From: Meghan M. Biro (edited)
What drives top employees now is more than just a paycheck. Purpose is a critical driver of talent.
Linkedin looks for employees driven by purpose. Its staff includes 41% who cite self-fulfillment and a desire to serve others as key (according to the 2015 Workforce Purpose index).
Recruiters take note: people who view their work as far more than dollars or promotions perform better on all fronts (according to recent research by NYU and Imperative).
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My introduction to The Recruiting Animal Show of November 19, 2014. It's about 5 minutes long.
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A recruiter might find you on the basis of your profile's keywords. To do that she really doesn't have to know much about the work you do. She might not even know the right topics to investigate when she speaks to you.
This means that you have to give her the information she needs to represent you properly to an employer. You have to educate her during the interview.
Founders of startups face the same challenge when they speak to reporters who don't understand their hi-tech products. So, let's compare some job hunting tips from Johanna Rothman and Rich Stone to the recommendations Caryn Marooney,Facebook's Head of Tech Communications has for startup CEOs.
From: Caryn Marooney, Facebook's Head of Tech Communications
As a founder, you know more about your topic than anyone in the world. If you’re talking to a reporter and you just answer their questions without telling them what’s important about your company, shame on you.
Brand image is your lump of clay and you have to go out there and make it into something beautiful. Respond to their questions, but then tell them what’s important in every answer, because they don’t know, or even how to ask.
Translated to Interviews
Johanna Rothman, Manage Your Job Search
For every line on your résumé, explain the value. If your build system automation work on a project saved three-person weeks every quarter, you would say something like this:
"Saved three person-weeks every quarter via automation by delivering scripts for the build system."
That’s still a little wimpy. As a first draft, that might be good enough... However, if you are refining your résumé, or you haven’t worked for too long, you want to craft each line on your résumé. How can you clarify this line to specify your value?
"Saved three person-weeks every quarter by automating scripts for our git-based build system. We transitioned from SVN to git and I automated the scripts."
Johanna also points us to Rich Stone
Don’t let your experience look like a job description. I see a lot of “responsible for this” or “participated in that” bullets.
If you are hiring a QB for your football team, do you hire a QB who was responsible for calling plays, throwing passes and participated in running the offense? or do you hire one who scored 30 points per game, rushed for 100 yards, threw for 350 yards, had a 75% pass completion ratio over that last 3 seasons?
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Cognitive Behaviour Therapy aims to ease disturbing feelings by exposing the sloppy thinking that provokes them and, usually, this means unmasking exaggerations.
I found a good example of this same process in a political discussion.
Peter Hitchens complains that critics of Vladimir Putin are all too ready to compare him to Stalin and argues that in spite of Putin's faults it's ridiculous to make hysterical accusations. Here is what he says:
Mr Putin, as often discussed here, is no paragon. He is indeed a man of many very bad faults, and his state is corrupt and violent. But to mention him in the same breath as Stalin is simply to betray a complete lack of the sense of proportion.
For me, it’s simple. Mr Putin has not yet opened a vast archipelago of homicidal labour camps, nor crammed millions of his citizens into them, nor launched a great terror on his people under which anyone may be seized without pretext, and tortured into confessing non-existent crimes before being shot in the back of the head or despatched to a living death in Norilsk.
Mr Putin has not deliberately caused a gigantic famine in which millions have died.
Mr Putin has not murdered many of his close associates. He has not signed an unscrupulous alliance with Hitler, partitioned Poland, or established an iron secret police despotism over the whole of Central Europe.
Nor has he persecuted legitimate scientists, nor has he embarked on anti-semitic purges of doctors. Nor has he encourage a pharaonic personality cult, requiring the erection of thousands of images of him.
Nor has he encouraged a cult around a boy (Pavlik Morozov) who betrayed his own parents to the secret police, nor has he compelled his own immediate colleagues to endure in silence the cruel imprisonment of their close family members..
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From: James Fallows, Hacked! (edited)
Google presents itself as the world’s leader in handling big data.
It attracts users with the idea that trusting cloud services is moderne.
And, yes, the services are free but the users are indispensable to the company as advertising vehicles.
Then, it exposes users to the risk of a “single-point failure” that could in a few minutes eliminate many years’ worth of crucial data.
This is the same company famed for making every bit of data part of the world’s “permanent record.”
