Category: Charting Your Career for Success

Interviewing Safety

The place of the interview is important.  People who are seeking home-based jobs may find that the job interview takes place in a person’s home and may include more than one applicant.

If interviewers ask that you meet with them in their home, you might ask who will be in attendance.  Most interviewers will meet with applicants in public locations such as a hotel lobby, coffee shop, restaurant, or airport arrival area.

If you are meeting in a hotel room, do so before or during regular business hours.  Let interviewers know that you happy to meet with them and to let your family or friends know how the interview went.

Let someone know you are going to the interview.  Schedule a post-interview call with a friend or relative to let them know when the interview is complete.  This practice can protect your safety and help you remember things you learned during your interview.

If you are flying for an interview, learn how to connect with ground transportation before you leave on your trip.  This information can make your transportation safer and save you time and energy during your travel.

Fly early in the day.  Just the eerie nature of a late-night empty airport is reason enough to travel early.

If the interviewer is lewd, profane, threatening, or violent, leave the interview.  Get in touch with friends or family as soon as possible and let them know about your experience.  Beyond those measures, I am not a lawyer.  I can not tell you how to handle legal matters.  If you believe that the interviewer has broken the law or hurt you, you should seek direction from the proper authorities.

You may find that interviewing is interesting, maybe even fun.  Plan ahead. Think about your safety before making commitments.  You will have terrific interviews, and you may even land a great job.

Is it Time for You to Start Your Own Business?

Prior to entering recruiting, I worked for two terrific companies: Procter & Gamble and Polaroid Corporation.

I did a lot of things that I loved to do.  I took pride in my companies’ brands.  I loved giving presentations.  I enjoyed the travel.  I took fascination in new product introductions.  I found joy in absolutely crushing the competition in shelf space, ad space, and in sales.

However, I had two frustrations.

1. Income: No matter how great my performance or the evaluations of my performance, there was little difference between my income and the income of my peers.  At one point at Procter & Gamble, I led in sales performance for 15 consecutive months and got the same bonus and same pay raise as everyone else.  My first year at Polaroid, I led the nation in sales against quota.  My bonus was 17% of my salary.  The lowest bonus was 12% of salary.
2. Location: Where my family and I lived had to fit the needs of the company.

My first experience at witnessing a successful start-up company was a real revelation.  I had just taken a promotion and moved my family to The Woodlands, TX, just north of Houston.  I had an office around the corner from a man, who had worked for a major oil company.  Three years earlier, he had started a company that brokered sulfur and sulfuric acid.  These chemicals are waste products.  Refining separates then from the oil.

To other companies, sulfur and sulfuric acid are essential products.  He developed the knowledge for selling these chemicals during the time he worked for the oil company.  His business model was simple.  He found people who needed to dispose of sulfur and sulfuric acid and found people who needed to buy them.  He made a commission off brokering the deal between the two parties.

His income and my income were very similar except that his income had significantly more digits to the left of the decimal point than my income at Polaroid Corporation.

Today, the company that he founded is an international chemical company that sells a diverse range of chemical products.

He started his company based on two concepts:

1. He relied on his established network, which immediately gave him a customer base.
2. He became a broker, which eliminated the costs of owning inventory and the costs of manufacturing products.

You may find that starting a company offers more security than getting a job.  A member of my family was a successful sales person for a fragrance company until another fragrance company bought his employer.   He found himself in the same place in which many people find themselves.  Another company bought his company and eliminated positions.

Rather than pursue another job and face the risk of yet another job loss through an acquisition, he set up a brokerage operation for consumer products.  He established contracts with a network of companies that would ship to and bill retail customers.  He had no shipping or inventory complications.  He got his commission directly from the company that shipped the product.  His retail customer base was the same as the one where he had been successful.  He reduced his risk of distribution losses by building a base of product selections built on contracts with a broader range of products than just fragrances.

He quadrupled his income.

