Branding Pivot: The Ladders Moves Away From Only $100,000+ Focus

In my bulk emails this morning, I received an email from The Ladders tagged with the subject line, "Bye-bye!" A quick review noted that they're abandoning their "only $100K+ jobs" focus, instead focusing on operating a curated board. Here's a clip from the email:

We're expanding, and today we say "bye-bye" to helping only those over $100,000 and "hello" to helping all career-minded professionals. TheLadders now takes all salary levels and shows the right jobs to the right person. So while we're saying goodbye to our narrower segmentation, we are not saying "goodbye" to keeping your job search on TheLadders relevant, focused, and targeted.

So, for example, you won't see jobs that pay half (or double) what you're currently making. You won't see jobs outside of your field — we still won't show sales jobs to finance professionals, or marketing jobs to technologists. And we won't be letting in scammy jobs, work-from-home schemes, or commission-only opportunities — we'll still be vetting every job and every recruiter before we allow them into our community.

I never liked the $100K+ positioning myself. I always felt like it put too much emphasis on numbers and not enough emphasis on the quality of the candidate or the job. My sense is that now, when the economy is so crappy and the job outlook so bleak, that finding any fish in the opportunity pond is a hunt. Still, other than a slight scent of despair, do you really feel like this expansion of their audience does anything for you? If you were an established customer under the old $100K+ umbrella, do you feel a greater sense of connection now that they have expanded their marketing circle?

An Amusing Look at Unusual Resumes

I've written about unusual resumes on several occasions. Here's a post with some amusingly unusual resume examples. It's probably worth noting that most of these are creative people seeking creative jobs... marketing is creative, right?

http://www.businessinsider.com/insanely-creative-resumes-2011-6?op=1

Whom you should hire at a Start-up: A Repost and An Obeservation

Earlier this week, there was an interesting post on Techcrunch. I always like these types of posts when I come across them. Whom Should You Hire at a Startup? (Attitude over Aptitude) by Mark Suster is another post from a VC and former entrepreneur on how to look at the problem of building a strong team in a start-up. It's a short, easy read and I recommend going through it before you move through the rest of this post.

The area that I wanted to explore is one that is touched on in his second and fifth recommendations:

2. Find people to “punch above their weight class”
5. Attitude over Aptitude

If you add up some of his statements like

It means that many management teams I know feel the need to hire people who have “done it before” and frankly many VCs encourage this. It’s a mistake. When you hire somebody too early who has already “done it” you often find somebody that is less motivated in tough times, less willing to be scrappy (as many startups need to be), more “needy” and less mentally flexible / willing to change their way of thinking...

You said, “Eff experience. I want to know whether you can deliver. If you can, you’re golden. You’ll go a long way. If you can’t – you’re toast. Are you up for it?” It’s Tristan Walker of FourSquare. They hired him when he was an MBA. He had no right asking for a senior biz dev role at one of the hottest companies in the US. But he was ready to punch above his weight class. And he pushed for it.

You might wind up with the take-away of, "don't hire tired experienced people, hire hungry inexperienced people." If that was your take-away, I recommend that you read his other post from his blog, Who Should you Hire at a Startup? This post presents a more comprehensive look at the role of talent, capability and experience, and provides some additional insights.

The Reality of Experiences That Make You Tired
While it's easy to see students coming out of school with a hunger and a naive sense of excitement, most of us that have struggled in difficult employment environments understand that there are a lot of pressures that can wear you down, weigh on your sense of enthusiasm, and make you a bit cynical. After all, if everything at work was exciting, challenging growth, you probably wouldn't be motivated to do something different. And when you interview, this is one of the challenges you often face in positioning yourself -- you don't want to seem like a grumpy curmudgeon that simply can't get along with the people you work with, but you need to position some clear reasons why you're considering this change. But regardless of how you present it, people want smiles in interviews and you're carrying frustrations.

So here you have the "Attitude / aptitude" issue wrapped up in a microcosm of perception. Perhaps the driver for your frustrations are the bureaucracies of your current employer or tired of being told that you don't know how to do your job because the organization doesn't follow your recommendations. Perhaps it's all driven by your frustrated desires to have a more senior role or more control of the process. It's even possible that you've tried to do more, only to be shot down as 'not getting it', too inexperienced, or not the right fit. In one sense, this might put you in the "punch above your weight class" group, but it also depends on the individual.

