Seeing that I left off my last entry by noting that getting interviews is the other half of the battle, I figured I’d share how I’ve been doing that, too.
One of the really interesting things about the job search is how much it relates back to sales and marketing. I’ve been going through outplacement classes (“sessions” sounds too therapeutic) over the past few days at my previous employer. They’ve been excellent. A career manager from Lee Hecht Harrison has been on site to guide us through the transition process. The most effective thing she’s been able to impart, aside from her 40 years of human resources experience, has been a framework for undertaking a new job search. This, I think, is the scariest thing about losing your job: not knowing where to start. There are résumés to put together, contacts to call, people to meet, portfolios to build, emails to send, searches to run, clothes to buy, research to do…the list goes on. I already had been passively looking for a new position since November — thinking something was going to happen to my team sooner or later — but, quite frankly, I just don’t think I would have gone to all this trouble if the necessity hadn’t been foisted upon me.
LHH has done a world of good by putting the job search in the context of project management — a topic that a lot of us business and technology geeks can relate to. You set your goals, design a plan, build milestones, track your progress, execute well, and assess its completion. All straightforward stuff, and not a big deal to people who have been drilling this stuff for the last several years. We’be also been learning quite a bit about Sales & Marketing because so much of a job search is exactly that — marketing and selling your skills and experience to meet potential employers’ needs. This has been both eye-opening and familiar to me at the same time.
For of my professional life, I’ve been working in a sales context, and that has given me a lot of exposure to what it takes to be good at sales. My work with the customer relationship management (CRM) systems that the sales teams use to organize their day has taught me a lot about successful selling. In a few words: it’s all about follow-up. If marketing campaigns (like that credit card advertisement you threw away yesterday) are the first touch, good selling is following up that message with a phone call, visit, or email. CRM systems essentially boil that process down to a workflow and a repository. If a CRM system is working correctly, it’s helping you remember the name of that guy you exchanged business cards with at that tradeshow two months ago, who asked you to give him a call sometime. Siebel has created a vast enterprise building these systems.
The need for successful follow-up became apparently clear to me once I started getting face-time with hiring managers. Promises to forward résumés, make phone calls, and send emails got lost in a sea of buisiness cards and handwritten notes. I had toyed with the idea of building a tracking system for this actviity, but quickly realized that a.) it would drain a lot of time that I need to use more effectively and b.) this functionality already exists with CRM, and there are open-source systems out there to use. After a bit of searching on SourceForge, I rediscovered SugarCRM: a PHP and MySQL, open-source CRM platform. I set up a subdomain on Simplificate and installed the app — SugarCRM was literally up and running within an hour, and I was reaping the benefits inside of a day.
SugarCRM uses a very standard object model for tracking the selling process: companies are organized into Accounts, people are associated with Accounts and identified as Contacts, potential sales are organized and associated with Accounts and Contacts as Opportunities, and any of these objects can be associated with todo items called Activities. When you log into the system, you’re presented with a dashboard that consolidates this information into one centralized view. Open opportunities sorted by dollar value are listed, along with activity reminders (did you call John Doe?) and a calendar. Your opportunity pipeline is graphically shown using an interactive barchart using Flash that you can use to drill down to more information. Pretty slick for a free application. SugarCRM is not without its bugs: there’s the occasional sort-order problem, an irritating display problem that shows PM times as AM, and general usability could improve (tab order and readability on forms, for example). But it does the basics, and does them very well.
I noted that sales and job-hunting have a lot in common, but there’s one key difference to keep in mind when using a CRM application. The goal of sales is to sell as much product to as many qualified leads as possible. The goal of job hunting, however, is to sell one single product to that one, very special customer.
