Professional Guilds –
using the ResumeBlog™ to “Hang out your
Shingle”
What is
SPM and how and why is it expanding?
SPM is
a two-year old professional guild consisting of software, networking, and
telecom marketing and business development professionals. Right now
our main offerings to our members are a very targeted job posting service
and an active discussion board about doing the job. Hiring managers,
recruiters, and HR personnel who post to SPM repeatedly tell us that our
members are highly qualified. This is quite different than less focused
job boards or the sites such as Monster.com which will return literally
hundreds of resumes with only a very few qualified candidates. Many job
posters prefer SPM because of the smaller number of submitted resumes, and the
much higher match of those that do apply.
Numerous quotes from satisfied job posters can be found on our homepage
at www.softwareproductmarketing.com.
We are
actively branching out and creating additional professional guilds – and not
just for software professionals. The new guilds and SPM will all be part
of a larger whole call ProfGuilds.
However,
posted jobs are only a small part of the total jobs open. We felt very
strongly that we needed a mechanism to get our members in front of the hiring
manager for the unposted jobs, which could be a very large percentage of the
total. And our mechanism is the ResumeBlog™.
ResumeBlogs are a way to “hang out your shingle”
White-collar
professionals had a big wake-up call in this current
recession particularly in the technology industry where there have been
thousands of layoffs and many people are into their third year of
unemployment. Companies have been evolving to be more efficient,
through outsourcing, streamlining, and depending more on part-time
workers. But the typical white-collar professional was still
sitting in his/her cubicle, working away, oblivious to the
changes. And when that professional was thrown out like unwelcome
guest, s/he realized that s/he hadn't developed the skills, nor had
the resources and visibility to become a "business of me".
Which is today's new reality – very eloquently discussed in the book "Free
Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself". Small
business owners, and many of the members of professions such as
accounting, medical, legal, and academia have long understood that they
have to make a name for themselves independent of where they are working,
because what they do next will not simply be the company handing them a
promotion – they have to go out and find the next project themselves.
Blogs
arrived in the nick of time to help us out. Within a few minutes,
any mildly computer-savvy professional can create a good-looking
"ResumeBlog™ which is the equivalent of "putting out a shingle”, that
is, signaling that you are ready for business, and equally important, ARE a
business.
Why are
blogs so uniquely suited to being the professionals’ “shingle”?
There
are 5 key reasons that blogs are much superior to having a website or using a
webpage consumer service
First,
blogs are designed to be shared. It's easy to set up a blog where multiple
people can post, comment on each other’s posts, and even edit each other’s
posts. This is critical in today's world where the ability to
collaborate, especially virtually, can mean the difference between getting a
job or not. And it allows the blog to be not just about me, me, me, but
also about me as a member of the professional community, and a member of a
team.
Second,
blogs are much, much easier to create and maintain than a website. I have several (OK lots) of
blogs and two websites (www.typaldos.com and www.softwareproductmarketing.com). Both of my websites are hard to
maintain. It is difficult to share the
workload, and doing even something trivial is not easy. For example, to
update my website to include this text involves starting up Dreamweaver (a
complex program in itself), figuring out what page to put this information on
(or create a new page or a new section), getting it into the right format using
several of the 10 or so little Dreamweaver toolboxes that randomly dot the
computer screen, saving the page, firing up an FTP (file transfer protocol
program), going the right spot in the website to update the page, transferring
the updated page, testing it (I really should have a staging server), and
so on. Actually, it's not even that easy. But for me to put this
into a blog is completely trivial. I just log into my blog, put this all
into a new post, push the publish button, and it's done. Now the
formatting of my blog won't be as nice as it could be unless I am willing to do
a little bit of HTML coding, but if you look at my website www.typaldos.com you will see lots of places where I
tried to do nice formatting with Dreamweaver and somehow created a mess
instead. As long as you know how to do the simplest things in HTML– bold, web links, headers, email links
and bulleted lists, you will be fine.
Third,
because blogs are easy to create and maintain, there are lots more of
them. And that means you are more likely to have a colleagues and
information that you want to link to that make your blog more integrated
with the other blogs and websites. Traversing links is the basic
lifeblood of the internet – links are the fodder that fuels Google – and are
what makes your blog not an island, but part of a tapestry. With appropriate
links pointing to and from your blog, as people browse the internet, they are
likely to come upon your blog in the right context.
Fourth,
it's easy for software developers anywhere in the world to design add-on tools
to be designed for blogs. This means that lots of clever people are out there
creating great tools that can then be incorporated into your blog. For
example, we use a blogroll to maintain a list of all the SPM ResumeBlog
members. We embed that tool in every single member's ResumeBlog (by having them
use our standard template). For instance, in the ResumeBlog of Jonathan
Prusky www.jonathan-prusky.blogspot.com
you can find links to other members’ ResumeBlogs in the right-hand column.