People react to adversity in different ways. As a long-distance cyclist, I've seen very tired people face hills near the end of a ride and get angry. I've seen them give up. I've also seen people who dig deep and continue to work, continue to push to get to their goal. In the case of people that you're considering for a start-up, while the environment that you're hiring them from may suck, I think that what you're looking for are the people capable of continuing to turn the pedals when the going gets tough. That doesn't mean someone who is happy to continue turning the pedals in a bureaucracy, but that's really back to the attitude question.


So What Do You Think?
Can somebody who is coming from an environment where they have been beaten down, told that they don't know what their doing or that they are doing it wrong be successful in a start-up? Can they succeed in an interview? Perhaps more to the point, if you're looking for a position where you can "punch outside of your weight class", do you really believe that a company will consider an "underqualified" candidate in today's job market? In other words, are you targeting a market where you have a realistic opportunity?

If Google Posts a Job Opening, Does it Really Count as a Job Opportunity?

We've all heard about Google's exclusive hiring practices and how they go through extraordinary efforts to hire what they consider only the most exceptional candidates. So it struck me the other day as I waded through a LinkedIn job search where where the first two or three pages of results were Google listings, if Google posts a job opening, does it really count as a job opportunity?

Consider this recent news from Google, Google gets 75,000 job apps in a week - for 6000 openings. That works out to about 1200 applicants per job. While you could look at this from a lot of angles -- hiring on internet scale, the compelling value of Google's work environment strategy, or even the real sucktacular nature of the economy -- let's think about how many of those 1200 people actually have a shot at that job. While you could argue that 1 in 1200 is a lot better odds than you have for winning the lottery, your odds of winning the lottery are simple probability. For those 1200 individuals, there are factors for qualification, differentiation, and probably a bunch of invisible, unspoken ones as well. For many of those 1200 applicants, the odds of winning the Google job lottery is actually zero.

Is a Google Job Listing the Equivalent of Spam?
Out of that group of 1200 people applying for an opening at Google, my guess is that there is probably a list of preferred candidates drawn from employee recommendations or other more direct submissions. But let's assume for a minute that the process is open. Following on the themes that I talked about in one of my Please Hire Me posts, how do you differentiate yourself in a pool of over 1200 people? Imagine a person reading 250 resumes per day for per position with a constant stream of new resumes coming in all of the time -- and that's just reading them, not following up, etc. If you think about that kind of scale, at best you're looking at an algorithmic scan of them all. At worst, you're looking at a giant pool of resumes that are simply ignored.

Think about what that means in terms of timing for when you submit you're resume. In the old days, you might have a week or two to position yourself, customize your resume, and focus your cover letter. If you're submitting to a position at Google, all that time you spent has just put you in the back of a chronological line 1200 people deep -- 1200 people whose 15 or so skills listed as requirements also match the position.

Finding the Deeper Meaning in Google's Applicant Volume
If you think about that pool of 1200 or so candidates and the difficulty of filtering that pool, you might start to wonder whether that type of process would yield a top-tier, unique candidate. Or even the most qualified. So, if you can't find the perfect drop of water when you're looking at the lake, why would you use a process that created so much water? What if the purpose of having so many candidates isn't to look at the candidates, but rather to provide statistical data that supports the idea that you looked at lots of people before you selected the candidate that you chose? The question is, are those 75000 resumes really about 75000 candidates or simply better justification for the 6000 that Google does choose, assuming that they fill each position from the pool that was generated that week. What about the candidates that they target and recruit, like from Apple or Microsoft?

The funny thing about all of this is that many job search sites (like Linked In) include check boxes so that you can just search listings from a specific company. When you look at the numbers, perhaps what they need is support for exclusion filters or Boolean search terms like, "not Google".

UPDATE:  I did a some research and experimentation using the Linked In search function. It turns out that there is Boolean support in Advanced Search. You can use AND, OR, or NOT, but they have to be in capital letters. While I was able to make this work in the Keyword search field, the company field doesn't appear to support Boolean search. So, if you want to filter Google out of your search results, you can add NOT google to the Keywords search, but you also risk filtering out jobs that might include Google as part of a skill or a capability.

