7 Quick LinkedIn Tips to Land Your Next Job

Recently a good friend of mine asked how I landed a job at a start-up without even applying for the position. I told him it was a triple threat:

1. Being connected with the right people (this is more luck than skill)
2. Having a skill set that is in relatively high demand by employers but low supply in the marketplace (again – more skill than luck)
3. Having a LinkedIn profile that is easily found, with content that positions me as the best and most obvious candidate to fill the job (this is the item most under your control, but some luck is still involved)

Although we only briefly got to talk about how he could leverage LinkedIn to get to the next step in his career, it was apparent that an opportunity existed for him to beef-up his online presence.

In a follow up email, I dispensed the following recommendations to help get him started:

• Understand the next step in your career
  • To do this, you must have at the minimum some vague sense of your career goal
• Develop a content-strategy for your profile that positions you for the next step in your career
  • Make sure your LinkedIn profile is easy to read with short, relevant, bulleted points
    • Make it about business metrics you’ve achieved, projects you completed, etc.
  • Proper Spelling/Grammar counts!
    • More accurately, improper spelling/grammar counts…against you!
  • Research other LinkedIn users who have the job that you want, and build/structure/re-use some of the words, phrases, and project descriptions that you can (honestly) put on your resume
  • Add relevant skills and certifications to the appropriate sections of LinkedIn
    • These are used as search terms for recruiters
  • Use at least a semi-professional looking photo with low color-saturation and isn’t too zoomed in (there should be at least some background visible in the photo)
    • Some industries have different expectations around this, so when in doubt, do what the industry protocol demands.
  • Resist and avoid outrageous titles, claims, and “purple cow” words and phrases unless your career goal is to work in a creative marketing agency
  • Include extra-curricular activities, interests, etc. that tangentially relate to your career goal (interest in Sabermetrics is a highly quantified topic, and relates well to risk-management in lending)
• Join LinkedIn groups relevant to your industry and specialties
  • Ask a question, make a comment, and get known in one or more groups
  • If a group isn’t active, don’t waste time trying to get it to become active
• Connect with people you know! Don’t add people spuriously (that is, if you don’t know them, don’t add them). Chances are, you are connected to a lot of people that are connected to the companies that have the jobs that you want.
• Ask for referrals from people who you have worked with/for.
  • Remember to “Approve” the recommendation so that it is visible on your profile
  • Any recommendation you receive should be authentic and more than just a one-liner.
• “Follow” the companies that have jobs that you are interested in applying for.
• Do some basic job searching on LinkedIn to get a feel for the job search engine and set up a weekly email notification for the jobs you may be interested in.

Believe it or not, these tips are just to get started and should be considered the bare-minimum to utilizing LinkedIn. Power Users will also do additional tweaking to their profile to be “Search-Engine-Optimized” (SEO) for recruiters to find them, get professional headshots, Start new Groups and put together LinkedIn events relevant to their area of expertise (in order to position themselves as a thought-leader).

What LinkedIn tips do you have? Challenges? Successes? Let me know in the comments.

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Acclaimed Movers & Storage = SCAM

I’ve written this review on Yelp as well, but I want to make sure that even non-Yelp users who perform a minimum amount of due diligence have an opportunity to save themselves from the abysmal atrocities that will occur as a result of doing business with Acclaimed Movers & Storage.

AM&S is unfortunately, the epitome of unprofessional, the embodiment of deception, and the defacto example of what you want to avoid when asking a moving company to handle your personal belongings. You can NOT trust AM&S to treat your possessions with the care, security, and trust that they should be. They will over-promise and under-deliver, and not feel bad in the least when you are inconvenienced by their mediocrity.

Even after asking if AM&S could deliver within a specified window and receiving assurance that such a delivery was feasible, AM&S reneged on this commitment and scheduled delivery for the following week, thus disrupting a new job-start date, travel plans, and forcing extra costs to be incurred (temporary kitchen utensil and furniture arrangements, eating out, etc).

Itemization of (some) Failures by AM&S:
–Failure to Notify of impending Delay
–Failure to return any subsequent phone call within timeframe specified by AM&S, or return phone call at all
–Failure to Meet Agreed upon deadline
–Failure to offer any kind of consolation, consideration, or compensation to customer
–Failure to speak to a ‘person’ and instead resorted to ‘contract speak’ and quoting business policy in order to explain AM&S’s behavior and business conduct.
–Failure to meet delivery date by more than five (5) days
   
You may be tempted to save money by using this service, but the peace of mind (and potential loss of your belongings) that you will lose as a result of dealing with the incompetence of this company is NOT worth that dollar savings.

