Set your goals high, and don't stop till you get there.- Bo Jackson 

Whether you have been laid of, abused at work or simply need something new, here are 10 tips to help you find your next perfect job.

Preparation is king

Before starting the job search process, make sure you have the required infrastructure in place to look professional. Make sure your primary voicemail (attached to the number on your CV) has a professional sounding message (no music, slang or clichés). 

Make sure your email address looks professional and isn't something childish (e.g. [email protected], [email protected], etc). Ideally you should invest in your own domain name (which can be had with a hosted email service for about $20 a year). Some recruiters even recommend setting up a new email address to be use only for your job search but this isn't something I personally recommend.

Have a cell phone number that makes you immediately reachable and add that to your CV (instead of your home number). The worst thing that can happen is you are selected and the recruiter can't reach you.

Find contacts in the fields (jobs) you are looking for and ask them about their jobs. What is it like? What are the required skills? How did they find their job? Ask them for recommendations on getting a similar job.

Update the paperwork

You should be updating your CV a couple of times a year, even if you aren't looking for a job. During a job search, spend the time to critically evaluate your CV and ask trusted friends to also provide their honest feedback. You only have once chance to make a good first impression.

Use the PDCA continuous improvement approach : Plan, Do, Check Act.  Plan what you want on your CV. Write it. See how recruiters react and then make changes as necessary to solicit the required response.

Google yourself

Most recruiters will search for you on the internet as part of their funnelling process. Google yourself and see what comes up. If you find embarrassing items, try to have them removed by the site hosting the content.

Make sure you have an up to date LinkedIn profile with some (select) information showing on your public LinkedIn profile page. Here are 7 LinkedIn tips to help you make a great first impression and to help with your job search:

1. LinkedIn Tip #1 - Customize your public LinkedIn URL
2. LinkedIn Tip #2 - Create a profile badge for your blog or website
3. LinkedIn Tip #3 - Your profile should be keyword friendly
4. LinkedIn Tip #4 - OpenLink allows you to message non connected members
5. LinkedIn Tip #5 - Export your LinkedIn contacts
6. LinkedIn Tip #6 - Convert your LinkedIn Profile to a professional resume
7. LinkedIn Tip #7 - Don't spam your connections with every update

I recommend you start a personal about you page. You can start by using a site like About.Me or setup your own personal blog (like I have at [www.kiledjian.com](https://www.kiledjian.com)). These sites are an opportunity for you to put your best foot forward. If you don't know anything about websites or blogs, setup a site using one of the hosted services like SquareSpace , Tumblr, WithKnown or WordPress.

Reference List

Most companies will ask you to provide a list of 3 references. You should already plan on who you would use and contact them asking for their permission and contact information. Never use an existing colleague or boss. Never use a contact without first asking for their permission. 

Ideally you brief your contacts on why you are looking, what you are looking for and what skills they may be asked to verify.

Use your network

Most jobs are found through contacts and not job sites. Use your network (friends, former colleagues, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc) to let everyone know you are looking. Tell them what kind of job you want and solicit their help in finding opportunities. 

Most jobs are found this way. 

Don't follow your passion

Cal Newport has written a book called "So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love" (link) and says the most common advice he sees is to "follow your passion".  He says this is a fallacy and explains in his book how (through a study) people end up loving their work didn't follow a pre-existing passion and instead their passion developed as they got better at their jobs.

Be a good listener and journalist

My wife is was a journalist and her ability to extract information from people she meets is uncanny. A good journalist knows how to ask open ended questions that encourage the other person to talk and talk and talk. 

Practice being a good journalist and asking potential interviewers open ended questions to get them talking about the job and company. Find out who is hiring? Why are they hiring? What are the skills they are looking for? What does the ideal candidate look like? 

First you have to build rapport, then start your gentle interrogation. Once you start asking questions, become an active listener and pay attention to every nuance. Some of my best interviews were spend listening rather than pitching myself.

Be nice to everyone

I love talking to everyone from the administrative assistant to the janitor. Everyone has a story. Unfortunately I have seen too many candidates ignore these people when waiting for the main interviewer. My recommendation is to be nice and try to talk to everyone. 

Talk to the receptionist. Talk to the administrative assistant. Talk to anyone from the company that may pass by and say hi. Just be a nice likeable guy or girl. 

Learn to speak body language

Most candidates I have met don't spend too much time thinking about this but it is critically important. What are your non vocal cues saying? Take the time to read up on body language and then practice your's using a mirror.

Once you learn body language, you will also be able to interpret how the interview is going by reading the body language of the interviewer.

In its default configuration, every time you make a change to your LinkedIn profile, it advertises this change to all of your contacts. This is a wonderful feature when you change jobs or companies but becomes annoying when you start cleaning your profile and send 30 updates to your network.

Here are the steps to change this setting:

Go down to the Privacy controls section

Then uncheck the box

We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
#quote #hope #belief

“A best friend is the only one that walks into your life when the world has walked out.” ― Shannon L. Alder

"Freedom lies in being bold" - Robert Frost #Quote #Freedom #Liberty

Many LinkedIn users carefully update their profiles to ensure they portray themselves and their experience in the best possible light. If you are one of these users, why not use a little LinkedIn secret and convert your profile into a professional ready made CV.

Use the LinkedIn Resume Builder (link). 

Did you know you can transfer your LinkedIn contacts to another contact management system? LinkedIn has a surprisingly easy feature to do this that most people aren't aware of. Follow this (Link) to the Contacts page

Click on the Export LinkedIn Connections

Choose a format to export the contacts in and voila. You can now import them in your favorite contact manager.

