There’s a sensitivity to talk about jobs, looking for other jobs and hiring that few really do it in the .edu blogging world unless they’re mentioning leaving their own jobs. It makes sense, no one wants their boss or someone else showing up online reading a blog post with their staff member giving advice about looking for a job elsewhere; lest they think you’re doing it too and jeopardizing your own situation.

But I’ve long thought we needed more intelligence gathering on the process, some tips and helping new graduates and others navigate some of the quirks and intricacies of higher ed hiring. We’ve already tackled LinkedIn, but I’d like to dig a bit deeper and offer some advice compiled from the hive mind of higher ed folks in my own circle, culled my from my own experiences of close to a decade in the field.

This isn’t meant to be an exhaustive list or a definitive one. Someone else could have a divergent list of insights to share that differ from these, especially since hiring varies by size of institution, the department you’re looking to work in and even down to the way the colleges or universities themselves seek positions. For instance, most hire centralized through HR, but there are institutions where departments do their own hiring directly which adds a wrinkle to things.

With that, here are a few insights worth filing away:

1. It’s probably going to take a while.

One of the rude awakenings of higher ed hiring is how long the process can take. Even in instances with small committees, you can find yourself waiting weeks to get answers. If you reach the stage of being a finalist, you might find yourself waiting even longer while I’s get dotted, T’s get crossed or unfortunately, someone else gets the offer you were hoping for. If they’re nice, they’ll call you (or email you) and let you know. Sometimes, you’ll get a letter weeks later. Occasionally, you never hear back. It’s part of the game, don’t let it deter you find seeking out other roles.

Calling to ask them where the process is (or emailing) is okay if it’s been a few weeks, especially if you’re truly interested but have been given a different offer. That said, don’t expect it to help the process. Some places are hamstrung by their HR process and there’s often nothing your contact can do to speed things up or even tell you where things are. It’s all very complicated and so, you’ll just need to learn to be patient and know that when you finally do get hired that it’s worth it.

2. Don’t restrict yourself just to Higher Ed.

This is mainly meant for new graduates. I see posts pop up on Twitter from soon-to-be minted graduates often who want advice from people already in the .edu game about how to get in. I usually tell them not to limit themselves. There are lots of schools around the country, but there are usually lots of applicants. Being a new graduate isn’t a bar to getting one of those roles. But you need to be strategic about where you apply and how you apply. Most of all, there’s just no harm in applying beyond higher ed. If college or university life is what you enjoy and want to make it your life, that’s excellent. But there’s nothing wrong with gaining perspective and experience outside of higher ed and then applying when you have another bullet or two on your resume from jobs you’ve had elsewhere. It’ll make you more competitive and marketable in some instances anyway.

3. Research the places you want to work.

I’m not just talking about how many students they have, what degrees they award and so forth. I’m talking more details. What’s the organizational structure? Who will you be working under? Who does your boss report to? Is the town you’re headed to livable and will your salary be enough to make it work there? These are things that seem like no-brainers, but aren’t often things we think about as new hires because you’re so interested in getting the job and letting the details work out later. Doing your homework beforehand will make you more informed during the interview process, but also, gives you the peace of mind to know whether it’s a job you want to take.

4. Don’t diminish your accomplishments

I think one of the things we get from being in a collaborative, team-oriented environment is this idea that work is accomplished by so many different people and we hesitate to take credit for our accomplishments. In a world that’s increasingly measured by “what have you done for me lately?” you no longer can defer your wins. You need to be logging your successful projects, noting them in level of severity and have a laundry list of things you’ve made better from the time you showed up in your job until the time you start looking for something else. The interview process is not the time to be shy.

You don’t have to be a braggart, but you need to communicate why you’re such a team player and ultimately, while you’ll be missed from your current role when they hire you to take the job you’re gunning for. If you have a hard time with this, enlist a close friend or colleague that you trust to help you filter your achievements to get maximum impact. Not everything you’ve done is impressive, but you can find the big things to make sure you stand out among the fray.

