Informational meetings with network contacts can either be time wasters or unlock doors to great job opportunities; it all depends on your approach. First, be sure to meet with the right people: those who can refer you, hire you, or provide valuable advice. Then, carefully manage and script the meetings to serve your goal, which is to get another career-advancing meeting or interview. Use the steps below to tightly manage your meeting agenda.
For those over 50 and gainfully employed, this study says you have a 56% chance that you’ll be let go before you’re ready to retire, risking substantial income loss. The study supports my own observations via client work that there is no real job security, only “career security.” In a sense employees are really all consultants.
But not to worry! Here’s a list of things you can do to both minimize the risk of an unwanted departure and set yourself up for a quick, positive transition if necessary.
Many jobseekers are too quick to write-off opportunities if they experience radio silence after an interview. A typical example: “My last interview was three weeks ago and I haven’t heard anything, I guess they’re not interested” (this jobseeker actually ended up receiving an offer). You can both avoid having to guess their intentions and improve your odds of landing an offer by taking the following steps.
Once you receive a job offer, all the negotiating leverage switches from the employer to you. They are no longer thinking about hiring anyone else, they’re now focused on getting you in the role. The result: items that weren’t negotiable before the offer are now suddenly negotiable. Use this new leverage and the following guidelines to make thousands in minutes.
LinkedIn’s “Advanced People Search” feature is a fantastic tool for finding people in your extended network or shared groups who can help you to reach your career goals. Including boolean logic in your search terms such as AND, OR, NOT, parenthesis and quotes around phrases can greatly expand its power. To demonstrate, here’s an example of a client who was interested in obtaining a VP of Marketing position at Pfizer.
If you’re struggling with a big career decision, your underlying challenge likely involves either: a) properly evaluating the risk associated with a specific action, b) identifying and narrowing down a long list of options, or c) choosing between two or three good options.
While each of these challenges requires a different approach to get to the best decision, they all share the same first step: offloading the decision-making criteria in your brain onto a spreadsheet or sheet of paper, to ensure you’ve captured and accurately weighed them all.
The following techniques will help you to choose the best option when facing any of the scenarios described above.
The email you send right after an interview can make all the difference between landing an offer and getting rejected. Think of your followup not as a thank-you note, but rather as an “Impact Email”; after reflecting on the interview, use the followup as an opportunity to really make your case. Ideally, send one email to each person you met with, tailoring the content to the specific conversation.
The content should influence the interviewer’s decision-making based on what you learned
Changing careers or industries can feel like a daunting prospect, yet clients accomplish successful career changes all the time. Knowing what you want to do next is half the journey. If you’re unsure of what path to take, reading this post could help. Once you’ve settled on a path, then you need to convince employers that they should hire you over more experienced candidates. To overcome this challenge, implement the following seven steps.
Perhaps you’ve experienced the disappointment of carefully crafting an email or cover letter asking for a meeting only to get no response or turned down. In fact, all too often these messages are not even read, because the email subject line or the content doesn’t resonate or the message is too densely worded. Clients who have applied the following nine rules, however, have seen big improvements in their email response rates.
How to Write a Compelling Executive Bio
by Robert Hellmann • Getting Interviews, Resume, LinkedIn, self-promo
If you’re a candidate for C-suite, Partner, or Board roles, you’ll be asked for a bio as part of the process. For some roles reporting to the C-suite, you may need a bio as well. Employers evaluating your candidacy want to see how your career story will look to prospective investors, clients, and employees when shared publicly. For more junior roles, a bio is usually not worth prioritizing, except when your story is especially unusual or compelling.
To create a resonant bio,