Here is the final installment of our tattoo series. I hope you have found it useful and enlightening!

Hard to know for sure, but have your tattoos ever hindered you getting a promotion or advancing within your current employer?

Reg: That’s not hard to know.  I know for a fact that it has and it’s been quite blatantly told to me that it has.  Early in my career I knew straight away I was automatically excluded from roles.  It didn’t stop me going for them, but I knew for a fact that it was never gonna happen.  The bank has a reputation and image it wants to maintain and I’m well aware that I sit outside that.

James: Sure.

Reg: So, as I said, it didn’t stop me showing that I had ambition for going for roles, even though I knew I wasn’t going to get them, and now I’ve been told quite clearly that advancement is there if I want it.  I know what I need to do to get there.  So it’s my choice to stay where I am.

James: So, have they made it really clear that, saying, ‘Look, it’s not your skills.  It’s not your experience.  It’s not even who you are.  It’s really your appearance.’

Reg: Yes.

James: That’s the only thing that holds you back from a promotion or advancement?

Reg: And then the opportunity for the advancement to be there, so obviously the role has to be there to fill.  So there’s a matter of timing comes into play, but yes.

See you next post.

All my best,

James E

Following on from the last post – here is another extract from my chat with Reg.

Are there any strategies you have used to lessen the impact of tattoos on others?

Reg: The answer is yes, quite deliberately.  So, I wear shirts that are cut with a longer than normal sleeve, to make sure that they hang over my wrists.  I don’t happen to be wearing one today, but generally speaking that’s what I do.  And I wear cufflinks that are quite bright, so that if my sleeves roll up and somebody catches a glimpse of color, then they most of the time just think it’s a cufflink.  And that’s a fact.  That’s deflective state.  That’s a technique that works.

James: And that works?

Reg: Yeah.  If I do this and it’s just a flash thing, ‘Oh, he’s probably wearing cufflinks.’  Nobody goes, ‘Oh, my God, he’s got tattoos.’  And it works.  And that’s deliberately employed on occasion around certain board tables.  There’s other things that I do.  It’s great connotations.  I sit at one desk with my sleeves rolled up, so I have tattoos visible on both arms, and it was just, that didn’t mean that I was a criminal or an idiot.  They linked it to a creative mindset, so I’m known for thinking quite laterally.  That comes naturally, but I did read a couple of books on it.   I’m known for being musical and started out quite pedestrian when I was younger in the bank, contributing cartoons and drawings and newsletters and articles to social newsletters that the bank has.  I still do that.  I still draw a cartoon every week.  So the perception, there, is that I’m just artistic and creative and we always cut those people a little bit of slack for being eccentric and I get away with it from that perspective.

James: So, do you have a label as someone who’s quirky, creative, eccentric?  Is that?

Reg: A little bit, yeah.

James: In the nice sense, not the bad sense.

Reg: Yeah.  I quite often get calls from people that say, ‘Look, I just need to throw something at a wall and can you give me your opinion on this.’  Or, ‘Can we just sit around a table and just throw this in the air and see what happens?’  And I get called into a lot of sessions for that.

James: But that’s quite cool.

Reg: That’s very good.  It makes my job quite interesting.  I’m very proud of that.

Tune in the third and final post on this most interesting topic!

All my best,

James

A little while ago I was sitting in a busy city cafe and noticed a chap sitting a couple of tables away. He was wearing a business shirt and trousers and smart leather shoes. His shirt sleeves were rolled up and i noticed a bunch of tattoos. I just had to introduce myself to this guy, tell him what I did for a living and ask him for an interview. Thankfully he said yes. We’ll call him Reg – not his real name. By the way … the photo on the left isn’t Reg!

Here is an “uncut” extract from my chat with Reg.

Have your tattoos ever got in the way of you getting a job since you’ve had them?

James: Yeah, great.  Go for it.

Reg: My tattoos?  No.  To clarify, my tattoos go down to the wrist on one arm and they protrude below a short shirt sleeve length on the other.  I have long hair.

James: Very long.

Reg: I have a nose ring.  I have earrings in my ears.  At one point I had my throat pierced and I work in a corporate environment.

James: Hang on.  Throat pierced?  How?

Reg: I had three in my throat.  I have them – so, what I’m displaying is transdermal implants in my chest that used to run the length of my throat.

James: Really?

Reg: And I don’t wear a tie at work.  So, have my tattoos got in the way of my job?  No, there’s plenty of other things that got in the way first.  So, the tattoos have done nothing.  However, the long hair and the earrings certainly have when it came to certain positions where they were customer facing or internally around certain conference tables or board tables at a management level that people are uncomfortable.  So, I know for a fact that they’ve gotten in the way.  Yes.

James: So, other people within the bank, either your peers or direct reports or people above you, do they feel it, do they think that, they don’t know how to take you or it makes them feel uneasy, or what?

Reg: I think they just have an impression of bankers, a certain, you know, the pin-striped suit.

James: Oh, you’ve got a pin-striped suit on?

