Rita Ashley, Career Coach. Field tested advice for executives.

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By admin, February 12, 2009 3:39 pm

Get control over your job search

“I am overwhelmed by the prospect of an unplanned job search.  I was laid off.  I am used to being recruited and this layoff has me stumped about where to start.”

Solution: One of the hardest hurdles for 6 figure income executives to scale in a job search resulting from a layoff is re-asserting control over your career.  Your first step is the creation of a ‘go/no-go‘ list that describes what you absolutely must see in a new employer/position to consider it a prospect.  Once you establish your boundaries, it helps you focus on only those companies/positions that can provide you with what you need for success.

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By admin, August 7, 2008 3:36 pm

All your efforts to land the right job paid off. You start next week and are raring to go. You have ideas, plans and enthusiasm. You are ready to hit the ground running. But wait. Before you plunge into the deep end, here’s a check list to protect yourself so you don’t drown.

• Do you know what is expected of you? Your job description was a clue, but do you know exactly what you will be chartered to accomplish? Ask your boss to state exactly the first three priorities and the metrics by which you will be judged. These are your marching orders and tell you how to spend your time.
• You will be working with other departments; do you know what they need to give you and your department the best support? If you are, for instance, the new Director of Development, talk to the QA manager to learn the form and process he needs in order to test and release your projects quickly. Ask him to show you examples of projects that made it through his department without glitches. Let him know you will use that as a template.
• If you are in Marketing, check with Sales to hear what their customers are saying. And if you are in Sales, get to know Customer Services well. You get the picture.
• Be leery of the first people to offer unsolicited advice. Don’t engage in debate; just acknowledge their comments and move on. It is too soon to know their agenda so acting on their advice may not be in your best interest.
• Avoid making comparisons with your former employers. A serious mistake a new employee can make is to begin sentences with, “When I was with HP, we did it this way,” or “We saw this same problem at Seascape. The solution was easy, what we need to do is …” Forget you ever had a former employer. Each company and certainly each team member likes to believe their company, problems and therefore solutions are unique.
• Before attempting change, interview all departments and people who might be affected. Listen without comment, but be sure to invite ideas and criticism. This simple action can help you avoid road blocks in the future.
• Starting a new job is always a stressor. Manage your health before you start and double your vigilance once you begin. Many people fall ill in the first three weeks of starting a new job. Stress plus a new germ environment make you vulnerable. Take your vitamins, get your rest and do whatever you do to reduce stress. Use hand sanitizers frequently and also wipe down the phone, door handles and keyboard in your new office. Wash your hands more often than normal and avoid shaking hands with people who are coughing and sneezing.
• Set a good example to your team. If you want to encourage people to have a life beyond work, don’t put in a 70 hour week. Make your expectations clear about deliverables and then keep to a 50 hour week (or whatever you expect from the team) yourself. The hours you put in during your first week of work will determine the pattern for your tenure. There is absolutely no advantage to the old-school dictum of arriving before your boss and leaving after. You are the role model for your team from day one.
• Most companies have a 90 day trial period, stated or not because it is easier for a company to recover by dismissing an executive sooner rather than later. Don’t be paranoid, but in a very real sense, your first months on the job are just one more aspect of the interview process. Be mindful of what you say and how you behave and try to chart out one significant success during your first three months.

Just starting your job search? Finding roadblocks to an ongoing search? Purchase Job Search Debugged, Insider’s guide for Executives and Technology Professionals at www.jobsearchdebugged.com.

Interested in real time support of your job search? Highly targeted Job Search Coaching available from, www.jobsearchdebugged.com. Or contact Coach at jobsearchdebugged dot com.

For Job Search Tools, Click here:

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By admin, June 26, 2008 11:42 am

As though looking for a new job isn’t stressful enough, let’s add scams and phishing warnings to the mix.  As an executive, you are considered a high net worth individual.  Your contact information is valuable.  Learn to protect yourself from marketers and scammers with selective use of the Internet. Omit your home address, even from your resume and use a free email address from Yahoo or Gmail.

There are oh-so-many ways for miscreants to appropriate your identity, get your credit card information and entice you to send them money for job search related scams.  And if you use the job boards, you increase the possibility of becoming a target.  You don’t have to pay for a job, job listings or other services unless you initiated the outreach.  And always double check the job boards to investigate a contact; determine the validity by new entries, not clicks to the site offered in the email.

Google (jobs, scams) and observe a circus of entries.  The hopeful candidate is always willing to believe the emperor is fashionably dressed.  My neighbor found a site that appeared to be recruiting for high income government jobs.   The job descriptions were compelling, the salaries were uncharacteristically high, in the mid $150,000′s.  Hard to resist making contact.  With just a few Google clicks, I discovered it was bogus.  The “recruiting” agent was selling extrodinarily expensive training (money up front, please) to qualify for those jobs.

It behooves you to check for scams periodically since the scammers and phishers are constantly reinventing efforts to get their hooks into your wallet.  Sadly, the cliche’ “If it looks to good to be true, it probably isn’t,” applies even to a job search.

For just a glimpse at what Executive candidates need to fend off: 

http://news.antispyware.com/?p=79
http://gadgetopia.com/post/3417
http://www.franzone.com/2007/10/16/a-monster-phishing-scam/

If you have been affected by a job search scam, let us know so others can learn what you know.  Make comments here.

For detailed support for your search, purchase Job Search Debugged, Insider’s Guide to Job Search.  For highly targeted and personalized guidance with your job search, consider Job Search Coaching.

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