How to Land a Six-Figure Job

Liz,

I'm in the middle of a career re-awakening like the kind you write about. My wife turned me on to your columns a year ago and since then I've made a big jump up in my career. Now I'm planning my next jump and would really benefit from your advice!

I've been a programmer for my whole career. When anyone asked me what I do professionally I've always said "I'm a programmer." I never liked to describe my projects because they're boring unless you care about the technical aspects of the project, and I don't think most people do.

A year ago my boss asked me to work on a big client project. The client is on the east coast and I'm in Chicago. The project requires me to travel every week. That's a lot of disruption for my family.

Before I read your columns I would have thought my only two choices were to say Yes or No to the project, and frankly I would have been afraid to say No once my boss asked me to do it.

Powered by mojo as a Human Workplace follower I negotiated my terms for the project. I had four requirements. I had to be home every weekend. I had to receive a small bump in pay for the duration of the project. I had to fly Business Class on every trip and I had to have the title Project Manager, because I was doing that work anyway.

The negotiation went perfectly. My boss agreed to all four of my terms. In the past I would have worried about advocating for myself like that, but your advice and encouragement got me over that hurdle. The project has gone really well. We will wrap it up in April 2015.

That was a big step up in my career, and now I have a new mountain to climb. My boss is retiring next month. He let me know in confidence that there's no way his boss (who will become my boss) will let me keep my new title and salary level once my project is finished in April.

There are no other big projects on the horizon so the company will expect me to go back to my old job and salary level. That is unacceptable to me, so I've launched a search for my next opportunity.

I found three headhunters using your advice and LinkedIn's database. I heard from one of them the day after I sent my resume. I was very happy about that!

The recruiter, Mark, said that he could probably place me in a Project Manager job if I had two years of project management experience rather than one. Here's where you come into the story again! My wife reminded me of how you've written that we can reframe our backgrounds.

I didn't have to restrict myself to sharing my official job titles for every job. My wife pointed out to me that I'd project-managed before, only without the Project Manager title.

I revised my Human-Voiced Resume to showcase my previous project management experience and I re-sent my resume to Mark, the recruiter.

He said "How did you get another year of project management experience between last week and this week?"

I said "I realized that I was underselling myself by calling myself a programmer during a year-long project which I actually managed."

Like you always say, if you can tell the stories about being there, you can claim whatever you've done! Now I have two interviews coming up for project management jobs, and that's just from one recruiter. Both of the positions pay over one hundred thousand dollars a year.

It will be a new milestone for me if I get one of these jobs, because I earn $86K now and that is my highest compensation level ever. I could use your advice on how about to handle these six-figure job interviews.

Thanks so much for all you do, Liz -

Best,

Troy

Dear Troy,

Congratulations on your magnificent forward motion and your increasing altitude! The more your muscles and mojo grow, the more easily you'll see ways to maneuver yourself into exactly the career situations you choose.

Your energy comes through your message loud and clear! It is great to see your flame is growing higher and higher as you remember how valuable your talents are to the people who employ you.

My first suggestion is for you to get a consulting business card. Get your cards at vistaprint online or at any office supply store. If you haven't been an independent consultant before, congratulations! I just waved my magic wand over you, and you're a consultant now.

I don't care whether you actually take consulting projects or not in the near term.

Your card has a different function. When you meet people in your networking, you'll give those people your consulting business card rather than the business card your employer gave you. Your own business and your own brand are more important to you now than the job you're planning to leave in 2015.

A six-figure job search is a different animal from a job search at a lower price point. Whether the jobs you're interviewing for are considered executive positions or not is unimportant.

What's significant is that your future employer is getting ready to plunk down a big sum, one hundred large or more, to get you on board.

Employers don't pay that kind of money unless they have big pain. Getting projects finished on time and under budget is a huge pain point for many organizations. That's your focus -- what isn't working now.

You might be competing for these jobs with people who have more project management experience than you do. So what? That's not as significant as your ability to talk knowledgeably with your next boss about what's keeping him or her up at night, and your ability to solve it.

You're not going on these interviews to trumpet your fabulousness, but to dig in and talk about what's gumming up the works at these organizations right now.

That's your mission - to talk about pain and solutions at each of your upcoming interviews.

