#33: Guerrilla Marketing for Job Hunters 2.0

Guerrilla Marketing for Job Hunters 2.0: 1,001 Unconventional Tips, Tricks, and Tactics for Landing Your Dream Job, by Jay Conrad Levinson and David E. Perry (Hoboken, NJ: Jay Wiley & Sons, 2009)

Summary:
"Do you know why Jay Conrad Levinson and David Pery use the word guerrilla in the titles of all their books and talks? The answer is that guerrillas pursue conventional goals in unconventional ways. Guerrillas ... have a better perspective on reality that their conventional opponents who tend to pursue their dreams by the book.

"Never before have guerrillas had such a competitive advantage. In the job market, doing things 'by the book' is a fairly certain path to disaster and frustration -- unless you operate according to the principles and insights in this book. This book ushers you into the land of conventional goals attained, to reality as it is, rather than as it was. It guides you to a new world that remains unknown to other job hunters -- a world in which guerrillas reign supreme. It has been said that in a dog-eat-dog economy, the Doberman is king. We're in that kind of economy right now -- and the guerrilla is king.

"It takes a lot to b a true guerrilla, and this book provides a lot to accomplish that goal. Wanting to be a guerrilla is part of the job, but the heavy lifting of becoming a guerrilla is is being a master of details. Where do you learn those details? The answer is in the pages ahead. It's not necessarily an easy answer, but it's a correct answer.

"You absolutely must be aware of how the job market has changed dramatically just in the last decade. This is not your father's generation; it is yours. But it only belongs to you if you have the wisdom and awareness of the guerrilla. You'll gain those invaluable attributes if you soak up that wisdom and become aware of today's realities. This book was written both to help you open doors to jobs others dream about and to show you how to get one.

"To many, getting the job of their dreams is close to impossible. But guerrillas are experts at learning the art of the impossible. Their knowledge of what is really happening in the job market transforms the impossible into the probable. Lightning has been captured in these pages. Minds will be changed. Lives will be changed. Light will illuminate the way.

"Can all that really happen with just a book? It's a beginning. If you're not a guerrilla job hunter, we wish you success, but if you are a guerrilla job hunter, we predict success." -from the Forward by Darren Hardy

Table of Contents:

• Chapter 1 - Why You Need to Become a Guerrilla Job Hunter: The New Global America

Part I - Your Guerrilla Mind

• Chapter 2 - Personal Branding Guerrilla Style: Shape Up Your Brand with Attitude
• Chapter 3 - Your Guerrilla Job-Hunting Strategy: Think Like a General -- Work Like a Sergeant
• Chapter 4 - Your Research Plan: Research -- The Guerrilla's Competitive Edge

Part II - Weapons That Make You a Guerrilla

• Chapter 5 - Resume Writing and Cover Letter Boot Camp: How to Overhaul Your Personal Marketing Materials
• Chapter 6 - Twenty-First Century Digital Weapons: If You Build It, They Will Come for You ...
• Chapter 7 - Recruiternomics 2.0: How to Work Your Job Search Commandos

Part III - Tactics That Make You a Guerrilla

• Chapter 8 - Guerrilla Networking: A Radical Approach
• Chapter 9 - Fearless Warm Calling: A Fresh Alternative
• Chapter 10 - Creative Ways to Find a Job: Breakthrough Strategies

Part IV - Your Guerrilla Job-Hunting Campaign

• Chapter 11 - 3 Sample Campaigns: The Force Multiplier Effect in Action
• Chapter 12 - Hand-to-Hand Combat: Winning the Face-to-Face Interview
• Chapter 13 - Negotiating the Deal: How to Bargain with Confidence
• Chapter 14 - Ready Aye Ready

My Take:
So, as you may have gathered from the above, if you're offended by a surfeit of either military analogies or plain old over-the-top gung-ho marketing stuff, this ain't the job search book for you. OTOH, if you can set that aside, there's actually quite a lot of good advice in this book -- enough that I've now borrowed it twice from the library, and just may end up breaking down and buying my own copy.