Please Hire Me: Your Resume and the Great Document Structure Lie

Did you hate history class when you were in school? Perhaps you had one of those classes where they made you memorize dates. Maybe you found it frustrating that each year they would teach you the same stuff they taught you about last year. As someone who found myself in a lot of history classes in college, I can sympathize with your frustration and your boredom. For me, a good history class isn't about dates, it's about stories. One of the best classes that I took retold the story of history through cultural history. It was an amazing class.

The problem with telling a story through dates and places isn't just that it's boring, it's that it isn't really a story so much as a sequence of events. As an example, let's take the story of the Titanic. While most people could tell about what happened and include details drawn from a variety of cultural or historical references, what you probably would not get are dates and times nor any sense of importance of dates and times. So why does everyone expect your resume, the story of your career, to be structured as a listing of dates and places?

Please Hire Me: Your Resume Strategy and Getting Noticed or Ignored

Once upon a time, you could post your resume to the various job boards and feel like you had accomplished something. You'd post, they'd search, and then they would contact you. In a sea of job opportunities, if you had a strong background and an search-optimized resume, you could expect to receive inquiries with some regularity.

In today's economy, this passive demand generation approach is more likely to yield spam than any real opportunities. Instead, your real opportunities are more likely to come from your own searches, you own network, and your sales activities. The resume that get's you hired will likely be one that you submit to a company.

Submitting your resume has the potential to have a big impact on your selling process. Since you are responding to an open listing, you start with some basic knowledge of the target customer and the opportunity. It's kind of like responding to an RFP. In theory, this means that you can craft a unique selling tool for each and every resume submission. But with today's job market, even if you're the ideal candidate and a perfect fit, it's quite possible that your resume won't get any response, and all of that customization work that you went through will have been wasted.

Please Hire Me - Your Resume, Geting Hired, Job Sites and Marketing Quackery

If you're currently out of work or feeling uncertain about your employment situation, the holidays and the end of the year can intensify the stress you're feeling. Faced with those stresses, looking for a project for the long holiday break, or simply seeking a way to quietly escape your extended family, you might find yourself locked away rewriting your resume. But there's one nagging problem with your plan -- how are you going to change it?

The resume is a funny creature. When you look at it, you can see the great story of your career history, but when you send it out, you're don't get hired for every job you apply for. And those recruiters, the big-game talent hunters, aren't beating down your door after finding your resume on one of those online job boards. There must be something wrong; maybe it's your resume. Or maybe we're all just a little biased when we're reviewing ourselves.

There's an industry that plays on these fears; they sell resume writing and job placement assistance. I'm not saying that there isn't a need to help people who don't write well (even those that do usually benefit from an editor), but like loan modification businesses, some of these businesses make their profits off of people in the most desperate circumstances. But is what they are selling really worth it?

I'm not a recruiter and I haven't been hired so frequently that I would consider myself an expert, but I do know marketing. And while there are some differences between the job market and a product market, the similarities are strong enough that you can apply the same strategy, analysis and evaluation criteria that you would use to measure your sales tools or marketing programs.

Initially, I thought this would just be a single post, but the more I wrote, the more I realized that this isn't a one-post topic. With that in mind, let's call this the end of the intro post.

You're Not Hired - Untangling the Myth of Market Expertise

Browse through any marketing job board, open up a listing and one of the first things that you'll find is a requirement for experience in a specific market or segment -- do you have experience in enterprise marketing, consumer marketing, in the storage industry, software, or retail industry. You name a market there are companies that will judge your ability to do the job based on whether you have worked within it in the past. Ultimately, the dialog goes something like this:

Have you sold blue pencils?
You have? Great.
Yellow pencils?
Oh, I'm sorry, you don't have the background needed for the blue pencil market.
Note » Just follow this is a simple recipe for uninspired marketing.

If this seems like a frustrating over-simplification to you, then please join me as we explore the logic and the quackery behind marketing segment expertise.

Problem Solving: The Most Valuable Skill That Won't Get You Hired

So I'm looking at my LinkedIn profile wondering what else I need to do to complete it, and this "specialities" section keeps haunting me. It keeps asking me for content, but most of the important things that come to mind are either so obscure that they will never show up in a search or worse -- they sound like tired, cheesy cliches.

Here's a perfect example: Problem Solving
One of the things that has struck me over the course of my career is how few people have basic problem solving skills. It sounds rather rudimentary and stupid, but understanding how to take apart a problem, analyze it, and produce a solution is... rare. It's surprising really. You can take some of the most competent people that you know and drop them into a situation where the environment or the problem is different than they expected and watch them break down. Many will complain right from the start.

