#my employment consultant emailed me about a potential job opportunity | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

johnstibal · 3 years

Text

Career advice for law students wanting to practice in international law

Hello,

I was recently asked by a law student for some career advice on how to get a job internationally, and particularly how they could get engaged in international (public and private) legal work.

While my legal background stems largely from doing multinational corporate work, particularly in the IT sector, here are my basic ideas outlining a few generic things to think about in terms of your career planning and some key approaches to pursuing these types of careers.

My background. For the past several years, I have worked primarily in London, and secondarily in Paris, for a very large telecommunications company. I was originally working for another one of this companies' affiliates in USA, and this enabled me to move internally to another one of their companies in the UK. Making this move internally within a large company allowed me to move abroad far easier, especially in terms of sorting out work visas and professional qualifications, etc.

Three Career Principles to Never Forget. In terms of general career advice, there are three principles which you must keep in mind to work in international law related field. While I recognize the risk of sharing a 'firm grasp of the obvious' (and I can almost hear some cringing already) most law students do not receive this message framed in this sort of a utilitarian light. So, here it goes:

The sole purpose of your first legal job is to enable you to get a better second legal job.

It is all about Brand. Your CV / Resume is a personal marketing tool. It is your personal ‘brand’. The choice of your first job should strongly take into account the value which the ‘brand’ of your new employer will add to your CV, and your future ambitions. This lasts for decades.

You cannot save the world if you cannot pay the bills. Public international law has some of the most interesting legal work around. Unfortunately, or fortunately, it also has a tendency to attract incredibly brilliant people who will work for a minimum salary. If you are independently wealthy, then great, no problem. If you have large education debts, please do not neglect the fact this will undoubtedly impact your choice of jobs in the short term, even if not necessarily in the longer term.

Your first Legal job. Getting your first Legal job is always a nerve wracking experience at best, and especially if you want to take a track other than going directly into a large law firm. Unfortunately, nearly all major law schools are set up to build a funnel for large firms. For your interests, even if you do not wish to 'end up' in a law firm or major global corporation, it usually makes considerable sense for you to go out to find the best ‘brand’ firm which you can, either in the US, UK or elsewhere. You will be able to extract the majority of the benefits during this time by working at a firm for exactly two years (or three years, if in New York City) doing whatever type of legal work - - of course, its even better if your firm or company has a public international law practice, but this is not required. By the end of this time, you will have ‘checked the box’ on your CV, and you can happily move on to what you really want to do. This is by far is the safest option for most, and also incidentally, completes one of the requirements enabling you to be admitted to practice in other common law countries (e.g. the UK). I’m not certain whether this is as helpful in other civil law countries, but I suspect it would be.

There is no question that working at a law firm, and potentially billing in ‘6 minute’ increments gets very tiring. Reviewing e.g. commercial leases is even less fun than watching paint dry. But this said, you will probably be practicing law for a very long time off and on anyway. Having a good initial first employer on your CV, who has ‘trained’ you is always a good investment for your CV even if not necessarily beneficial to you over the long term.

As a lawyer who has graduated from a US law school, you are able to come to Europe with a well respected professional background (speaking generally). In terms of global perceptions, US lawyers are highly respected, maybe in a similar form of the admiration to being world-class in other professions e.g. French engineers, British accountants, or Indian mathematicians - - not to foster bad stereotypes… But, needless to say, the USA legal professional qualification travels well around the world, particularly among global employers.

This being said, there is a particular area of confusion when you first come out of law school. Legal training is not the same around the world, meaning in France, a jurist has may have only attended the equivalent of undergrad and not graduate school (in terms of USA style nomenclature, depending on their qualifications). In the UK, while there are some permutations, most young associates at large law firms will attend around a year and a half or so of graduate school, followed by two years of a training contract to learn how to practice law. In Germany, many associates hold an LLM, or a PHD, at minimum, staying in school much longer. While you probably can research the differences in the number of years of schooling better than me, you should be particularly aware of this issue when you turn up to speak with a new potential employer in Europe. There is a risk of being perceived as wanting to find only a training contract, which is not needed as a USA law school graduate. After your first job, the timing issue goes away as you accumulate more PQE (Post Qualification Experience). The same is true in France, as I understand it.

An alternative path in human rights / non-profit sector for law students. This is an area where my knowledge is limited. But, if I wanted to pursue a career in this field, I would adopt some of the following key approaches.

