In many of my blogs I have advised you to concentrate your efforts on the 15-25 corporations for which you are likely to be the preferred job seeker. So what if you want to move to another industry or role? What if you have not yet had a job offer in your preferred target group and need to expand your efforts?

Who needs you most?

The process is the same. You need to identify corporations that will value some part of your background - perhaps a different or very narrow aspect of your skills - and concentrate there with a pitch that showcases the relevant skills. And because you may be missing a portion of experience that client was hoping for, it is very important that you include case histories and metrics of success.

Delivering bad news gracefully

Here is an example: I was working with a customer service manager from a hospital who delivered scary or bad news to patients about tests they had recently completed. He was gifted at delivering bad news gracefully but after a while it got to him and he wanted out of critical health care. So we identified other industries that would appreciate his gift of delivering awkward or complicated or bad news. He applied to mortgage companies where he could tell consumers about loan alternatives if they did not qualify for their preferred loan terms (this was before “sub-prime” was a dirty word.) Another obvious industry was student loan providers, where he could coach people on additional loans to apply for.

Cows for warlords

Another of my favorite examples is a woman who worked as a Product Manager for a high end clothing manufacturer in Europe, then went to a humanitarian non-profit in Africa during a political crisis as Marketing Director. Then she was recruited to a security company in France which protected multimillion dollar executives. On the surface those companies and jobs had nothing in common. But I showed her that they had a lot in common:

• The need to access and manipulate international resources.
• Project management in a hostile or highly competitive environment.
• Very short time frames in which success had to be achieved.
• The need to deliver out-of-the-box solutions in ambiguous environments. For instance, for the clothing manufacturer she had models in evening gowns jump out of helicopters into movie debuts instead of running newspaper ads. In Africa she solicited aid from neighboring governments with gifts of cows. In France she could be negotiating with groups who were also friends with the terrorists on some level.

How to apply to Minnesota

So how did she job hunt in Minnesota? We decided the corporations where she would be most valued would:

• Do business in many countries on a very sophisticated level.
• Want her for her ability to run teams that protected executives worth $15-30 million in compensation.
• Or want her for her ability to evaluate business partners in foreign countries. Can this manufacturing rep team in country X deliver a 15% sales increase in sales in the next 12 months? Is that potential manufacturing partner in country Z able to deliver 3 million cases of widgets in 8 weeks?

There are several processes that can be used to identify options like these whether you are intuitive or deductive in your processing of information. But the key is to look for corporations and roles where your past successes will be highly valued by the target audience. Have fun exploring!

I am in my 50s. Yes, age bias exists and, yes, it is illegal. You won’t always be able to avoid it. But age bias is sometimes not really about your actual age, it is about certain soft skills and attitudes that employers desire but older employees are less likely to value. And if you learn to address those issues, you can make concerns about age go away.

Attitude

First of all, if you think the world is against you, I will bet it shows in your interviews. You need to peel back the layers on your emotions. Do you think society has fouled up again? That young managers don’t know what they are doing? Or is it that you don’t know how/where to sell yourself at this stage of your career and are afraid?

Your focus should be to find the companies for which you are a highly desirable applicant just as you are and to present yourself to those companies in a manner that makes you one of the first applicants to be selected for an interview. While this may require a stronger sell than was necessary a few years ago, it is not at all impossible. It just requires some additional strategic layers and may indicate a different kind of company than the one you left. For instance, a smaller company or start-up may prefer a more experienced candidate to obtain a greater depth of industry knowledge with a smaller staff count. Or target your skills in business development (well-documented with case histories) to a company who has been struggling with the issue for some time.

If you are significantly overqualified for a job description as written, don’t spend a lot of time applying for it. The company will be concerned that you will leave as soon as you find a job for which you are better suited. You could offer to sign a contract promising that you will stay at least 2 years, but they will still be concerned that you will become crabby in the role because you are being under-utilized and that you will be disruptive to the balance of the team structure.

Trends in age of employees

• 2000-2003
  • The number of workers under the age of 45 was constant.
  • The number of workers over 45 increased 86%.
• 2005
  • 45% of workers are over the age of 45.
• 2010 projected
  • Labor shortage due as baby boomers retire
  • Most boomers plan to work full-time or part-time after retiring.

How older workers are perceived

• More expensive than younger employees doing the same work (usually true).
• Difficult to supervise, they think they know more than team mates. Poor or selective follow-up.
• Inflexible, grumpy, frumpy, more likely to argue. Poor communication skills. Less political.
• Hard to train, don’t know new technology.
• Disconnected from company vision and younger team-mates. Prefer to be sole contributors.
• Get sick more often (false).
• Low and declining energy. Resist overtime.

Market demand for new hires

• As the pace of corporate innovation increases, the duration of the average permanent job decreases because company priorities change more rapidly, and your seniority or longevity may be irrelevant. The career track you were on for the last ___ years doesn’t matter. The employer wants to know if you can hit the ground running for today’s needs.
• 2 out of 100 resumes result in a job offer.
• A resume needs to be better written to be effective because employers have access to more resumes through websites and job databases. Is your resume well-written enough that you will be one of the interviewees chosen from 20 resumes? 100?