And then there are also those people who just seem comfortable solving problems, creatively adapting solutions to fit the needs of the moment. They are the people you drop into unusual situations and they adapt and work through through the differences. Often, they question rules and assumptions and their approach may not be what you expected. But they produce results.

That's another funny thing about problem solving skills -- it becomes like a safe harbor in a storm. In difficult times, people turn to problem solvers. Drop a stranger in the office and they'll probably turn to nearest desk. For the people in the office -- if the office is large enough to have functional specialists -- they will go to the specialist. But in smaller offices or for problems that live outside of a specialization, people turn to the problem solvers.

Being able to solve problems won't endear you to every organization. Some businesses stick closely to established culture, structure, and processes. Some promote consensus over individual initiative. And while some problem solvers do thrive in those environments (possibly as the underlying catalyst for activity or change), it's probably not the personality trait that the organization screened for -- which brings me back to the focus of this post.

Problem Solving and Umami: Everybody Wants Some
While Kikkoman wants to link the idea of "umami" as a keyword for their products, the concept of umami is about savoriness and the taste of a richness of flavor -- the kind of thing that you would like to have in most things that you eat. But at the heart of it, what we're really talking about here is how you would measure it, characterize it, and differentiate on it. While it's likely that the braised short-ribs from The French Laundry will have significantly more umami than a Black Angus steak, it's equally likely that you won't see it used to differentiate the two. Both could conceivably put umami as a specialty on their LinkedIn profile and even if you were 'interviewing' them both, you probably wouldn't be able to differentiate based on that one characteristic.

The real problem with some of these soft characteristics is that they are difficult to quantify and place a corresponding value on. In the same way that Apple products are frequently recognized for their design, there is also a chunk of the population that downplays the value of design and questions paying extra for it. Is design a "specialty" for Apple?

The problem for you, Problem Solver, is that you want to be in an environment where your problem solving characteristics are recognized, valued, and rewarded. And that means finding a way to feature your design, your umami, and to reach the audience that values it. Good luck.

The Job Boards Have Started To Roll

Note: I first started this post back at the beginning of September. Since that time, I've continued to see increased activity on the job boards, plus whispers from contacts that suggest things are starting to turn around again.

Starting around the beginning of September, postings on the job boards seemed to start ramping up. Economic confidence appears to be showing more signs of confidence. Of course, being on the front end of this wave can be a mixed blessing.

If you're unemployed, any fish on the line is a good thing -- sometimes it's just a question of how good. For job seekers, problems arise when tight markets and limited opportunities force you to deal with those companies that look at a struggling labor market as an opportunity to exploit. Some companies approach the labor market like the stock market -- buy low, sell high. These companies attempt to leverage employee (or potential employee) desperation to save some money on salary-based operating expenses. Carried to the extreme, some use economic events to cull their ranks of expensive talent, replacing them with new, 'more desperate' staff as the hiring market transitions -- think pro sports and the salary cap.

When times have been tough and you're at the front end of the ramp back up, companies may try to leverage your despair to undercut your salary negotiation position. The funny thing about this is that, while this approach may make sense on a by-the-numbers strategy, it overlooks the fact that 'human capital' is not equal to traditional corporate assets. A key factor in your performance is psychology. When was the last time an enterprise software or a manufacturing tool went through a period of reduced performance because it was sad, frustrated, or felt exploited?

This corporate strategy starts with the idea that anyone can be replaced with little overall difference in the operation of the business. Want to fall on your sword? Big deal, there are thousands of marketing pros out there, just waiting in line to take your underpaid, overworked place. It's the worker-turned-factory-production-equipment concept applied broadly across all parts of the business.

While it's easy to hate the 'exploiter' strategy, businesses can find a lot to like about it. The Exploiter mindset is often an institutionalized value. So even if you hate it, don't go in expecting it to change. Unless you're stepping into a senior executive role where you have the ability to shape culture, you're probably not going to be able to change it directly. For most exploited employees, change usually means finding work with a new, less exploitative employer. And for potential employees, that means that a focus of your new job will be looking for a new job.

----

So what's the take-away from all of this? Back in this post that I wrote in July, I noted an article talking about recruiters looking for "soft candidates", candidates who already had a job and were less interested in changing jobs. To that end, keep in mind that whenever you get into negotiations for a new job, no matter how desperate your current situation feels and how good the new job looks -- always approach the deal with the idea that you can walk away, that there is another opportunity waiting just around the corner. Ultimately, there is only one you and whatever you sign on for is going to eat a big chunk of your life.

