Talking Talent

The Australian Financial Review interviewed me for its Education section a few months back.  In it, I was asked to describe my best and/or worst career move to date.

I am very philosophical and have taken learnings from all my career moves - the good, the bad and the ugly.

I have had some difficult jobs that I did not love, worked for people I did not respect and yet the experience made me who I am today, better able to help other people and organisations in times of success and adversity.

Creativity hubs such as YouTube represent the future of how we identify and sign up new talent. 

Recruiters in the US are already hiring dedicated staff to scour outlets of online creativity such as YouTube to find “the next big thing”.  And now the trend has caught on with mainstream audiences and four in five employers in the US are receptive to receiving visual CVs.

Video resumes are not new.  Time magazine says that some businesses were offering video resumes in the United States in the mid-90s.  But as they weren’t easy to store or distribute, video CVs never really took off.   Then YouTube arrived on the scene.

A quick search of YouTube for “video resume” throws up more than 32,000 hits.  And it’s no longer budding film directors who are selling themselves on video  - everyone from sales manager to business analysts are shooting their own video CVs to give themselves the best shot at their dream job.  Yep, right here in Australia.

While multimedia-savvy Gen Y candidates are the most likely to fly the video resume flag right now, it’s only a matter of time before we all grow accustomed to the concept.

But the video CV does bring with it some challenges, as well as some opportunities.

For the employer or recruiter, the video CV offers the chance to assess a candidate’s compatibility immediately, which leads to a faster and more streamlined selection process. 

And in any professional role, where presentation and communication ability are an integral part of the job, a video resume will quickly demonstrate a candidate’s strengths.

However, this method of recruiting does have its downside: employers can see a candidate’s age, gender, race and appearance at the very first stage of an application, which may increase the risk of discrimination claims.  But don’t forget the upside: candidates who may not be so impressive on paper can add some real oomph to their application with a video CV.

For employees, the challenge is to make your application stand out from the crowd.  This doesn’t mean looking too cool for school.  One video CV swirling through cyberspace shows a candidate lifting weights, serving tennis balls and ballroom dancing.  It didn’t impress his prospective employers, but it certainly made them snigger!

So, start by looking the part you wish to play.  What role are you pitching for?  Dress as you would for an interview, and present yourself and your CV the way you would to a prospective employer.  Rehearse your script, take care to look at the camera and speak slowly and clearly.  Be funny, lively, personable and professional – but keep it short (just one to three minutes).  Most importantly, focus on your professional endeavours, not personal ones!

Video CVs are a snapshot of a potential employee and serve as another layer of filtering before recruiters settle on their preferred candidates for face-to-face interviews.  They’ll never replace paper CVs entirely, but let’s not forget humans are visual creatures.  We absorb much of our information and communication non-verbally, so it’s a fair bet that video CVs will become the way of the future!

Not long ago, there was a predictable workplace where you could depend on continuous employment and job security. With minimal planning, your career and life ‘happened to you’.

Consequently, we’re unprepared for today’s career challenges.

In a workplace where change and competition raise varying levels of uncertainty, even the most confident individuals wonder “where do I fit?” and “what’s my future?” And the answers are not quickly forthcoming.

It is pleasing, then, to know that some people view this change as positive and rewarding. Like Pollyanna, we’ve put on our smiley faces and adopted euphemisms for the changes around us. We call the new career landscape a ‘mosaic’, people are expected to become ‘skilled at managing a portfolio of careers’, formulating ‘proposals for career moves’ and then ‘smoothly transitioning between jobs’. Now transition sounds so easy, so nice. One has visions of a graceful glide from one position to another – degree of difficulty 4.5.

It is quite unlike the reality of the working world.  What often happens is that people are casualised, destabilised and marginalised. Workers find out about their redundancy on the late night news or they are the ones who have sat at their same desk for four years and worked for three different companies only to find out that the urge to merge is closely followed by the urge to purge.

One woman I know likes to think of her career in terms of Lego. She says she’s very good at building a space stations that transition to ambulances.  I must say my attempts to build with Lego as a child ended up with my space station looking more like the shuttle disaster, where all the King’s horses and all the King’s men were unable to put it together again.

The real challenge for leaders in today’s world of work is to shape their own roles – before it is reshaped for them!

This means a commitment to pursuing life long learning goals, and facilitating and encouraging others to do the same. For leaders to stay ahead they must step outside the boundaries of their own organisation and competency to ensure they are informed about trends in population, the environment, technology, social contexts and the economy.

I like to apply the ‘n+1 Principle’ for myself and my staff. For every n (number of conferences attended in your own industry or competency), attend one that is outside your field, and use the information to make positive change.

Around 77 per cent of recruiters use search engines to find background data on candidates (according to one survey).  Of those, 35 per cent have eliminated a candidate because of what they found online.

So how do you protect your personal brand?

Web strategist Jeremiah Owyang recently examined an online dispute between a photographer and an employee at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art recently.  While I won’t go into the details of the dispute, the upshot is that the photographer blogged about the incident, called the SF MOMA employee (Simon) an ‘a-hole’ and the story was soon circulating through cyberspace.  It became the number one story on Digg, and spread to Flickr, Zoomr, Friendfeed and Twitter.

