Brand Love Hate

Know How Much You Want to Make

When speaking with job seekers about opportunities on my team, the discussion may turn to compensation, especially if it's going well and I'm trying to get a sense of their requirements.

Sometimes this part of the interview is fine, and the candidates share their current compensation and/or their ideal salary moving forward.  But often, it quickly gets confusing and frustrating.

Some answers I have heard are:

"I didn't think salary would be discussed in a first-round interview."

"I would like to be paid based on the value you expect me to provide to the company."

"Career services told me to not share a salary number in an interview."

"Oh, I hate that question." OR "Oh, that's the dreaded question."

"I'm open to whatever."

It's hard to totally blame candidates for these answers, as the Web is filled with similar advice that basically guides people interviewing for jobs to avoid or deflect questions about salary.

I think that's bad advice.  As a hiring manager, I want a potential new employee that understands and can express the value he or she can bring to the team.  Being coy and avoiding tough questions comes off as a lack of confidence, and even a lack of preparation for the interview. Why do you "hate the question," because you don't believe you can do the job?

While I understand that most job seekers don't want to turn an interview - especially one early in the process - into a salary negotiation, I want candidates to be able to clearly communicate how much they want to make, or have been making. If they flounder with that question, I definitely wonder why they weren't prepared for that discussion, and what else they might be struggling with.

Don't Send Thank-you Notes

One of the most dangerous things a job seeker can do after an interview is send a thank-you note or letter.  After already opening yourself up to an employer, you're creating another opportunity for criticism, but this time you have no control of the situation, and no opportunity to answer.  While the purported benefits of the thank-you note include letting the employer know you want the job, I think the risks outweigh the benefits.  A recruiter or hiring manager may think you're great, but a terrible thank-you note could change his or her mind very quickly, or at least call into question whether you are the best candidate.  I also highly doubt that a strong thank-you note ever helped someone overcome a lackluster interview, so if you had a good conversation with a company, why risk it?  Here are some of the problems I have seen, almost all of which warrant removing the candidate from the list of finalists:

• Having typographical and/or grammatical errors
• Using IM language ("u" instead of "you," "ur" instead of "you are")
• Misunderstanding the job, the product or the company
• Becoming a rambling mess and/or bringing up unrelated topics

If you must write a thank-you note or letter, it must be 100 percent error-free.  It has to kick butt.  It has to make you look better than you did in the interview, not worse.  Not even a little bit worse.  So if you are brave and want to take this risk, spend time on it - even sleep on it before sending.  And keep it very short and to the point - many of the examples I've looked at online are way too long.  Here's my stab:

Susan:

Thanks for taking time to meet with me today - I know you're incredibly busy.  It was great to learn more about the Account Manager position.  Based on what you shared, I feel like I would be a good fit and could really contribute to your team.  Please let me know if I can answer any additional questions.

Thanks again for your time,

Jason

I'm not saying it's perfect (I'm saying don't do this at all), but it meets my new criteria for these things:

1. Short
2. No errors
3. No new topics

Let me know if I'm crazy, or if you have any other good examples.

New Series of Posts - The Job Search

I have been hiring a lot recently and, along the way, have seen a number of things that job seekers think are good ideas, yet those decisions have not helped them at all.  I wanted to share the details because my thoughts generally go against the job search advice I seem to find on the Web and at campus career centers.  So I basically want to find out if I'm crazy.  Also, I'm hopeful that some of it - even if you choose to do the opposite - will prove helpful.  I'm going to tag the posts with "job search" so you can find them all and judge for yourself.

A Reason Not to Use AOL Mail to Send Out Your Resume

Today I received a resume via e-mail for one of the openings at my company. At the bottom of the well-written e-mail cover letter was the following footer message tagged on by AOL (which owns TMZ):

The Famous, the Infamous, the Lame - in your browser.

Get the TMZ Toolbar Now!

A word of advice to job seekers - use Gmail or spend $50 for the year to get e-mail at your own domain. It's worth the time and/or investment to make a good first impression.

Who is this Gen Y?

Yes, someone finally has defended Generation Y! In a recent post on his blog, Thom Singer says something long overdue - the portrayals of Gen Y are "phooey!"

I've been collecting articles and white papers written about Gen Y for months to try to get some consistent sense of the group's motivations and expectations when it comes to work. However, I became frustrated with what I found because the content was so contrary to my own experiences working with Gen Y employees. One that I have kept starred for this post is an article from Fortune about how UPS is "training the untrainable Gen Yers." Along with that quote, I marked these as bogus (emphasis added):

"Much derided as a group of upstart technophiles of little work ethic and even less loyalty, Gen Yers aren't exactly a perfect fit for Big Brown. In fact, it's hard to imagine a worse match."

"But if there's one group that isn't down to be engineered, it's Generation Y, people who can't even be bothered to use punctuation, let alone memorize anything."

Wow, I really couldn't believe these and other such condescending lines in the story. I really expected some 24-year-old superstar at Deloitte or JPMorgan or even UPS to write in the following week with a message like Singer's - phooey! But no such note came (or was published), so I was left thinking:

• All I've been reading is true - Gen Yers read this article and just agreed.
• Why am I expecting a group as clearly lazy as Gen Y to write a letter?

Neither of those thoughts are true, and you know how I figured it out? By working and communicating with Gen Y employees rather than reading absurd articles and generalizations.  Two examples:

I currently employ an intern who is finishing her final year of college, and is eyeing graduate school, while working close to 24 hours per week for my company. She has a great work ethic, is incredibly professional for 21, and genuinely wants to help the company however she can - marketing, client services, sales, whatever. She jumps at opportunities to learn new things, take on new projects and work extra hours. I guess she forgot to read the white paper about how she's supposed to ask for more money and demand that her role be perfectly defined?