The broker business model is simple.  Brokers find a person with a need and a person with a product or service and make a commission from putting them together.  Sales people have the straightforward opportunity to go from an employee to a contract employee, because they typically have an established network for their goods or services.  Yet many people have a network and the skills to meet needs within that network.  Even without a network, people set up websites with shopping carts and start new businesses.

Self-employment provided me with these three things.

1. Allow me to live where I wanted to live
2. Connect with contacts and knowledge I already had and every year build on those relationships and that knowledge
3. Tie my income directly to my performance.

Is it time for you to start your own business?

I have written other articles on how to prepare for job interviews and how to prepare for business meetings.  The things that you do to prepare for both meetings are the same.

Once you land a job, you are competing with other people inside and outside your company to keep your job and to progress in your career.

If you want job security and, especially if you want to get promoted, treat each day as a job interview.

Before starting your business day, make a list of five things you want to accomplish that day.  If those five things include business meetings within your own company or outside your company, preparing for those meetings is very simple.  At first, you may find that making these preparations may seem complicated and burdensome.  I know that I did.  However, I found that repetition made these preparations easier and the habit of making these preparations made them feel natural, even necessary.  I also found that when I encountered new situations, these habits made preparation for those situations much easier as well.

Before going to a meeting, write down the following things.

1. The purpose of the meeting
2. Presentations you need to bring to the meeting
3. Names of participants
4. Location, time, and date of the meeting
5. The things you want to accomplish in the meeting

During the meeting take notes.  From your notes you can send follow-up emails and take action on your commitments resulting from the meeting.  You will do a better job for your employer and your peers.

The Types of Recruiters and Agencies

There are four types of staffing agencies.

1. Temporary Agencies specialize in referring people for positions that are temporary or part-time.
2. Placement firms specialize in placing people in hourly positions.  These firms may charge you a fee for their services.
3. Contingency firms get paid by the employer upon filling a position and typically place people in management and middle management positions.
4. Retained search firms specialize in filling positions at the executive level and are paid for a scheduled period of service plus an override based on the income of the position filled, and receive reimbursement for their expenses.

Recruiters usually specialize.

Individual recruiters and, in most cases, recruiting firms specialize in a particular industry such as healthcare, consumer products, technology.
Also, recruiters and firms may further specialize in the type of jobs they fill.  For example, they may only staff for jobs for nurses, accountants, engineers, sales managers, marketing managers, and so forth.

Recruiters specialize, because by specializing they are able to build a network of hiring companies that recruit applicants with similar profiles.  Quite often, recruiters have worked in similar positions and industries in which they recruit.  Because recruiters specialize, they can contribute added industry information to help an applicant prepare for a job and plan a career path.

What do the different titles for recruiters mean?

People refer to recruiters with a lot of different names:  employment agent, headhunter, corporate recruiter, executive recruiter, career or recruiting consultant, and other titles.   There is little difference among recruiters in their basic functions.  They typically spend most of their day contacting companies to get job listings, interviewing applicants, scheduling interviews, checking references, and sourcing applicants.

Should You Work with a Recruiter?  Whether or not you should work with a recruiter depends upon your personal comfort in working with other people.

• Resume guidance
• Interview preparation
• Company information
• Access to hiring companies
• Industry knowledge
• Income information and guidance

When working with a recruiter, you should set up an understanding about how the recruiter manages your information.  Depending on your need for getting a job relative to your need to keep your information confidential, you and the recruiter can set up guidelines on whether you need to approve of each place the recruiter sends your resume.

I recommend that you be selective in the number of recruiters you use.  If you place your resume with several recruiters who are competitors, you will not be expanding your opportunities, but will discourage recruiters from wanting to help you.  Never send an email with a “Send to” list that displays the name of more than one recruiter.  You will appear thoughtless, desperate, and will probably discourage the recruiters on the list from trying to help you at all.

The type of firm you need to contact depends on a two factors:  the type of position you are seeking and the firm’s client base relative to your experience.

Most recruiting firms have websites.  You should be able to determine from the information on the website whether the firm is right for you.  In addition, you may know people who have worked with recruiters and who can recommend recruiters and firms you might want to use.