Use this protocol to spin the table at the start of the interview, when a manager asks you "So, tell me about yourself!" You'll re-focus the conversation on the pain that is necessitating an expensive new hire in early 2015. Pain interviewing is essential for six-figure job-seekers, and a really good thing for everyone to know.

If you merely sit and answer questions about your background like a sheepie job seeker, never getting to the meat of the matter -- the Business Pain lurking behind the job ad, very unlikely unexpressed - you have little chance of influencing the conversation.

Then the hiring manager will revert to answer the question "Who's the safest hire?" They'll make the hire about credentials, rather than ability.

A hiring manager who doesn't talk about his or her pain in job interviews is likely to hire the person with the most years of experience or the most certifications, making an easily defensible hiring decision in case things don't work out.

You have to change the conversation completely, get behind the invisible curtain and shift the conversation to what isn't working in the manager's part of the business right now.

You also have to frame your own background in terms of pain and its relief, and be ready to talk about the business results for your past projects. You have to take a high-altitude view of the work you've already done. "We got 13 projects completed on time last year" is a Good Little Sheepie interview story.

"From our 13 new product releases last year, we gained $45M in new revenue" is a much higher-altitude story. You have to take a businessperson's view of your career, in addition to your programmer's and project manager's perspectives now that you're entering the compensation big leagues.

No one will care that your VP was happy with you or that you got the Employee of the Month award. Someone is thinking about paying you a hundred thousand bucks a year.

They have to see how your work in the past saved the day for your employers. You have to make that connection clear by telling powerful Dragon-Slaying Stories that tell your interviewer what you came, saw and conquered.

You'll study your prospective employers and then walk into every interview with a pain hypothesis to test. The more you can learn from your headhunter friends, the better, but I also don't want you to restrict your search to just the third-party-recruiter channel.

You've got a marketable set of talents, so it's your best interest to use all the channels as you can in your search. Use your network, and focus on growing that network starting the first week of January!

Get out and meet new people and catch up with old friends. Don't merely go on interviews that your headhunter pals send you to. Do your own scouting and Pain-Letter writing, also!

When you have at least three channels working for you -- the recruiter channel, your own direct approach to hiring managers, and a large and mobilized network -- then you'll have your six-figure job search engine up and running!

Congratulations on reframing your background to emphasize what you did in each assignment rather than just what the HR database labelled you.

Of course, you'll need to make sure that your resume makes clear the difference between your official job title and the role you performed, so that prospective employers don't run into snags when they verify your employment later in the process.

That is an easy task, luckily.

Our client Nancy used the title "Office Manager with HR Responsibility" in her HVR, making it clear to each employer she met that the title "Office Manager with HR Responsibility" is descriptive of her past role rather than an official job title found in her ex-employer's HR systems.

That re-framing helped Nancy get her new job. Her manager told her that pointing out her HR experience right in her title made a big, positive difference. You have the right to claim your past Project Management experience, even though your company called you Programmer during that period.

Congratulations also on negotiating your terms for your current assignment. What tremendous practice for your upcoming job-offer negotiations!

You are learning that with increasing altitude and ownership over your career, you can also run into increasing uncertainty, the same way airplanes can run into turbulence at certain altitudes.

Maybe if you hadn't gotten a pay bump and a new title a year ago, you wouldn't be job-hunting now. So what?

Would you be happier hunkering down in a burrow, keeping your head low and hoping to make it to retirement without upsetting anyone? Of course not! You want to soar, as all eagles do. When you run into turbulence at a certain altitude, you'll do what pilots do every day.

You'll keep climbing. You'll keep asking the universe and the people around you for what you want and assuming you will get it. That's how mojofied job seekers like you take control of their lives and careers rather than letting anyone else call the shots.

You go, Troy!

2015 will be incredible year for flame-growing!

All the best,

Liz

Human Workplace is a publishing, coaching and consulting firm. Our mission is to reinvent work for people.

Check out our 12-week virtual course, "Land Your Six-Figure Job," launching on Saturday, January 3rd, 2015!

This virtual course is self-paced. You don't need to be in a particular place at any specific time. You'll work on each week's new lesson as it suits your schedule best. Learn how to brand yourself, work with recruiters, use job-search channels, develop Pain-Spotting muscles, reach out to hiring managers directly and much more!

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