Jonathan doesn't have to maintain that list; it is pulled in real-time when his
ResumeBlog is accessed. Incredibly, by using a trademarked keyword
embedded in the blogroll, and a simple Google search box available free from
Google's site, we have created a keyword searchable database of all of the
ResumeBloggers! And we have done this without any software engineering,
any purchased database software, and any hosting service! But we haven’t
sacrificed quality – we have some of the best tools in the world at our
fingertips – e.g. Google is our database search engine. Instead of
outsourcing we have basically done away with the whole kit and caboodle of
IT. Now, certainly someone is handling these issues for us...we
use combination of tools from Blogger (now part of Google), Google itself,
Yahoo, Quickbase (part of Quicken), CreateSurveyand so on. You can find
the list of tools and services at http://typaldos.com/presentations/cybersalon
We are
very pleased with having these companies as the basis for our ResumeBlogs,
because these are some of the best companies in the business! We haven't
compromised at all by not doing anything except the assemblage. Now, it
does take quite of bit of cleverness to put these tools together in ways that
make sense, and we also have to constantly stay up on what's new (and what's
gone stale) and provide support. We believe members will pay a small
(medium iced latte) monthly price for that service. But since our costs
are nearly zero, we don't have to charge much!
Fifth,
the 21st century is going to be more and more "self serve", a trend
that began in the 20th century with the cafeteria.
It's often so much easier to just do something yourself than to
spend the time to explain to someone else what you want and then interact with
them as they attempt to deliver the goods. Hiring managers, even at the level
of the CEO, are prowling the web for the BEST person to do the job. And
they are just like us; they start by going to Google and typing in a bunch of
key words. Let's say you wanted to find someone with skills in social
software, at a CEO level, which is now or has been an entrepreneur.
Reasonable search terms are: "social software" entrepreneur ceo. You may not believe this, but I did
NOT check Google before I came up with those search terms. Then I went to
Google and typed in the keywords. My
ResumeBlog comes up as item #7 in a list of 240 items. Why is my
rating so high? Because I belong to the SPM Guild and by linking to each
other (in ways that matter), Google recognizes my blog as relatively
important. So, by being part of a
guild, everyone gets more of a web "presence". Which makes
sense. In real life an isolated worker with few or no business
relationships is not going to be someone that everyone knows about.
What are some productivity statistics or share some success stories of how Blogs have been able to find work for a candidate?
We are
just implementing the ResumeBlogs now, but already in the first few weeks
approximately 10 (out of 125) ResumeBloggers have been contacted by a hiring
manager, HR manager, or recruiter about a job. In today's market,
having someone call YOU about a job is almost unheard of. If you
apply for a posted position, your resume goes into a black
vortex. Our beta ResumeBloggers are thrilled...several have even
gone for interviews that came out of these contacts. And, as we expected,
the person with the job was just plopping in keywords to Google and seeing who
came up. For several of the ResumeBloggers, it wasn't their ResumeBlog
that came up first, but the googler also explored the links of other
ResumeBloggers and found them by traversing the links. Now, as I explained
above, there are a lot of things at work here that enabled this to happen...the
ResumeBlog had to exist of course, but that ResumeBlog also had to be part of a
tapestry that is in essence the community of professionals in
software marketing.
What is the difference between belonging to a “professional guild” and being an “employee”?
Right, it’s changing your orientation from employee at XYZ Corporation who happens to be the controller, to being a controller in the automotive industry who happens to be working at XYZ Corporation. Interestingly, there are professors at several of the top schools in the country (MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, etc.) that are studying the (re)emergence of professional guilds. References coming soon. Being part of guild includes networking with others in your guild (e.g. other finance people in the automotive industry, and other types of professionals automotive industry and even other industries. It’s all about developing an expertise and they aggressively seeking out rewarding opportunities to use and enhance that expertise.
What are two or three gems of advice you would give someone wants to change jobs?
1) You
should always be thinking about the next job. That's a cliché, but it's
truer than ever. That means you should have your "shingle" out
on the web (using the ResumeBlog for example) you should be participating in
activities that raise your Google presence (e.g. making presentations, writing
articles, etc.), and you should be working part-time with others on consulting
assignment where you can develop an expertise (or where you are already an
expert). Your goal is that when the person with your perfect job types in
the four or five keywords for that job, your professional presence (e.g. blog)
comes up very near the top of the list.
2) Find
a way to interact once/month with professionals outside your core competency,
and even outside your industry. This
will add to your “weak ties”, that is, your number of acquaintances. Professor Mark Granovetter, now at Stanford
University, studied the use of social networks as professionals sought new
jobs, and discovered that the acquaintances were the best source of
opportunities. For more about
Granovetter’s “strength of weak ties” please visit http://www.softwareproductmarketing.com/about_spm/pg-weak_ties.asp
3)
Develop an unusual expertise along with your must have skills. With the internet it is actually possible to
fill the perfect job with the perfect person, because every professional can
make him/herself findable. Again, as an
example, suppose I need a finance professional who is an expert in stock option
programs for venture-backed startups. I
don’t want just your average Joe or Jill; I want the best there is. So into Google go the keywords:
finance
“stock option” venture
The
first 100 references show only one professional
http://www.hitechlawyer.com/index.html
He’s
not a finance executive, but he’s got the right experience.
Don’t
you want to found too? If yes, start
ResumeBlogging at http://www.resumeblog.com/