Searching for a Job in in the Recession

Here's a little something that I came across on Crooks and Liars. The post from Susie Madrak describes how the recession is affecting the job search market. The emphasis of the post is that, when we fall into a recession, employers become increasing selective about the candidates that they look to hire. Not only does the hiring market become a 'buyer's market', providing employers with substantially more leverage over a prospective hire, but it also shifts the employer's behavior. Here's a quote about what employers say that they are looking for:

they would prefer to fill positions with “passive candidates” who are working elsewhere and not actively seeking a job.

While we're all familiar with that old axiom about it being easier to find a job when you have a job, think about what this means, extracted into some sort of theoretical expression of marketing, economics, and buyer behavior. Using the "Blue Ocean" metaphor, as the market gets more tense, this group of decision makers would rather increase their fishing in a place that yields fewer results (assuming that the quality of the result will be higher) than using a broader net and then perform an actual analysis of quality.

How Did We Get... Here?

If you learned everything about life from watching movies, you might see your life as sort of a flowing, unfolding path, building to some dramatic finale. I remember listening to this Radiolab show talked about this odd aspect of humans and how, as we go through life, our mind actually rewrites the story in our head (I think that this might be the episode). Inside our mind, we actively construct and reconstruct the narrative that we tell ourselves about our lives (of course, I may have simply constructed that story in my head).

With the evolution of the modern economy, our professional lives have shifted from something planned and predictable to a crazy roller coaster ride that leads us into strange and unpredictable places. Even in regions and places where people once expected lifelong careers, going to work, building a life, and having a predictable pattern that they structure their lives around, the idea is gone. In the great landscape of career analogies, we have shifted from an "agricultural" job market -- where we once worked the soil of a career, year in and year out -- to become "career hunter-gatherers" -- nomads wandering the landscape looking for places and opportunities that will support us (Welcome to the Silicon Valley Tribe!). Now you're here, but when you left high school and went to college, when you started your first job, did you really expect to be doing what you're doing today?

But I'm Just a Marketing Goomer...
As I mentioned in an early post, I never expected to be working in the corporate world. And yet, as I've moved through the nomadic path of my career, I've found myself traveling deeper into the corporate landscape. While my writing and creativity were my essential tools early on, over time I've found a need to learn a whole different set of tools that I never would have considered pursuing in the preceding years -- and I'm not just talking about learning about the markets that you sell into or learning how to use a new software tool. While I've had to build some expertise and understanding of the many markets that I've worked in, I've also found myself wandering into strange territories. For example, in the past six months, I've downloaded programming and software development tools for two different software platforms. What's more, I don't think that I'm unique in being pulled this way -- this seems like a common direction for a lot of us in the Silicon Valley tribe.

This strange evolution leads to a lot of introspective thinking. How did I get here? Why am I now learning how to apply these complex technologies, to design and manage computer networks, to develop software and write programming code? What happened to all of the people who actually studied this kind of stuff in school? What do I know that they don't? I'm not going to pretend that I know more than them, but why am I being pushed and pulled into these solving these kinds of problems? More importantly, as I've now become some sort of weird hybrid/mutant creature, what am I?

On Marketing and and Mutants
The thing about marketing is that, in one sense, it's all about categorization and being part of a group. You learn about the customer so that you can divide them into categories. As customers, we are drawn to products, brands, and images that we believe match a category that represents us. When you're looking for how to position a product, you're looking for ways to define categories that will help the customer be a part of that group. You apply this same categorization practice on a personal level every time you search for and apply to a job.

So what happens when the market changes, or when the 'what you do' is undergoing such a radical transformation that it's hard to determine what category that you fit into? What happens when the old definitions start to fall apart, when the 'where you are going' is so different that there isn't a category defined yet? How do you know what job to look for if you don't know the title? How does somebody rank what you're worth or value the unique aspects that you might bring to the table? Who sets the benchmarks for the category?

Creole and an Interesting Aspect of Synthesis
A few weeks ago, I came across this radio segment about Creole languages and a linguistic experiment. While I have always associated the idea of Creole with Louisiana, Cajun food, and the synthesis of flavors, I wasn't familiar with Creole as it applied to linguistics. From the transcript of the program, "Creoles are hybrids that come into being when people who speak different languages live side by side." As the program also noted, "Creoles and islands kind of go together." Basically, a Creole language becomes the hybrid that servers for communication on the specific island.

