Also, make sure to check in next week, I’ll be running a series on retirement investments and changing jobs – really excited about that!

6/8/10 – A few of my friends lost their jobs last week.  All of us who know them wish them the best and quickest journey toward their next ventures.  Along with that, I figured I’d offer the best job advice I have.

Don’t rub it

Losing a job can’t help but hurt a little bit.  Even the most well-adjusted person who has a complete understanding that the loss of their job had nothing to do with them feels a little sting at some level.

The trick is “don’t rub it.”

I learned a lot of what I needed to know about life from little league baseball.  One of the things I learned was that when you’re hit by a pitch or when a ground ball catches you in the chin – after the play, the coach will yell “don’t rub it!”

I’m still not sure what it means, but I think there are two things going on here.

1)   The coach doesn’t want you to put undue emphasis on your “ouchy” because you’ll focus on it

2)   The coach doesn’t want the other team to know they hurt you.

Either way, I think it applies here.  Read my post entitled “So you got laid off”.  One of the things I point out there is that you have to get over your lay off before you can make real progress toward your job hunt.  Do this in private with a good friend.

Once you’re done, be done, and don’t rub it.  Neither recruiters nor Hiring Managers have any interest in hearing your layoff story.  If that seems harsh, it is, but would you rather hear it from me or just not get the job?

Exercise

Aside from religion there is no more important aspect to a job hunt than exercise.

Set up a time to exercise.  Be diligent about it.

Exercise has been proven to help one keep a positive attitude and outlook as well as learn new things more quickly.  The job search is a set of skills like anything else, so learning quickly is a key to success.

Stick Together

Figure out how to stick together.  If it means creating a job hunt group, or accountability team with others looking for work, then do it.  A sense of togetherness will help with a positive attitude as well.

Share your experiences.

Share your opportunities.

Eat Well

Just because you’re at home, you don’t have the right to treat your body poorly by eating Twinkies all day.  Eating right will help your outlook, your motivation and your ability to actively job search.

Don’t Stare at the Screen

The biggest misconception about the job hunt is that a successful job hunt is one in which we stare at the computer screen all day waiting for the pixels on it to magically rearrange themselves into the words “you’re hired”.

It won’t happen.  I promise.

Job boards have their place, and email as a communications tool in networking and talking with recruiters is fine, but I think job boards should be 20% of a job search and no more.

What you need to be doing is meeting as many people as you can.  Learn about what they do.  Get to know them.  Attempt to help them in some way.  Don’t ask them if they have a job for you, but be clear about the job you want when they ask you what you do.

Reconnect with old co-workers and friends, find out what they’re doing.  Find out about their lives.  Every person you meet has the potential to help you find the next job.  Put them to work by clearly and concisely stating the work you want to do next.

Volunteer

People who have never had a break in their work life can’t imagine that unemployment is full time work.  It is.  You have to be working on your job search 24-40 hours a week to have positive results.

For that reason, get a volunteer job.  Doing something for others will help you feel better about your situation, show employers that you’re actively doing positive things, and that you use opportunities like having some time off to make the world better.

Keep Your Chin Up

Positive people get jobs.  Period.  Notice how much of this post talked about positive attitude and outlook?  Positive people get jobs.  I’ve seen it again and again in the last year that I’ve been working this business as a Job Search Coach.

Additionally, I’ve seen people’s lives change for the better almost the instant they decided the glass was half full!

By the way, having a positive attitude isn’t simply about seeing the future as all roses.  It’s also about planting roses!  So if your skill set is stale upgrade it.  If another career path is calling you, check it out.

You have the ability to change where you’re at and where you’re going.

Keep your chin up.  Good things are ahead!

1. 9 of 10 interviews are with recruiting agencies.

2. Your resume “isn’t quite ready” yet.

3. Your LinkedIn profile isn’t up to date.

4. Your friends don’t know you’re looking.

5. You don’t have business cards.

6. Your schedule isn’t packed for the next 2 weeks with breakfast and lunch meetings.

7. You’re “waiting to hear back from…”

Let’s get you into 5th gear!

Over the last year a lot of people hired me as a consultant in their job searches.  The one thing that was common between all of them, was that their lives were changing.  I’d venture to say that nearly 95% of my clients saw the circumstances surrounding their need for a new job negatively before we worked together.

There were a number of things that I saw repeatedly.

Forgiving Oneself

Many times people were laid off or let go.  Sometimes their pride played tricks on them.  Their pride (or ego) convinced them that there was something they did to deserve the action.  Their ego convinced them to look back at their actions until they found something that they could take responsibility for.  Once they took responsibility for whatever arbitrary action or event they thought caused their current situation something funny happened.