First, figure out who are the heavyweights thought leaders in your particular field of interest, either individuals or organizations - - and, do your best to somehow associate yourself with their organization or sphere of colleagues. You want to try to figure out who these organizations interact with, and by extension, which of these organizations might hire you. Linkedin is an extraordinarily powerful resource for this research. To test your hypotheses, try calling up or meeting up with the General Counsel of any public interest foundation (if not possible to meet in person, then email / Skype also works but is far less effective than in person). Introduce yourself, and ask him or her for some general advice, in particular what ‘outside counsel’ their foundation typically uses - - make clear that you admire the work of their foundation, and look to gain relevant experience by doing similar work in the future. Ask about their Legal department organizational structure (General Counsels - GCs) love talking about this stuff), and what skills they look for over the long term, but even if not necessarily immediately. If it goes well, you might get some really good information, and maybe even a referral to a firm or sister organization. Senior Executives are very used to people asking them for jobs on a daily basis. But, they get asked for their advice far less often. Use this to your advantage... but do not be a pest.

As an example coming from NGOs, from time to time, I have occasionally dealt with some of the affiliates of the United Nations as a supplier. There are probably 20 of these, e.g. World Bank, IMF, UNHCR, IATA, WIPO, Red Cross, Red Crescent, and Red Crystal. Some of these organizations you are probably more familiar to you than others. There are two consistent traits that I see when dealing with their personnel. First, many of the staff are about to retire, and second, their staff have all consistently bounced around the world working in many different UN affiliates and national governments doing all sort of different roles, both legal and non-legal. The first of these is a well known problem for the UN and its agencies, at least, at a macro level, which might be helpfully to you. While I’m not certain what formal hiring programs may exist in these orgs, you should check with them around world, and particularly in Geneva, Switzerland and New York. Also, in terms of firms which advise this types of groups, you should also talk with McKinsey & Company. They do some very impressive pro bono work consulting for non-profits, and like to hire people with diverse backgrounds often having law degrees.

To get the attention of any large organization, and not just the UN agencies, you will always want to first find a way to get through the door, even if you need to do the unsexy type of legal work. Once you are inside, it is usually far easier to move internally. For example, if you work for a big organization like the UN, they have a vast array of legal needs, ranging from the basic to the exotic. It is undoubtedly the case that a large portion of the UN’s legal budget goes to HR and Procurement legal advice (e.g. doing commercial leases, procuring pencils and IT projects) (whether done in-house or by external firms.) When a UN agency needs to lease a building in sub-Saharan Africa, some lawyer somewhere in the world needs to review and advise on the tender process (often in combination with other local lawyers). Therefore, this is an opportunity to target. Yes, this is not sexy work, but it gets you a pass into the ‘club’ to work on other more interesting projects in the future.

As a final thought. Having outlined all of above, if you truly want to work in the non-profit / human rights space, it might be the case that being a ‘junior file clerk’ for Google.org or the Gates Foundation is equally beneficial (from a brand perspective to get your next job) as being a senior associate at Skadden Arps.

On the one hand, being at a big firm allows you to potentially develop a deep legal specialty, which might be later retooled for a good purpose. For example, undoubtedly, at some point, a brilliant lawyer in some large law firm will figure out how to package up millions of ‘microfinance’ loans using mezzanine financing techniques (i.e. allowing Wall Street money to start funding billions of very small loans around the world) - - in so doing, they could indirectly create prosperity in Africa for a life time.

At the same time, NGOs have a potential to do great things too. These are the people who are likely to generate the next generation of new legal concepts / quasi-regulatory regimes. For example, a newer area which I am following lately relates to 'conservation services' and 'natural capital' (see Conservation International) (www.conservation.org). These structures are, essentially, quasi-voluntary regulatory schemes to allow companies to share and manage ecological externalities (see Jennifer Morris's speech at Stanford). For me, CI's approach is just a start of a major trend in this area: soon there will be ISO certificate schemes covering externality pricing, as well as voluntary business case weighting methodologies which hopefully over time will become a standard approach in global commercial activity - - yet, this said, few individuals in the world understand how these types of governance tools work in practice. It simply cross too many intellectual domains, which so far has stymied adoption on a global level. 'Deep Greens' are not well suited to create these types of applied 'corporate' innovations around externalities, but maybe you are the one given your legal background.

Highly innovative organizations, such as the Gates Foundation, look great to onlookers because, in large part, by comparison, the other large global NGOs have tired ‘business’ models. Often major NGOs have been doing the same exact thing for decades. For me, I could see this as creating an opportunity. It might be great fun to join one of these NGOs for the express purpose to reshape it, remake it, and help them to reinvent their bag of tricks as an NGO. As a lawyer, you can have this level of influence within these types of organizations - - but, remember, always ask for forgiveness, never for permission when trying to affect major change within large organizations.

Keep in touch. If you like this or have other items to add, please drop me a note. I always enjoy hearing from people and what they think. These are changing times!

