================================================= "Achieve Your Dreams" - Volume 30, December, 2009 ================================================= Greetings! Welcome to "Achieve Your Dreams", a quarterly newsletter for people with a dream - - whether it's accelerating a career, changing careers, building a business, securing a new job, achieving that long-desired goal, or discovering a new life vision and direction. Each newsletter will offer 1-2 noteworthy articles, a section on "Office Happenings" and "Helpful Resources", and some favorite quotes and sayings to motivate and inspire you. In this issue: 1. "How's Your On-Line Presence?" 2. Office Happenings (Academy of Dental Assisting) 3. Helpful Resources (Company Salaries and Employee Reviews) 4. Favorite Quotes Feel free to forward this to those you believe would find it useful. Feedback is encouraged and appreciated. If there is a specific topic you'd like covered, please send the suggestion to me via the e-mail address below. ============================ How's Your On-Line Presence? ============================ Whether you're a jobseeker or a solopreneur, if your dream employer or client were to Google you, what would they find? Would they find a rich mix of "hits" that showcase you as an expert in your field? A series of value-added tweets on Twitter or your thoughtful participation in on-line discussion groups? A blog? A compelling LinkedIn profile featuring numerous recommendations from associates? Or, would their search dredge up embarrassing tidbits about your personal life, political views, or "after hours" activities? Or still, would they find absolutely nothing? As the popularity of online social networking sites like LinkedIn and Twitter continues to increase, the question of whether to have an online presence has become fodder for discussion around water coolers and at dinner parties. "Talking heads" in the media seem to agree - an online presence is a must. But, for those of us who do business on "Main Street," is there truly any value in the time and energy required to sit behind a keyboard creating a network of unseen connections? Does the return on investment have real impact on career, job search, or business endeavors? Consider one of my clients who recently received a terrific job offer from a medical device company that originated solely from her presence on LinkedIn. This start-up was doing a confidential search for someone with my client's experience. They found her name in a LinkedIn-based medical device group she had joined and was participating in, and they were impressed by her excellently written, compelling profile. They contacted her to ask if she'd be interested in talking and, after three rounds of interviews, she was offered the job. The power of an online presence! So, how's your on-line presence? Statistics show that a rising number of recruiters and hiring managers are using social networking sites to find job candidates. In a recent study of HR professionals and recruitment firms by Jobvite, the majority of respondents said they use Google and social networking sites to research candidates. Further, 80% of respondents said they use or planned to use social networking to find and attract candidates this year, with 77% using social networking to seek and approach passive candidates. LinkedIn was the most used social networking site among respondents at 95% (up from 80% in 2008), with Facebook and Twitter coming in at 59% and 42% respectively. All signs seem to be pointing to the need for today's professional to have a quality online presence, whether you're a job seeker, happily employed, or your own boss. After all, "you are what Google says you are," as aptly stated by Jenny DeVaughn, a senior talent consultant at Talent Connections. And, if decision makers in the business world are Googling your name, you should be proactively controlling Google's message about you! So, what could your online presence look like? LinkedIn is considered the bare minimum online presence for a professional person. It's the largest, most popular professional/ business networking tool on the web, used by more than 39 million professionals in more than 150 industries globally to facilitate millions of business introductions. All of the Fortune 500 companies are represented on LinkedIn, with participation at director level and above, as well as more than 300,000 CEO's. So, there's no excuse for any professional not to be on LinkedIn! The key to LinkedIn success is to create a profile that showcases the best of your professional experience. Make yourself as easy to find as possible by including key words in your profile - terms relevant to your field that recruiters or trade professionals might use to search for potential job candidates or service providers. Include accomplishments in your profile to showcase the value you've brought to previous employers. Then bolster your profile's claims with recommendations from prior managers, customers, and colleagues using LinkedIn's recommendations feature. LinkedIn allows you to further position yourself as an expert and a networking giver by answering questions found in LinkedIn's Answers section. In addition, you can build your own networking contact pool and continue to showcase your expertise by joining groups associated with your field and ambitions and thoughtfully participating in the group's discussions. Facebook, another highly popular profile-based social networking site, provides a different arena in which to build your online presence and connect with others. The challenge for professionals using Facebook is to balance the amount of personal information you want the world to see versus the amount of professional information you want to showcase. Typically, if you wouldn't want your boss or co-workers to