Some people learned from it.  They looked at what happened, took some notes, and then turned 180 degrees in the opposite direction and moved forward.

Other people had a hard time stopping taking notes.  They stared at the entire history of their last job and spent oodles of time dissecting it and analyzing it.  They got so good at tearing down their history that they didn’t stop.  In fact, many people I’ve met, who have been through this, are still looking back at what happened and haven’t moved on yet.

What’s the difference?  Why do some people move forward from things like layoffs and job changes so easily and effortlessly while others don’t?

My Friend

I have a friend who’s had a lot of jobs.  He’s been fired from several, others he was laid off from, and still others were temporary work assignments.  Most recently he completed a 6 month contract gig with a reputable firm.

One night he and I were catching up, and he told me that he was “fired again.”

My friend is the type that is very open and honest and doesn’t discriminate against anyone in regard to what he tells them.

As I listened to his story about how he got fired, I realized that he wasn’t fired at all.  His contract ended.  He completed his contract and the company thanked him and let him move on.

I told my friend that this is exactly what is supposed to happen in a contract (not contract-to-perm).  He wasn’t fired – he successfully completed his contract!  What a difference!

A little later that same evening, I heard him tell another person that he got fired.  There’s only so much I can do, right?

How We Think About Change

I’ve been thinking about why some people think about change so differently than others.  A book I read several years ago came to mind.  If you haven’t read it, it is the definitive story about job change and change in life.  If you haven’t read it, you absolutely must order it and read it as soon as possible.  It’s called, Who Moved My Cheese.

The reads at less than 100 pages, you can get through it in an afternoon, but the story will stay with you for years!

Do you ever wonder why I end so many of these posts with the words “good things are on the way”?  Buy the book and find out!

If you’re considering contracting directly with a company (not using a contracting agency) and you don’t own a company, this article applies to you.

Independent Contractors (1099)

You may have heard the term “1099” (ten ninety-nine).  1099 is a form that any business is required to submit to the IRS when they have paid money to individuals other than employees.

When an individual enters into a contract with a company to do business (and gets paid), the IRS treats that individual as what is called a “Sole Proprietor”.  It means, an individual doing business and it’s the simplest corporate entity to form, because there’s virtually no paper work involved.

There are a number of things to remember and prepare for if you are a Sole Proprietor…

1. Taxes – Many people are not aware that half of their Medicare and Social Security Taxes are paid by their employer.  When you’re a Sole Proprietor Uncle Sam expects you to foot the whole bill.  So instead of the normal 6.2% for Social Security and 1.45% for Medicare Taxes, Uncle Sam expects you to pay 12.4% and 2.9%.  This is one reason you should set your rate higher as an independent contractor than you would if you were to contract through an agency.
2. More Taxes – Employers pay payroll taxes throughout the year.  If you’re an employee, it comes out of your check based on how you filled out your W2 for the year.  As a Sole Proprietor, the company you’re contracting with isn’t paying those taxes, so you have to pay estimated quarterly taxes.  You can get the forms from the IRS web site or TurboTax.  The IRS website will tell you when they are due and how much you will have to pay.  If you wait until your taxes are due to pay these (pay late), you might not go to jail, but you will pay a penalty.
3. Liability – if you screw up something important the company can come after you.  Liability insurance is generally affordable. Whereas other corporate entities protect the owner’s assets, a sole proprietorship does not.  Consider liability insurance if there are significant liabilities with the work you’re doing.
4. Legal Matters – contracting agencies have lawyers working for them to ensure their best interests are accounted for.  If you’re a sole proprietor, at minimum, you’ll need a contract written by an attorney.  This contract defines the relationship between you and the company.  Remember, a verbal contract is only as good as the paper it’s written on!

Hopefully, these three articles have helped you understand a little more about contracting and the various considerations for contracting.  Good luck!

Recruiters and contracting agencies tend to throw around a number of terms.  Let’s talk through a few of them and discuss considerations related to them.

Contract to Perm

Many times contracts are proposed to candidates as “contract to perm”.  This means that there is a stipulation in the contract that the client company may hire the contractor.  Notice the word “may”.

Just because a contract is “contract to perm”, doesn’t necessarily indicate an intention on the part of the client to convert the contractor to a permanent employee.  Further, many times recruiters will use the fact that a contact opportunity is “contract to perm” as an incentive to a candidate.  Why not, it’s a selling point right?

Think of this from the company’s perspective.  If you’re the company, and you need 10 people for a project that will last 6 months and you know you’ll need to keep 3 of them after the contract expires, what would you do?  Wouldn’t you want your choice of the contractors at the end of 6 months?  I would.

