Deepen Your Social Media Substance
by Chris Barton, President & Founder
Throughout Philadelphia and the broader Delaware Valley you cannot turn a corner without a career coach, recruiter or public relations expert explaining how important it is to improve your social media presence. They will commonly add on the value of tools like LinkedIn, Twitter and blogs in creating an “expert presence” on the internet. It seems these days that the “secret sauce” for an award-winning job search recipe is creating an on-line persona that gets you to the top of Google search rankings. Good. Problem solved. Not so fast grasshopper! Spit-shined shoes, a good hair cut, a great blog and solid LinkedIn page will only get you so far.
You know those folks that evaluate used cars for a living? You drive your used car into the dealership hoping to get top value as a trade-in on a new model. The used car manager looks over your car from top to bottom. He gets underneath the hood, opens the trunk, lifts up the seats and looks around the seals of the glass. When he comes back to the showroom to return your keys he has a painfully long conversation with the salesperson.
Now it’s the moment of truth! The salesperson returns to the desk where you have been patiently waiting and says, “I am sorry I don’t believe we’ll be interested in purchasing your vehicle.” Upon further inspection the used car manager found something wrong. The car looked polished, clean and well maintained but the overspray on the back left quarter panel revealed your secret! The vehicle has had some body work from an accident.
The purpose of the used car metaphor is to illustrate the concept and critical nature of true substance in our social media presence. Exaggerated accomplishments, masked employment gaps, and flowery on-line recommendations are common place among many professional users of social media. How many negative references have you seen on a LinkedIn profile? Exactly! Zero. Nada. In response, the skepticism of decision makers is on the rise. This is due in no small part to professional brands that have been over marketed and hyper-exposed.
It is true that you need to be found online. It is also more imperative than ever that you are able to support your advertised accomplishments and track record with specific actions, situations and results. A good way to conduct a review of your social media substance is to prepare a situational story for every accomplishment that you have listed. If you can’t support what is advertised with a meaty story, get it off your profile.
Second, make sure the applications, tools and presentations displayed on your accounts reflect a consistent, accurate message. The worst thing you could do would be to display contradictions within an on-line profile. People just love to use that reading list application these days on LinkedIn. You may want to have actually read the book before you put it up there!
Third, don’t go over the top. Too much emphasis on how “fabulous” you are can end up being misconstrued as arrogance or blatant embellishment. Finally, review your on-line brand for the words I, me, my, mine. First person language is a dead giveaway for ambitions that run shallow.
Relationships That Produce Results!
by Chris Barton, President & Founder
By now, every career transition professional within earshot has explained the importance of “networking” as it pertains to managing your professional brand and unlocking the secret code of the hidden job market. Lots and lots of documentation exists to support the well known fact that you’ll find your next gig through networking 73% of the time. What does that really mean though? Of course it means that you’ve got to get out of your pajamas and out of the house to land a job, at minimum. However, we are terribly frightened at Barton Career Advisors by how often we hear that getting ahead through networking is a numbers game. It’s not… a game.
Let me tell you a story about relationships that what learned from my grandfather…
“My grandfather, a Sergeant in the US Army during World War II and a proud representative of the greatest generation, used to teach me fundamentals of leadership through little jokes and jabs. He was known for his attention to the important relationships in his life. Sometimes we can all get a little stubborn, particularly when it comes to getting what we want. When my grandfather observed this behavior in someone he’d say directly to that person, with a little crooked mischievous smile and a sparkle in his eye, “Well, you’re just ONE WAY!” He could get away with this not because he was old but because he was genuine, caring and his delivery was impeccable. He was so well known for this phrase that a relative even made him a ONE WAY arrow sign (just like the traffic signs) for a special occasion. The darn thing even had hooks on it so he could hang up his keys. My grandfather displayed that sign right next to the family room door for all to see! It served as a constant reminder that relationships are not one way and it always made me smile.”
In a world of slick technologies to accomplish everything from love matchmaking to landing in a new career, we have begun to wonder if we are not missing the true manna! Personal attention! Relationships in business and in all endeavors are similar to living organisms. What happens if those petunias you bought to make the house pretty don’t get watered while you are away for a long weekend? In exchange for water and little Miracle-Gro® they give you bright color and great fragrances into the early fall! While this analogy may define relationships as quid pro quo, the point is rather clear – our relationships need to be TWO WAY!
At the foundation of every effective relationship you will find trust and a passion for truly understanding what is important to the other party. This goes well beyond immediate tangible goals and extends to the use of our human sensibilities to detect the hopes, fears and aspirations of others. Hey, if you really want to see how a one way street works for relationships, try jumping in your car and driving the WRONG WAY on a ONE WAY street. If you are lucky, don’t get hit by another car and manage not to kill anyone we guarantee you’ll get honked at!
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Barton Career Advisors, LLC is a relationship based outplacement and career coaching firm offering premier career transition services to corporations and individuals throughout the US and Canada. The company which is headquartered in Wilmington, Delaware offers flexible outplacement for businesses and career coaching and resume construction for individual clients. The company supports its one to one approach with its innovative career transition portal, CoachOnetoOne™. Through Speaker Services the company works with corporations, professional associations, conferences and non-profits to provide training and key-note presentations on career related topics. Barton Career Advisors employs a need-based business model, BCA One-to-One, which is driven by experience and client outcomes.