Strategies to try

So what am I saying? Learn and emphasize what a company values in today’s market. Make sure you know how to sell yourself. Focus on the benefits of your depth of knowledge, but make sure you also counter the expected negative attitudes associated with older workers. Note the ways attitude as well as knowledge is being addressed in the bullets below:

• “I really enjoy being on teams which solve problems and grow business.” Don’t just say “I have lots of experience” which would emphasize the gap in age but not the quality of experience and your willingness to be a team member.
• “I have the contacts to drive growth.”
• “I thrive in fast-paced environments.”
• To an insurance or medical company with older customers: “I may understand your customer better than a younger applicant.”
• “Yes, I supervised many people. Learned how to work with lots of different kinds of people. Can we take a tour of the company? I would like to see how you do it.“
• “I can start as a part-time consultant to let you evaluate what I offer at a small cost.”
• “I just attended a conference on that new technology and was a panelist.”

Your “Board of Directors” should include:

• People from industries similar to the ones you have been in and they have been in a role that would have at least interfaced with you so they can give informed, intelligent advice.
• People senior enough that they will not be afraid to disagree with you or tell you that you are missing a point and they are also senior enough that they are credible to you and offer wisdom you may not yet have had the chance to learn.
• No one on your board should be family, spouse, or significant other although these people will offer some insight about how you fit in a company culturally based on what you bitch about when you get home at night.
• A former customer.
• A former direct supervisor or someone who is truly senior to you on the same path you are considering and has been very successful at it. Ideally they should have evolved to a larger, more impressive company or role since they worked with you on a daily basis.
• A former direct report whose opinion you respect. Be brave enough to pick someone who has hop-scotched past your title and is now senior to you.
• One should have had your exact title, and similar business challenges. For instance, if you are currently a Product Manager focused on New Product Development, you want someone like that advising you.
• One should be a good general purpose business person with a broad understanding of company strategies you may not have yet been exposed to. If you are a Product Manager, look for someone who is a General Manager. If you are a Marketing Communications Specialist, pick someone who has risen to be Director or VP of Marketing. You want someone 2-3 steps above you in the pecking order.

See the pattern?

They need to be people who can show you how to get 33% ahead in your career. They need to know enough about what you do that you will actually listen because they are giving real, credible advice that is practical on an every day basis as well as in the long term.

Here is how you use them:

• You meet maybe 3-4 times a year in a location where you can talk about company issues and politics without being overheard.
• Meet with them as a group, not individually. The synergy that comes from group think will make the advice richer and keep it focused on you instead of drifting to the personal experiences of your advisors. They will be more willing to discuss some awkward issues as a group versus when they are talking to you as a friend one-on-one because they are confirming each other’s views. The group setting makes it easier to deliver those topics in a nurturing way that keeps friendships intact.
• If you assemble the board you need to be ready to listen. If you don’t listen, the process may have backfire and you could lose credibility with some of your strongest references.
• Tell the board you intend to change or rotate members over time to gain fresh perspective on personal issues or industry trends.
• Lastly, offer to be on the Board of Directors for your advisors as needed. You will build a business intimacy that will benefit you both over your lifetimes. This is networking at its best.

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.

Fast facts:

1. 70-80% of jobs are filled through referrals and networking where the client is familiar with the reputation of the job applicant before receiving the actual resume. Those resumes are read very differently than the resumes of total strangers. (Read my blog posting The “Hidden Job Market.”)
2. When a hiring manager reviews resumes for people he (or she) has not had referred to him, he reads them looking for cues that will maximize his ROI (return on investment) for the available budget. Therefore, the first applicants to be called for an interview will be closest to an ideal fit. If and only if one of these candidates does not work, will the hiring manager widen the search to applicants who offer a less perfect fit.
3. Hiring managers don’t always put everything they are looking for in the job ad, just the “minimums.” And they usually make the ads broader than the ideal to widen the net and catch more fish in case the ideal candidate does NOT show up in the narrow definition of the specs.
4. A job ad for a JAVA programmer when posted in a big database like www.monster.com will generate 300-400 applicant resumes after about a week. A job ad for a Director of Marketing will generate 25-75 applicants.
5. At least 50% of the people who send a resume to any job posted in a public place will not actually be qualified for the role. Responding to ads for which you are not a close fit is a poor use of your job hunting efforts. It also may annoy a hiring manger who has limited time available.

Are you the best candidate?

You should do homework on what might be important to the client beyond what the job ad says. You can research this through:

• Annual reports
• Informational interviews
• Former employees of that company
• Trade press
• Internet
• Networking
• Reading other jobs ad from the company

If your homework reveals you are a strong candidate, make sure you add content to your resume to demonstrate you are an excellent risk. Instead of applying to 100 companies for which you are a long shot, send tailored resumes to the 15-20 clients where you are most likely to be the preferred candidate.

How to show you are the best applicant

This is done through case histories, testimonials, and details in the resume that show your strategic leadership. If possible, you should show you made the company money, saved the company money, or made it more efficient.

The introduction

70% of hiring managers don’t read beyond the first half of the first page of the resume or spend more than 30 seconds reading before they decide whether or not to opt out. This means that you need a powerful introduction to your resume that makes builds the reader’s expectation that you are a relevant and exciting candidate. This will keep him reading longer so he is more likely to be sold on you.

Beyond the resume

If you think about it, you need to be ready to use similar strategies in networking, cover letters, interviews, in every contact with a potential hiring manager. Your objective is to reinforce repeatedly that you are the best of possible candidates for the job.