In that case, the company would be stupid not to stipulate that all the contracts are “contract to perm” even though the company knows from the beginning that they’re only interested in keeping a small percentage of people.

If you don’t understand what “contract to perm” means, you stand a good chance of being disappointed at the end of the contract!

What’s more, the company is under no obligation to tell anyone how many contractors they will convert.

From the contractor’s perspective its easy to think this is unfair.  The fact is, as a contractor, you’ve signed an agreement to work for the company until X date.  You know for certain that there is a high likelihood that your contract will end on X date.  That’s a lot better than some employees (who are waiting on a layoff) have it right now!  At least a contractor has a good idea when there work status will change.

Conversion

What happens when a company decides to hire a contractor as a permanent employee?  What should you know in regard to conversion before signing on with a contracting agency?

Many times contracting agencies stipulate the company will pay a fee when a contractor is converted to a permanent employee of the company.  If we’re thinking of this from the contracting agency’s point of view, it makes perfect sense.  Once the contractor is permanent, the agency’s stream of revenue is gone.  There’s got to be an incentive for the company to continue in a contract relationship until the end of the contract.  Or rather, there’s got to be a disincentive for the company to convert the individual.

What about after the contract is over?  Can’t the company freely hire the individual at that point?

Most of the time, the contracting agency still charges a fee (albeit a lower one).

If you’re the company, you’re happy to pay either fee because it’s usually less than it would have cost you to recruit the individual yourself!

What does that mean to us?  Well first, one contract is not necessarily as valuable as the next, even if they pay the same.  A contract to perm may be worth more to us than a contract with no chance for permanent employment.  A contract-to-perm without incentives may be worth more than one with them.

Stipulations

Aside from the stipulations above, its important to understand the contract you’re signing.  The contract is a legally binding document.  If there is ever a dispute and mediation or judgment is needed, what the contract says wins.  Remember, a verbal agreement is as good as the paper it’s written on.

Some of the stipulations I’ve seen in these documents include items like notice that must be given by the contractor if he/she decides to leave.  Others include non-disclosure terms, non-compete agreements, and IP agreements.

It’s rare that a contractor going through an agency gets to read a contract before saying “yes”.  But just because you say, “yes” to a position doesn’t mean you have to sign an agreement that is fundamentally flawed.  READ your contract.  Ask questions.  Exercise your right to walk away if you don’t feel comfortable.

I hope these considerations help in your search and next contract.  Join us later this week for Part 3 of this series!

If you’ve never done contract work, it can be a little confusing.  Here are some common questions professionals might ask regarding contracting.

What is a Contractor?

A contractor is someone who does work for a client as defined by a contract.  That’s it.

In the professional world, many times companies need workers for only a specified period of time.  In these cases a company may choose to hire an individual as a contractor.  Generally, a term is specified in the contract.  The most common lengths of time are 3 months, 6 months, and 1 year.  I would say 6-month contracts tend to be the most popular right now in the Triangle in IT.

What is a Contracting Agency?

There are 2 main ways a company may find contractors:

• Directly
• Through a Contracting Agency

Directly means that the company in need of a contractor uses their own resources (HR people, Managers, etc.) to find a candidate for the contract position.

Some companies like to use Contracting Agencies.  Contracting agencies generally do the recruiting and screening for a company prior to an interview.

What is the difference between Permanent Employment and Contracting?

There are several differences:

1)   Permanent Employees are harder to fire, whereas Contractors can be let go in accordance with the contract (many times with no notice.)

2)   Permanent Employees get benefits from the Company.  Independent contractors must take care of their own benefits.  Contractors through Contracting Agencies are sometimes offered benefits through the Agency.

3)   If you are an independent contractor (meaning you don’t contract through an agency) there are tax implications.

Check back next week for the second article in this series!

The question I left you with last week was “what can twitter do for your job search?”  Hopefully you’ve read last week’s article, gotten signed up for twitter, and started playing around with it.  Now its time to make twitter a significant resource in your job hunt.  If you don’t know what Twitter is, read this before finishing this article.

Lists of Career Experts

One of the ways to use twitter during your job search is to follow other twitter users that are career experts or otherwise entrenched in the job market.

Alison Doyle from About.com has a long list of career experts here.  I haven’t made that list yet with @howtogeekon (Alison, <insert clearing of the throat noise here>… hello?)  It’s a strong list none-the-less.

OneDayOneJob.com also has a list of the 50 users some of which are helpful to follow during your search here.

Mashable has its own guide that is worth a read.

Finally, I’m always looking for career-minded individuals to follow, so take a look at those I’m following and pick and choose the ones that will help you.

