability job counselor for advice if that applies to you.

In the case of the woman who had been ill but was not now disabled, I told her to simply say she had been on sabbatical for an undefined personal issue but was now ready and able to work 40 hours a week without distraction. She needs to carefully research the clients who would be thrilled to have her for what she does know and have a very polished selling statement ready to offset fears related to the unexplained gap. She should have strong testimonials ready. If necessary, she could offer to work for them on a contract-to-hire basis or discounted pay scale until she establishes her value in the present time-frame. She still may have trouble “getting back in” but she shouldn’t compound doubt about her reputation/ability with a lie. If there is no fear the illness may return, you could offer a doctor’s note to show you are fully recovered.