"Almost Real" Shortcomings of Virtual Outplacement
Over the past 5 years the outplacement and career services industry has seen dramatic changes. The high fixed cost offerings of traditional outplacement firms have been under assault from a wave of low cost web based services. We have literally started a shift from “bricks” to “clicks”. Just like death and taxes the proliferation of the concept among Chief Human Resources Officers that outplacement is a “check the box” commodity offering is certainly right around the corner. And so we embrace the age of “Virtual” outplacement with open arms. But of course! Nothing else matters when you start competing on price. If the economic buyer of outplacement is looking for the lowest cost option and assumes that all offerings are essentially the same, the virtual option seems as satisfactory as every other option. The price is right! Virtual outplacement it would seem is the head usher at the funeral for a guy named “Customer Loyalty”.
Our thought leaders, partners and clients got together to discuss this phenomenon and we agreed on the undeniable fact that virtual is at its best only “Almost Real”. Think about it for a moment. You don’t have to go far to realize the inherent and embedded outrageous guarantee that comes with the virtual outplacement model. Wikipedia will tell you what we found:
“The term has been defined in philosophy as “that which is not real” but may display the salient qualities of the real. Colloquially, virtual is used to mean almost, particularly when used in the adverbial form e.g. “That’s virtually [almost] impossible”. By extension to the original philosophical definition, the term virtual has also come to mean “modeling through the use of a computer,” where the computer models a physical equivalent. Thus, a virtual world models the real world with 3D structures and virtual reality seeks to model reality, enhancing a virtual world with mechanisms for eye and hand movements.” (Source: Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual, Retrieved October 29, 2011)
An interesting parallel in the examination of virtual outplacement services is the use of virtual flight simulator technology to train commercial and military pilots. It is widely acknowledged that these simulators are excellent tools in the training curriculum for pilots. It is also evident and accepted that these technological tools have inherent limitations. In an October 2007 report from the FAA researchers outlined the following in their opening remarks:
“Yet it remains unproven that skills developed in such training devices improve a pilot’s ability to regain control of an actual airplane during an in-flight upset. Moreover, because of flight simulator limitations such as unrealistic control input responses or lack of control force feedback, the potential for negative training exists. Even Level D flight simulators, for example, are known to present pilots with unreliable models of actual airplane performance when flown near the limits of, or outside of, the normal air transport operating envelope. Finally, almost all ground-based flight simulation devices—including all Level D flight simulators—lack the ability to replicate the high G forces pilots likely will encounter in upset-recovery maneuvering.” (Source: Rogers, Bouquet, Howell & DeJohn (2007) Preliminary Results of an Experiment to Evaluate Transfer of Low-Cost, Simulator-Based Airplane Upset-Recovery Training, Office of Aerospace Medicine, Federal Aviation Administration, Retrieved October 31, 2011 from www.faa.gov)
The question is somewhat obvious. If some of the most technically advanced virtual flight systems in the world cannot accurately simulate “real world” flight emergencies, how can corporate economic buyers expect that virtual outplacement will adequately prepare those in career transition for the rigors of today’s marketplace? To be fair, virtual flight simulation is quite good and it does make more sense to train on simulators rather than testing it out in real airplanes with real downside consequences. However, career transition and reduction in force situations don’t involve big airplanes and complicated technology. These situations involve people and relationships.
The interesting part of technological innovation is that it can be easily duplicated. Virtual outplacement too will be under assault from new offerings and innovations in the coming months and years ahead. In the world of outplacement people must be at the center of the engagement. Yes, technology and online resources are important but they should not represent the nucleus of a complete outplacement offering. In the 2010 Outplacement Industry Benchmark Report completed by MacFarlan Lane the study found that managers going through an outplacement program rated six top factors in determining their satisfaction levels with the program. Technology and web-based tools were noticeably absent from the list. The top two satisfaction factors were:
- Ability of the consultant (coach) to actively engage with individuals
- An ability to develop shared understanding of capabilities and strengths in the individual
(Macfarlan Lane Career Development Research, Sandra Beanham & Associates, (2010) Outplacement Industry Benchmark Report, Retrieved March 22, 2011 from http://www.macfarlanlane.com.au/ml-career-development-research/w1/i1001650/)
It is our belief that the best outplacement solutions are relationship based and facilitated by career coaches who can meet a client at their level of need and professional skill. Barton Career Advisors, like many other firms in the outplacement space, leverages technology (CoachOnetoOne™ web-based portal) to better serve our clients. However, we keep things in perspective. Technology = Tools. Tools ≠ Relationships. Therefore…..Relationships ≠ Technology! Virtual outplacement is “almost real”. In our opinion, web-based career transition services are a tool, not an outplacement program.
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Barton Career Advisors, LLC is a relationship based outplacement and career coaching firm offering premier career transition services to corporations and individuals throughout the US and Canada. The company which is headquartered in Wilmington, Delaware offers flexible outplacement for businesses and career coaching and resume construction for individual clients. The company supports its one to one approach with its innovative career transition portal, CoachOnetoOne™. Through Speaker Services the company works with corporations, professional associations, conferences and non-profits to provide training and key-note presentations on career related topics. Barton Career Advisors employs a need-based business model, BCA One-to-One, which is driven by experience and client outcomes.
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