Believe me -- even before this, my latest appearance in the job search Olympics (cripes, Levinson & Perry have me doing it now!), I've read a ton of job search and car. At the moment, I've also got two of the Knock 'Em Dead guides out, which are OK, but ... frankly, I can only look at so many different resume formats and sample cover letters before my eyes glass over. Read enough of this stuff while you're what yesterday's interviewer tactfully called "unencumbered," and it's like reading a steady diet of What to Expect books while you're pregnant: try to follow everyone's advice to the letter, and you'll only make yourself crazy. But this book's different. Yes, the analogies and some of the advice is a bit out there, especially for some fields (like, um, higher ed administration?) So you take it with a grain of salt. The book still contains some excellent, in-depth information about how to successfully, effectively use the internet in your job search (in brief, Google is your friend when it comes to research, but don't rely too heavily on the job boards). There's also some outstanding advice on negotiating an offer, and some good points on questions to ask your interviewer about the company that will help increase the chances of an offer's being put forth. As for some of the other, harder-sell techniques recommended, many don't quite seem like they'd fit in the companies/ industry I'm most familiar with, but hey -- they may indeed be well-suited for marketing or sales positions, and there's no reason the skeptical-but-creative among us can't take and adapt what works, and leave the rest.

#24 - The Adventures of Johnny Bunko

And now, for something completely different: The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need, a graphic (read: manga) book by Daniel H. Pink (New York: Riverhead Books, 2008).

Summary: "Meet Johnny Bunko. He's probably a lot like you. He did what everybody -- parents, teachers, counselors -- told him to do. But now, stuck at a dead-end job, he's begun to suspect that what he thought he knew is just plain wrong. One bizarre night, Johnny meets Diana, the unlikeliest career advisor he's ever seen. Part Cameron Diaz, part Barbara Eden, she reveals to Johnny the six essential lessons for thriving in the world of work."

My take: A quick, entertaining read -- I think I knocked it off in half an hour -- and a good conversation-starter, but calling it "the last career guide you'll ever need" is overreaching a bit.

When we first meet Johnny, he's a stressed-out, not particularly talented accounting drone at the Boggs Corporation. Imagine his surprise when, after picking up take-out from a nearby noodle stand for yet another late night at work, he snaps his chopsticks apart and BLAM! Suddenly, there's a mysterious sprite who calls herself Diana hovering before his eyes. She promises to tell him the secrets of succeeding in the world of work, but there's a catch: he only has six pairs of chopsticks, and once he's used them up, she's done. For each set of chopsticks and each apparition, she reveals one lesson:

1. There is no plan. As Diana explains,

"You can't sit there at age 21 -- or even 31 or 41 or 51 -- and map it all out. You may think that X will lead to Y, and Y will lead to Z ... but it never works that way. ... Life isn't an algebra problem. Well, actually, it's like an algebra problem painted by Salvador Dali. X might lead to W and W might lead to the color blue. And the color blue might lead to a chicken quesadilla. ... It's nice to believe that you can map out every step ahead of time and end up where you want. But that's a fantasy. The world changes. Ten years from now, your job might be in India. Your industry might not even exist. And you'll change, too. You might discover a hidden talent. You might fall in love and move to Tahiti. ... You need to make smart choices. But you can make career decisions for two different types of reasons. You can do something for instrumental reasons -- because you think it's going to lead to something else, regardless of whether you enjoy it or it's worthwhile ... or you can do something for fundamental reasons -- because you think it's inherently valuable, regardless of what it may or may not lead to. The dirty little secret is that instrumental reasons usually don't work. Things are too complicated, too unpredictable. You never know what's going to happen. So you end up stuck. The most successful people -- not all of the time, but most of the time -- make decisions for fundamental reasons. ... They're not fools. They're enlightened pragmatists."


2. Think strengths, not weaknesses. "The key to success is to steer around your weaknesses and focus on your strengths. Successful people don't try too hard to improve what they're bad at. They capitalize on what they're good at."
   
3. It's not about you. "It's about your customer. It's about your client. Use your strengths, yes, but remember ... you're here to serve -- not to self-actualize. ... Of course you matter. But the most successful people improve their own lives by improving others' lives. They help their customer solve its problem. They give their client something it didn't know it was missing. That's where they focus their energy, talent, and brainpower. Outward, not inward."
   
4. Persistence trumps talent. "What's the most powerful force in the universe? ... Compound interest. ... It builds on itself. Over time, a small amount of money becomes a large amount of money. Persistence is similar. A little bit improves performance, which encourages greater persistence, which improves performance even more. And on and on it goes. Lack of persistence works the same way -- only in the opposite direction. ... The world is littered with talented people who didn't persist, who didn't put in the hours, who gave up too early, who thought they could ride on talent alone. Meanwhile, people who might have less talent pass them by. ... That's why intrinsic motivation is so important. ... The more intrinsic motivation you have, the more likely you are to persist. The more you persist, the more likely you are to succeed."
   
5. Make excellent mistakes. "Too many people spend their time avoiding mistakes. They're so concerned about being wrong, about messing up, that they never try anything -- which means they never do anything. Their focus is avoiding failure, but that's actually a crummy way to achieve success. The most successful people make spectacular mistakes -- huge, honking screwups. Why? They're trying to do something big. But each time they make a little mistake, they get a little better and move a little closer to excellence."
   
6. Leave an imprint. "Those other five lessons are crucial. But truly successful people deploy them in the service of something larger than themselves. They leave their companies, their communities, their families a little better than before. This isn't just career advice, buys. In some ways, this is what it means to be alive."
   

Over the next few weeks, as Johnny heeds Diana's advice, he finds himself on special assignment to the marketing department, and then tasked with coming up with a fundamentally new concept for Bogg's newest client, a shoe company.

Though I didn't exactly find it life-changing, I did enjoy the book -- and to its credit, the manga format does make it considerably quicker and less pretentious than many of the "how to succeed in business" fad books du jour that I've encountered. I'll be interested to see if this one takes off in a big way.

#88 - Never Eat Alone

OK, time to whittle down the non-fiction stack a bit. I'm currently reading Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time, by Keith Ferrazzi (Currency, 2005). It's been on my list so long I've forgotten how it got there; for all I know, it's something I saw in an airport and found intriguing. Interesting, as it's essentially a book on networking, that it percolated up just as I'm kicking off my job search in earnest. Sometimes karma works in mysterious ways.

Ferrazzi's premise, drawing from his own experience as a working-class but ambitious kid from a small Pennsylvania town who nonetheless attended elite schools, graduated from Yale and then Harvard, and achieved impressive success in the corporate sector, can be summed up as follows:

"[I]n some very specific ways life, like golf, is a game, and that the people who know the rules, and know them well, play it best and succeed. And the rule in life that has unprecedented power is that the individual who knows the right people, for the right reasons, and utilizes the power of these relationships, can become a member of the 'club,' whether he started out as a caddie or not."

From there, he goes on to outline principles for building strong professional relationships (a/k/a your network) and (presumably) therefore achieving whatever goals you've set for yourself. Specifically, these principles are as follows:

1. Don't keep score. Ferrazzi argues that if he had to sum up the key to success in a single word, it would be "generosity." You need to both accept it and ask for it. You also need to be willing to introduce your contacts to each other. Here, he cites a former prep school headmaster who, in his words, "build an entire institution on his asking people not 'How can you help me?' but 'How can I help you?'"
2. What's your mission? According to the book, the folks most likely to succeed are those who not only have goals, but write them down and build a concrete action plan that will get them there. He further breaks this down into the following steps: finding your passion (both by looking inside yourself and seeking friends' and colleagues' advice); putting your goals down on paper (ideally, both a three-year goal, and then three-month and one-year mini-goals that will help you get there); and identifying people who can help you on your way to each of these goals.
3. Build it before you need it. In Ferrazzi's words, "people who have the largest circle of contacts, mentors, and friends know that you must reach out to others long before you need anything at all." The piece that really spoke to me in this chapter was the following:

"Too often, we get caught up efficiently doing ineffective things, focusing solely on the work that will get us through the day. The idea isn't to find oneself another environment tomorrow -- be it a new job or a new economy -- but to be constantly creating the environment and community you want for yourself, no matter what may occur.