Teena Rose – “Get Job Leads Fast Using Twitter”

If there is one ultimate guide to the twitter enabled job search, it is Teena Rose’s free ebook found here.  Its 40 pages of everything you need to make twitter a useful part of your career transition.

I’ve used Teena’s book to compile the following list of applications born into the twitter ecosystem with the purpose of helping you find your next position.  These are just a few of the applications and resources Teena gives you in her ebook.

TwitterJobCast

• Currently in Beta
• Finds all tweets with the word “hiring”
• User can browse tweets by city

TweetBeep

• Google Alerts for twitter
• Alerts you when words you’ve selected are tweeted
• Subscription-based service

TweetMyJobs

• Sends tweets to you based on job searches you set up
• You choose the keywords and geographical areas and receive tweets for jobs that meet those criteria
• We’ve talked about TweetMyJobs before here and here.

TwitterJobSearch

• In beta
• A Job Search Engine for Twitter

Twellow

• Yellow pages for twitter

TwitHire

• Several categories of jobs: programming, design, and “other”

TwitRes

• Upload your resume
• Get a small url (link) for your resume you can tweet out to employers

Twitsume

• In Beta
• Upload your resume and connect to your twitter account

Later this week I’ll have an interview with a leader in the field of social media and job seeking, also the founder of North Carolina-based technology company.  Make sure to check back in for that!

As always, I’m ready to assist you in your search!  Contact me when you’re ready to get unblocked and move on to your next great position!

Perhaps my least favorite term in the job search is the term “overqualified”.  Ever notice how many times you hear the phrase “I’m overqualified” and how rarely you hear the phrase “we thought he was overqualified?”  There’s a reason for this…

What the Company is Saying…

It’s the minority of cases when a company tells an individual that he or she is overqualified.  The reasons these are the minority of cases are:

1. Response – The large majority of companies these days are not telling people that they didn’t qualify for a job, much less why they didn’t qualify
2. Candidate Pool – Even though the pool of available candidates over the last couple of years has been bigger than any other in recent memory, the percentage of truly overqualified candidates is still very small.
3. More Responsibility – Companies are asking more of positions of responsibility than they have in recent memory.

When a company does tell a candidate they are “overqualified” its generally a wimpy way of saying:

• You want too much money
• Your ego is too big
• Your story is bigger than the position
• You’re too old
• You’ve made it clear you want the hiring manager’s job instead of this one

What We Hear When Someone Says This…

The statement “I was overqualified” is perhaps the weakest disguise of a jobseeker.  It’s also usually the first one people try on.  To those of us who have gotten down in the dirt and really explored career transitions, interviewed hundreds of job seekers and studied the world of the job seeker, it’s a little hearing the song “it’s a small world.”  The song is cute and catchy, we even like hearing it at first, but then it gets stuck in your head and you can’t get it out.

It’s a chorus that is easy to learn, but a refrain from which we should refrain.

What others hear when a jobseeker states she is overqualified:

• “I’m too good for them anyway!”
• “I got rejected but don’t think I should have!” (i.e. The company was wrong!)
• “They couldn’t afford me.” (i.e. My fixed costs are too high.)
• “I don’t know why I got rejected, so I’ll claim I’m too big for the position.”
• “I didn’t know how to sell myself.”
• “I have a GIGANTIC Ego!”

Any of those sound a little egotistical?  I think I speak for a lot of people when I say, most of us would rather hear, “they couldn’t afford me,” or “I’m not ready to take a step down and that’s what they were asking me to do.”  At least then we know it’s a conscious choice rather than Ego, conscious or subconscious.

The Truly Overqualified

People who are actually overqualified generally don’t have to say it.  It’s a little bit like integrity, if you have to tell people about yours there’s something wrong.  Either everyone knows an individual is overqualified and understands the reasoning behind why this person is taking a step back OR no one knows because the individual plays the part perfectly and doesn’t let on to the fact that he/she could be doing more.

There are a few people who apply for positions for which they are truly overqualified.  Generally this is because:

1. They don’t know it,
2. They know it, but don’t believe it, or
3. For some reason, they don’t want (or can’t get) the higher level of responsibility.

In the case of #3, a truly overqualified individual will know how to present herself in such a way as to appear perfectly qualified.  Class, after all, is an essential soft skill for any well-qualified individual.

My experience, by the way, is that no individual who is actually overqualified for a position has ever felt the need to tell me they were!

Good luck and keep your chin up!

