Friday, July 24, 2009

Bored people are boring

What do your employment workshops look and sound like?

Here is a page with some example presentations for inspirational purposes: You are in the presentation business. I think the first one is the best use of design, and the voice is dramatic. Larry Lessig's delivery in #2 has good timing, but I don't find it interesting.

Here is my favorite TED video: Hans Rosling and "the best stats you've ever seen."

More slide shows: Slideshare.

I borrowed some style from "What teachers make" for a presentation on dressing during a job search (door to door visits). I took out the pictures for privacy reasons. You'll need to use your imagination.

Slides included photos of onestop employment specialists demonstrating the right and wrong ways to dress. Including staff made a huge impression on the audience, who commented that it was much better than generic pictures of models or strangers. For further involvement, ask job seekers to participate as models. As we went through the slideshow, we asked participants to critique the outfits.

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

A Hamburger Today...or Two on Tuesday?

I'm catching up on the July posts that I promised! If you're having trouble waiting, there is bad news in store. Self-control and delayed gratification may be connected to success in life, according to a long-term study described in this New Yorker article by Jonah Lehrer.

In May, I accompanied a job seeker on a job hunting trip. We picked some employers in a nearby neighborhood and hit the sidewalk with resumes in hand. She was dressed nicely, business casual with a spring flair, and she had taken the time to fix her hair and makeup. It was a noticeable effort that I complimented. Then, she said, "And I can't smoke, right?"

That's right!

The next hour and a half was a battle over an extreme example of self-control: resisting nicotine addiction. She made it to 7 businesses before I let her have her cigarette reward. At that point, she looked through her purse and found that she had lost her last one.

Along the way on our trip, she found a twenty dollar bill on the sidewalk. That made the lost cigarette a minor disappointment.

While cigarette cravings are not the type of impulse referenced in the New Yorker article, the situation helped me link the study with employment services. What kind of impact, I wondered, could an inability to delay gratification have on a job seeker?

Some ideas:

1. Unrealistic expectation of a short job search; frustration grows as time goes on.

2. A lack of long-term planning; no investment in training, education, or working oneself up from entry-level.

3. Disassociation between the effort necessary to apply and the reward of being hired; there may be too large a gap between the action (targeted resume and cover letter, fully completed application, follow-up calls or visits, interviewing) and the result (job offer).

This is where an employment plan with short-term goals -make a big deal about checking them off- can pay off.

Thursday, July 16, 2009

Dying newspapers and growing application piles

Recent discussions with Portland, OR employers have revealed the following.

*A job listing in the daily Oregonian newspaper received only a few responses (walk-in applications only).

*The same job listing on craigslist a week later resulted in a steady stream of applicants, but only on the first day. Responses dropped off to only a handful on day 2. The employer was reluctant to post on craigslist due to previous issues with the quality of applicants ("interesting people").

*One discount department store is receiving up to 50 applications a day. Over the summer, hiring will slow down due to participation in the youth (WIA) summer jobs program.

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Employment specialist, unplugged

The New Yorker is emerging as my main source for ideas that can be adapted to workforce development. It's fitting since I love Malcolm Gladwell.

This article by John Colapinto (also good), "Brain Games, The Marco Polo of neuroscience," is a fun look into contemporary research on autism, atemnophilia (a compulsion to amputate healthy limbs), and other conditions. The research is described as evidence of the brilliance of Dr. Vilayanur S. Ramachandran. He is certainly smart. The details of how he works are the most interesting part:

"Ramachandran listened closely as Jamieson talked about his condition. In a specialty that today relies chiefly on the power of multimillion-dollar imaging machines to peer deep inside the brain, Ramachandran is known for his low-tech method, which often involves little more than interviews with patients and a few hands-on tests -an approach that he traces to his medical education in India, in the nineteen-seventies, when expensive diagnostic machines were scarce. 'The lack of technology actually forces you to be ingenious," he told me. 'You have to rely on your clinical acumen. You have to use your Sherlock Holmes-like deductive abilities to figure things out."

Job seekers need computers: resumes and cover letters, craigslist, indeed, employer websites, email contact, linkedin, etc.