Do yourself a favor and consider a moving company that has demonstrated and earned its opportunity to do business with you, and one that is more deserving of your trust.

Oh, and I see their PR-damage-control rep, "Eugina C." is berating and attacking former customers on Yelp as well. If you are still thinking about using this service, just go to Yelp and see how they respond to 1-star reviews, and ask yourself if that is how you want to be treated.

Also, Google Reviews seems to be planted with a lot of fake reviews for this service – all the people who reviewed the service gave it 5 stars and it was the only review that each of the individuals had ever written (and all within a 3 months period of today)!

To wrap up, don’t trust the Better Business Bureau’s review of their service. It is shady that the BBB could accredit this service, but a crowd-sourced review system like Yelp could tell a completely different story.

Website: http://acclaimed movers.com/

Google Reviews: http://www.google.com/maps/place?cid=3842165415947161838&q=acclaimed+moves,+van+nuys,+ca&hl=en&view=feature&mcsrc=google_reviews&num=10&start=10&ie=UTF8&ll=34.215611,-118.479654&spn=0.000071,0.000086&t=m&z=14&vpsrc=0

Yelp Reviews: http://www.yelp.com/biz/acclaimed-movers-van-nuys

Facebook User: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100001042308219
Facebook Page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Acclaimed-Movers-and-Storage/158987960788964
Pacebook Page #2: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Acclaimed-Movers-Storage/141759095870897
Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/AcclaimedMovers
Google+: https://plus.google.com/113454170860415956123/posts
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/company/1674525?goback=%2Efcs_GLHD_Acclaimed+Movers_false_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2&trk=ncsrch_hits
Google Reviews (North Hollywood): http://maps.google.com/maps/place?ix=aca&um=1&ie=UTF-8&q=Acclaimed+Movers+and+Storage&fb=1&gl=us&hq=Acclaimed+Movers+and+Storage&cid=16104819036530592742&ei=BZZ3T_zFAaWPigLNuaSnDg&sa=X&oi=local_result&ct=placepage-link&resnum=3&ved=0CJABEOIJMAI
Google Reviews (Malibu): http://maps.google.com/maps/place?ix=aca&um=1&ie=UTF-8&q=Acclaimed+Movers+and+Storage&fb=1&gl=us&hq=Acclaimed+Movers+and+Storage&cid=5572930795758324885&ei=BZZ3T_zFAaWPigLNuaSnDg&sa=X&oi=local_result&ct=placepage-link&resnum=4&ved=0CJgBEOIJMAM
Los Angeles City Search: http://losangeles.citysearch.com/profile/46352522/reseda_ca/acclaimed_movers.html
Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ro1_B50Jy9A

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Cheap Gasoline and Spam-powered Cars

The thought began: “How many calories are in a gallon of gasoline?”. Then the social experiments. Then the blog post.

Sometimes I walk to work.

And sometimes when I walk to work I ask people if they drove to work.

If they say ‘yes’, then I tell them that I walked to work and then ask how long their commute was. [The answer to this question is irrelevant, but is instead meant to shape the answer to my next question].

Finally, I ask them who they think burned more calories (to be precise, I should say ‘kilo-calorie’) on the way to work. Me walking or them driving?

Of course this is a trick question, as asking about calorie burning is a measurement typically applied to physical fitness and not in the consumption/efficiency of automobiles. The correct answer is that my coworker who drove to work burned more calories.

Why? Because while I may have burned a mere 85 calories per mile to get to work, the highest efficiency non-hybrid commercial automobiles burn the equivalent of 775 calories per mile under the best conditions [true nerds can find math/assumptions at bottom of post]. Almost 10x more than walking. Your car gets its daily work-out in before you’ve even started thinking about your workout[1].

The bright side to this is that it is actually cheaper to power your car than it is to power your body. You can buy 31,000 calories from your local gas station for $3.51, but to get 31,000 in Spam, you would need to spend $95.01 on 30 cans of Spam (Amazon has a 6-pack available for $19.20)[2][3]. I don’t know if Spam is the least expensive food per calorie, but it is well known to be extremely calorie-dense. Gasoline is 27x more efficient per dollar than Spam.

