I’m impressed! These gentlemen continue to post nice and brief video segments about living as a modern professional on the Internet, and I’ve yet to disagree with a single thing they’ve said. Good work, and please keep it up.
If you’ve used LinkedIn for a little while, you are probably familiar with the recommendation process. I’ve said some inflammatory things about recommendations before, because I think it fails at its intended purpose. The intent was to build a web of trust that was valid across the entire LinkedIn network, and acted as a kind of currency. I’m leery of that, and I see someone with a lot of recommendations a lot like someone with a lot of professional certifications. It’s fishy, and looks to me like they are trying to make up for something.
Before you explore trust models in LinkedIn, you should attempt to connect with everyone (yes everyone!) you’ve ever worked with. After you’ve done that, I think you should be using the LinkedIn recommendations to build 3 separate trust models.
Build a web of trust:
From your oldest professional experience forward, write recommendations for your contacts who are exceptional. This should define the list of people that you would trust to do a great job. These are the people on your “short list”, or the people you’d like to find a way to work with again.
Don’t ask for a recommendation back! Even though LinkedIn facilitates this, I don’t think its a good idea. It’s cheesy and puts people in an awkward position.
Follow your own web of trust. Try and meet the people recommended by the people you’ve recommended. You’ll probably find that they are 1st tier professionals as well.
Identify the web of indifference:
LinkedIn has really done us a disservice with the “ask people to recommend me” stage of setting up your account. It puts peer pressure and politeness on the forefront of the process, which is more or less worthless.
Look for people who have recommended dozens of other people. If they ran their own company would they immediately try and hire all of those people they’ve recommended? I find that very unlikely. In this case it’s someone who is probably a good networker and just being nice. No harm, no foul, but also no value.
Also look for intra-company recommendations. In an average company this is just peer pressure. I completely ignore these.
Look for lots of recommendations to and from consulting/sales organizations. It might be one of the above cases, or it might contrived. Most people are not aware that the web of trust is tainted, and some people are trying to use it to their advantage. It’s not that I don’t trust sales/marketing people, it’s that I don’t trust sales/marketing people.
Build a web of distrust:
Make sure you’ve connected with everyone you hate and would rather die than work with again. It’s seems crazy, but this is no Facebook and you are not here to share pictures of your kids. These are the people who are not good at their jobs, and make things worse for everyone.
Keep an eye on “the bad people.” Where do they work? Who do they work with? Do they work for the competition? Worse yet, do they work for a client?
Look for people who recommend anyone in your web of distrust. Mark them down as suckers and/or idiots. Stay away from them, their companies and their products if it seems appropriate.
Be wary of any recommended by toxic professionals. On LinkedIn you have to approve the posting of a recommendation. What kind of person posts a recommendation by someone in your bottom 1% of the working world? Stay away.
This probably sounds like a lot of work, particularly if you’ve done a lot of networking. It’s not the type of thing you’d check on every week. If you are ready to hire or be hired, I don’t think you can safely skip these steps anymore.
You need a new job. Maybe you’ve got one and are looking to switch, maybe you don’t. Either way, you might not be aware that the job hunting world has changed.
Your career probably revolves around IT, even if you’re not an IT person. If you struggle with your personal IT, then put the time in now and learn it. It is always a differentiator, and it’s probably a big one.
LinkedIn is probably the most important task to set for yourself, if you do nothing else, follow this part.
Sign up, create a complete profile. It’s very much like a terse version of your resume or CV.
Connect with everyone you know, especially people from past positions you’ve held.
If you’ve made some connections via social networking, ask to connect with them as well.
Keep working with your profile until LinkedIn says you’re at 100%. That include recommending people you have connected with.
Recommendations in LinkedIn are kind of a scam. I would never use them as a trust metric. The problem is that in a lot of organizations you can see the “recommend me” peer pressure sweep through a whole organization. If you were to watch LinkedIn every day, you can see it roll right through departments, it’s creepy.
That’s why I suggest only recommending people you no longer work with. Start with ancient history and work your way forward. When it comes right down to it, you probably only want recommendations from the people you most respect because that is the real intent, to build a web of trust.
Jobless or not, it is important here (as on your resume) to show that your skills are current and you are actively doing something. You don’t have to be incorporated or anything that requires a big investment, but you should clearly look like you are not sitting on your hands and that you are available to work.
Next, be ready for the job search once you’ve pulled the trigger and started applying. You can expect the following things from everyone your resume reaches:
You are going to get googled. If someone out there with your name is making your search results look scary, put it in your resume and in your cover letter. “I am not the Chris Horn who made headlines in 2008.”
You are going to get stalked on Myspace. Delete your myspace account, it is lame and not the sort of thing highly skilled professionals have. If you are tempted to argue with me on this one I understand, it’s just too damn bad.
