Working World

As I look back, I think that sometimes you can’t have the five-year plan for yourself. If you’re doing something well, you tend to keep doing it. That’s how you fall into careers.

So says Carol Smith, senior vice president and chief brand officer for the Elle Group. Every time you start to worry about where you’ll be in the next few years or whether you’re on the “right track,” remember that even the most successful professionals didn’t have it all planned out.

Last week I highlighted an international job seeker (a recent college graduate) who I felt was making some great moves when it came to her job search (moves, it turns out, that got her a job about a week after we met). What impressed me was the fact that she was getting out there and meeting people rather than relying solely on the Internet. She was contacting people directly and doing informational interviews rather than simply hoping that an application submitted blindly would be enough. (And I should note that I singled out Idealist in that post not as a slight but rather because I highly recommend it as an online job resource).

Anyway, following that post, a few readers inquired about the specifics of said job seeker’s tactics (apologies, by the way, for the mysteriousness created by calling this person “job seeker” rather than by name—nothing deep intended there, only caution). The gist of the readers’ questions were: How did this job seeker get these face-to-face meetings and informational interviews? Did she have a contact in the organizations? Did she simply call/email and ask for the meetings? Did she make a phone call and ask to see the person in charge?

Rather than speculate, I decided to ask our job seeker how she did it:

Before my move, I narrowed down where geographically I wanted to be (Washington, DC) and in what area I wanted to work (international exchange and global education). From there, I made a list of interesting organizations and located as many contacts of those organizations as possible. I emailed these contacts my resume and an explanation of my professional background and my future goals (working for an international exchange organization).

I received a reply less than 1/3 of the time. I kept in contact with these repliers and eventually met with them in person when I was in Washington, DC. These contacts also referred me to other employees of interesting organizations. I also kept in contact with individuals from organizations where I had been granted an internship/ job interview but was eventually turned down. It was a bit hard to keep in contact with an organization I felt did not want my skills, but I had to remember that they had an overabundance of applications and it was nothing to take personally. [My emphasis.]

From keeping contact with one of these individuals, I was granted admittance to an exclusive meeting with the president of the international exchange organization. I feel it was imperative to be organized in knowing what sort of job I wanted, as well as be perseverant in contacting individuals of interesting organizations.

And how exactly did she find those organizations that comprised her list at the beginning? Certainly searching via Google and Idealist is a good way to get started. Our job seeker also had other strategies for focusing her search:

One way was looking at an [interesting] organization’s partners, affiliates, etc. listed on that organization’s website. I then researched them and weeded out what I thought was interesting. I also consulted career books specializing in international affairs and jotted down the most relevant to international exchange. Rarely, I was given recommendations of organizations.

I was even more impressed by her moves after hearing these specifics. She set herself up in just the right way to hit the ground running once she moved to DC. And her tactic of first generating email contact with people and then, only after introducing herself and perhaps engaging in some email back and forth, asking for an in-person meeting was very well done. When job seekers ask me how they can generate informational interviews at organizations where they have no contacts, I’ll often tell them to do some research, find a contact at the organization doing a job that looks interesting, and then email that person asking for a meeting. And while I still think this can be an effective tactic, I’ll also admit that it can be odd to receive an email from someone you’ve never met asking if she can come in for a meeting and, by the way, can you advise me on my career? (And no, that’s not a veiled reference to not email me—by all means, keep them coming!).

But our job seeker’s method is much better. It still involves sending a random email to someone you don’t know, but it’s a way to start off slow. Instead of barging right in and saying, “Hi, you don’t know me but can I come meet with you so you can help me get a job?!”, our job seeker’s method allows you to ease in. Do what she did and start by emailing an introduction of yourself—your resume and your professional interests—and then perhaps asking one easy question to which that person can respond quickly and easily (such as, “Can you recommend a partner organization that I should also look into?”**). If the person responds and seems interested in helping you, follow up and when it feels comfortable, ask if you might meet with him or her in person.

This whole process might seem much more time intensive and like much harder work than simply Googling for jobs, finding them, and then applying online—and that’s because it is. I’m not going to pretend that I’ve always done it right or that I’m good at it, but ask any professional who’s been in the field for a few years and I’m sure they’ll tell you that our job seeker’s tactics are far more effective than exclusively relying on the Internets.

Because the economy inside the Beltway is better than most:

At 6.2 percent, the unemployment rate in the D.C. metro region is lower than in any other major metropolitan area in the country — and far below the 9.5 percent national average.

Which is great and all, though I was struck by a sobering fact buried amidst the happy talk of DC as a recession-resistant city:

A 2007 study found that more than one-third of the District’s residents are functionally illiterate, and a large portion of District residents are among the most vulnerable to recession, holding retail and consumer service-type jobs that suffer most.

You often hear DC residents talk about how “no one is actually from DC.” While this does speak to the undeniably transient nature of the city—you can run into people from everywhere in DC—such a statement would only ever be made by those well-to-do professionals who themselves came to DC from somewhere else. It’s easy to forget, when inside the Capitol Hill-K Street-NW professional bubble, that there is a large population of DC residents who in fact were born and raised in DC. It’s even easier to forget (or maybe ignore is the better word?) that too many of those residents haven’t had even close to the same advantages as the highly-educated and well-to-do professionals who migrate to the city.

UPDATE: The Atlantic confirms: DC is the place to be for jobs.