"Creating such a community, however, is not a short-term solution or one-off activity only to be used when necessary. The dynamics of building a relationship is necessary incremental. You can only truly gain someone's trust and commitment little by little over time."

4. The genius of audacity. Frankly, networking (oops, sorry, relationship building) doesn't come naturally to anyone ... but on the other hand, "nothing in [your] life has created opportunity like a willingness to ask." In other words, you need to introduce yourself to new people, even if it's uncomfortable and you'll probably get rejected sometimes.
5. The networking jerk. Don't be That Guy (or Gal) who loves to schmooze and gossip, but treats underlings poorly and/or is only in it for what they can get.
   
6. Do your homework. Pretty self-explanatory; essentially, find out as much as you can about people before you meet them, and find some common ground ASAP afterwards.

There's much more -- the above notes only take me about halfway through the book -- but all in all, it's an excellent reference and provides some good food for thought and action, whether you're on a job-hunt like I am or just interested in such stuff.

#69 - Winning Nice

OK, not only are all my library books save one due back tomorrow, but if I don't catch up on blogging soon, I'm going to forget what I read ... which kinda defeats the purpose.

So, my 69th book of the year was Winning Nice: How to Succeed in Business and Life Without Waging War, by Dawna Stone (Center Street, 2007). I have a weekness for books about leadership and management even when I'm not on the job market (yeah, I really know how to have a good time, I know), which is why this one jumped out at me. Overall, it was a better than average specimen of the genre. The author, a successful entrepreneur and executive (among other things, she founded Her Sports + Fitness magazine -- now Women's Running, and was the winner of The Apprentice: Martha Stewart), argues that not only does one not need to be an S.O.B. or a bee-with-an-itch to be successful, but being a nice girl (or guy) actually reaps significant professional dividends.

The book is divided into two main sections: "Build Your Foundation," which outlines seven interpersonal skills key to personal success and making a difference to others, and "Build Your Future," which discusses how to apply these skills in one's own personal and professional life. Specifically, the skills she champions are as follows:

1. Believe in yourself - i.e., believe that you can truly make a difference.
2. Learn to communicate, because essentially, all interaction is communication, and the higher you go in your career, the more of it you need to do.
3. Give recognition. The key to genuine, inspiring leadership (not to mention retaining the best employees) is effective recognition.
4. Take an interest in others -- treat everyone as a potential customer, client, or friend, because hey, you never know.
5. Help others help themselves, whether that's by encouragement, mentoring, or just plain listening.
   
6. Be part of the team -- go the extra mile, do what you say you will, and show some enthusiasm.
7. Exude professionalism. Here I was afraid this would be all about dressing for success, but it's not -- appearance and attire are mentioned, of course, but so are punctuality (which won points with me right there), communication, and sensitivity.
   

Once you've mastered everything in the tool box, Stone urges readers to kick it up a notch by doing the following:

1. Find your passion. This seems to flow logically from believing in yourself; if you do this, you can and should find a line of work that you truly love and are committed to.
2. Promote yourself. This isn't about (or advocating) bragging, so much as communication ... which darned well better include making sure your bosses know what you've done and that you want to advance beyond your current position one day. I'd personally always thought this was obvious, but it's actually not -- especially in the non-profit sector, where I work -- but that's a whole 'nother conversation.
3. Learn the art of managing nice. This one's a bit tough to summarize, but basically -- be approachable, set clear goals, and build trust.
   