At this point most people like to remind me that you can’t eat gasoline (although it may explains some things if I had at some point). Only cars can ingest liquefied dinosaur remains. Sadly, and despite this fact, our car engines are at best converting those calories into productive work (moving those wheels) at around 20% efficiency, while our human bodies digesting, say – a potato, operates closer to 40% efficiency[4][5].

So what’s the point?

There are three points actually:

• If you had to power your car strictly with the effort you can expend with your human body, you would have an appreciation for just how much work those dead dinosaurs do for us, and how cheap they do it for. To get the energy of one gallon of gasoline, I would need to run for almost 5 hours straight.
• There are 3,500 calories per pound of fat. This means that if you are 9 pounds or more overweight, then you are carrying around at least 1 gallon’s worth of calories. Most people are overweight because they spend too much money on eating food, and even more money on gasoline so they don’t have to expend the calories in that food. A bit ironic isn’t it?
• Gasoline is still cheap for the amount of work it does in a short time span, but healthy food is amazingly expensive. Is this a result of the laws of nature or the laws of our nation?

[1] Using KIA Rio’s 2012 Highway MPG of 40MPG, and average calorie count per gallon of gasoline (31,000):  31,000 / 40 = 775

[2] As of 6/17, current Avg. Price of gasoline is $3.51 according to AAA on: http://fuelgaugereport.aaa.com/?redirectto=http://fuelgaugereport.opisnet.com/index.asp

[3] 2oz @ 174 calories * 6 (to get calories per can) = 1,044 calories in one can. Amazon has 6-pack for $19.20 so divide by 6 to = $3.20

[4] http://mb-soft.com/public2/humaneff.html

[5] Technically this is a flawed comparison because our bodies are not combustion engines and are therefore governed by a different system of equations than a car.

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What is your Password-Protection Strategy?

I have had many friends who have had at least one of their accounts hijacked temporarily. Some friends have had one of their accounts hijacked multiple times (I’m looking at you, Ted). What follows is an outline of what an individual should do (at the minimum) to protect their accounts. To be clear, I’m not a security analyst or have anything to do with security in my professional life. What I am is a tech-savvy prosumer who cares about the security of my friend’s info, and my info (via their accounts).

From my perspective, my friend’s account breach shouldn’t have happened more than once at most. Failure to properly secure a hijacked account and protect it from further intrusion is simply asking for another black eye. Furthermore, every hijacked account that contains details of your acquaintances puts their accounts at risk as well. This necessitates that some friends/acquaintances be removed from social connectedness (on the web – not in real life) in order to protect your own life’s details.As such, here are the bare minimum rules for having a moderately secure account:

1. Never use the same password for more than one site/program/login
2. Password length should be at or near the maximum allowed for the website/program being used.
3. Password complexity should have at least uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and a mix of punctuation/symbols (to the extent that web site/program allows them).
4. Sharing passwords with others makes that system only as secure as the least secured person you share it with.

But having only four rules doesn’t make a strategy. In the balance between having ultra long and complicated passwords that you yourself can’t remember, and using the same short, monosyllable password for everything, there needs to be a password strategy that maintains security and convenience. But even a strategy is at risk of failure if the enemy (hackers) know your strategy. This is why you must develop your own strategy and keep it private. So there is a fifth rule:

5. Develop a Password-Protection Strategy.

A strategy doesn’t have to be complicated, or hard to understand, or even completely secret (just private). Here are the elements to a password protection strategy:

1. Password Generation – defines the process for creating your passwords, their length, and their complexity
2. Password Storage – defines if/how you will store all the various passwords you generate including the medium (electronic versus hard-copy), encryption, accessibility (sync’d to the web or printed on paper and stored in your wallet), etc.
3. Password Sharing Policy – defines under what conditions will you share a given password, to whom, and under what expectations including action plan for if/when shared access should be revoked
4. Action Plan for Security Breaches – defines how you will stay informed of potential security breaches and what action you will take if one does occur.

That all may seem like a large home-work assignment, but informally written it might look something like this:

1. I’ll use a phrase from one of my three favorite songs on my financial websites a tag line or quote from a favorite movie for my social websites; and the name and breed of my first dog for shared passwords plus the first 5 characters from the name of the music artist, the movie title or actor/actress, and pet, respectively. I’ll also substitute certain letters with similar looking symbols. I’ll add the year of the song, movie, or pet’s birth date, and lastly I’ll add the first letter of the company/product I’m logging in to. Example:

!llbebackARNOL91C (“I’ll be back”, Arnold Schwarzenegger, 1991, “C” for “citigroup”)

2. I will only store these in fully encrypted password database on a single computer which is password protected where only I know the file location (and its existence).