A good friend recently quit a stable position at a well-known and reputable organization because his heart just wasn’t in it. He described it to me this way:

I resigned because it doesn’t fulfill me, but I realize, despite my insistence on courage and faith and confidence, this may be the dumbest coherent decision I’ve ever made.

It’s impossible to say whether this was the “right” thing to do. In a similar vein, it’s impossible to say whether passing on a job that won’t completely fulfill you to wait for one that will is a wise move, in a practical sense. But regardless, and despite his own doubts about the decision, I greatly admire his courage to pursue that which will fulfill him the most and thus allow him to make the greatest impact—to go balls out in a way that I don’t know I ever could.

I recently met with a recent college graduate seeking a job in the international world. I was struck by this young woman’s approach to her job search—namely her insistence on pursuing face-to-face contact. While she relied heavily on web resources and email contact while still in school, once she moved to DC, she set about contacting people directly and doing informational interviews rather than relying solely on Idealist and other sites. This seemed to be an incredibly effective strategy since, by the time she met with me, she’d already interviewed for two jobs and had two more on the horizon.

Her strategy reinforced for me the notion that simply searching for jobs online, and then applying for them, probably isn’t going to cut it (especially in a down economy). Getting in front of people and making yourself a “known quantity” will prove to be much more effective.

UPDATE: I just got an email from this job seeker and she got a job! Persistence, and face-to-face contact, does indeed pay off.

A senior at Penn State put himself, and “the right to interview and potentially hire” him, up for auction on eBay, says the Chronicle of Higher Education today:

As a finance major, [John] Pereca had taken a course in marketing and knew that if he wanted to stand out to a potential employer, he would need to differentiate himself from the crowd. So he took out a $60 ad on eBay, starting at a 99-cent bid for “the right to interview and potentially hire” him.

“Things like this get noticed all the time,” he said. “I thought, ‘Hey, this could work.’”

He posted pictures of himself and of his résumé on the Web site and included a link on his Facebook and Twitter accounts. Realizing that celebrities often have hundreds, if not thousands, of fans checking their Twitter pages, Mr. Pereca started to post on the walls of Oprah Winfrey, Jimmy Fallon, and Shaquille O’Neal, among dozens of others.

“I graduate in 3 days from PENN STATE! My Auction ends on Friday!,” he wrote on several celebrities’ home pages, with a link to the eBay listing. “Help me out!” Kevin Spacey’s account responded, encouraging Mr. Pereca and his unique idea.

The experiment yielded a few offers—photographer in Ocean City, Md., a sales job in Atlanta, and an offer to be in a porn film—though he accepted none of them. eBay eventually pulled his auction from the site, as it violated their terms of service.

Pereca’s experiment reminds me of this guy job hunting outside the DC metro with a sign around his neck. Doesn’t look like these outside the box methods have netted either one a job, but you’ve got to give them credit for pulling out all the stops.

This is a question that Sherry continually challenges those around her to consider in their career discernment. What she means is that you’ve got to think not only about what organization you want to work for and the kind of cause you want to serve, but the more specific, mundane stuff too: What sort of daily tasks do you want to do? Do you want to work in the U.S., or abroad, or be based in one place but regularly travel to many others? Also important is: What sort of environment do you want to work in? Are you more comfortable with a small nonprofit that has few employees and no bureaucratic structure? Or would you prefer a more “corporate” environment, in which things are much more structured? Perhaps somewhere in between?

Case and point of Sherry’s mantra: a friend and former grad school classmate has been with the same major international consulting firm for four, going on five, years. He has already received several promotions, but has now reached the level of needing to land the “big” promotion, or else his time there is short. Basically, there are 10 employees, including him, at his level. Only three of those 10 will receive the next promotion. The other seven are then expected to move on. He called it a “rank-and-yank” model. I’ll let Wikipedia explain more:

Rank-and-yank-like models are common amongst management consulting firms, often referred to as an ‘up or out‘ approach to evaluations. Specifically, Accenture [the huge international consulting firm---you see ads featuring Tiger Woods in every airport ever] uses an ‘up-or-out’ model with its staff: if employees do not get promoted after a certain length of time at their existing career level (usually no more than 4-5 years), they are ‘counselled out’ of the firm (shorthand for being fired – but on generous terms)…

This system promotes vitality in the firm, theoretically allowing only the strongest performers to reach leadership positions. In practice, however, this system has a tendency to dilute leadership, as individuals who may be better oriented toward upper management and executive positions leave the firm before promotion to those levels is possible. Additionally, due to extraordinarily high levels of employee attrition, Accenture is built on the need for enormous recruitment, particularly at the entry level. If, for some reason, the firm was no longer able to recruit the enormous number of graduates it requires each year – or was unable to attract a high quality of graduate – this model would falter.

My friend was frantically busy for several weeks pulling together the necessary documentation and support for his rank-and-yank evaluation. Soon after turning in his supporting documentation, he was called before a panel to do an oral evaluation of his performance (sort of like defending your thesis, it seemed).

This all stressed me out more than it did him. As much as I’ve bitched about the lack of clear advancement structure and salary hierarchies in nonprofits, I realized that at least nonprofits are the devil that I can deal with. Hearing these intimate details about the stresses of what a “corporate advancement structure” actually comes to mean made me want nothing more than to never, ever be involved with a rank-and-yank promotion situation. While my friend reveled in that kind of competition and pressure, just hearing about it made me break out in a cold sweat.

All of which reinforced to me the point that an ongoing consideration of how (and where) you want to spend your days is a vitally important part of your career.