Marketing Me! Resume Assistance

In the email box, a software based service which promises to get your resume "to the top of the heap". How enticing.

A conversation with a business colleague; an anecdote about a friend in the tech industry who hides industry related keywords in white font heavily throughout his resume. His rationale for doing so? That most resumes are scanned electronically and his hidden keywords will place him at the top of the hiring manager's list.

Look, these tricks may help get a resume in the "pile", but they are no guarantee of employment. Employment and steady work are the goal, not getting to the top of the "pile".

Networking, done correctly and constantly, results in less employment downtime.

Networking means more opportunity before and after the hire date.

Play resume games if you will, but concentrate on your personal network and leave the games, piles and heaps to the amateurs.

Happy hunting!

Marketing Me! Business vs. Utopian Dreams

All businesses should:

Be environmentally friendly.
Encourage diversity in their hiring.
Provide excellent health care coverage and other benefits.
Encourage education through training and tuition reimbursement.
"Give back" the local community.
Provide a safe, clean and caring work environment.
Create regular philanthropic opportunities for the employees.
Insist the company be run based upon input from all employees.
Provide goods and services without obscene profits.
Make lead into gold.
Bring world peace, cheap gasoline and free beer.
And give it all away in the name of global harmony.
Blah blah blah...


All this and somehow not go bankrupt.


I had a friend who ran her small company along these lines.

Rather than make the core business the top priority, she put employees needs first. She ran her business like a democracy where every decision was the result of employee discussion and consensus. That included client relations, accounts payable and hiring/firing.

After a year and a half of missed deadlines, lackluster performance and lost sales, her business folded. Along the way to bankruptcy, her employees had plenty of meetings and gripe sessions all with catered lunches, chair massages and foosball breaks.

Is it impossible to have a caring business and still be successful?

Sure it is. There are many companies which provide wonderful work environments and have wonderful, happy employees and long work application lines.

Take the Container Store for instance.

Consistently rated as one of the best places to work, The Container Store is successful not because of tuition reimbursement or health care coverage, but because The Container Store sells neat profitable stuff that customers want to buy. To make the experience easy, The Container Store hires helpful people and places their store locations in easy to find, high trafficked areas. It works.

Also, my hunch is the employees of The Container Store love their work not only because of the benefits, but because of the vision and commitment of the business. It makes work fun, interesting, challenging and worth doing.

If you own or run a business, don't try to create a workers utopia - you will fail as you try and put the cart in front of the horse.

First, be identify and be successful at your core business.
Figure out how to delight and amaze your customers - be it with good value, innovation or excellent service.
If you succeed, your business will grow, you will make good money and can use that money to hire and retain talented motivated employees.

And if you have a true vision and are able to clearly share it, your employees will love working with you and serving your customers.

Focus on being a successful business and good employees will come willingly.

Marketing open positions and separating work from life

Seth Godin points out (from an older post) how to market open job positions with your company.

It's tough filling jobs with "good" people. We all want them, but how to go best about it?

One trend mentioned is the Internet based video for the job position. I checked Monster and Dice and did not see a "Video Resume" or "Video Job Opening" on either site. That does not mean such a feature is not buried somewhere on their site.

Seth suggests a video not about the job, but about the workplace. An interesting suggestion which would probably be useful in the hip, dot-com workplace (complete with game tables, dog beds, earth friendly coffee service and a huge poster of Obama for Pres), but not useful in most places I visit.

I see many successful companies with white walls, institutional furniture, temp receptionsists, and business park locations.

What makes these companies successful are highly targeted niches, enthusiastic, low maitenance employees, a clear business plan, financial stability and a defined separation between work and leisure.

These companies and their employees know work is work.

Google can build kitchens and dorms and hold hockey games, but most employees want to work and then leave. People need a clear deliniation between work and offtime.

Many companies don't think that line should exist and do everything to make work part of life. I see burn out as a real problem in this type of environment.

Hire great people who want to do great things and then leave them alone.

The Web is (us) ing us

Quite possibly one of the better reasons for visiting YouTube.

Several years ago, I worked in television. I wrote and edited the news for an ABC affiliate in a major market.

At that time, we shot stories with "mini cams" (old analog video tape technology - later replaced with "beta cams"), took the finished product back to the television studio and edited in sound and voice overs to create a "package" - a one to two minute news story.

Watch this video. This is what "news" will/is look like (perhaps sans the music, but quite possibly not).

This video will also explain the Internet if you just joined us.

Relevance to Marketing Me? Obvious. But take the last few frames of this video and add..

.. we will have to rethink work....

... and finding work...

.. and defining work...

... and the workplace...

... and ourselves...

Watch it.