4. Become a great leader. Stone argues that what sets true leaders apart from mere managers is "the vision thing" -- seeking out opportunities, changing the rules, and so on.
5. Build lasting relationships. Again, this seems like a pretty clear parallel with taking an interest in others. Networking may be a cliche, but it really is the name of the game.
6. Embrace your customers and clients. The book argues that we all have customers, whether they're people who walk into our store, our employees, advertisers, vendors, and so on. Whoever they are, if you don't make their experience a good one, they won't want to do business with you.
7. Give back. Just as you should ideally do something for a living that you're passionate about, you should find a cause outside your primary job to support, with time and/or money.
8. Be your best (yeah, this one sounds a little Oprah-ish): Focus on what you really want to do, and put in the effort you need to do it well.
   

As is often the case with books of this ilk, much of this isn't rocket science -- but Stone does include enough details and anecdotes to both make for interesting reading and provide some useful ideas for most early- and mid-career professionals. Definitely worth a read, though probably not a hardcover purchase.

A Brace of Business Books

So much for this not being a particularly personal blog; somehow, it seems all the weird quirks of my personality are leaking out in what I read. Today, you get to see yet another of my strange habits: my weakness for self-help/ "how to" books. Once upon a time, when I was young and (more) foolish, I really did believe that each one I checked out of the library or picked up at the corner bookstore was Really It -- this was The One that was finally going to help me lose weight, make more friends, succeed professionally, you name it. (Several years ago, Jennifer Niesslein poked some less-than-completely gentle fun at the self-help industry that promotes these attitudes in her book Practically Perfect in Every Way: My Misadventures Through the World of Self-Help and Back -- which I found pretty amusing, at least until I got fed up with the author's recurring comments about how her own life really is the next best thing to perfect that I opted not to finish it.)

Anyway, those optimistic-bordering-on-delusional days are long past now, but I do still enjoy a good self-helper now and then -- mostly as cultural artifacts, to see how the authors define problems or conflicts, who they seem to be targeting, and what they're proposing in terms of solutions. Soo ... without further ado, I bring you:

#13 - Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, by David Allen. OK, yet another true confession: I'm a big sucker for these "how to manage your time, your work, and your life" advice books. I love, love, love me some lists, calendars, and spreadsheets. I get a rush from my Saturday morning housecleaning blitz. I start my workday with a cup of coffee in one hand and a to-do list in the other, and probably end it with a revised, color-coded, prioritized to-do list and an empty but still unwashed cup. (Yes, my friends & family remind me often that there's a word for people like this.)

But no matter how many time-management/ organization books and articles I read, I can't seem to help myself; a new one crosses my path, and before I know it, I'm a few chapters in. This one was a good start, if you're looking for some basic advice on how to manage your time and work, but certainly not the comprehensive life-changing system it purports to be, and of limited use for folks whose work leans heavily toward complex, long-term projects. Allen's main thesis seems to be that if you gather everything that's currently on your radar screen -- projects, paperwork, reading material, stuff to file -- and process it using his decision tree, you'll gain control over your work and reduce your stress level. The decision tree looks something like this:

Is it actionable?

> No -- well, then, do one of the following:

-->Trash it

-->File it for reference

-->Put it in your maybe/ someday tickler file, for possible future action

> Yes -- in that case, will it take less than 2 minutes?

-->If yes, just do it.

--> If no, do one of the following:

---->Delegate it

---->Defer it, for action at some later time

Not rocket science, but the basic premise makes some sense. Allen also offers a few isolated tips that did seem like they'd be broadly applicable. These include using your calendar only for meetings and tasks that really need to be completed on a certain day, rather than for writing and rewriting the same list of things you'd like to do over and over each day when they don't all get done; keeping separate lists of calls you need to make and items on which you're waiting for a response or action from someone else (the former so you can crank through them all when you're near a phone; the latter so you don't lose track of things you've farmed out elsewhere); and keeping your list of action items separate from your reference/ stuff to read file and your maybe/ someday file. I also appreciate that his system can be pretty low-tech; you can use a computer- or PDA-based list and calendar system if you want, but it works just as well with pencil and paper.