Reg: Which I am wearing, but there’s just certain, a mould that they expect people to fit and they are not so willing to take you seriously if you don’t fit that mould.   With the long hair and the piercings and whatever, that’s fine to put in a processing center, but do you have a seriousness of mind and an education that we can respect and is gonna add value, I think there’s a perception that straight away shuts that down.

James: Can you tell us what your role is and what’s your background?  Are you degree qualified?  Have you done a doctorate?  What?

Reg: Okay, so my current role is, I work in a business transformation team that does project work, specifically, related to scope and requirements, benefits realisation, stakeholder management, leveraging and extending capabilities to develop new products and processes, the strategy work.  So, that’s the role I’m in now.  My background has been project management within commercial lending and asset finance.  Prior to that I did process engineering in back office areas.  I have no formal degrees.  I just have a lot of confidence and a little bit of arrogance.  I once, this is a true story, I got asked to build a database in Access and I said sure, and then I had to go and buy an Access developer book and read it over the weekend, build a database the next week.

James: Which I did.

Reg: Which I did.  Yes.  So, there’s a certain level of arrogance.  I say arrogance, but it’s just self-belief that I have that carries me through sometimes.

James: But, the thing about it is, as a side point, sometimes education gets in the way, because no one told you, ‘You can’t read a book on the weekend and build a database.  You can’t do that.  You have to go to university and learn about the theory of design and about the background and all this.’  No.

Reg: Yeah.  The Internet’s a wonderful thing, right?  [laughter]  You look up a few rules on normalisation and away you go.

Tune into next post for part 2 of this great chat with Reg.

Keep well,

James E

In the last post I talked about the importance of keeping the axe sharp.  One way of doing this is to build and strengthen relationships. I have never liked the term networking. To me whenever I hear that word images of self-serving people wanting to get something come immediately to mind. An exaggeration maybe, but I think you get the idea. I much prefer to use the term relationships.

According to dictionary.com  one meaning of the word relationships is  connection, association, or involvement. Each of these nouns assumes a two-way street. For there to be a connection, association or involvement with someone means that you are doing something and the other party is doing something. A real relationship involves this two way action.

To build and make relationships stronger requires time and effort on your part. One very effective way to do this is to serve people you want to have a relationship with or put more simply do favours.

Favours don’t have to be big, time consuming or expensive. Usually it is the small random acts of kindness that have the biggest impact. For example, one of my clients complained that they never had enough of the same drinking glasses when they held meetings with external people (like me) – it was embarrassing. It came up one day in conversation and I made a mental note that next time I was in their office (which happened to be 2 weeks later) to bring with me a set of 12 glasses. I left the box of glasses on the desk of my client and went to another meeting. I think they are still talking about it!

By doing favours for people in your current organisation (and sometimes more importantly those outside your employer) you build a reputation as a good person; someone who helps others not just him/herself.  However, all other things being equal (which is code for “if you are doing the right things the right way”) when you need help there should be those around who you can call upon for a favour!

See you next post,

James E

I first wrote about this about 15 months ago. It is such an important topic I thought I’d “re purpose” the piece. So here we go!

I had a coffee a few years back with a senior recruiter and we were talking about the importance of relationships in business.

At the outset of the chat the senior chap stated that it was important to keep the axe sharp.  I asked him what he meant by that. He leaned forward in his chair and asked me if I ever had the situation when I had a job to do around the house needing a particular tool I hadn’t used for a long, long time. I go to my shed, find the tool and see that it is blunt, rusty and simply not up to the job at hand. I of course replied (like most honest males out there can attest) yes. He then asked me how I felt at the time. I told him I felt frustrated and angry. Not only did I have to spend more money to buy a tool I already had purchased and owned, but the job would now take me much longer since I would have to go down to the hardware store and choose another tool from the range of dozens they would no doubt stock and try to choose. Aaaarggghhh – what a waste of time and money!

The senior chap nodded, reclined back in his executive leather chair and told me something which made a whole lot of sense. Wouldn’t it have been better to take a little bit of time and care to keep your saw or axe or whatever the tool was sharp and ready to be used just in case you ever need it? The obvious response is yes. Well that is EXACTLY what needs to be done with the relationships and networks people have and maintain. It is far more effective to invest, build, enhance and help your network when you don’t need any help; rather than expecting your friends and contacts to help you at a moments notice when they haven’t heard you for  a long, long time! Sound familiar anyone?

Bye for now,

James E

A friend of mine is a senior executive with  Telstra.  Here is his response to the question, What are three main things that you look for when you hire?

Probably the most important one would be engagement. I would really be looking for somebody who is seeking to engage with the business, to engage with me as their boss and to be willing to put in and deliver. You can say a lot about skills and hard work, but it’s that mix of the two you get from somebody that will really be the key to find out how successfully they mix with your team.

I suppose another one would be a sense of their track record; not just their track record on paper, but how proud they are of it. Do they have a sense of self-worth, driven out of their track record? Somewhere in between engagement and self-worth would be initiative. Initiative is part of engagement and it really drives your track record. I’m not a micro manager. I don’t believe I need to tell people how to do every single aspect of their job. If somebody comes back to me with output for a certain objective that I’ve asked to be met, so long as they have correctly reached the outcomes that we needed and have achieved benefit for the shareholder, the business, the team, me and themselves, then that’s what you want to have. My style relies on initiative. It relies on people being self-starting. I do tend to trust people. So I will tend to devolve authority to my team.