The entire world has sped up in the last few years, much more so than at anytime before. I realized this when I started using my Blackberry. I could never figure out how I could receive 5 new emails before I got back to my desk regarding the architecture meeting I’d just left. How did these people get anything done aside from writing email? And who was building the architecture if that’s all they did?

When I got my first Blackberry I understood quickly. All the people without one suddenly appeared to be stuck in a different dimension – a very slow and unresponsive one.

The feeling was akin to working on a T1 connection for the first time and then having to come home to a 56k internet connection. Ugh.

Now that I’ve been using a RIM device for a few years, I can’t figure out why my emails sometimes go for days without a response! By the time I get a response I’ve forgotten why that conversation was important or I’ve moved on.

The same thing happened when I got on Facebook. I would see these people who I knew hadn’t spoken with each other in several days and they’d have this inside conversation I knew nothing about. It was weird! Then I signed up for Facebook and added my friends. The situation turned around. Suddenly, I was connected and my non-Facebook-using-friends couldn’t understand how I’d already heard “the news”.

Before I figured out the Events feature on LinkedIn and what a tweetup was, I was mesmerized by all the events the people around attended. How did they find out about all these great events?

I don’t know why some of my friends don’t know about How to Geek On and our services – I’ve announced them on Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter and Email and etc… where were they?

So what if you were a Hiring Manager for a software company and you were immersed in all these technologies? You’re highly available, highly accessible, and plowing through a bazillion candidates for a Software Engineer’s position. You’ve posted the position, tweeted it, and announced it on FB and LinkedIn.

You get a tweet within minutes from a qualified candidate, followed by an email with resume and link to the candidate’s LinkedIn profile. You quickly find someone who knows this candidate through Facebook and work with them to checkout their profile. Nearly all of this you do in 10 minutes with your thumbs while waiting for the coffee maker to finish. Stirring in your sugar and creamer you thumb an email asking the candidate to meet for lunch.

If you’re that hiring manager and you have your choice between this candidate and the one that sends you an email 2 days later – resume attached, no twitter handle, no LinkedIn profile, which will you pick? Keep in mind, by then you have 300 other resumes.

Remember, this is a technical position. As the hiring manager, is it in your company’s best interest to hire the person using technology from 2003?

As with any technology the ground rules remain the same: stay courteous; be professional; do what you commit to doing. Using twitter doesn’t lower the bar with respect to your grammar or professional conduct, just like email without proper capitalization and punctuation is no longer acceptable (since about 1998). It may get by right now, because we’re still learning to think in 140 characters, but that will change. Be on the leading edge of that curve.

The medium and timing of career transitions has changed vastly. Learn about new technologies and how to employ them. Then, beat your competition to the punch by being more responsive!

The cold, hard lessons of life start immediately after graduation from college.  For most of us, we begin being humbled the day we start interviewing for our first position.  Remember being ready to take over the world?

But that first interview, when they asked me, “how in C++ would you get the name of a pointer,” I realized I was screwed.  I still don’t know the answer, mainly because I avoided pointers the majority of my entire career as a software developer.

I spoke last week about the idea of Acceptance and Rejection in the job hunt.  I think this is the least intuitive and most important concept of the job search.  It is one that I reiterate to clients.

When we shop for a car, we have a certain set of features we want.  Or we have an idealistic vision for the car we want.  We have a vision of what it will say about us.  There are things we want in a car and things we don’t want.  When we choose not to buy a certain car… why?

Most often it’s about price.  Many of us absolutely love fancy cars – Ferrari, Lotus, Lamborghini.  But we don’t buy them.  Why?  Is it because we hate the car and think it has no value and shouldn’t even be on the market?  No.

We chose not to buy those cars because we know we can’t afford them, or because they are not practical.  There’s nothing personal about it.  We know the price.  We have an idea about the cost of insurance on them, and know that it simply doesn’t work for our lifestyle.

The same thing happens in a job hunt.  Many times a company doesn’t hire person X because of the price tag.  They simply can’t afford it.  That’s no rejection of the person, its just not a good fit.

Further, some people need a van because they have a lot of kids, or are the carpool parent.  The fact that they aren’t going to buy a sedan has nothing to do with the sedan itself.  The person just needs the space a van offers.  They’re looking for a good fit.

Its difficult, at times to break down job opportunities like this.  It feels so much like WE are being rejected.  But that’s simply not the case.  The buyer is choosing what they believe is best for their situation.  And if your situation merits it, you should be looking at fit too.  Is this the person you want driving?

The Job hunt is not about you as a person.  It’s a set of skills and a set of needs and whether those match.  The point at which they do is a good offer.  Here’s to you getting one soon!

If you’re struggling in your job search, contact me.  I enjoy partnering with individuals to progress their job search!