My Job Search Lessons Learned ~ for what they're worth...

As I enjoy my last “free” day before starting a new job with VMware about which I’m super excited, I thought it might be helpful if I shared some lessons learned from my recent job search (after having been RIF’d, totally by surprise, mid-pandemic).

Whether or not you're under the impression “it can’t happen to me - not without warning,” note that if you’ve not done a job search recently, some of the pointers below will save you time on your next search, whether that's urgent or strategic.

For bottom liners who want to cut to the chase, here’s my top line lessons:

1.      Have an Up-to-date Resume: Keep your resume updated and in tip-top shape, at all times, formatted and written in the latest “State of the Art” resume style.

2.      Have an Up-to-date LinkedIn Profile: Keep your LinkedIn (LI) profile updated, matching your up-to-date resume, and put some time in on it - to distinguish you from casual LI users – as a real LI All-Star.

3.      Grow Your LI Network: Don’t ever stop working on growing your LI network and contacts.

4.      Keep Marketing Yourself: Not only do you need to market yourself externally, on LI and in professional and industry organizations, and to clients, but don’t forget to market yourself internally at your place of work. Make sure your management chain knows and understands your bona fides. In our Age of Corona RIFs, it’s no time to be humble about tooting your own horn inside and out.

5.      It’s a National “Buyer’s” Job Market Today: With many jobs going remote and millions out of work, competition for open positions has gone national and is intense – assume that you’re literally up against the nation’s best and brightest.

6.      Be Flexible. In a highly competitive national “buyer’s” job market, it’s imperative to be a “Gumby-like” flexible job seeker.

For those with a bit more time to take a deeper dive into the above lessons, especially my peers over age 50, below I elaborate on the above in the following eight lessons learned:

First, always keep your resume up to date. That’s what everyone is told and knows, but how many of us really do it? Guess what, when focusing on getting or retaining “Employment in the Age of Corona,” this lesson is an important first rule of self-employment and preservation. Trust me, as someone RIF’d by surprise, take time to always keep your resume updated (from this day forward).

Every time you get a promotion, take on new job duties or responsibilities, accomplish something noteworthy, be sure to update your resume. For example, if you’re reporting a personal accomplishment on Facebook (FB) or LinkedIn (LI), then pull out your resume and decide if the same merits a resume update. Trust me, you’ll thank your stars you did so if any bad things happen to good people, like a fast-breaking job curveball.

ASIDE: Make sure you don't just market yourself externally, but be sure to ensure your management chain is more than aware of your bona fides.

Second, update your resume style to latest greatest. If you’ve not updated your resume style, like me, in the past decade or so, then you need to do some serious work.

News Flash – resume styles have changed, bigly!!!, as have job search techniques, and you need to bring your resume up to 2020 standards.

Despite having the benefit of an outsourcing firm’s coaching (a benefit provided by IBM as part of the RIF), it still took me almost four weeks to perfect my resume to match today’s style (and my lawyer’s “perfect document” standards) to adequately represent my experience.

Heavy text resumes with semicolons, like my 2007 resume, listing, in short descriptions, work matters handled, have gone the way of the Dodo Bird, replaced by the “now in season” heavily bulletized resume, laden with objective, substantive stats (perhaps eight to ten descriptive bullets per job) for each job held in the past 20 years, but not for prior jobs for those of us with greater experience (e.g., “* Spearheaded 200K Cloud deals in 2019 leading to 3M customers gained/viewer impressions resulting in $2B added revenue”).

If you’ve not bulletized your resume, it’s not ready for 2020 prime-time. In my case, I needed a complete resume “Extreme Make Over” and, like Rome, building up my “2020 resume” was not done in a single day.

If you can, ask friends who’ve recently looked for and found new jobs to share with you their winning resumes.

Third, your updated resume includes both a branding statement and resume summary. To have a “state of the art” 2020 resume, one needs a “personal” marketing or branding statement to “lead-off” the resume, right under the contact section, along with a summary resume profile statement that sits right under the branding statement.

The branding statement is one that should carry over to your other professional social media messaging. Let’s just say that this in-house attorney, who prided himself on his humility and being up-to-date on the law, found this brag statement to be something for which I was grossly behind the times on and needed to get used to making, as it becomes central to your 30-second elevator speech, explaining at core what you're about.

Not having looked for a new job for some 13 years (since joining IBM in 2007), I’d totally missed the personal branding trend, shocked to find it to be critical to talent scouts, necessary to get traction to move my resume from recruiters to hiring managers.