There are lots of things to consider when you’re on the market. Don’t be afraid to learn and grow from the process. Rather than being disappointed when you miss out on a job you want, remember that every experience makes you a better candidate. Just tinker and adapt your approach each time, reflecting on what you did right and what you could do better. There are more issues to follow up on and I imagine we’ll cover them in a future post. For the folks already in higher ed, what sort of information would you share? There’s lots I didn’t cover in this post.

So goes the old story, parable, proverb, or whatever you want to call it. It’s a seminal truth tied to our need to develop empathy for others. The more we can understand a person’s experience, the more we can have empathy for that person. The development of empathy is the one of the highest attainments in the human experience.

If I’ve ever given you one of my MOO cards and you’ve looked at the back of it, you’ll notice a quote from philosopher Martin Buber, “Through the Thou, a person becomes I.” In the 1923 work, I and Thou (where the quote appears), Buber speaks extensively about dialogue, developing authentic relationships with other individuals, and how, through language, we come to appreciate the other’s experiences – even to understant what the dialogic partner has lived through.

In other words, when we regard other humans as the same as we are, we develop empathy. We begin to consider them the same – as the subjects of our actions instead of the objects.

Whoa. Getting deep here, right?

Which brings me to a thing we all did last week – Higheredshoes. The tumblr features pictures of shoes from folks who work in all parts of higher education. Y’all – developers and designers and writers and professors and managers – submitted photos of your shoes and they were posted on the site.

The tumblr design is bare, maybe too stark. But it doesn’t detract from the photos. We all wear shoes – well, except for Debra Goldentyer at UC-Berkeley and you know how those Berkeley people are. We’re the same like that. We’re also different like that. Berkeley is especially different like that.

Shoes are more than their design or color or whatever. They ground us. They plant us on this earth, and they help us stay up straight. They point where we’re supposed to be moving.

They remind me of the higher ed community. We’re all dramatically different in our roles and talents and personalities, but we’re all the same. And most of the time, we manage to regard one another as true partners in producing something great through higher education.

We all wear shoes. We’re all the same.

As Buber goes on to say in I and Thou, “All actual life is encounter…. All real life is meeting.”

I am truly thankful I belong to a community that is same and different and full of respect. I’m thankful y’all will send me pictures of shoes – no questions asked.

I’m glad I met and continue to meet you.

For those who don’t know, I think Minnewebcon is one of the most interesting combinations of tech and marketing and communication because it brings together business and higher education. Both types of organizations can learn from one another, and it certainly helps us in higher ed know what folks who may have more access to resources and talent.

That’s not the main point to this post, though.

At Minnewebcon, I noticed that the rooms for content-based sessions were consistently filled, whereas the tech-focused rooms often had seats to spare. Which led me to wonder – do more marketing/communication/strategy/content folks come to conferences? Or just the conferences I attend because I’m a mostly-content-focused person?

But the fact is, many of us who are Armies of One have both technical and content skills. So why don’t we choose the tech tracks at conferences? Why aren’t there more higher education conferences that have stronger offerings focused on technology and physical innovation?

The same thing seems to happen at HighEdWeb each year. Or maybe that’s just my perception. As a member of the board for the Higher Education Web Professionals organization, I know we’re making a concerted effort to include more and stronger technical offerings at our annual and regional conferences. It’s a difficult proposition, though.

I’d love to hear your feedback on this idea – especially from folks who code, and sit in the tech rooms, and go to tech conferences. Does my perception ring true? Or do we need to work on the technical offerings so that more solo practitioner types can understand and apply the information in sessions?

Is it simply a chicken and egg question? Will more technical people come to conferences if there is a better balance of sessions? Do we need to have more events focused strictly on technology for higher education?

I don’t have the answers, but I know some people who plan some conferences. Your input could help us make the time in sessions more productive for all of us.

