Business Insight Zone

Don’t get lost in the mountain of resumes.

Last month’s talk at the Houston Interactive Marketing Association gave me the chance to meet Raegan Hill, a veteran recruiter who is HIMA‘s program chair. Given the seemingly endless stream of layoff news flowing past us these days, I asked Raegan to share her most basic, most pointed advice for job hunters.

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What’s the first thing a person should do when he or she loses a job?

Sudden job loss is stressful and very emotional. Take at least few days to adjust, decompress and mentally “reboot” before starting your job hunt. You’ll have more focus if your mind is clear.

What’s the biggest mistake people should avoid in looking for a new job?

The biggest mistake people should avoid when looking for a new job is not planning before they execute their job search. Most people dive into a search with no strategy or clear map of how much time they will spend networking, online job hunting, what companies to target first, etc. You wouldn’t develop a new software without a product road map or launch a marketing campaign without a plan, would you? Focus the first few days on planning out your strategy and then execute on that strategy. That way you can measure your results and tweak your strategy as you go.

What are some practical steps that people can take before they’re laid off so that the loss of a job won’t be disastrous for them?

Build your network before you need it! Most people land a job and stop attending networking events or nurturing business relationships. Then, when they lose their job, they wind up spending the first few critical months of a job search getting to know the decision makers in their industry. Always be committed to growing your network; if you take time to help others when they need it, they will be there for you when you need it.

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Thanks to Raegan for these insights!

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Related post: What to do when your friends are laid off.

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Photo by woodley wonderworks, used under a Creative Commons license.

I heard the news today, oh boy,
About a lucky man who made the grade,
And though the news was rather sad . . .

Over the past couple of days, I’ve had several conversations, online and off, about how bad the economy really is, and whether the American news media are over-reporting the bad news and under-reporting the good news.

Thanks to a Twitter conversation with her, I got to read Rieva Lesonsky’s take* on this issue at AllBusiness:

• The Small Business Blog: Out of Touch Means Out of Business

The short version: she can’t stand it when people bury their heads in the sand, refusing to acknowledge what’s going on in the world. And from a small-business perspective, she thinks that businesspeople miss opportunities when they don’t make themselves aware of what’s going on in the world.

I’m right there with her. I was trained as a newspaper journalist and I’ve been a news junkie since childhood. (To put it another way, I’m the kind of person who ends up in Hoover’s editorial department.)

Beyond that, regular readers will know I’m a firm believer in following the Stockdale Paradox: acknowledge fully the reality around you — no matter how brutal it is — but also have faith that you’ll prevail in the end.

It seems like Rieva is right there with me, since she ends her article by saying this:

In the closing lines of his inaugural address President Barack Obama told us “with [our] eyes fixed on the horizon” we can get through “this winter of our hardship.” That doesn’t mean bury your head and hide from reality. It means keep your head up and focus on the better times ahead.

But I would offer one caveat: if the general woe-is-us state of the news today is genuinely getting you down emotionally, pare down your sources of information so that you’re seeing only what’s relevant to your business. I love accumulating knowledge in the abstract, but in business what you really want is knowledge that you can act upon.

Consider a couple of headlines in today’s business news:

• Layoffs at Macy’s? Interesting, sure, but it doesn’t affect any of my personal business responsibilities.**
• Good earnings for Avon? Well, good for them. It’s a comfort to know that some well-run companies are succeeding despite the hard times . . . but Avon also doesn’t affect me.

My point is not to disagree with Rieva, but to recommend that you take a view of the news that . . .

1. . . . is realistic about the state of the economy. My relative lack of macroeconomic chops notwithstanding, I know enough to say this with confidence: At best, the economy is as bad as it’s been in 30 years and will stay that way for some little while. The other likely alternative is that the economy is is as bad as it’s been in 70 years, and won’t pick up appreciably in 2009. At all. If that seems overly harsh, well, I’d refer you back to the Stockdale Paradox: better to face the brutal truth than to try to wish it away.
2. . . . is realistic about what the state of the economy means for YOUR business. In the vaguest sense, yeah, I guess the Macy’s news tells me something about the state of the economy as it’s playing out in the retail sector, but it’s not anything new, and retail isn’t relevant to my duties. So if the drumbeat of layoff news were making it hard for me to get fired up for work each day, then yeah, I could live without knowing the details of Macy’s restructuring.