If you don’t have a branding statement or a resume profile disclosure statement on your current resume, I recommend you google “2020 resumes” to read up on how best to upgrade your resume. A quick search generated some articles titles that I’m sure will help: Indeed’s “The 6 Most Important Parts of a Resume (with Examples)”; The Muse’s “This Is What Your Resume Should Look Like in 2020”; Ladders’ “The High Score Resume format: How to write a resume for 2020”; Cultivated Culture’s “How to Write a Job-Winning Resume for 2020 [Free Templates & Examples]”; and LinkedIn’s “The key components of a resume” and “12 Resume Writing Tips”.

ASIDE – "The Ageless Resume": There’s also something called an “Ageless Resume” in case you have more than 20 years of experience since leaving school or entering your industry. An Ageless Resume focuses just on the past 20 years or so, and downplays any earlier dates, including your years of graduation and earlier job history dates. Admittedly, it’s arguably gamesmanship, as a good recruiter worth his/her salt will be able to figure out graduation dates, etc.

A side ASIDE:– I did have an India-based recruiter tell me mid-screening call that she thought I had just 21 years’ experience given my resume focus on my last two jobs (IBM last 13 years, Nokia for eight years prior), so when she figured out I had greater experience she said I was "over qualified" and could not proceed further as the position had a firm 20 years out of school/total experience limit. Yes, ageism alas is alive and well out there.

Fourth, your updated resume need include a link to your LI profile and a modern email address. Also, part of a modern resume, and perhaps obvious, your contact info needs to link in to your LinkedIn (LI) profile, and you need a modern personal email address from which to conduct your search.

My personal email for decades has been my “yahoo” account. My kids caught a glimpse of me working my resume and told me in no uncertain terms that my yahoo email address said “old fuddy-duddy,” as if I was working from an “AOL” account, so they strongly recommended I conduct my search using my gmail account for contact purposes. Sorry if that’s another newsflash about modern workplace, or societal, ageism, but I got the message and gladly converted to gmail, with its easy tie-ins to other google tools, especially google calendar.

And with regard to your LI Profile link to display on your resume, you don’t want to just use the LI profile link assigned by LI “as is,” but rather you want to customize it – showing you are “in the know” and part of the "Linked In Crowd.” LI lets you customize your profile link. By doing so, my profile link ending went from ross-blair-89b3a13 to ross-blair-esq. Maybe that’s not a biggie, but if after a “bot” says your key-word score is good enough to go to perhaps a 20-something recruiter for a 30 second screening, it’s reassuring to think it might get noticed that your hip enough to know to convert your LI profile address to a customized setting.

Fifth, keep your LI Profile updated. You’re LinkedIn Profile is literally your window to the job seeking world, and recruiters’ portal back to you, so you’re LinkedIn Profile needs to be worked hard, and worked again, and then worked some more, until it’s just right and substantially matches up with your resume marketing “personal brand” statement and profile summary.

However, you don’t want to just have what’s on your resume in your LI Profile – being duplicative is both “boring” (said one recruiter to me), but leaves you under marketing yourself, since you have far more bandwidth (and word count) to show off via your LinkedIn profile.

You’ll want to pick the right profile picture, upgrade your masthead (so you don’t have the generic LI light blue squiggly lines version), incorporate your branding statement into your name/title, and use your resume summary disclosure, as your bare minimum upgrades to achieve “LI All-star” profile status.

But to be a real LI all-star, understand that you can do oh so much more with your LI profile. For example, my profile incorporates links to “tres” cool IBM public videos on matters I covered. And my mast head has not just a picture tying into my support of the semiconductor industry, but also my favorite quote that seemed apropos of someone trying to find a new job post RIF mid-global pandemic: ‘ “Before the fact is the dream.” ~ Hubert Horatio Humphrey’. My LI profile pic is a professional headshot (taken on a barter basis with my daughter who has a photog business - I help cover her rent :) ).

Please feel free to take a look at my LI Profile for ideas on what you can do, understanding mine, although upgraded, is only the tip of the iceberg of what’s doable. To find out more about LI profile upgrading, study up on articles about profile self-improvement, including LI’s “20 steps to a better LinkedIn profile in 2020” and “77 LinkedIn Tips for 2020: Updated”.

Sixth, grow your LI Network. Link in with people you know, or meet, constantly, from this point forward, making a conscious effort to build your LI network. Do a deal, meet a person, attend a meeting, participate in a conference, friend someone on FB, then be sure to reach out and connect with those you meet on LinkedIn to build your network.