Well those are the words from someone who hires a lot of people and is doing it for a household name

See you next post.

All my best,

James

All I can say is that I’m sorry … again.

I haven’t published any posts for the last three months or so. The reason is two fold. Firstly, I’m on the lazy side. Secondly, I was in the final throes of finishing a book titled, “What do Accounting Clients Really Want?” The book is being published by Thomson Reuters in the next couple of weeks. If you are interested you can visit my other blog, whatdoclientsreallywant.com for more info. You’ll be pleased (I hope) to know that at least I’ve kept that blog up to date!

So here we go – two posts a week – each Monday & Thursday on a range a topics all around the central theme of how to get a job with a particular brand or a specific industry.

See you next post!

All my best,

James E.

I went to the Google reception in Sydney and told the nice lady at the front desk that I had a lunch meeting with Elvis. She asked me to take a seat, Elvis would be with me shortly.

Whilst I was waiting for Elvis I looked around the reception area. Interesting. A single tyre was hanging from the ceiling and the nearest meeting room had its chairs suspended from the ceiling accessible by a series of pulleys. But what really caught my eye was the large plasma screen mounted on one of the reception walls showing in “real time” what people were searching for on Google. Obviously the rolling list was sanitised in some way because the it showed search items like shoe laces, university entrance scores, green building materials and gluten free foods. Not one naughty word in sight.

When Elvis came, we greeted each other, and strolled out of the building together. I told him that I had found a great place nearby that served wonderful – yes you guessed it – hamburgers!

In the restaurant I asked Elvis about his background before he joined Google and the how and why of him being hired. He detailed at length his reasons for joining Google, but what I found most interesting was the way that he was hired.

Elvis was working at another technology organisation operating in a different market to that of Google. A close friend of Elvis suggested that he would be a great addition to the team at Google and that if he (Elvis) wanted to he could arrange it an initial interview. Elvis agreed – it would be fun to interview with Google.

Little did Elvis know that the interview process would take 8 separate meetings spanning over 9 months. I have been working in the talent search space for over 12 years and I have never heard of a hiring process involving that many meetings over that amount of time – not even for CEOs of major publicly listed compnaies.  Why so many meetings? Tune into the next post to find out.

Bye for now,

James E

A couple of years ago I was at a conference and met a lady. Lets call her Lisa-Marie (not her real name).

She was a friendly woman who had a diverse  career working all around the world. We chatted about a range of things. Noticing the wedding band on her finger, I asked her what her husband did for a living. She casually replied, “Oh … he works with Google.”

Time stood still. I felt my heart quicken and my palms starting to sweat. I was one step away from meeting someone who actually worked for the company that everyone wanted to work for. A company whose brand had now become a verb – Google.  Boy o boy – this was seriously cool.

I pleaded with Lisa-Marie for an introduction to her husband, Elvis, also not his real name. After a tense 20 second interval Lisa-Marie gave me his email address. Wow – I could smell a wonderful meeting in the making.

Not wanting to appear to anxious or uncool I emailed Elvis a couple of days later saying we should “do lunch.” Given the wit and charm of my email I expected a reply in the affirmative within minutes.

19 days later the reply came. The answer was yes; Elvis would have lunch with me. However, owing to a tight schedule it would have to be when he got back from an overseas trip. No problem I was willing to wait for Elvis.

Tune into the next gripping post where I outline in immense detail my lunch with Elvis of Google.

Bye for now,

James

In the last post I talked about the importance of keeping the axe sharp.  One way of doing this is to build and strengthen relationships. I have never liked the term networking. To me whenever I hear that word images of self-serving people wanting to get something come immediately to mind. An exaggeration maybe, but I think you get the idea. I much prefer to use the term relationships.

According to dictionary.com  one meaning of the word relationships is  connection, association, or involvement. Each of these nouns assumes a two-way street. For there to be a connection, association or involvement with someone means that you are doing something and the other party is doing something. A real relationship involves this two way action.

To build and make relationships stronger requires time and effort on your part. One very effective way to do this is to serve people you want to have a relationship with or put more simply do favours.

Favours don’t have to be big, time consuming or expensive. Usually it is the small random acts of kindness that have the biggest impact. For example, one of my clients complained that they never had enough of the same drinking glasses when they held meetings with external people (like me) – it was embarrassing. It came up one day in conversation and I made a mental note that next time I was in their office (which happened to be 2 weeks later) to bring with me a set of 12 glasses. I left the box of glasses on the desk of my client and went to another meeting. I think they are still talking about it!

By doing favours for people in your current organisation (and sometimes more importantly those outside your employer) you build a reputation as a good person; someone who helps others not just him/herself.  However, all other things being equal (which is code for “if you are doing the right things the right way”) when you need help there should be those around who you can call upon for a favour!

See you next post,

James E