Really, this advice isn’t much different than I would give when times are good, because we should always be focusing on the information that’s most relevant to our interests.

But I’m sensitive, in hard times like these, to the psychological reality that some people really do have a harder time functioning if they let in a steady stream of bad news. They dwell on it. They feel bad about it on a personal level. It keeps them from functioning well.

If you’re in that camp, okay, slim down your media diet. Tune out the generically bad headlines that the media are pumping out so you can focus on the specific information — good, bad, or mixed — that’s most relevant to YOU in YOUR work.

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Now, what do you think? Are the media over-reporting the bad news?

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A couple of notes:

** Please pardon a moment of pride in my Hoover’s editorial colleagues: I picked the Macy’s example at random from the headlines, but when I went to check our record on the company, I found that our editor on the record, Alex Biesada, had already updated it with an exquisite, pithy explanation of the Macy’s restructuring. I’m proud to say that this is typical, not just for Alex but the whole staff.

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Photo by Alosh Bennett, used under a Creative Commons license.

Following up from last week’s post . . . more than 60 photos now show up in my Delicious account with the “blog-images” tag. Like the one you see here, these are all Creative Commons-licensed Flickr photos, so feel free to rummage around and use them to your heart’s content. (Remember to play by the Creative Commons rules and credit the source of any photo you use.)

Another idea in this vein occurred to me last week: for better or worse, I always have many more ideas for blog posts than I could possibly write up. In hopes that my ideas might jog the imagination of other bloggers, I’ve started posting just a few of them on Twitter, all of them tagged with #blogideas. For now, it’s just a handful, but I’m slowly clearing out a big stack of notes that are sure to contain many more tidbits that I can’t use.

Maybe nothing in either source will help anybody — but I thought I would at least put the material out there in case it’s useful.

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Photo by Ed Uthman, used under a CC-Share Alike license.

. . . “due to the fact that” is needlessly wordy, you should use “because” instead.

These and several other valuable anti-jargon phrasings can be yours by the simple expedient of clicking the following link to Dan Santow’s Word Wise blog:

One (Isn’t) the Loneliest Number

You have my permission to get onto me when I use any of Dan’s wordy phrases. And feel free to tell me in the comments which of his phrases are your “favorite” (i.e. most loathsome), or which other phrases you would add to his list.

(Hat tip to my new friend-via-Twitter Jess Flynn — go Longhorns! — for this.)

Image by Tim Morgan, used under a Creative Commons license.

Waiting for no reason

The other day at lunch I stood in line for a long while to collect a meal that had already been boxed up for me. Money in hand, I had to stand there, just waiting for a chance to pay. Three people ahead of me, and a growing number behind me, waited too.

It got me thinking about the chokepoints that afflict our business lives.

The manager, who had been running one of the two cash registers, left his station to help the other cashier, a rookie, with a tricky — but, from what I could tell, trivial — problem with ringing up an order. It was one of those things where the difference between a la carte or the package deal means a difference in 75 cents. Yet the resolution of it dragged on . . . and on . . . and ON, all while the line backed up.

At the front end of the line, other workers kept dishing up food, contributing to the backlog. At least a couple of the folks I saw working have rung me up before, so one of them might have been drafted to run the second register for a few minutes to clear the backlog. But no.

The manager is a good guy, always affable, and he apologized wholeheartedly both to the woman who was shorted 75 cents (she seemed more bemused than upset by the whole thing), and to me for the delay when it finally came my turn to pay. I didn’t mind the apology, but I would have liked it better if the manager had instead simply addressed the chokepoint when it arose.

Look around you.