You are going to get stalked on Facebook. Make 120% certain you have all of your Privacy settings locked down so that only people in your best friends forever list can see what you have posted. Facebook privacyFacebook friends list
If you have been social networking on twitter, digg, reddit, etc… make sure it doesn’t make you look like a jerk, like me. @chorn
If you are not currently social/professional networking at all, it is time to start. You don’t have to look like you are the foremost authority in your field, but you should at least look like you are paying attention. If people can see that you are involved in your field, it is a big differentiator.
If there is any other ugly content from you or about you on the Internet, you’d better have your talking points ready now because it’s probably there for good.
Build a presence on the Internet. You don’t have to be social networking whiz, but you really can’t afford to avoid it. Your goal in social networking is to find a balance between fame and reputation. You can work your way to having thosands of followers in all of the major networks, but if they don’t know what you are good at, and that you are looking to get paid to do it, you aren’t really helping yourself.
Here is how I would get myself on the Internet:
Get a domain name. For me, chorn.com is great, scrapbooking-for-life.com would probably not be a good choice. That’s probably because scrapbooking in general sounds like kryptonite to me, some other cool sounding hobby might be ok.
Use GoDaddy as your registrar and for DNS, not for hosting your e-mail or website.
Use Google Apps for your domain for e-mail. They have good directions on how to set it up with GoDaddy. If you can afford the $50/year for the premium level, it’s worth it for the added support and features. E-mail addresses like resume@{my_domain_name_goes_here}.com look professional.
Use Tumblr to host your main webpage. They’ll host the A record for your domain for free. That piece is important!
Tumbr is also a great place for you to start blogging, vlogging and aggregating the rest of your social networking related activity that makes you look like an Internet professional.
In addition to Tumblr, Google Apps for your domain includes some free web page hosting with the Sites feature. Not only should you have your resume here as a PDF, but you should put it up as HTML too. If you don’t know what a PDF or HTML is, learn now. Then you can share your resume as something like http://resume.{my_domain_name_goes_here}.com, which is a really nice touch.
Don’t forget the standards you probably already know:
Have a polished resume. Experienced and skilled people do not have a 2 page resume.
Tell everyone that you are looking for a job and what you are looking for. If you are just pushing your resume around you are just a list of buzz words and a price.
Hopefully your area has a professional networking group or two you can attend and meet potential employeers at.
You can work with placement agencies, but your success there is primarily driven by the number of openings and which buzz words they match up on your resume.
The job market is pretty grim right now. Depending on your skill set it might always be grim if you’re choosey, I don’t know. I do know some top notch people who are without a paycheck right now, and looking for some ways to outshine the rest of the pack. Hopefully this helps, but then again maybe it’s just worth $.02.
This is the time of year where implementing my 2009 budget is in high gear. That means I’ve been making lots of calls to produce and/or service vendors, talking about solutions and asking for quotes. This time around I’ve also implemented a new rule:
A sales organization that does not return your call within 24 hours does not deserve your business.
I’m not a salesperson by trade, but I would argue that in an agressive market that time frame should be closer to 2 hours. I am more than a little amazed at how often this rule is factoring into the early rounds of weeding out vendors. If their sales organzation isn’t responsive, imagine how the support will be!
I’ve worked directly with more than my share of commercial vendors, and the majority of the time things did not go well. I’ve made foolish assumptions such as:
They care.
They know what they are doing.
They tell the truth.
What they’ve said they’re going to do is really what they’ve done.
They realize that I’m the paying customer.
It’s not too difficult to imagine any or all of your ISP/Telephony/Hosting providers in that list. Residential vendors probably fall into this list, more or less every time. I’ve tried to define a process, and follow it. It’s my goal to minimize the time I spend doing other people’s jobs, and increase success overall.
How to make the request:
First and foremost, talk to your rep, your tech contact and make sure they can actually deliver on your request. Hopefully they have request forms and/or a process of their own.
Document the complete detail of the request as if you had to do it yourself.
Don’t assume that any standards or jargon you use is defined the same way by the vendor. Culture trumps facts.
Include all technical details.
Assume that the work will be done by someone who could care less whether or not it is done correctly, and is not qualified to to the work.
Include any necessary timing.
Unfortunately you really can’t make anyone work faster than they want to, but setting timing sets expectations.
Include the tests required to verify correctness.
If you don’t define success, the vendor will define it for you, to their advantage.
E-Mail the request to the account rep, CC: liberally.
Include any and every previous e-mail thread even distantly related to the request.
Assume that the person doing the work is not privy to any conversations you’ve had with the rep.
Ask for an update every 2-5 days as appropriate.
Once you are notified the request is complete:
When you are notified the request is complete:
Run the tests yourself and verify that it is correct.
If any tests fail:
Let the account rep know immediately.
Ask for a new, appropriate time line.
Ask for an escalation path, including names, phone #s if you don’t already have a list.
Escalate early and nicely.
Failed tests put you back to the beginning of the process.
Escalate higher and a little less nicely each time you iterate because of failure.