So, back to introspective land here -- if you think of each company, each specialty, as a language, one question that you may want to ask yourself as you synthesize your new hybrid is... are you becoming something and speaking something that is useful to someone outside of your own island? Will the world that you are targeting recognize your new language or will they simply scoff at your very bad French? You may be able to make an awesome roux, incredible crawfish etouffee and seafood gumbo, but if you're trying to feed very unadventurous eaters, you still may have an uphill battle just trying to get them to taste your food.

Marketing By Deception - Why I Avoid Using Some Products

More and more, I'm finding it increasingly unbelievable when I come across companies that use deceptive web marketing practices in an effort to pull-in audience or drive their demand generation programs.

For clarification, here's an example of what I mean. If you go to Monster.com -- when you log-in, change a record, or perform virtually any activity -- once you click the "okay" button to submit the transaction, the next page you are taken to is an advertisement -- a pre-populated submission form that you might think is just a review of your data (if you're in a hurry). The default choice (the big button) submits your information to the advertiser. You have to actively select the "No Thanks" button each time. What's more, if you're updating your account, you may have to go through this screen several times.

Beyond the shear frustration of the interruption, the real problem with this type of advertising is the profile of who winds up in the lead pool. Do you really want a list of people who were deceived into signing up? What kind of loyalty can you build when your first interaction is deceptive? This is also the reason why I'm usually opposed to purchasing one of those "lead lists" -- one of those "I never thought of that" moments that frequently come up when the sales guy decides to try on a marketing hat.

On the reverse side of this topic is the discussion that I frequently have surrounding Google Adwords and Search Engine Marketing programs. One common thread I hear is "we keep getting all of these leads, but they're not any good." With several Adwords programs that I've run, the volume of inquiries that sales received rose dramatically, but because the products were picking up a small segment of a consumer market, many of the inquiries had high customer service requirements with low potential unit volume (one or two units). But it's important to remember that with Adwords, these people looked for the product, clicked on the ad, went to the site and read enough to bridge the gap and contact the company. Contrast that with someone who was tricked into signing up. These prospects may not have been an ideal fit for the product that sales was offering, but they had already bridged one major gap -- they were actually interested in the product.

Deception Marketing - Making it Go Away
For me, the aggravation of having to navigate deceptive or interruption marketing programs isn't just the shuck-and-dodge that you have to do to avoid getting lumped in -- particularly since you didn't want the product in the first place -- it's that there isn't a very good way to penalize the companies that do this type of marketing. If you don't like it, you just don't show up in their pool of prospects.

Imagine something that cataloged and scored this type of marketing. Maybe it might look like Scoville units, the system that they use to measure how spicy peppers are. Instead of being more spicy, marketing programs could be measured by degrees or units of Spam. After all, interruption marketing is basically Spam. And while spammers could probably care less, if you were a reputable organization, would you really want to have a high Spam score?

Unfortunately, I don't know of anything like this system. So, until then, my only choice is to call these programs out when I find them and they stand out in some way.

Looking for a New Marketing Job - Part 2

This post is part 2 of a look at how to find a new marketing job in a company that doesn't do marketing. In prepping several of drafts of this post, I starting down a path of strategy mapping, but the topic thread seemed overly broad and preachy. Instead, I've decided to take more of a tactical focus, listing a few techniques that I know some people have had success with.

Some techniques to help you get the new marketing job that you're looking for:

1. Resume Search Engine Optimization -- if there is a type of job that you're looking for, then your resume better include the keywords associated with that job in it. Keep in mind that when you're optimizing for search, you need to think in terms of how the person on the other end would search in order to show up. But more importantly, if you're looking for a specific type of job -- knowing what you know about the HR screening process -- you probably need the title of that job in your resume. How you stick it in there is an interesting challenge -- particularly if the role appears to be a tangent from your current resume. Like search engine marketing, if you take a user to a page that doesn't match their search, you're going to have a high bounce rate, and that has the potential to impact you across the category. In that way, if you think of resumes like web pages, assume that a recruiter is like a human version of the Google page rank algorithm -- tricks that elevate your rank today have the potential to crush your rank in the future -- focus on good content.