That embarrassing picture of you in a nightclub, that subversive definition of “santorum”— they and other ephemera are eternal, but all your e‑mail can disappear before noon?
My Comment:
Is Google great? Yes. Does putting its best foot forward mean hiding its other foot. Yes, indeed.
You should read that whole article. It's amazing.
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The Republicans portrayed Mr. McGovern as a cowardly left-winger, a threat to the military and the free-market economy and someone outside the mainstream of American thought.
Whether those charges were fair or not, Mr. McGovern never lived down the image of a liberal loser, and many Democrats long accused him of leading the party astray.
Mr. McGovern resented that characterization mightily. “I always thought of myself as a good old South Dakota boy who grew up here on the prairie,” he said in an interview for this obituary in 2005 in his home in Mitchell.
“My dad was a Methodist minister. I went off to war. I have been married to the same woman forever. I’m what a normal, healthy, ideal American should be like.
“But we probably didn’t work enough on cultivating that image,” he added, referring to his presidential campaign organization.
“We were more interested in ending the war in Vietnam and getting people out of poverty and being fair to women and minorities and saving the environment.
“It was an issue-oriented campaign, and we should have paid more attention to image.”
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Is making money helping others wrong?
Kelly McParland says The Toronto Star is quite ready to turn its own employees into victims while it makes money posing as an organization that cares about them.
Having worked there for a short time I understand that its obsessive search for victims and automatic alignment with any left-wing crank out there is as much a business model – a search for profits – as it is adherence to the famous Atkinson principles of which it boasts.
You think the Star sympathizes with struggling salaried workers? Try being on the other side when it negotiates a contract, lays off staff or tries to squeeze senior people into quitting so it can replace them with cheaper youngsters.
Here's where Kelly goes wrong. If the paper can't make a profit it can't defend victims. So the employees have to bite the bullet. The same would be true for a charity. It makes sense to me.
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From: Barbara Falters, New York Magazine, Lloyd Grove Feb 25, 2007 (edited)
Barbara Walters is scrupulous in the drudgery of fame maintenance.
The secret of her success is her mastery of the subtle, ceaseless game of collecting friends, trading favors, and dispensing the rare but well-aimed swift kick to keep her place at the top of the pile.
She’s had a lifetime of making the right friends.
I’ve received my share of handwritten thank-you notes on her embossed personal stationery and polite typed missives on the official ABC News letterhead.
Once, at my request, Walters spent five minutes on the phone giving career advice to an aspiring pundit I was dating.
Another time, I repeated to Walters something 60 Minutes creator Don Hewitt had told me — that he’d never seriously tried to steal her away from ABC, despite press accounts to the contrary.
The next day, a courier from Walters’s office arrived with a photocopy of Hewitt’s letter of apology to her.
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Billy Christian has an interesting posting about leadership called McGuinty’s Bold Plan
In it, he congratulates the premier of Ontario for harmonizing the Provincial Sales Tax (PST) with the Goods and Services Tax (GST).
The message is that a real leader will do unpopular things.
"Thursday’s budget," Christian says, "showed that he is a genuine leader." Why? "He has the courage to take a big political hit."
The Globe and Mail highlighted the fact that common consumer purchases like coffee, muffins, gym memberships, golf and Internet fees and vitamins would become more expensive. McGuinty knew that this kind of attack was coming but it didn't stop him.
Ironically, in spite of his praise for bold public action, Christian also implies that sometimes a leader should be deceptive.
He claims that Brian Mulroney slit his own throat when he made the GST a visible rather than a hidden tax. "The visible tax irritated people" and "it destroyed his popularity forever."
Instead of billing the public directly at the point of purchase he could have imposed the tax on the producer or importer who would have added it to the price and passed it onto the consumer. This would have achieved the same effect without damaging the leader's relationship with a short-sighted public.
Inotherwords, if you're dealing with ignorant, prejudiced, narrow-minded people it's unwise to give them information that will only inflame them because it's more than they can understand.
This is a conservative idea of leadership. I'm thinking here of conservatism as a political and social idea that manifests itself in a structured society in which the leading roles are reserved for people who deserve them by virtue of their knowledge and character.
Since the leaders have greater understanding than the popular masses they are not obliged to be fully transparent with the lower orders or to deal with them as equals. The common people govern themselves more by emotion than deep thought and so, like children, don't have to know everything.
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