The Best Job You Can Apply For

The best job you can apply for is one that doesn't exist yet. Many people looking for a job make the bad mistake of basing their hunt on job postings. This is a great strategy if you want to minimize your chances for landing a job and to maximize the number of interviews you get without actually getting a job offer. Think about it: if you see a job posting, thousands of other candidates are seeing the very same posting. In these days of high unemployment, you know that each job posting garners dozens or even hundreds of applications, many of these by well qualified candidates. Your application, if it is seen at all, is considered among many others and should you be lucky enough to get invited to interview for the position, you will be one of several candidates, each striving to be the last one standing at the end of the process. Too many steps. Unattractive odds.

There is a better way. How about a job that is tailor-made just for you? Seems like too much to ask for in an economy where jobs are scarce? Well, I got news for you. This is a tried and true strategy that works a lot more often than you think. In fact, this strategy worked for me twice in my career - my current job and my last one. Unfortunately, getting such a job involves the "N word". That's right, networking. I know everyone says it's necessary, and pretty much everyone hates doing it, but this is a special kind of networking, it's networking at the top.

Here is how it goes:

Step I - pick an industry or market

Step II - make sure you understand it well (ideally, this is a market you already know)

Step III - network your way into meeting CEOs in this industry

Step IV - make your pitch

Of course, the trick is step III - CEOs are busy people and are not sitting around waiting for your call. In fact, the only viable way to meet a CEO is to be introduced to one through a mutual acquaintance. That's where the whole networking thing comes in. Don't even think about cold calling or spamming. That's not going to get you hired.

Why a CEO? The good thing about a CEO is that he has no boss (technically it's the board of directors, but they don't deal with such things). If he likes you, he may very well create a position for you where none existed previously. Presto, a position out of thin air. What's more, the position is yours. You don't need to interview against hoards of qualified applicants. Another possible outcome is that the CEO will refer you to a member of his staff to interview with them. That's what happened to me in my previous job. After meeting with the business unit CEO for a networking meeting, he liked me enough to recommend me to his VP of Marketing. A recommendation from the CEO is almost as good as an offer letter... almost...

By the way, before the angry comments start flying my way, I am not against applying for jobs you find on the Internet. Someone has to be getting all those jobs, right? All I am saying is that this is a very competitive and impersonal process and that many applicants (myself included) feel that it's difficult to shine or stand out from the crowd in an e-mail application. I have never gotten a job from an online post. Your results may vary.

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Efficiency and Effectiveness in Hunting for a Job

Alpaca is still looking for a job - it's been a few months now, which is not surprising in these economically challenging times. On Tuesday I met for breakfast with an old friend who works for a venture capital firm. We were chatting about our families and I mentioned Alpaca's job hunt. My friend immediately asked what kind of job she was looking for, and after I explained he asked me to forward her resume to him by email. I did, and a few hours later he sent an e-mail introducing Alpaca to all the partners in his well respected VC firm. Later that day, one of the partners sent Alpaca an e-mail. Yesterday they spoke on the phone and a few hours later he introduced her by e-mail to the CEO of one of their portfolio companies that had recently raised funds and that was looking for help on the marketing side. I don't know if this will end in anything concrete, but it's definitely a step in the right direction, yes?

Saying that networking is the key to finding a job is an old cliche, but that doesn't make it any less true. Which belatedly brings me to the topic of this post: in business school I took a class in building distribution channels. The professor explained that making your sales targets is largely the function of two parameters: (i) the efficiency of your sales channel; and (ii) its effectiveness. Efficiency is the number of customer contacts you make - or how many sales calls you make. Your effectiveness is a measure of how successful you are in converting each customer contact. Calculating your success is a simple multiplication exercise: how many customer contacts you have, multiplied by your success rate with each contact.

Today it struck me that success in a job search is subject to the exact same performance metrics. Your success is a combination of the number of job interviews you land (or the number of random networking contacts you make), and of your ability to convert those interviews (or random networking contacts) into job offers.

The implication for this is simple: you just need to be out there and meet with as many people as possible. Even if you are a particularly poor batter, if you take enough swings sooner or later you will hit a home run. The important thing is to keep swinging no matter how many times you miss the ball.

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Imaginary Personal Finance Cages

Once again I am on a business trip, this time I am visiting Texas. Yesterday I went out to dinner with a colleague in a local restaurant and we got into a conversation with our waitress - who happened to be on her first day on the job. The conversation lasted about 5 minutes, but we learned some very interesting thing about her which I wanted to share with all of you.

Our waitress, a nice woman in her late 20's, whose name I don't remember, is an Illinois native, but she lived in many places around the country, including South Carolina and now, Texas. She has a college degree in "culinary arts" and a passion for wine. Before moving to Texas, she was thinking of moving to California and to work in the wine industry but decided that this was too risky, and instead moved to Texas where she "has some family". Her dream is to go to Italy, travel the country and experience the culture and the people. I don't know this for a fact, but I got the impression that our waitress is not married, and I am pretty sure that she does not have kids.