Unless you’re unlike most people I’ve ever met, there are chokepoints in your working environment, too. Consider this starter menu of choices:

• You have to jump through needless hoops to do something routine (ordering office supplies? filing timecards? booking a conference room?).
• You mean to get right to work in the morning, but it takes you an hour to hack through your inbox.
• Budgets or goals or performance reviews or whatever always run late.
• Gatekeepers in your company exert too much control over access to resources.
• You cannot do anything without holding eight meetings first.
• Key players won’t make decisions, even when their delay mucks up the works for everyone else.
• . . .

Even good companies have chokepoints. So do good employees. But great ones ferret them out and get rid of them systematically.

The boss at the place I got lunch is a good manager, but not a great one. A great one wouldn’t let the line pile up at a chokepoint like that.

Q.E.D.

Turn the spotlight on yourself.

What little tweaks could you make — today, this week, this month — that would free up the flow around your chokepoints? (Don’t eschew little tweaks because they’re little; they can add up fast.)

If you got your team together to talk about chokepoints, do you think the conversation would uncover surprises? Or would everybody pretty much agree on, say, the three worst chokepoints that impede the group’s work?

Either way, are you willing to address the chokepoints, for yourself, your team, your company?

What are your chokepoints?

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Related:

• Jon Swanson: There is always something.

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Photo by Charlie, used under a CC-Share Alike license.

A while back we discussed Dr. Peter Pronovost and his use of simple checklists to improve, often radically, patient care in hospitals.

These two posts on using checklists showed up in my RSS feeds over the past week:

1. From Dave Stein’s Commentary on Sales Leadership blog: Checklists: For Surgeons, Pilots and . . . Salespeople

ESR estimates that 80% of sales opportunities are lost due to either ineffective qualification or ineffective planning. Every sales plan I’ve ever written has had a checklist. What’s a sales plan without a list of events, activities, calls, meetings, and tactics — a checklist?

(Dave also includes a link to a sales checklist of his own device.)

2. From the Signal vs. Noise blog at 37signals: Verify your work with checklists

It’s the kind of stuff that we all know, but that we’ll often forget if we’re not being reminded about it in the moment. Thinking back to the mistakes we’ve made in the past, there are plenty of those that could have been avoided or caught much earlier if we had been using checklists.

These posts have led me to revise my own daily checklist, which I use to make sure that I cover all the bases of my job without lingering too long on any one task.

Are you using checklists?
If so, how do they benefit you?
If not, what’s keeping you from it?

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Image by Eugene Peretz, used under a CC-Share Alike license.

A friend of mine who follows politics more closely than I do expressed his surprise that I hadn’t said anything here about the new economic stimulus package being bruited by the Congress. I promised him I’d explain my reasoning on stimulus in general, and why I haven’t talked about this round of it much.

1. Macroeconomics is not my strong suit. It’s comforting for me to think I’m smarter than the average bear on the topic, but there’s enough diversity of opinion among the real economists and economic journalists that I doubt my voice would add much to the discussion.
2. The political debates of the past year have left me feeling scorched. Partisanship in general repels me, and I have no wish to open this blog to politicized topics.
3. In general, I subscribe to the notion that everyone becomes a Keynesian during a recession / depression. So we’re going to get some stimulus — and indeed, we already have. The question remains, What kind?
4. If you feel strongly about your answer to that question, you could contact your member of Congress or your industry’s lobbying group.
5. Otherwise, most of the businesspeople reading this blog would be better served to stick to their own knitting. While I absolutely do believe that government action affects the business climate for better and for worse, I also believe that in most cases it won’t affect your business nearly as much as your OWN efforts.

What do you think of my reasoning?

And, more importantly: What are YOU doing to provide stimulus to your OWN business?

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I’ll leave you with a tidbit from Benjamin Franklin — one I’ve quoted before:

The taxes are indeed very heavy, and if those laid on by the government were the only ones we had to pay, we might more easily discharge them; but we have many others, and much more grievous to some of us. We are taxed twice as much by our idleness, three times as much by our pride, and four times as much by our folly, and from these taxes the commissioners cannot ease or deliver us by allowing an abatement.

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Image by Olaf, used under a CC-Share Alike license.