3. I’ll only share passwords for websites/products/services where if a breech occurs, the worst that happens is that I am locked out of the service, and it can be made right by a simple phone call during business hours. I will not share passwords that have the potential to do financial harm or risk identity theft.

4. In the event that one of my passwords is leaked, I will change any and all passwords related to the service that was breached, shut down any integrations it has with other services, notify potentially affected parties, identify if I could have done something different to prevent the breech, and closely monitor the problem after I believe that I have fixed the breech.

Of course, this is not my own password strategy and I haven’t written down any formal definition of my strategy. You must make your own strategy that fits your workflow and necessities and to make sure you don’t share your password strategy. Some people use much more secure strategies than my example, and by spending an 30 minutes learning about different methods, you can save yourself hours and days of grief (and potentially your life savings).

30 minutes < inconvenience/embarrassment of a single hijacked account.

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What Black Swans have to do with Asbestos Removal

I see many examples of today’s long-term unemployed who became that way by not understanding the extent they create value (or don’t) for their organization, and by not preparing themselves for the future.

Basically, they took for granted that a particular job would always exist for someone with their (current at-the-time) skill-sets, and perceived their employee-employer relationship as if it were a closed-loop system without any other outside influences/variables. Quite a dangerous assumption – to only focus on what they knew that they knew. They didn’t even bother to ask what they knew that they didn’t know. Those people who take the time to understand what it is that they don’t know, stand a better chance to survive an industry or economic shift away from their core-competency. The best prepared will also attempt to minimize the range of the things they don’t know that they don’t know.

An over-simplified example is that of a manual-laborer that is presently and gainfully employed working in asbestos removal in a narrow region of the United States. There are three ways that this person will manage their career:

Focusing on what you know that you know: A person with complacent, presumptuous, and soon-to-be-unemployed temperament will just continue doing that job day in and day out oblivious to the fact that no ‘new’ asbestos problems are being created and that some day, the value of running an asbestos removal business will decline below what is an economically viable standard of living.

Keeping on eye on what you know that you don’t know: People who manage their career with an open mind are constantly filling in the gaps that they’ve discovered in themselves. In the example of the asbestos-remover, he will identify ways to extend the life of his job by specializing in certain types of asbestos removal, learning to use certain equipment, and perhaps expanding learning skills that open up work opportunities in adjacent industries (debris clean up/removal). These persons hedge their career bets by generalizing to some degree unlike the people in above who tend to specialize very narrowly.

The most economically protected people are aware that there are things they don’t know that they don’t know (Nicholas Taleb calls these ‘Black Swans’), and they proactively attempt to minimize the likelihood that events that fall in this bucket don’t arrest their career. Usually this takes the form of additional hedging, but for it to be effective hedging, it must be wholly outside and unrelated to the current value-stream of activities used currently. The asbestos remover might want to consider a side-career in something outside of toxic materials removal/transportation/storage.

We can see that at a minimum, it is necessary to reduce the number of known-unknowns and fill in gaps in our skill sets as we identify those that are/will be necessary for the future of creating value for the organizations we work for. This is the minimum that one must do. This take the form of expanding in the same topic area as one is currently employed. A marketer will educate themselves about new trends in marketing, social media, marketing automation, etc. A software engineer will learn other software languages, platforms, and new programming paradigms (object-oriented versus procedural, etc.). A automobile mechanic will branch out from the makes/models he/she knows and learn the systems of others, or even move into locomotives, tractors, etc.

The best one can do is be ever-expanding the range of knowledge and skills that are available to put to use to create value (read: "a job"). This is hedging against Black-Swans, or "unknown-unknowns". Although it is no guarantee, an out-of-work taxi-cab driver might find that they are a pretty good florist and can make a viable living doing so because they had cultivated an alternative skill set during their cab driving career.

Understanding and analyzing the reasons that people fail to properly hedge their career bets is a much bigger can of worms that ultimately leads back to culture and values, but problems defined at that level aren’t as actionable and don’t usually have ‘correct’ answer.

Some footnotes:

• The concept of the “Black Swan” is much broader than I describe here, and the author Nassim Nicholas Taleb covers this in detail in his books “Fooled by Randomness” and “Black Swan”. The image for this post is the book cover.
• “unkown unknowns” are a becoming a concept more talked about in recent times, probably starting with Donald Rumsfeld’s famous quote concerning the matter.

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