And doing so isn't just about you. Your LinkedIn network will not only help you, but it will help your friends and LI connections if ever they need to connect with someone you know. As my fellow IBMer “RIF'ees” searched for their own jobs they often asked who knows anyone at X Co., or reached out to me directly to say I see you have “first LI connections” with a number of people at Nokia, Lockheed, Fidelity, Capital One, Microsoft, etc. I was able to help connect them to insiders so as to pass along their cover letters and resumes, hopefully getting them a step close to a hiring manager - without having to pass the “bot” resume “keyword” test, or survive what we’re told may be just a 30 second initial talent acquisition recruiter resume screen.

And using “personal connections,” despite all the online tools available to job seekers, is still the number one way to get a job (statistically 90% of all successful job hunts rely on your connections).

Seventh, get active on LI - making comments or posting, etc. I was in my own little FB bubble world until being RIF’d, ignoring LI, just occasionally reviewing posts of friends, but not vested. Now, I’m reading posts and active, contributing comments, posting articles of interest, and, as here, posting my own articles.

TIP: A good friend told me make sure you aren’t just a “cheerleader,” but be a substantive contributor, showing off your professional bona fides.

My first LI post ever was important – it was about being RIF’d. That post not only helped my state of mind to respectfully announce that I’d been RIF’d from IBM, but it advised I was now a free agent, and it generated a number of leads, with 5K+ views. I confess I worked on it with a dear old HS friend with deep marketing background experience - we went through a couple drafts of his comments and my edits, before it was ready for prime time.

My next couple posts were, admittedly, cheerleader posts, but that’s me, and I’m OK being known for my positivity and upbeat attitude, being “The Maya Angelou Whisperer”, setting Dr. Angelou’s life lessons and observations to my daughter’s photography, in a two-fer, letting folks know I’m still here while advertising her business Emma Quinlyn Photography (@Emma Blair, ‘ “have camera, will travel” - a modern day picture taking Paladin). As a matter of fact watch for more of the same. I’ll be putting one out as a complement to this piece. Maya's are great lessons to live by - I've had the deepest respect for her ever since stumbling on “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” many years ago.

By letting folks know I was looking on both LI and FB (the one benefit of being RIF’d, you can do a highly public, visible search), my network was in the know and activated. In turn, I was amazed by how many folks I’ve come to know over the years, including at my first law job (Rudnick & Wolfe, n/k/a DLA Piper) and my two most recent inhouse high-tech gigs (Nokia and IBM), went out of their way to help (providing resume samples, resume review, job site suggestions, job postings, connections for networking, resume forwarding, and good old fashioned pep talks (“you got this!”)).

So, even if you’re searching in stealth mode, reach out to close confidants and old connections – don’t try to look in complete secrecy – at least deploy trusted friends. The funny thing about the connections, I’ll note, is that it wasn’t just my close friends from HS, College, Law School or my latest job who leaned in to help, but old contacts, even past and present clients, and some opposing / counter party counsel – all of whom constitute my greater network, my “Village of Lifelong Connections” that I wrote about when announcing that I’d landed at VMware.

Eighth, it’s a highly competitive national buyer’s job market so be flexible. Job searching in our New Covid World, where many employers have discovered that many of their jobs, especially legal jobs, do not require an on-site, in-town presence, thus making remote work not just acceptable but highly workable, has created in turn a highly competitive employers’ national “buyer’s” job market. That’s one of my great epiphanies.

As employers have determined that positions can be done remotely, those positions are now open to a nation-wide talent search for the best and brightest candidates. Hopefully that won’t result in some hiring managers getting caught in never ending searches for the world’s best candidate, but it’s definitely a search game changer.

The takeaway is to understand that, at least for a remote job, you may well be competing with every similarly situated candidate across the country. That may impact selection criteria, or lessen the pay scale, and it likely requires candidates to be willing to be flexible, highly flexible. In my case, when I wasn’t searching for a job where I live or previously lived, I added at the end of my resume “Open to Relocation”.

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While there are many more lessons I learned in my job search, I hope the ones I’ve highlighted above will help others, whether you find yourself in dire straits, or looking to make an upgrade or change, or just testing the waters. Whichever it may be, given the strong buyer’s market we’re now in (a major reversal from just six months ago), I wish you “Happy hunting!” 

Be well, stay safe, strong and smart, with great emphasis placed on always trying to stay at least one step ahead.