Carl Bradford

Archive for the ‘Finding Jobs’ Category

When you become a job seeker, the situations you face on a day-to-day basis can take a tremendous toll on your emotional and mental well-being. You deal with rejections, frustration, disappointment, limited or no feedback to your employment inquires and possibly disrespect on a daily basis.

You probably experience more emotional ups and downs than most any other time in your professional career. And, no matter how successful you are, your progress is less predictable than you would probably like.  As a job seeker, your level of mental and emotional toughness affects you every day, in everything you do.

It’s More About What You Do

Being mentally and emotionally tough is less about what you say and do than it is about how you feel about what you say and do. For example, if your feelings about asking a another colleague or a professional that you don’t know, to provide you with referrals keeps you from asking, then you start a downward spiral to nowhere. First, you’re uncomfortable asking, so you don’t ask and end up wasting time chasing over marketeted job prospects. You get angry with yourself and/ or potential employers for wasting your time.

All these negative feelings and actions only serve to tear down your emotional and mental well-being.

Here’s a Carl Bradford Rule

“Never become emotionally involved in a networking call, especially a cold call.”

Being emotionally tough doesn’t mean that you have no emotions or that you are a cold person. It means that you have learned how to control your emotions so they don’t keep you from doing what you have to do.

How often do you have to be tough during a job search?

Only for five minutes at a time. There is no need to put undue pressure on yourself to be tough all the time. What’s really important is to be tough during those times when you need to be. It only takes five minutes to be tough enough and bolster your courage to do the things and ask the questions that we find personally difficult.

Most job seekers have reluctance to pick up that 900 pound phone and make that first cold call. It only takes five minutes.

Job seekers are also uncomfortable asking for an interview. There are comfortable ways to do this. Learn them and then get tough with yourself for five minutes to ask the question that will get you the answer.

Another issue is asking for the job offer. We all have trouble with this, but boosting your toughness for five minutes will improve your chances of obtaining a new career opportunity.

Can you spare five minutes?  Be tough and do the tough things in five minute segments.

A whitepaper’s – The ninth Source of Hire report from CareerXroads – key findings report that, on average, 41 of the country’s larger businesses filled just over 50% of their job vacancies in 2009 by internal transfers and promotions.

That’s the greatest percentage since CareerXroads first reported the information in 2002.

Predictions for 2010

Regarding 2010, however, 48% of the participating businesses believe they will hire and hire aggressively. The prediction is for a 29% growth in hiring. Only 10.8% of the interviewed employers anticipate hiring a lesser number of employees in 2010. Compare those percentages to the Source of Hire Report issued a year ago and you will discover that 100% of the businesses forecasted they would employ fewer employees.

The reports authors, Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler attitributed this to an increase in internal movement resulting from the US economic downturn, thus effectively obscuring many other sources of hire.  They expect internal movement (promotions and transfers) to return to more typical levels in 2010.

HR’s Disconnect with Contingent Workforce

Another key finding – and something recruiting managers and Human Resource professionals need to quickly get a handle on – is that 30% of the respondents were unaware for the size of their contingent labor force.

Amazingly, the survey preference selected from the 30% was that we “do not really know and can’t even guess” the size of the contingent employed pool. Of those who did report a size, the average was 13.6% of the labor force was considered contingent.

Another very interesting thing discovered is that forecasts call for these businesses to increase their contingent staff size to as much as 25%-35% in the coming years.  If that is correct, this only serves to point out that the HR and recruiting staff professionals have a very big ‘disconnect’ that has to be resolved.”

It should be pointed out however that the majority of the reports results deals with the source of employment of full-time staff.

Sources of External Hires

As Crispin and Mehler have reported for the last eight years, referrals are the largest supply of external hires. Not only were 26.7% of the external hires produced from recommendations from their workforce (who are the reason for the largest share), vendors, alumni, customers, and the like, but referrals are a powerful applicant resource.

A side note: If you’re reading this summary report, and are an active job seeker, this is a big, big clue on how to bypass the traditional recruiting application process and get recommended by an insider.  What, you don’t know anyone? There is a strategy for getting past that hurdle, but that’s part of what I coach my candidates on how to do.  You’ll need to contact me for that level of advice.

Just how effective is the referral system” “The yield for referrals is one hire for each 15 referrals, making this category essentially the most effective source by far and away,” say Crispin and Mehler.

Close to referrals, company job sites, at 22.3% of the total external hires, produce the most hires.

This is likely due to the fact that job seekers find the organization website from elsewhere; probably from the search engines or perhaps a employment post website link or an email from a friend.

Add these two top percentages together and you discover that 49% of all external hires come via referrals and the company website.

You’re probably wondering where job boards weigh in on source of hire.  The report indicated that job boards averaged 12.3% of all external hires.

Now the total for all three sources are 61.3%.

That leaves almost 39% of hires from other sources. Part of the difficulty in reporting on the 39% of external hires can be attributed to HR’s poor tracking systems, a portion of it is traceable, but attributed to a host of smaller sources.  One of the emerging sources is social media, but the ability to track that is still being developed.

An additional observation

LinkedIn accounts for 60 percent of all hires attributed to social media. Now, again if you’re a job seeker this is a big clue you must utilize in your job search.  The problem is, very few job seekers really know how to maximize LinkedIn’s effectiveness beyond the obvious.  For those that do, it is a treasure-trove of job opportunities, often yielding job opportunities with little or no competition.

What to know who the best companies to work for today, in 2010, and why they’ve garnered this top billing?  They top the list in each of their respective catagories and many of the share similar working environments along with extraordinary benefits – despite being involved in different businesses.

Here are a few interesting facts about some of these companies.