IMO, the major shortcoming of Allen's approach is that it doesn't address how one juggles multiple, constantly changing priorities (a hallmark of every place I've ever worked), and doesn't really offer much for the person whose work mostly involves getting assigned lots of complex projects which are defined only in broad terms, and having to figure out the details on their own. To be fair, he does concede the latter point to some extent: there are many project-management guidebooks and software packages out there, most of which are far too technical to be of use to the majority of people who use them, and this book isn't intended to be one. In most middle- to upper-level management positions, however, even after you've weeded out everything that isn't an action item (because it's waiting for someone else's response, reference materials, done and gone in 2 minutes, or relegated to the tickler file) -- you're still left with a long and largely undifferentiated list of actions, and Allen doesn't offer much in the way of how to prioritize these or whether and how to plan the intermediate steps of a longer project (e.g., implement document imaging system) beyond the first "next action" on your list (e.g., search the internet for vendors and prices).

In summary, the book may be useful to someone who's either new to the workforce (or to the white-collar, office-based workforce) or who's totally clueless about time and workflow management, but doesn't really offer much for folks at a higher level and/or who do a lot of project work. 2 out of 5 bookmarks.

#14 - One Person/ Multiple Careers: A New Model for Work/Life Success, by Marci Alboher. Here's another one that would probably be shelved somewhere in the same ball park as the above, based on LoC or DD classification (disclaimer: I am not a librarian), but with a different focus. Specifically, if you have a passion in life that isn't what you do to earn a living, and have mused about finding a way to better integrate the 2, this book is a decent place to start. However, it's short on concrete advice, and what it does offer is probably only realistic for a privileged few. The thesis consists mostly of anecdotes of a variety of people working in what Alboher calls slash careers: a psychotherapist/ violin maker, computer programmer/ theater director, teacher/ male model, lawyer/ minister, and so on. She uses their experiences, coupled with some fairly vague take-home points, to suggest that almost anyone with a passion that's not their day job can create a "slash life" for themselves if they're flexible, determined, and have a touch of entreprenurial spirit.

Certainly an interesting idea, and I can certainly see that if you've been starting to burn out on your 9-to-5, and wishing you could somehow be as excited about your job as you are about your [painting/ dancing/ horseback riding/ insert your hobby here], this book might be the spark you need to start thinking about whether and how that might be possible. And some of the advice did seem fairly broadly applicable; for example, the suggestion that almost everyone can teach, speak, or write about their passion, especially if you start small and for little or no pay; and the illustrations of how several different people kept a hand in a primary job to pay the bills while they got a second off the ground. That said, my own "will it play in Peoria?" test for business/ cultural advice like this is, will it fly for the working class? Alboher, herself an attorney/ writer/ speaker, doesn't really address this point, but I think the answer is no. Granted, she does offer several examples where half of someone's slash is a blue-collar profession: a longshoreman/ filmmaker, police officer/ landscaper, and so on. However, the vast majority of her examples are folks with at least one career that's both lucrative and offers a lot of opportunity for private practice/ self-employment -- law, computer programming, medicine, and so on. And frankly, the few blue collar slashes she includes are not a representative sample of the jobs available to folks without college degrees; they're concentrated in the few remaining bastions of strong unions, overwhelmingly male, and offer/ require extremely flexible schedules. Trust me, as the sister of two firefighter/ housepainter/ bartenders, one of whom can also add / lawyer to that list (yes, you read that correctly), I get how a cop's or firefighter's schedule is very conducive to picking up a second or third job ... but I also don't think it'd work for someone who stocks the shelves at Wal-Mart or cleans bathrooms in the local Econo-Lodge. Heck, I've got a master's degree, and it wouldn't work for me ... my field is pretty much 9-to-5, year-round, and especially if you need health insurance or other benefits, part-time options are pretty darned slim.

All right, that's a bit of a tangent. Bottom line, One Person/ Multiple Careers is a conversation starter, even if that conversation may initially be with yourself. If you're fortunate enough that you either aren't financially dependent on a single full-time job (or more), or work in a field that's not always Mon-Fri 9-5, it's worth considering ... though this book alone won't tell you much about how to get there if you do decide that's what you want. 2 out of 5 bookmarks.