Best of luck,

John

#UN affiliates #career advice #career planning #change management #emory school of law #gates foundation #international law #law school #law student #non-profit #open precedents #public law #skadden arps #united nations #conservation services

21 notes · View notes

edwinurrutia13 · 3 years

Text

Lawyer Salary

Weiss and Associates did a tremendous job at preserving us informed in regards to the standing of our case and when the time came for an appearance they have been successful in getting the ticket dismissed. I want to thank Weiss & associates for the outstanding job regarding my visitors ticket in NYC. The case received dismissed and I'm very happy dealing with the firm . Anybody that's dealing with a traffic violation should name them ASAP and get the matter settled. Great communication and they are all the time obtainable to assist answering my non stop questions. Questions have been answered and I was kept knowledgeable on a month-to-month foundation. I known as one business day before my scheduled courtroom date and spoke with Giselle who was very nice and trustworthy in regards to the process.

They emailed me information every step of the best way and the $ spent was a really worthwhile funding. I couldn't say higher things until they could of gotten me out of getting a ticket within the first place. The complete course of only took me a couple of minutes to send them the data and a check and the remainder was done with out my involvement Edwin Urrutia. They spent years combating my ticket, and I didn’t need to carry a finger.

Wonderful expertise with this firm unfortunately I will be needing their services again. They will battle and try to get you the very best outcome with steady updates and get in touch with in contrast to different firms.

They were definitely price the cost and would advocate them. The firm was wonderful and made the entire course of simple and painless.

They additionally make the complete course of as stress free and simple as potential. Weiss & Associates have just helped me to successfully contest a speeding violation which, at one level, appeared dire by way of potential outcomes. I was very impressed by the degree of professionalism and effectivity exhibited by the agency. I highly suggest them to anyone in an identical situation who is looking for first-class legal illustration. They gave me all the confidence in the world that they'd handle the ticket with out me being involved, they usually delivered! I highly recommend Weiss and Associates for moving violations within the NYC space.

They had been very skilled in contacting me every month to ensure we have been on the same page and that I was updated with any new information. I've had greater than my fair share of visitors tickets over the years. Weiss & Associates has gotten the most effective results of nay firm I've labored with.

In the light of recent occasions relating to COVID-19 the NYC Traffic Violations Bureau and other courts in New York and New Jersey have closed quickly. Our workplace is staying on high of all circumstances being rescheduled. Call to start your free consultation with an employment regulation legal professional in New York at Nisar Law Group, P.C. You have no opportunity in any way for a favorable consequence in any other case. The speeding ticket was not dismissed but that would have been miraculous because it occurred in Queens. Points had been lowered and Weiss was profitable in laying aside the courtroom date for almost two years. They had been additionally excellent about communicating and preserving me abreast of the status of the ticket.

When I began to research divorce attorney’s I felt that the price’s and lack of empathy only deepened my frustration and concern. Our authorized work consists primarily of uncontested New York divorce cases and contested New York divorcesonly when clients aren't able to reach an amicable decision. David Centeno is a premier New York divorce lawyer providing each contested and uncontested divorce representation. We additionally symbolize plaintiffs and defendants in litigation and mediation in bankruptcy court, including choice actions looking for to keep away from preferential transfers, and avoidance actions seeking to keep away from fraudulent transfers. We have an in-depth understanding of the legislation and concentrate on every detail to help our clients. Our follow isn't restricted to representing people and households. We help businesses with succession planning and non-profit organizations with administering planned giving applications and regulatory compliance.

Furthermore, we understand that with household trusts there are often complicated and sensitive household dynamics that should be considered throughout the belief administration course of. New York Divorce Any Divorce Lawyer will tell you that every one Divorce Matters are heard within the Supreme Court of the State of New York. Each county has a part no matter whether or not it is in New York City . Long Island has their own Matrimonial Parts of Supreme Court. Any Manhattan Divorce Lawyer will tell you a Divorce is the authorized dissolution of a marriage. Be conscious, there isn't a common regulation marriage in New York State.

I would like to thank Weiss & Associates for getting my NYC speeding ticket dismissed. Initially, I hired them to struggle a cell phone ticket that I obtained which was found responsible. I perceive that you can’t win all of them but Matt and I spoke about it and I was left assured in him after our conversation to let him fight this speeding ticket and good thing I did. Do not hesitate because of the charge, it’s price every penny when you've positive results. I actually have really helpful Weiss & Associates’s to family and friends and can continue to take action. By the way in which communication by way of out the complete process was A++++. I actually have fought tickets in the NYC space myself with combined results.

1 note · View note

la-jolie-mln-posts · 3 years

Text

What is a brand? For most of us it’s a line of apparel, a type of smart phone or your favorite cereal. But a brand goes way beyond just products and extends to people. Some of you will remember the Apple ad that showcased a Bill Gates type (guy in a jacket and tie, looking dull and corporate) against a Steve Jobs type (hip, casual, smart). You get the point. And, so did the audience — Microsoft blah, Apple, cool. It worked!