know a particular piece of information about you, you probably don't want it showing up on Facebook. Twitter is a social networking site that is gaining popularity with professionals, having largely overcome an initial "bad rap" as a time drain devoted to recording trivial answers to the question: "What are you doing now?" And, while many use Twitter for purely social reasons, savvy professionals have learned that Twitter provides an opportunity to develop an online brand and connect with others in their fields with unprecedented access. The basic concept of Twitter is that you "follow" other people's "tweets" (140-character messages), and they follow yours. Further, you can see who else is following the people you're following. So, by following key people in your field (CEOs, top- level executives, hiring managers, and everyone in between), you'll know who spends time with them, what conferences they attend, what they're reading, and what's on their minds. And it allows you a potential opportunity to connect with them directly. So, what do you "tweet" about? The same basic principles of real world networking apply here. Give, give, give! Don't blatantly self-promote. Tweet about an article, an idea, or share a link of professional interest. The more relevant and interesting your tweets are, the more followers you will gain. And those followers may be potential employers, business partners, or even the very CEO's and hiring managers you are following. Other means of building Google's positive message about you include: * Blogging. Blogs rank high in Google searches. If you have strong opinions about what's happening in your field and you believe your opinions would be respected and valued by others, a blog is an excellent way to showcase your expertise and experience. You can also gain visibility by participating in others' blogs and offering your point of view in response to their blog posts. * Writing articles and contributing to articles for online professional journals relevant to your field. These publications are always looking for article contributions and offer a tremendous opportunity to position yourself as an expert. * Online resumes or portfolios for those in artistic fields. Even if you're not artistically inclined, you can build an online resume and professional portfolio using VisualCV (http://www.visualcv.com) a highly effective means of showcasing your professional accomplishments on-line that's quick and easy for employers to view. Used individually or in combination, all of these online resources can jumpstart your professional online presence. Remember that you will likely never maintain something that overwhelms you, so don't feel pressure to jump into the online networking pool cannonball-style! Pick the method you feel most comfortable with to tackle first, and then add other tools as you feel ready. ================= Office Happenings ================= I'm thrilled to share with you that the Academy of Dental Assisting in Frankfort, KY has purchased 75 of the Study Guides that accompany my interviewing DVD, "10 Steps To Interviewing With Confidence." The Director of the school had purchased the video and felt the contect was so rich that they've decided to use it, along with the Study Guides, in upcoming classes to educate their graduates on the job search and interview process. In mid-September I was quoted in an MSN/CareerBuilder article titled, "The Worst Interview Faux Pas." I shared one example of an interview faux pas and I was joined by other career coaches and recruiters who offered their own interview faux pas. You can read the article at http://tiny.cc/fKRF7. I was delighted when last summer the editor of Boston Women's Business Journal asked to print one of my previous newsletter articles, "Turning a Second Interview into a Job Offer." She felt the article was perfect for a section they were doing on careers and job searching. The article was published in the June, 2009 edition of the paper. ================= Helpful Resources ================= Have you ever wondered what Apple pays its engineers, or what employees at IBM say it's like to work there? Well, a website that's recently come to my attention can tell you that. It's called Glassdoor (http://www.glassdoor.com/index.htm). Glassdoor is completely free and offers salary information on jobs at numerous companies, as well as reviews by employees of what it's like to work at their company. However, to gain access to all of their salary data or company reviews, they ask that you anonymously post a salary or review of your own. So if you're interested in seeing salaries, Glassdoor asks that you post an anonymous salary for your current or former job, and then you'll get access to salaries for all companies. The same goes for reviews and interviews - if you post an anonymous review of your current or former employer or post an anonymous review of a recent interview experience, then you'll get access to all reviews and interviews for any company. To learn more, visit Glassdoor's Q&A section at http://www.glassdoor.com/about/learn.htm. =============== Favorite Quotes =============== "Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task." -- William James "Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising which tempt you to believe that your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires... courage." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson "You decide you'll wait for your pitch. Then as the ball starts toward the plate, you think about your stance. And then you think about your swing. And then you realize that the ball that went past you for a strike was your pitch." -- Bobby Murcer Wishing you all a wonderful holiday season spent with family and friends and a healthy, happy 2010! In support of you, Jeanne