The First Thing That People in Transition Need to Do Is to Lose Their Minds

Yes you need to change your wiring and learn a new way to land a job these days. It is the New Normal.

People in transition try to figure out their new life by what worked for them when they were successfully working and how they got a job in the past.

If they have been working for 10 years at their previous job they may have found it in a newspaper. Think that works today?

Job hunting is the farthest thing away from working unless you know how to turn your job skills into knowing how to market yourself.

I had a coffee the other day with a person newly arrived in the out of work game. I’ve been out of the game for a long time. It was at a Starbucks I really like. Right across from the Mission in San Juan Capistrano. People were at restaurants for a late lunch and the Swallows Inn had a number of folks at the bar. The Farmer’s Market was starting.

I’ve Been Aged Out Of My Job.

I heard a term the other day that I had never heard before.“I’ve Been Aged Out of My Job.”

I have never heard or thought of that before. Maybe because I work for myself and if I aged out of the business I wouldn’t be writing this.

I have the same internal voice that I did when I was a kid. It never goes away. At times the volume goes up or down. It always goes forward even with bumps in the road.

Sure, I have heard about hiring biases for older folks which is totally true but you shouldn’t let companies define your age or your journey. You can always turn your knowledge into a job by working for yourself. You only have to be comfortable with jumping off tall buildings without a parachute and hoping you catch one before you hit the ground.

Not for the faint of heart.

Career Tips for 2015

Yes a New Year is upon us. Happened faster than we thought. What else is new?

I think that there will be a lot of changes in the workplace in the coming year. There will be a shortage of talent especially top notch digital talent. Today, Digital Marketers, Digital Strategy folks, SEO talent, and programmers are all very hard to find.

If you don’t have those skills acquire as much game as you can learn.

More people will be moving around this year than ever before. Some companies will portray them as opportunists. Remember companies killed company loyalty, not employees.

So here are some career tips for the coming year.

Job Hunting In Today’s Ad World.

I have been doing a lot of recruiting and talent sourcing these days.  Another way to leverage my network. Still hunting and connecting which I love to do but in another way.

The ad world has changed a lot and at the same time some stayed the same. One thing that has changed is that if there is financial pain at an agency the cuts are deep.  Even Junior people lose their jobs. Companies don’t even wait to Friday to let people go.   In the past youth were sheltered and protected more.  That has changed.  And yet young people receive very little advice on how to build a career in the New Normal.  Trust me the era of the Mad Men is long gone.

That is why everyone in an agency has to be ready for change.  I have written a couple of blogs on the subject called Are You Ready to Get Fired and Why Ad People Need to Market Themselves Better.

One thing that hasn’t changed is the agencies don’t hire for themselves; they hire for their clients. It may even be more important these days.  That means they look at your resume and LinkedIn profile with the brain scan of “What will the client think?”  “Can I merchandise them to the client?”  “What experience can I sell?”  Nobody is taking career chances these days.  Close in horse shoes doesn’t even get points these days.  Your horseshoe needs to be wrapped around the pole.

This means that first and foremost you need to focus on your experience.  Some resumes are chock full of job duties but have limited category experience and brand names that the reader knows. You won’t be there to explain your experience to them.  Think of doing a human search on your resume.  I am going to be scanning for job title and keywords like healthcare or whatever.  I am not going to be searching managed budgets and timelines.  Of course you did that but that is not what catches my eye.  I can’t sell duties initially; but I can sell brands and experience.

You see in the New Normal getting a job at every level is like going through the eye of the needle.  You have to expand the eye of that needle by making yourself most marketable.

The same thing applies to your LinkedIn profile.  It’s all about the keywords.  It is all about how searchable you are.  Job hunting is about being found.  It is about pull not push.  You get pull if you push out the right key words.

I also see LinkedIn profiles that are almost sterile.  As arid as the desert the person will be going through if they happen to lose their jobs.  No time to have a strong LinkedIn profile?  You may enter a land where you have too much time on your hands.

I have had many great bosses during my career. Boy they were smart.  One great talent master at JWT taught me this.

It is all about the brands that you worked on.  The bigger the brand the more marketable you were.

Here is how I apply brand to careers today.  I worked with my friend at JWT.  That is a big brand.  Ten years of working at JWT in Toronto and Chicago has given me a halo event to today. The average size of an agency in the U.S. is seven people so not everyone gets to work at a multinational agency

However I have met people in many small agency markets that are working on great brands. Make sure those brand names scream out on your resume and LinkedIn profile.  Include logos of those brands on your resume.  Make yourself easy to be sold.  You will take care of the rest.

You can connect with Hank on LinkedIn:

Follow his updates on twitter: @hankblank

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Watch Why Young People Shouldn’t Try to Find A Job

Why Agencies Shouldn’t Respond to Client RRP’s

Does Cold Calling Work?

Life in the New Normal is Just Like Playing Hopscotch.

This is a recent blog that I wrote for Marketing Executives Network Group or MENG.

Remember playing hopscotch? It was easy to play.  All you needed was some chalk. Maybe you stole it from school.

Life in the New Normal is very much the same game.

Just like hopscotch it all depends when tile you land on.

Just like in hopscotch in the New Normal many people have one foot tied behind their backs. A balancing act of intention and resolve but precariousness.

Some companies are hiring and some companies are still firing.

It all depends on what tile you step on.

Stepping on the getting hired tile can be very difficult especially if you are over 50.  Some are younger than Baby Boomers yet many people think they are out of the game.  I am glad that I stopped looking for work in the Old Normal way a decade ago.  I learned new games.

I always thought that getting through the eye of the needle was a tough parable.

Getting hired if you are a long term person in transition is even harder.

The irony is that the companies that fire people hire people slowly but they want you to like them on Facebook instantly. Please like me they say.  Here is a contest.  Here is a game you can play to win a gift certificate. Here is how you connect with us.

Many companies are sitting on piles of cash because you buy their products.

Companies don’t look too often into the firing mirror.  Some wouldn’t see a reflection.

In the New Normal I hear from people that are killer on social media.  They teach on how to harness its power.

However they send out emails saying they need work.  They aren’t landing on the right tiles.

In the depth of the melting of the world in the fall of 2008 as the financial markets crumbled I would be travelling to speak on Networking Your Way to New Business.  I could have been in Des Moines, Duluth, or Oklahoma City.  The world melted on the coasts first and not in those parts of the world. Business was tough. I came home and told my personal witch I felt like a fraud. “We teach what we need to know,” she said.  That is why she is my personal witch. I have lent her from time to time to other people who need a little brain alignment.

I spoke recently at a local college about how on why people shouldn’t find a job.  I had a follow up coffee in my hood with a young chap who was born on the other side of the globe.  My sister was born in Beirut.  He had some friends in Dubai and was heading there. He was younger than my kids.  He asked me to connect him with somebody in my LinkedIn network from that part of the world.  I never met her but she reads my blogs from time to time.  She connected him with another contact  in her LinkedIn  game and he got a job with a Multinational Agency in her part of the world.   He is probably 23.That is how Hopscotch is played today in the New Normal. Some people have one hand tied behind their backs and some people are free and growing.

It’s your turn to hop in the New Normal.

You can connect with Hank Blank on Linkedin.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/hankblankcom

Follow his updates on twitter: @hankblank

Like Blank and Associates on Facebook

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