Another Gen Yer, this one a friend of the family, graduated from college in 2006 and is trying hard to make it on her own in New York City. She still is figuring out exactly what she wants to do (uh oh, sounding like Y?), but is working hard at a job she cares about. With two affluent parents, I suppose she missed the article about how she's supposed to run home to Mom and Dad rather than "pay her dues" in the big city?

I'm not saying that all of the supposed attributes of Gen Y are false - there absolutely are generational differences that affect how people work and how companies can recruit and retain them. But the generalizations are garbage and, as Thom says, Gen Yers need to stand up for themselves. I think they are - by how they work and act and communicate.

But what do I know? I'm just a cynical Gen Xer.

Client Service is Branding

Every interaction with a customer or potential customer is a brand experience. Regardless of what your advertisements say - if you even have any - it's via real interactions with you and your company that people's opinions of the organization will be shaped. My current clients range from major job boards and Fortune 100 employers to small staffing firms and individual recruiters, so when I hear, "Thanks for taking the time to work with someone like me," I know that I've done my job and made the most of that branding opportunity.

Conversely, every missed connection, every neglected e-mail, every customer blown off as "not important enough" is a ding in that person's perception of not just me but my entire company. Working with the "impossible" client - while often hard as hell - is not a joke. It's an opportunity to break through with a detractor and even convert a negative brand perception to the positive.

Word-of-mouth marketing (big surprise) is not exclusively positive. At a recent trade show, I watched two recruiters from a huge company walk away from a vendor's booth shaking their heads and essentially laughing at the presenter. What do you think they told their team upon returning to the office? No matter how great that company's product may be, or how slick its sell sheets are, it took a brand hit that day. Those two ladies cared about how they were treated for those three minutes - that was the brand experience - and nothing else.

Personal Branding is Not About Being Famous

Steve Rubel has a nice post and Ad Age link today on personal branding. Both made me realize that I disagree with some of the thinking and articles on personal branding because they so often focus on being famous, "A-list" or a Web celebrity. From my experience, you can develop a personal brand with clients, contacts and co-workers without ever being on Google or having "micro fame" - it's about how you carry and express yourself, and how you do business (reputation). That should certainly extend to anything you do online, but building a personal brand is not dependent on having a blog or a digital identity. The consistency in behavior comes first; the digital element is simply a mechanism for its expression to a wider audience.

Federer-Nadal: Greatest Rivalry in Sports?

I watched most of the Wimbledon final today between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal and it was a great match. Federer is ranked number one in the world, Nadal number two, and they have faced off in four of the last six "grand slam" tennis finals. Nadal dominates the clay-court French Open and Federer owns grass-court Wimbledon, winning the last five championships there. In the ATP points standings, Nadal is more than 2,000 points ahead of American Andy Roddick in third place. That's dominant.

Sports fans eat up rivalries - someone to love and someone to hate - and the ongoing Federer-Nadal battle is a great one. Today it looked like Nadal might actually topple Federer on grass, but the Spaniard lost the fifth set to Roger, 6-2. The "never won on clay/grass" dynamic makes this an even greater rivalry, probably the best in sports. Because with the Boston Red Sox getting swept in the MLB playoffs (2005), missing the playoffs altogether (2006) and dominating the American League East (2007) since 2004, their rivalry with the NY Yankees has been pretty quiet. Plus, the two teams with the best records in the NBA in 2007 did not make the finals (and could not as they are in the same conference). And the Woods-Mickelson or Woods-anybody rivalry in golf has never really come about. So let's watch tennis, right?

That probably won't happen. Other than the US Open, tennis majors are held outside the good old USA, meaning they typically are on TV here at 10:00 a.m. or earlier, or are tape delayed. Also, a Swiss vs. a Spaniard? Without an American in the mix, it's unlikely that Federer-Nadal will become like Borg-McEnroe in the United States. I really don't think it will become a big deal until one of the champs finally loses on his fave surface. But they are both dominant, young players (Federer is 25 and Nadal is 21), so this battle potentially has something else that makes rivalries great - longevity.

Goodbye Mr. Wizard

An icon of my '80s childhood, Mr. Wizard, died today. Some things I'll always remember:

• Inertia
• Radiation vs. convection vs. conduction
• Ice won't overflow a cup of water when it melts

Here's the intro - Nickelodeon, can we please have a marathon this weekend?

Is It No Longer OK to be Computer Illiterate?

"But you said you would help me! Would you help me, please?!"

Those were the words of a man checking in at JFK just after me on a recent business trip. His attire said "businessman" but his tone said "desperately afraid of computers." JetBlue at JFK now requires passengers to check in via their kiosks rather than with the ticket desk personnel. The process (to me) is incredibly simple - swipe any credit card for the kiosk to get your name, confirm the flight destination and number of bags, then take your bags and the freshly printed boarding pass to a human employee.

But the man behind me in line was very intimidated by the kiosks and was literally begging the one JetBlue employee standing by for help. Her job is not tech support, but rather kiosk police - she makes sure no luddites try to get in line without first making friends with the kiosk. So as the passenger whined for help, she tried to shout him instructions while directing other customers to their own PCs.  The entire experience was very uncomfortable, and as I tried to both watch and walk to my gate, I wondered - is it even OK to be computer illiterate anymore?

This reality at JFK told me no - anyone paying to fly JetBlue is expected to be able to use a kiosk to check in, without tech support. In business it's not that different - if an employee can't forward an e-mail or set up an appointment in Outlook, that reflects poorly on his or her personal brand. Almost every job description includes "proficiency in Microsoft Office," but what does that really mean? And is an expectation of computer literacy fair? In business, yes, but in life?