Happy New Year Job
Emmanuel Conde, Alliant Technologies
Have you been hanging in there at your old job waiting for the right time to make a change? Then the New Year may provide the incentive for change. Network engineering positions are going unfilled, and headhunters are circling.
So what are your plans? Waiting for the right moment could be a good thing depending on how you really use the time. Just like you did when you prepared for the CCIE Lab you should study up on who is hiring and prepare for an interview. It’s not hard to find out who’s hiring.? Interviewing is not easy for anyone who has not been on the market lately. I have seen CCIEs flub interviews, coming away angry and upset about the company and interviewers. I always advise anyone going into a technical interview to brush up on the terminology, protocols, OSI 7 layers and physical appearance. Just knowing how good you are does not always translate into that dream job. CCIEs are targets for tough technical interviews, too.Everything you know or take for granted in your current job might be questioned thoroughly. Often the goal of a comprehensive technical interview is to do a real assessment of your skills, but sometimes these are used to lower the candidate’s salary expectations. Yes, it’s true. You might find yourself in a defensive posture during an interview. What do you do then? Step away from the emotions and don’t let them see you sweat. Sure you are not going to get all the answers right, that is to be expected. Missing an answer is not bad. It’s how you handle missing it that counts. Make sure to let the interviewer know that you are familiar with the item in question, and say you don’t remember the answer if you really don’t know.
How do you handle job boards? You can use these anonymously. Don’t be afraid of taking your resume and putting it on Monster, Dice, HotJobs, CareerBuilder or BradReese.com. If you are trying to remain anonymous, make sure to change the properties of your word document so your name is removed. I use this all of the time to see who posted their resume on a job board and most times the anonymous posting has the name of the document creator in the document properties. If you choose to include your name and contact information, remove your exact address and use only a zip code or city and state. Identity theft is rampant and the boards provide a lot of personal information. Never give out your social security number or drivers license information to a caller looking at your information on a board. When you apply for a job in person as part of an interview this information might be relevant, but not before. Many employers post positions on boards. If you find a posting by an agency keep digging since you may find the direct posting for the same position. Research the company and use your network to find out what it’s like to work at the company.
Social Networks are all the rave. I will admit I like LinkedIn and the use of Second Life job fairs is taking off in Europe for technical recruiting. (See “Recruiter attracts large crowd at Second Lifese Cisco job fair with Avatar band” ). I like to keep CCIEs aware of my global recruiting efforts, therefore I use vehicles such as LinkedIn to make them aware of my activities. What’s good is that you can build a network of professionals with mutual interests. What’s bad is if your network contains a potential competitor your contacts could become targets for the competition’s purposes. So you must keep the contacts true to your goal for your social network. When you get invitations to be added to someone’s contact list check out their profile and make sure you are adding someone who enhances your network!
Don’t have a social network profile but want one? Start by thinking about why you are doing it. If you are joining to enhance your career start by building your profile from the details you would like to be considered for. Let’s say a CCIE wants to become attractive to potential employers. Look at your resume and pull out the details that could be attractive for positions you are not interested in. Leave in the company information in and the titles of the roles you held in the past, so anyone who you might want to reconnect with can find you. Beware of the automatic invitations these sites can send out. They will often take an outlook contact list and send out automatic invitations to everyone in it. This is a source of irritation to many folks. If you want to guard your social network’s contact list use the controls to keep contacts from seeing each other.
My contact list in LinkedIn allows CCIEs all over the globe to see each other, but I have removed recruiters and recruiting agencies from the list since I cannot control their views of my network.
Now what are you worth? That’s my next topic.
Happy New Job!