The LinkedIn system only allows you to message other members you are directly connected with (first degree connections) There is a group of premium members that have configured their profiles as "Open Profiles" which allows anyone on LinkedIn to message them, even if they are not first degree connections. 

Open Profile Video

Here is how you can message an Open Profile LinkedIn member without having InMail or any other premium membership (Link).
 

"Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend." - Theophrastus

Recruiters are searching LinkedIn for potential candidates using keyword searches. Your job is to make it easier for these people to find you by adding the most relevant keywords for your industry to various sections of your LinkedIn profile.

First determine what the power keywords are for your industry then make sure you add them to your headline, in your summary, in your experience and maybe even in your skills section.

Kiledjian.com is my personal soapbox where I can talk about anything I want. Why not use it to generate more LinkedIn contacts. If you look to the right of this article, under my site's search box, you will see my own LinkedIn profile badge.

Creating one is extremely easy.  Just go to this site (link) and configure it the way you want.

Related:

• The "You brand"

This is a great way to get grow your LinkedIn network and have access to more people in more companies.

Vanity URLs are extremely popular and can help make your profile easier to find and maybe even a little more professional. As an example, my Linkedin vanity URL is https://www.linkedin.com/in/ekiledjian.

How can I select a custom vanity URL for my LinkedIn profile? Good question! Go to this (link) and choose Customize your public URL

Leadership is as elusive a concept as leprechauns. Everyone fancies themselves a good leader and leadership is a fantastic buzz word to sell books or fill seminars but very few have provided real tangible implementable definitions.

But before we talk about what leadership is, please talk about what it isn't

True leadership is not 

Your senior executives may not be leader! Most employees mistakenly believe that their organizations most senior executives are the leaders. Look at the number of companies that fail in the hands of these so called leaders. Does the staff working for these most senior execs think they are being lead in the right direction (towards success) or out to pasture for slaughter? 

I have worked with a handful of C-suite executives that were leaders but not all of them are. Inversely, 

Management and leadership aren't the same. The other fallacy I fight with is the mistaken belief that management and leadership are the same thing. Management is the art of managing your organization for efficient exploitation of your resources to deliver value to the shareholders. This means a good manager must  be able to plan, measure, validate, hire, fire, budget, market, etc. All very necessary skills for companies but remember that this is not leadership.

A leader doesn't have to be charismatic and well spoken. A leader could be charismatic and well spoken but he/she doesn't have to be. We have been raised in a world where we see leadership coming from extremely talented, public and opinionated people. Jack Welch (former CEO of GE), Rudolph Giuliani (former mayor of NY City) or Donald Trump. The fact is that none of these characteristics are required for true leadership because they don't help you lead your people better. 

True Leadership is

In the words of Anatole France "When a thing has been said and well said, have no scruple: take it and copy it." Drucker is the father of modern management techniques and provides a simple yet powerful definition of leadership. He is correct but other leaders have then drive the point even further

These definitions further expand on the meaning of leadership and provide additional context. These are all wonderful but they are still missing one element: moving towards a mutually beneficial goal. Add this last element and you have the winning formulae. 

So my definition of leadership is a person that empowers his followers to become better and helps them achieve the required goals while also achieving the organizations goals. Don't forget that your most valuable asset is your people.

IQ, EQ and beyond

Long ago, we accepted the fact that Emotional Intelligence (EQ) was more important than IQ for a leader. Emotional Intelligence equips a leader to discuss things at an emotional level. To make decisions based on emotions. Through research, we have learned that there is a small yet important link between EQ and good leaders.

The new world order suggests that social intelligence is a critically important "intelligence" for a modern leader. It is the ability to understand social situations, to occupy socially defined roles and to influence others. It allows the leader to see and understand other peoples perspectives while understanding the complex new "social rules or norms" used in social relationships. No where is this more evident than the migration of some of our social relationship to the digital world (personal and work). 

New research suggests that social intelligence may be the most important intelligence trait successful leaders possess. 

Where IQ was defined at birth, emotional and social intelligence is teachable and can be developed. 

Are leaders born or developed?

Emotional and social intelligence can be taught. The next question is are leaders born or made? Many leaders claim that they are born with the gift of good leadership but research says otherwise (link). 

Tests conducted using twins concludes that leadership is 1/3 born but 2/3 developed. Unfortunately the leaders that claim it is an innate skill typically don't spend much time developing or fine tuning it in themselves or in their followers (which is bad). These leaders falsely believe that they must find the next "needle in a haystack" leader with the right stuff to help the organization succeed. This means they could be turning down amazing future leaders under false pretences. 

With the economic downturn starting in2008, many companies have dramatically slashed their internal training programs which means they are not preparing their future leaders. These companies don't understand that finding the perfect leader "in the market" is a long, complex and expensive proposition (as opposed to developing internal talent already showing early signs of greatness).

Early on in this entry, I wrote "A leader could be charismatic and well spoken but he/she doesn't have to be." Research shows that extraverts have greater leadership potential (compared to introverts) but remember that this is the 1/3 of the solution that you are born with. 2/3s of leadership are learned thus only extroverts that improve or develop their emotional intelligence and their social intelligence emerge as leaders. 

Conclusion

Leadership is a critical skills for any company wanted to success long term and I have provided much of the roadmap needed to increase your pool of leaders. 

• Remember that leaders are made not born. 
• Remember that a good leader is constantly learning and doesn't rest on his/her laurels 
• Remember that you are more likely to make great leaders from within your company than finding good leaders from the outside.