My colleague and I were perplexed. I asked her why she's not chasing her dream? Why not go to Italy? Her reason: she doesn't have the money. My response to that was "why don't you go to Italy and work there?" After all, if she can be a waitress in Texas, she can be a waitress in Italy as well. She explained that she wants to go to Italy when she has enough money to experience the country and its culture without being worried about every dime she spends. In a different part of the conversation, she mentioned that the restaurant was paying her a salary of $2.25 / hour, not including tips.

I am not going to sit in judgement on a hard working waitress, but both my colleague and I were amused by her attitude. I am in my late thirties and my colleague in his early forties. Both of us traveled the world extensively, on tiny sums of money. Backpacking and hitch hiking our way across continents, when we were more or less the waitress' age. I didn't work during these extended trips, but I met many backpackers who did. And what better way to experience the land and its people than to live among them? We both recall those times as some of the happiest in our lives. For me these were times of adventure. Of freedom. Of peace of mind. Imagine waking up in the morning in a strange part of the world, for months at a time, with the only thing on your mind being the next big surprise that is waiting for you around the corner.

I compare those times to the life I lead today, tightly constrained by the daily necessities of raising a family and nurturing a career, and I marvel at the adventures I had. I am tempted to look at our waitress and wonder at the imaginary personal finance cage that she put herself in. Not pursuing your dream until you have the money!? "Break free", I want to shout at her. From my vantage point it looks like the barriers standing between her and her dream are all in her mind. But then I wonder whether someone with a different vantage point could say the exact same thing about me. Even though those cages exist only in our heads, the barriers we set-up for ourselves govern our lives.

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Home Insurance: The Big Picture

As part of our ill fated house purchase late this summer, we did a lot of thinking about home insurance policies. A truly riveting topic, to be sure. Nevertheless, we discovered a few interesting things about the subject:

Most home insurance companies offer about the same rates for the same coverage. This is not terribly surprising when you think about it. These guys' jobs is to estimate risk and then to price their plans a bit higher than the expected pay-out, such that they generate a profit for their companies. Since this is an extremely competitive market, prices should gravitate to more or less the same level, and they more or less do.

The biggest impact on your home insurance premium seems to be your deductible... that stands to reason as well. The insurance companies are in the business of making money. If you can sue them for every little thing that goes wrong with the house two things happen: one, you are more likely to sue. Small things go wrong all the time. Second, when you sue, they not only incur the cost of paying you for your loss, they also have a considerable administrative cost. However, if you are willing to take a higher deductible, things look much brighter from the insurance company's perspective: you are less likely to sue and you are less likely to be able to manufacture false claims. In addition, the insurance company knows that you are motivated to reduce the likelihood of damage, since you bear a larger percentage of the cost.

The difference in insurance premiums is dramatic. We found that by increasing our deductible from $2,500 to $5,000 we could roughly double our liability coverage for the same premium.

My philosophy about insurance is a simple one: you insure only risks you cannot afford to bear yourself. The window is broken? No problem. Repair it yourself. You don't need insurance coverage for that, and you certainly don't need to pay for the insurance company's profits. However, most people (ourselves included) can't afford to replace a entire house lost to major disaster. That's what insurance is for.

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How I Almost Lost My Job

About 18 months ago I got a new job. I left a large, established technology company, for a small start-up in the same field. There was a certain amount of trepidation involved in leaving a solid company for a tiny one with only a few months of cash in the bank. Last week my decision was vindicated, in the most nasty of ways. My former company eliminated my old position. In fact, they eliminated the entire team that I ran.

OK. I admit it. That wasn't even close to my losing my job. Still those cuts hit close to home. Some good friends of mine lost their jobs, in what is a very nasty job market.

I believe that I would have kept my job, had I stayed with the company. I had very good relationships with my management and I believe that they would have found a new role for me in some sort of a re-org scenario, but I can't help but feel that I made the right decision to take a risk and move to my current position.

There are a couple of lessons to be had here. First, no job is safe in today's corporate culture. Next time you have any feelings of loyalty or warmth towards your employer, remember that those feelings only go in one direction. If the need arises, your company will let you go in the blink of an eye. I am not saying this in a pejorative way. In fact, just a few weeks ago I had to let someone go in my company. However, what I am trying to say is that "every man for himself" is the reality in today's business climate, and I don't know that it was ever different.

Second, job security is a very ephemeral thing. Some of the financially strongest companies in the world are laying people off, left and right. Some small businesses and companies are retaining their employees and are even hiring. Big business is such an impersonal thing. You could be doing a phenomenal job, but if someone at the top decides to lop-off a business unit, you would lose your livelihood just as the slacker in the next cube would.

At the end of the day job security exists no-where in corporate america today. I believe that a new term is needed: Career Security. It's not about keeping your current job, it's about making sure that if you do lose your job your long term earning prospects are not diminished. Career security is about recovery and resiliency more than it is about maintaining a specific employer.

I think there's a book in there somewhere.

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