Employment specialists need computers: tracking databases, matching job seekers to openings, skills assessments, reading blogs, etc.

But can we get by without them?

Now that I'm working in Supported Employment, I'm encouraged/required to get out of the office and work with customers in other settings: meet with employers, going out to submit applications together, onsite job coaching. It's still hard to get away from the computer, and I realize there are things that I do in my cubicle that don't have to be done there.

Employment plans, reviewing job leads, resume reviews, mock interviews, counseling... Really, if a jobseeker is computer literate (word processing and internet), all employment specialist-job seeker interaction can take place without a computer nearby. The exception would be assisting individuals who cannot edit their own resumes or submit online applications (even then there are other options for applying). The only currently essential task that requires computers is data entry for internal program reasons, not for direct services.

By interacting with the jobseeker free of the computer distractions, one of Ramachandran's techniques pops up: you can listen more closely.

Getting away from the computer also prevents one of my professional fears: that my role as an employment specialist becomes simply a middle-man for craigslist posts and support services.

Something else came to mind as I reread the piece for this post. Ramachandran frequently uses mirrors to manipulate how a subject perceives him or herself. I wonder how having mirrors present would affect discussions about the proper way to dress for job searching and interviewing. Mirrors may also have an impact in building self-awareness and hopefully self-esteem.

Sunday, July 12, 2009

Rags to Riches in 15 days!



I recently read Get Hired Fast: Tap the Hidden Job Market in 15 Days by Brian Graham, which I acquired as an impulse buy at FedEx Office. I bought it after skimming through and seeing that it focused on cold calling, which is a common deficiency in job searches. It is taxing to make enough cold calls to get good at it, and people generally stay away from doing things they are not good at, which leads to few cold calls.

According to Get Hired Fast, it is a mistake to shy away from cold calls, and I agree. The book's strong suit is its support for cold calling as the focus of a job search strategy, from researching employers to developing a script for calls. It's all part of a regiment that prescribes a short (3 weeks) but concentrated (150 calls) calling campaign.

There are 2 things I've started to tell job seekers lately. The first is that job search is what they do outside of my cubicle (meaning that they need to be active outside of our visits). The second is that of all the job seekers who have found jobs while in our program over the last year, only 1 has gotten a job from online-only sources. All the others have used personal contacts (including job developed by employment specialists), walk-in visits (including in-person visits to employers advertising online), or cold-calls to find open positions that they've applied for and gotten.

Get Hired Fast corroborates this position that job seekers need to get away from the computer as much as possible. Unfortunately, cold calling is only the subject of half the book. The rest of the pages are repeats of standard job seeking advice about interviewing and responding to job offers. This highlights the difficulty with cold-calling; even a book about cold-calling needs a little sugar to help the medicine go down. Instead of this generic advice, I wish it would have included more about script writing and more about dealing with rejection. It honestly states that there will be a lot of rejection.

Get Hired Fast is also like a guide to losing 10 pounds or quitting smoking. It tells you what to do and it tells you how to do it. It doesn't make it easy or fun, though, and the hard work is up to you. If you're advocating for job seekers to make cold calls, I recommend checking it out from a library; it is not essential to have it permanently on your bookshelf.

As a bonus, it can help with job development, where cold calling skills are useful.

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Summer Slowdown

I've always wondered why the summer is a time of tv re-runs and magazine combined issues. Now that I'm writing this blog, I see why. Summer outings (and evening runs and picnics) means less time for production.

There are several posts that haven't made it from my head to the blog:
1. The NY times article this weekend about the success of employment training programs.
2. A New Yorker article on self-control and delayed gratification as predictors of success.
3. A New Yorker article that inspired me to wonder what employment services we could improve by removing computers from Employment Specialist desks.
4. A post on improving workshops and presentations for job seekers.
5. Another post on first-hand job development information.
6. An activity for encouraging job seekers to write cover letters.

I'll write all of these posts before the end of the month. Also, I'm planning some changes by the end of the summer (bigger and better).

Here's some of what I've been doing instead of writing blog posts: