Almostgotit.com

Is this guy you?

~The first part of this post can be found here.~

Everywhere I turn, I find advice for the job-seeker. Revamp the resume. Write a killer cover letter. Hire an interviewing coach. In short, it’s all about how fabulous every job applicant must be.

Why isn’t anyone telling employers that they need to be fabulous, too?

If there is a recession going on, and so long as we insist upon using dire, Darwinian terms with job applicants, we ought to be giving the same talk to businesses, as well. 

HR writers, though, seem only to take two approaches.  If not cajoling employees (and potential employees) to behave themselves, they are chuckling with their fellows about how dumb employees are, particularly when the latter expect that “good enough” ever really is.

Meanwhile, I am reviewing potential employers who address me like this:

“Applications submitted without salary history will not be considered.”

Oh, don’t worry, is my knee-jerk reaction. Applications allowing you to decide in advance how cheap you can be will not be submitted, either!

Nevertheless, this also translates into another lost job opportunity, and I’m not sure how many more of those I can afford.

“Submit application along with contact information for three references.”

References up front? No sir. My references are an extremely valuable commodity. As a courtesy to them, and for my own sake as well, I need to prep my references every time I invoke their names, and I’d rather not spend that vocational capital unless I know there’s at least some chance of a return on my investment. I should not be asked for them until I am interviewed, and that used to be the rule. References, once given, can be “spent” by a potential employer at any time, and some lazy employers routinely plow through any number of contact calls quite early on, before they’ve even decided on their pool of finalists.

What if I’m forced to prep my contacts so many times that they themselves begin to doubt my employability? What if a contact is also a current employer, who didn’t know I was applying for a job? This topic of references, alone, is worth several more posts on its own.  I’ve been burned, and I have issues.

In any case, an intelligent employer should do his or her own evaluation before trusting an applicant’s obviously- biased list of references. It’s okay to sniff around. I don’t mind. I’d be honored to work for a smart employer who cares that much about doing a good job search. It’s right there on my resume, so how about contacting my *previous* employer on your own? How about talking to someone you trust who might know me? How about (here’s an idea) actually reviewing my online portfolio and making your own decision about whether my work is good or not? Everyone uses web analytics now, so I can tell when you haven’t!

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Related Posts:
Employers: It’s Your Turn to be Fabulous  (part 1 of this series)
Blind Box Ads: Bad-Ass, or Just Bad? (part 3 of this series)

Cool Creative Commons Photos by Weeping Willow

To quote Kermit the Frog: It’s not easy being green.

Not all of us can commute by bicycle, plant a community garden, or volunteer to wash all of our colleagues’ dishes so they’ll stop using styrofoam. But here are a few of the easier ways to make your workspace more eco-friendly, and most of them will save you money as well.

1. Always turn off your monitor and computer when not in use. Don’t forget to turn off the printer, too! Some folks believe screen savers save energy: sadly, they do not. If you are in the market for a new computer, remember that laptops are more energy-efficient than desktops (they were designed that way, in order to conserve battery life).

2. Take the Stairs. I started doing this when I was twenty pounds heavier, and at first it was hard work. Sometimes I cheated. Finally, though, I decided to pretend that none of the elevators worked, ever. The hardest part? Walking with other people and having to stop mid-conversation so I could hike up the stairs and meet them at the top. Sometimes though, I WON! (Elevators often aren’t time savers. Nor are cars, when you have to search high and low for a place to park them, then walk between car and actual destination. These have been very interesting discoveries of mine…)

3. Think of ways to reduce your business meeting travel. Besides contributing to global warming, the use of gasoline and airplane fuel isn’t getting any cheaper. Travel is a time investment, as well, and your time has monetary value too. Therefore, many businesses (and independent consultants) are using more virtual world technologies instead of physical travel. The key is to choose the right tool. Email and instant messaging are great for simple questions; videoconferencing works well for more in-depth conversations. Technology will never completely replace face-to-face human interaction, but it’s a smart way to augment it.

4. Use less paper. Print on both sides. Send more mail electronically. Save scrap paper and use it to take notes. Reuse mailers and boxes, too – you can use mailing labels to add new addresses – and extra blank ones to neatly cover the old printing, if necessary.

5. Buy used. Craigslist and Freecycle are great places to find almost anything you need. Thrift stores (Goodwill, etc.) are great places, too – several of my favorite, designer-label business clothes (not to mention my umbrella, my computer case, and all the storage baskets in my office) were thrift-store finds.

6. Carry your own shopping bags. Reuse old ones, or keep a stash of canvas shopping bags in your car.

The key to being green? You don’t have to start big, just start! And I’d love to hear your ideas, too.

Here are some more online ideas on working greener:

Nature.org: Earthday

Treehugger.com: How to Green Your Work

MoreBusiness.Com: Running your Business

CoopAmerica.org: Buying Green

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Related Post:

11 ways to be cheap in honor of Earth Day

Standford Business School’s Bob Sutton and I had an interesting conversation about assholes today.

He (literally) wrote the book that is changing the world’s bad idea that it’s okay to be a jerk in the workplace, so long as you get things done. But Sutton seems equally interested, at times, in his ongoing crusade on behalf of the word “asshole” itself.

He’s very fond of it, and doesn’t seem to have any use for a thesaurus.

I love the guy. But he didn’t get my point that the concept is more important than the word — and that sometimes words themselves are assaultive (he, of all people, should know this.) This particular word not only further offends those who may deserve it, but might also offend people who want to talk about healthy workplaces without always using words like “asshole” when they do.

Which might make the person who keeps insisting on the word, himself, an asshole — right?

We rode the train to Portland today. We had to go to some effort to get onto the train with the dining car, because while my children have been on many trains, they’ve never eaten in a dining car. It all worked out perfectly, except for the playing cards part.

Everyone knows that one of the best ways to pass the time on a train is to play cards. Another of the best things to do on a train is to walk from one end of the train to the other, finding the snack car along the way and buying something there. And what we wanted to buy was a pack of playing cards. We got on at the beginning of the Seattle-LA route, so everything should have been freshly stocked. Moreover, I was a perfect customer — on vacation, living large, and willing to spend almost anything for a little deck of cards with “Amtrak” written on them. And which, moreover, they had listed prominently for purchase on their snack car menu. We waited eagerly in line, being bumped by all the hotdogs and dorito bags going the other way.

But they were OUT. No cards. They’d not even bothered to stock them this morning, apparently.

Amtrak is a company in perpetual financial straits, and they really need my money. And I would very happily have obliged at their snack car, as I already had in their dining car. They also need to fill me with happy memories so I’ll come back as a repeat customer, and playing card games with my daughter in the lounge car would have gone a long, long way in that direction — for both of us!

On the other hand, later that afternoon, we stopped at Powell Books’ flagship store in Portland. What a great bookstore! And by coincidence, in a matter of hours, also one of many that would be unveiling HARRY POTTER #7. They had the costumes, the signs, the brilliant cross-promotions. There were “Harry Potter Updates” going out over the loudspeaker every few minutes. Outside, the line of excited H.P. fans was already wrapped around the block. Powells, however, was prepared already with tents, signs, and traffic cones. Two news vans were already comfortably parked on the busy street as well, and ready to jump on the unfolding story.

Which is why Amazon.com STILL hasn’t beat Powells books, even in this, their mutual home territory.

Penelope Trunk  recently wrote a wonderfully iconoclastic column in The Huffington Post entitled Hold CEOs Accountable for Their Bad Parenting.   It seems that corporate boards don’t mind their CFO’s having mistresses, or even having three mistresses at once: they just don’t like it when all three mistresses go public and embarrass the company. 

Even more horrifying, however, is how universally this “success” culture celebrates bad parenting by lauding wealthy fathers who work 100-hour weeks and assure their colleagues that “My Family is You.”

Trunk writes:

I can’t decide which is more pathetic — the way these men approach their role as a parent, or the way that Fortune magazine writes about it without any commentary.

How can there be no mention of the fact that these CEOs are neglecting their kids?

We have a double standard in our society: If you are poor and you abandon your kids, you are a bad parent. But if you are rich and you abandon them to run a company, you are profiled in Fortune magazine.

Don’t miss the article, nor the comments, either.  One is by Harvard Business School’s Bob Sutton.

Who washes his own family’s dishes.

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Related Posts:
Woman vs. Rabbit Hole

My daughter graduated from 5th grade today.  I never graduated from anything until highschool, but today I’m thinking:  some new ways of doing things actually are good.  We need to mark our milestones.  They matter.  My son will graduate from high school next year, and then supposedly will go to college (if he can remember to apply to any of them).  If 5th grade graduation can make me cry, I will really need my friends around me when my first born leaves the nest, I can tell you right now. 

But no, today, I’m not even going to go there. 

My mother is flying in for a visit tomorrow, the house is a total disaster, and I am also exchanging flurries of email with a potential employer.  The latter has gotten more than slightly ridiculous, like we’re settling a lawsuit or arranging security clearance, instead of just talking about a no-big-deal job.  Yesterday I almost walked away but decided to send one last demanding email instead, sure it would scare them off once and for all (which would actually have made it easier to focus on cleaning my house) but nope:  back they are again today, still wanting to talk.  I don’t know.  I asked them for the weekend. 

I still need some more time to eat olives and bake cookies. 

Have moved from cookies to olives.  Really strong, salty ones, right out of the jar.  How is it that I survived the first three decades of my life without liking olives? 

However, I am even more grateful for friends.  Some of whom I’ve not even met in person yet, but whose words, both public and private, (Thanks Ann, thanks Peggy) have been very helpful indeed.  Nor will I entertain any silly idea that the ongoing weirdness of my (almost) life is a sign of terminal uniqueness, because I know it is not. 

So.  Millenial career guru Penelope Trunk insists that one of the keys to success is taking long lunch hours, and I agree with her. 

For one thing, meeting for lunch doesn’t take nearly as long as meeting for golf, and I can’t play golf anyway.  Sharing a meal is one of those sacramentally human things for which there is really no substitute.  Call it “networking” in a career context if you want, but it’s so much more than that.

A friend asked to meet today and I happily said “yes.”  We’ve both been so busy with our own lives and all they contain that we don’t see each other as much as we would like.  Across the table, our eyes meet and we smile as we talk. 

This is the good stuff.

She just finished her classes for the term, her first as a Ph.D candidate, (hurray!)  Her life this summer will be filled with trips and beaches, dancing and driving lessons, and getting a child ready for a semester abroad.   We laughed at how this mothering just keeps going on, no matter how long it’s been since we actually had these babies.  At least we can identify, in advance, that summer will be hectic for us, a balancing act between the still-insatiable demands of our tall children and the need to carve out our own space in the midst of them, even as the tall folk inevitably object.  Which, just as inevitably, will make us feel bad, and we’ll have to persevere through that as well. 

It seems too early to call this stage a “mid-life” anything, nor are we empty-nesters just yet.  So we’ve been calling this stage “Chapter Two.”  The most demanding part of our childraising is over (except during vacations!) and we are coming up for air and to take a look around at what comes next.  Several of us (my friend included) are looking at a life without the life-and-financial partner we’d assumed would live it with us.  That’s more than a little rough.

Nor has the world waited for us. Often, weirdly, we’re less employable now than we were straight out of college, even though most of us have had several additional years of gainful employment since then. 

Go figure.

But here is something Penelope Trunk doesn’t know, because she’s not been here.  We’ve been around.  We already know how to be counter-cultural.  We’re tough, and we’ve still got lots of game. 

Watch us. 

And just for you, my friends: one of my very nice Cesar #2 Montesinos, by Tabacalera Fuente.