• Even in a tough job market, some employers dole out perks like on-site saunas, discounted massages and classes on Wii bowling.
• There are 22 Best Companies to work for who at the time of this post have at least 500 openings. What kind of candidates are they looking for?
• There’s at least one of these employers who have never, ever had a lay off.
• Some things about one company included: stock options on hire, baseball games, surfing lessons, kayaking tours, white-water rafting, bonfires, bowling, and volunteering opportunities.

Fortune has been producing this list for 13 years and their annual list of the “100 Best Companies to Work For” was announced last week and is published in the Feb. 8th issue of the magazine.

These companies overall seem to be thriving despite the economic conditions we’ve been living through recently.

If you’re a smart networker and know how to find insider’s who will help get your resume reviewed, these employers make ideal targets for top job seekers.  These are great companies for you to review and building networking contacts with.

Not every job market is depressed.  In fact, there are a number of employers that are listing job vacancies with third-party recruiters because they are having difficulty filling specific jobs.

While there are several different industries where this is occurring, two in particular seem to be exploding with growth.

One of those will not necessarily be a surprise and that one is the medical field. There is an extreme shortage of just about anyone with skills and experience in that market.

Another one, that surprises many people is the financial services market sector. Given all the news media attention in that market during 2009, you might conclude that little or no hiring is happening there, but that would be wrong.

In this post, I’ll cover just one area within the financial services market that the recruiting division of my Bradford Consulting Company is working on for 2010. This is a large, national search that is likely to go on throughout the year and beyond!

Financial Advisors

Demand for Personal Financial Advisors is projected to grow a whopping 41% between 2006 and 2016 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. CNN/Money ranks Personal Financial Advisor job opportunities #3 on the list of the Top 50 Jobs.

This is represented by such recent media headlines such as:

Why Financial Advisors are Changing Employers

The Sweet Spot for Financial Advisor Opportunities and Where

By going to smaller firms, career growth is more rapid for most of the reasons listed above. With more individual mentoring, better technology and resources, and the opportunity to make significantly more income, the opportunity is very real.

Instant Leadership Opportunity

There is also a new and very enticing opportunity for more experienced Financial Advisors who might like to make and move and take a small group of fellow advisors with them, i.e. move a small team. This will allow these brokers to immediately begin to earn larger override commissions on their teams efforts while at the same time providing everyone on the team with a much more attractive career path.

Video Explains More

At my Bradford Consulting website we’ve prepared a video that provides more detail as well as an opportunity to confidentially explore these opportunities.

Click the video icon to review this video.

Do you recognize these frequently used terms?

Home based business
Home business employment
Work from home
Make money at home

These are just four examples, but they are the root of many, many searches on the Internet every day around the subject of work from home ideas.  Of course adding words before and after these terms are also used, but most searches on this subject has some combination of these words.

How many searches are conducted you ask?

I did comprehensive research in Google on a variety of these and similar terms and the number of searches per month totaled 16,375,800!

And, I doubt I covered nearly all searches; it’s just these were the most obvious and doesn’t take into account similar searches conducted on other popular search engines.

So Whose Searching?

The reason is that recently I’ve been asked many times to comment on making money from home.  It seems to be this increase in interest ties with the search results I just mentioned.

And I should add, the individuals that were asking were very often individuals accustomed to earning high 5 figures and well above.  This includes many who were earning $200K and above.

The reasons for their interest are many, but chief among them seems to be more long-term financial stability, greater time freedom and creating additional streams of income.

In quiet a few cases, these individuals had lost their corporate America jobs at least once and sometimes several times through no fault of their own.  Reductions in force, acquisitions, mergers, downturns in business have often been the culprit.  In most cases losing their jobs had nothing to do with poor job performance.  Because of that, they want to better control their own career destiny.

I’m currently conducting a brief survey on this subject and if you’d like to participate, just click on this link.

What’s Often Misunderstood?

In order to earn an income at home, do you get a job working from home (home based employment) or do you get a home-based business (home based business startup)? The two are very, very different and for our purposes it’s important to distinguish between them.

Even before I can lay out the criteria that will show you how to evaluate earning an income from home (in future blog articles), it’s vital to define both methods so you know which one will best fit your needs.

Further, the criteria that you’ll use to evaluate each of them, is not the same. In fact a lot of the negative comments that are often associated with this subject occur because someone pursued a specific income opportunity, let’s say for example, a work from home opportunity and discovered the opportunity is really a home based business. What has resulted is a ton of misleading advertising and scams such as the “legitimate home jobs” sites that promise to get you work from home in return for a fee.

Sometimes the person offering one or the other of these methods does not make it clear up front; and that is where the mis-communication frequently occurs. It is very often how an opportunity is marketed that makes people believe they are a scam.  And some are just that – a scam, yet there are many, many others that are very much legitimate.

It’s a shame that many people are turned off by truly great legitimate ways to make money from home because it was presented to them initially as one thing and then turned out to be something else. Immediately their “scam alarm” goes off.

I prefer to present things as they really are. If it’s a business then call it is business.  If it’s a job working from home, then just say so upfront.

Going Forward

I believe that I have a unique perspective on this subject and feel qualified to lead a discussion with my readers because not only have I been recruiting candidates for corporate America for over 40 years, I personally have worked many years as a typical company employee in a Human Resources leadership role.

However, for most of the last 20 years I have earned my income in a home based business environment as a recruiter, consultant and trainer.  I have both relatives and friends who do the same and most of us earn a comfortable 6 Figure income doing so.  Like, me they create multiple streams of income so that when one stream weakens, others are there to make up the difference.

I’m going to continue blogging about working from home and home based businesses for awhile because I think it has merit and apparently many of you do as well, judging by the many inquiries and emails I’ve been getting.

Stay tuned as we begin to dig deeper into this subject and explore some work from home ideas.