I don’t really like having my resume out there, because it just all feels a bit weird to me. Nonetheless, I show up only to leave again.  It’s not that I didn’t understand how to use the site, how to manage it or anything like that. I just think one of the advantages you have in personal branding is not giving it all away for free. That is to say, I think there’s a particular competitive advantage to people who are looking for the same jobs you are not knowing every aspect of your pitch.

This time, I’ve decided I’m staying. I came to this conclusion, because it’s not like I’m not already online. My rationale for years has been that if people were going to Google me, that I needed to have some control over what they found first. Maybe they’d dig up some old article I wrote when I was in my early 20s and impressionable. That’s fine. (After all, I can explain.) But it would be better if the first few things that came up (or in my case, the entire first page of what they get) are things that I’ve curated or intentionally want them to see.

I figured that highlighting my struggles with the site — and working through them in real time — might help one or two of you out there manage your own LinkedIn identities. This isn’t meant to be a definitive reference, but rather just how one random guy decides to use it — based on cobbled together information, but also just my limits. If you’d like a primer on LinkedIn before getting started, check this one out from Joe Ginese.

1. My public profile is intentionally sparse.

I don’t really want my LinkedIn profile to make the first page of my Google results. So I don’t go out of my way to elevate the content. For a long time, I didn’t have one at all. But I came around on the idea, figuring that if someone were looking for it it’d be better to make it possible to find it without being logged in. I make just enough information public to verify (along with a photo) that I am indeed that Ron Bronson, but anything more and they’d need to be 1) connected to me and/or 2) logged in.

2. Decide who you’re writing this profile for.

We preach audience a lot in the web content world anyway. It’s no different for LinkedIn. Your profile would be structured differently for recruiters than if you were just trying to use your profile for networking. Understand the “average” user that you’re targeting. In my case, it’s literally for networking purposes and even that’s confined to people I’ve met in real life, know from someplace (former colleagues, et. al.) or meet at conferences. To that end, I’m not doing things like filling in job descriptions. There might be a time when I feel like that’s necessary, that time is not now.

3. Don’t be afraid to shine

Look, you do good work. You shouldn’t hesitate to share those successes, because if there’s anywhere worth sharing them outside of a personal site, it’s a place like LinkedIn. I don’t think there’s a limit, though assessing what your goal is will determine specifically whether talking about the awards you won in 8th grade are relevant for your profile or not. Ultimately, it’s up to you.

Don’t be afraid to be toot your own horn, though. Other people will be, that’s for sure.

This is just a starting point. But with anything, starting is how you make progress. Good luck and don’t be afraid to reach out.

One of the valuable side effects of interacting with people in the larger community, is the perspective I’ve gained. You can be easily mired in your own world and feel like everything happening is the biggest, craziest thing. Then you talk to other people, hear their struggles and challenges and realize that other folks are going through similar things too. It’s not just about work. We share our struggles, our fears and how we’ve overcome challenges with each other.

So much of our talk about social media is focused on measuring impact, ROI and the gains we achieve from doing what we do. But the residual benefits and relationships we establish pay dividends that simply cannot be measured in Klout. Going back to my first point, creating community means sharing big ideas and small ones. It’s taking risks beyond the ordinary and fleshing out ideas that maybe you wanted to work out someplace other than a whiteboard. Maybe you’re a small school? Make friends at bigger ones. At a large school? Find out how the other half lives in smallsville. Resist your silo and reach beyond your circle to discover how it can you do your job better than ever before.

If you have set goals for yourself in the past year, it behooves you to implore your social network to hold you accountable. Even if you don’t, you can start by simply assess where you are and what you need and feeling emboldened enough to discover people who are likeminded. This doesn’t have to be a conclave of Twitter friends. It’s community where you find it. But wither the days where you feel alone, like no one else understand what you’re doing. Reach out and touch someone because I assure you that there’s another person thinking it, who wants and needs to hear from you.

You can start with us.