Of course, the challenge with this is that good content for search engines is not always good writing and design for people -- and many people haven't caught up to this yet. It's entirely likely that the things that will help a recruiter find your resume are also the things that will make them reject you when they look at it -- search engine optimized resumes don't necessarily match "traditional resume style". Let me know if you've come up with some good strategies for this.

2. Respond to job postings with a resume that's optimized to match the listing -- this is an important technique to keep in mind if you have any hope of getting past some "front line" recruiter and human resources filters. I've spoken with friends who recommended highly qualified candidates for internal organization openings -- only to see their resumes not make it past the first screening. Then, the same candidate sail through the process on a less matched position with a revision of their resume to match the specific listed "requirements". The point here is that requirements are a checklist used by the people who run the filter -- and they don't interpret that checklist or look for shades of capability.

3. Lie... err... Fictionalize... err... Loosely Interpret and stretch your background -- I don't recommend this. It's not something that I would do. But it goes without saying that I have run into people in the workplace who seem to have padded their background with capabilities and skills that they didn't really have. My personal experience is that this approach comes back to bite someone -- either the resume-padder or the people that they work with who are now saddled with colleague that can't do what they claim. Also, going back to another one of my previous posts, it's easy to overlook how small Silicon Valley really is. And if the work environment here is small, I would bet that your only way to escape the consequences of this type of move if you work in other locations is relocation.

Of course, moving beyond the how-I-try-to-be 'legal' disclaimer, consider "stretch your background" from a marketing point of view -- specifically, what exactly are you saying when you say "stretch your background." Forget about the making stuff up part -- what about that project team that you worked on, whose idea was it to add that feature? Was that you or the team? Or how about something like CRM -- if you worked three years at an organization that heavily used CRM, does that really make you more of an expert than the guy that set-up and configured Salesforce.com, only to watch the sales team not use it? The reality of these hypotheticals is that we work with real world examples like these every day. We work with people who take credit for our work or don't contribute to group processes. And, in the marketplace of your career, your competition includes those people.

Typically when your marketing a product, you don't have to tell you're potential customer about all of the negatives, the features that underperform, or the nuanced aspects of how the product doesn't work. Think about what might happen if you were buying a used car and you could see a detailed view of every moment of the car's history -- would your potential customer rule the car out because of that time when the car drove to Lake Tahoe, or maybe because of that time the car went over that speed bump at 20 MPH instead of 10?

Again, my point in all of this is not to misrepresent the product that is you. When you are selling you, you need to remember that you're taking your prospective employer through a selling process. And one of the first stages of that process -- the resume / cover letter gateway -- is early-stage selling, and you need to be concientious about controlling your message.

Your New Challenge: Looking for a New Marketing Job in a Company that Doesn't Do Marketing?

Once upon a time you designed advertisements and campaigns that won awards, but the market for print-based advertising is going away. Or maybe you're the PR pro and your rolodex and your rules for press releases are being rewritten by the internet. What if you're one of those people who can see the shifts in the marketing tide and you want to catch the wave? Now you're facing a dilemma:

• If you feel like your current role and its associated tasks are becoming obsolete, you don't want to look for another one of the same.
• If you pursue a completely new role, in the eyes of a potential employer you may have little experience -- certainly less than someone who has been actively involved in that role.
• If you want work in an environment that understands the core changes to organizational approaches to business (like those presented in Meatball Sundae), then you're selling yourself to an organization that either already gets it, or one that probably hasn't approached the idea yet -- either way, you're probably facing a tough sell positioning as a change agent.

So, what you're looking for is an organization that understands and embraces the changing tides of marketing, that has some series of needs within that position, and is looking for someone with roots in traditional marketing but with a passion for new marketing and (probably) without much of a documented history of new marketing execution to point to. Good luck.

Seriously though, it's not your fault. You're a victim of this perceptual fallacy that expertise is grown through some sort of big-bang genesis of an idea to become an expert at something, followed by a long period, deep in the trenches. But the reality is that most people pick up these new directions as more of a sidebar to their primary activity -- dipping a toe in here, dabbling with a little bit of that concept there -- only to find that the concept, the opportunity, or the requirements consumes increasing amounts of their attention.