From Time Magazine Commentary: “MIT Dean Marilee Jones Flunks Out” (May 4, 2007):

M.I.T. has lost an apparently great dean at a time when you don’t read a lot about successful university administrators. And, it turns out, she is one who had a personal as well as professional understanding of the stresses of our résumé culture. It would be a useful lesson for M.I.T.’s students if the gatekeeper who gets to award the golden credential of a degree from the world’s most prestigious technical institution is someone who lacks that kind of credential. It would say, “Don’t let it go to your head. An M.I.T. diploma isn’t necessary. In fact, it isn’t sufficient either. There are qualities that M.I.T.’s admissions office can’t sort for and its distinguished professors can’t teach. And as you go off to face the world with your M.I.T. degree, you may or may not have them.”

Instead of dumping her, M.I.T. might want to consider giving Jones an honorary degree. We’re coming up on the season when universities hand out these things with abandon, often to people who never saw the inside of a classroom at this, or sometimes at any, university. These folks get honorary degrees because they gave the university a million or two from piles so large you can’t even see the dent. Then she could go to the university health services and get another piece of paper stating that the résumé fib was the result of stress. She’s the expert on résumé stress, after all. And then let her go back to the work she apparently does so well.

Click here to read the whole Time article  (it’s short!)

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Related Posts:
MIT blew it
Hail Marilee, denied any grace
The Marilee Jones joke
How to (almost) get Marilee

“Some mornings it just doesn’t seem worth it to gnaw through the leather straps”    Emo Phillips

Frankly, I’m in an (almost) funk.  I met with two great guys at our favorite diner this a.m. to talk about some paying projects we have coming down the pike.  That’s good news, too.  But I also may just have lost one of my clients (for whom I was writing copy about one of the most boring subjects you can imagine – I mean, if you were going to pick a subject that was so quintessentially boring that you could make a great joke about it?  This one would be it.)

Nevertheless, it was honest work and paid well. I like the client too (as I generally do), and fervently believe in their right to assertively market a solid and necessary product.  Moreover, it truly is an interesting challenge to help people in such obvious need of a “make-over.”  Also, I’m learning a great deal. 

It’s really sweet to be (almost) employed.  That’s about how I would describe things at the moment, given I’ve only been (almost) freelancing for a couple of months now, and have only made enough money doing it to buy a new laptop (which was, first and foremost, NOT a Dell.  Dells are great, but they are also standard-issue at The Institution Which Shall Not be Named.  So of course I had to buy something else!)

Some have asked if I’d keep writing this blog.  Is it fraudulent to write about being unemployed when, technically, I’m not?  But then again, I would feel equally fraudulent  claiming I know everything there is to know about being an employed person now. 

Besides.  I have yet to write about my various inquiries and explorations of going back to school.   About all the post-stay-at-home-mom career issues that I’ve been obsessed with for the past few years.  About how even after you’ve taken all the personality type indicator tests that exist over the course of your ever-lengthening life – and even taught some of the WORKSHOPS for God’s sake – it’s still possible to have no idea what to do next.

Or how incredibly complicated life can become sometimes, especially whenever one is tempted to get smug, so that all of the normally-healthy, normally-obvious “things to do next” are neither.  Oh well.  As Whoopi Goldberg quipped,  ‘normal’ is just a setting on the washing machine.

I’m afraid you’re stuck with me.

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Related Posts:
Success!
In Defense of Thoughts

I promise not to mention Marilee Jones any more but this once.  I was very pleased today, however, to have been able to unearth an online copy of one of my all-time favorite essays by one of my all-time favorite essayists.  Here it is, from the October 2005 New Yorker Magazine: Getting in: the social logic of Ivy League admissions,  by Malcolm Gladwell. 

What is talent?  What REALLY makes people economically successful?  How much does “being smart” matter in business, let alone in the general scheme of things?  And who decides and unlocks the gates for us?

I’ve added some related links (see right) which you may be interested in reading, too, especially if you have children (as I do) heading to college soon.  Enjoy!

N.B.: Once today’s links have expired, you can always find them in my “del.icio.us” archive by clicking directly on the ”del.icio.us” links headline, or by clicking here. 

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Related Posts: 
MIT blew it
Marilee Jones joke
Hail Marilee, denied any grace

How to (Almost) get Marilee

Coming Out: I’m a closet academical