A simple Google search will now uncover hundreds of results tied to Simon being an ‘a-hole’.  As Jeremiah Owyang says, Simon had very little online footprint to start with, and “now it will be dominated online by all of these social media elements” and his reputation will be forever linked to this incident.

… we know that many recruiters use the web to find candidates, and seeing several results like this could result in a recruiter passing up a candidate. If a recruiter doesn’t care, or doesn’t see this, hiring managers are likely to do Google searches on the individual finding this.

So, the key takeaways (courtesy of Jeremiah):

• For those that don’t already participate online, and have a small digital footprint, they don’t have a strong platform to stand from. 
• Anyone is susceptible to brand damage, even if you’re not in this space (and even emails can do damage – see the Dianna Abala saga and marvel!).
• Bloggers with large social media platforms are incredibly powerful, and must recognize the long-term impacts of their actions. 
• Businesses should assume every customer (and employee) is capable of impacting an individual or company’s online reputation.
• Simon may have to buy search ads to get his printed resume or story correctly positioned.

So, go Google yourself.  It’s not so much ego surfing as research!

Readers of Career News were recently asked “What advice would you give a friend who feels they are not balancing their work and life?”

Some of the responses are really insightful.  Have a read…

“Even if you work long hours by choice or necessity, you have to try to make the most of your time off. Plan an activity with family or friends at least once a week. Exercise regularly; try to have dinner with your spouse, family or a friend on a regular basis. Go to church, enjoy being a spectator at a sports event, go for a long walk, help a neighbor out… These things all keep your life in perspective no matter how busy you are.”

“Love what you do. Find fulfillment in hard work. And enjoy each day. Plan your life outside of work - don’t just sit back and hope something happens, make it happen!”

“My work is a part of my life. I’m in the early years of building my career and want to move up quickly. I know that I need to establish myself now, this is my decision. I work hard to accomplish a lot. It’s like an athlete, if you want to be at the top of the game, you have to put in the hours - and be self-driven. If you enjoy what you do, ultimately this contributes to your happiness and sense of fulfillment.”

“Enjoy your weekends. There’s plenty of time to have a full life. I hear so many people complain, but these are the ones that don’t ever do anything with their time off. Get up early and workout, after work spend time with your family and friends. At least one weekend per month, plan an activity. Live your life!”

“Work hard so you will be able to provide for your family. Hard work is a good and admirable trait.  I think too many people are afraid of working hard. Yes, it does require compromise, but what doesn’t?”

“Plan, prioritise and schedule better. Don’t be afraid of hard work.”

At a recent leadership seminar, Ella Bache Australia CEO Karen Matthews told the audience that the key to crystallising your career is to imagine that, on a particular morning in the future, you open the business section of a newspaper and see yourself on the front page.

What does the headline say?

Matthews believes you should be able to write this headline in 30 seconds. 

And then spend time writing the article underneath.  This becomes your business plan. 

“The paragraphs underneath become the series of objectives… or they become the timeframes that you might be measuring your progression on, or they become your strategies and tactics,” Matthews says.

Read more about Karen Matthews’ presentation, including the 10 things that she says make the difference between “OK” leaders and “amazing” ones.

“What do you want to do with your life?”

It’s a conundrum that most of us have wrestled with at some stage of our lives.

If you need some direction, 43 Things is a social networking website built on the principles of tagging.   Users create accounts and then list a number of goals; these goals are then connected to similar goals constructed by other people.

43 Things not only encourages people to write down their goals – an important factor in high achievement – but also provides a social networking space for people to meet other enthusiasts with the same (sometimes very obscure) goal, to share their progress and to learn from other people who already achieved that goal.

More than a 1.1 million people have joined the site and have set themselves goals such as ‘donate blood’, ‘learn sign language’, ‘travel on the Trans-Siberian Railway’, ‘grow my own vegetables’, ‘watch every Bette Davis movie ever made,’ ‘keep up with current web trends’ or ‘be happy even if the rest of the things on this list never happen’.

43 Things is very much like the ‘21 things to do in a lifetime’ concept that I’ve often talked about in motivational workshops, and written about in my book, SelfScape: Success through Balance.

My list includes ‘write a novel’, ‘retrace the steps of a famous explorer’, ‘ learn something from a child’, and ’sail the seven seas’.

The first time I wrote my list of 21 things, it was the result of a session facilitated by my supervisor at the time.  He was a creative thinker and looked for different ways to develop better teamwork among his executive group.  Each of us wrote our list and then one by one we displayed them and discussed each point.

My manager was looking for common areas of interest where the team or a sub-set of it could undertake activities together on the basis that that the best relationships are developed through shared experiences.  It lead to some of the group sailing together through the Whitsunday Islands, some racing cars in serious races and some four wheel driving across the Simpson Desert.

That was in 1995.  I wonder if today we’d all sign up for 43 Things and then share our lists through the Internet?