Perhaps you worked at a small to mid-sized business and your title didn't include the words "analytics" and you didn't spend your entire workday doing analysis, but that doesn't mean that you haven't learned the fundamentals of the process or that your analytical guesses are any less insightful. It goes without saying that you probably didn't sit around thinking to yourself, "when I grow up, I want to do analytics." More likely, you had to figure it out and just start doing it because it was needed.

Another factor that adds to your foot-in-the-door problem is the filter known as corporate recruiters and HR staff. In all likelihood, they're don't have the background or experience to interpret and synthesize capabilities based on related things that you might have done. In fact, most initial resume screenings are done simply by matching the listed job description requirements with details in the resume. That means that if you are targeting a product marketing manager position, your best shot is if you have a product marketing manager title in that industry, followed by product marketing manager in a related industry. After that, your best hope is that your resume includes a title with the words product and marketing and possibly manager somewhere in the list -- product manager, product marketing specialist, marketing manager, etc.

A big contributor to this is something that Seth Godin points to in a section on "Competence" in his book, Small is the New Big and 183 other riffs, rants, and remarkable business ideas. Basically, his point is that people measure competence as an ability to repeat and reproduce a set of results. In short, the best candidate for a position is someone who has successfully done the same thing repeatedly in the past. While this may seem like some measure for predictable success, Godin points out that what it misses is something in the artistry of innovation, that people who are demonstrate competence typically don't deviate from rigidly defined, standard methodologies.

Ultimately though, the why probably doesn't mean much if to you if you can't find a solution. I'm not sure that I have a good answer to this problem, but lately I've been thinking a lot about some strategies to deal with the issue. But since this post is getting long -- with the possibility of losing focus, I'll pick up on some solution strategies in an upcoming post. In the meantime, if you feel particularly touched by this, feel free to post comments or to email using the link on the blog. I'd love to incorporate your comments into solution strategies.

The Joy of Interviewing

In drafting my recent post about tips, I am reminded of a strange challenge that some marketers face -- the job interview. You'd be surprised how many professional marketers that I have met who are nervous at the prospect of a job interview. On the one hand, it is a perfectly human expression for an awkward situation -- you have to talk about yourself and tell somebody about how great you are, but most of us don't want to be that guy who tells everyone how great he is. On the other hand, the guy who is thinking about hiring you doesn't really want a marketing guy who can't differentiate and develop effective messaging, and if you can't do that about yourself (the product that you've known and worked with all your life), how can he have any confidence in your ability to position and market his products.

Add in one more factor, and you've got a lot of the psychology wrapped into it's own perfect storm -- inherently, we all have some sense of the personal quality of our efforts (if you thought that everything that YOU did sucked, you would probably find not be looking forward to the prospect of doing more unfulfilling work). As a result, the job interview is also a personal evaluation of the mirror -- if the organization that is considering hiring you can't recognize the quality of your work, then you probably not going to want to produce work for them.

And then there is the other aspect of the equation -- if you're interviewing, that means that there is money on the table, and that revenue source has the potential to reshape your livelihood.

So what's a marketer to do?
The advice that I usually give to friends it to treat job interviews like you are pitching your services as a consultant to a prospective client. While they share a lot of common threads, the process and tone of pitching a new client is quite different from a job interview. Pitching services as a consultant always seems to be significantly less intimidating than a job interview.

Differentiation is it's own challenge. Consider:
Q - So, how would you differentiate yourself from the other candidates in our pool?
A1 - Well, I have good ideas and they don't.
A2 - Well, I know what I'm doing and they don't.

From an interview standpoint, this type of question is one designed to elicit conversation, to get the candidate to open up. But look at this from a marketer's standpoint: Differentiation typically involves research and analysis, understanding the market, your competition, their strengths and weaknesses, the audience, their unique requirements -- the whole landscape -- then developing positioning and messaging based on all of that analysis. Even when you're thrown into a brainstorming meeting, you typically have some basic understanding of the topic areas that you are faced with and you can anticipate some variables. But this is an interview and you don't know anything about your competition. You could be in a pool with Steve Jobs or Steve Ballmer -- they've got great jobs, but you never know; maybe they've just decided to make a change, explore some options. Of course, it's more likely that the pool of candidates is a handful of people who are a lot like you.

So what is your brand? How do you take you to market? What aspects of your brand have you focused your development on, made into strengths? If your able to communicate your unique brand strengths and your prospective customer/employer isn't able to connect with them, the answer may actually be that they weren't a qualified prospect -- but your demand generation programs are successfully driving traffic.