Who are some of the most visible people with personal brands? Kim Kardashian comes to mind. But if you are interviewing for an executive position at one of the top 5 consulting firms, hers is not the brand image you want to bring to your first Zoom call or in-person interview.

Oprah Winfrey owns her personal brand. She welcomed discussion about body image, embraced her own and never lost her credibility. She dressed for her position, for the occasion and for her image. She never looks sloppy. She’s crossed the Rubicon from entertainment icon to business mogul, but never lost the Oprah brand.

Princess Kate Middleton is a princess, mom and leading figure in the world of outreach to children in need. As her style has evolved, she’s been able to communicate her brand through personal acts and personal style that remains young and hip.

Today women head some of the biggest U.S. corporations. Here’s just a few….

Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube Lynsi Snyder, CEO, of In-N-Out Burger Marillyn Hewson, CEO of Lockheed Martin Mary Barra, CEO of General Motors Whitney Wolfe Herd of CEO of Bumble

They may not have the same instantaneous brand recognition as the Kardashians, Oprah or Princess Kate, but to achieve the positions they have on the highly competitive playing fields in which they operate, they all had to create something unique — a personal brand.

Branding with the 4 “P’s’

It’s a familiar strategy for experienced marketers. Let’s say you’re launching a new brand of lipstick or changing a trusted brand with new packaging or a new message. You start by thinking through your brand strategy using the 4 P’s:

Product: A product can be either a tangible good or a service that fulfills a particular need for consumers. Whether your product is a brand of potato chips, a household item like dishwasher soap, a hotel chain or a university, it’s essential that you have a clear grasp of what makes it unique before you can successfully market it.

Price: Once the product offering is established, you can make pricing decisions. Price determinations will impact profit margins, supply, demand and marketing strategy. Products and brands may need to be positioned differently based on varying price points.

Promotion: Once product and price are established, it’s time to promote it. Promotion looks at the many ways advertisers market to consumers and includes includes: advertising, public relations, social media, emails, search engine marketing, videos and more.

Place: Successful brands are all about putting the right product, at the right price, at the right place, at the right time. The mission is to convert interested consumers into actual customers. Today, the initial place potential clients engage is online.

Now, create your own brand using the 4 P’s

You are the PRODUCT, so begin by evaluating what makes you special. Ask yourself: Q. Are you dressing for your body? A. If you’re curvy and you love yoga pants, make sure you purchase high-quality yoga pants that aren’t see-through when you stretch or bend over. And consider the occasion before wearing them. If you’re going for a sophisticated look, slim fitting trouser pants may be a better fit. - If you have big chest, go for a v-neckline time. - No matter what the occasion: job interview, business trip, night out with friends or going to your kid’s soccer game, the items you pull together should communicate the same message. “There goes Susan; she always looks fabulous.”

Q. What colors work best for you? A. Navy or black works on just about everyone; here’s a few ways to make it yours: - If you’re going for a job interview, neutral is best. But a pop of color is a great way to express your personal brand. Whether a lush pink shirt under a dark blazer, a red velvet shirt with a black sweater, a dress accessorized with a fun pair of sneakers (only if you can pull off the look), or fun pair of pumps, your signature brand will emerge as you try things out and focus in on what works for you. - Hair can be a fantastic branding tool. If you’ve been blessed with a gorgeous mop, go with it. Hair is one of our best weapons. If you want to call out your inner artiste or you play in a rock band, pink or blue hair is okay. But it’s definitely not for everyone. Some work places, like design agencies, hair salons and big tech firms are amenable to this look. But if you work in a bank or a law firm, probably not. If you simply have to try it, there are always extensions. Remember, the look has to work on you. If you can pull off something like this, go for it…

Let’s talk about PRICE

What PRICE are you willing to accept for your talent, your contribution, your value, and your time? When I worked in marketing at a big corporation in my late 20′s, I met a woman who was hired to be a copywriter. She was actually a former agency owner and had a lot more to offer. The guy who hired her put her in a huge, open office setting where she wrote copy for retail projects such as in-store banners and such. She left after 2 weeks, but she also left an impression.

So, he called her back to see what it would take to hire her. She was polite, but firm. She said, “I’ll need my own office. I want to be paid twice the hourly fee you paid me, and I want to bring in my own creative talent (writers and designers) to work with.”

Done. She got what she asked for. Why? Because she knew what she was her value and had the confidence to ask for it.

Promoting yourself is a tricky business

PROMOTION today is about establishing your online presence. As we’ve seen lately, the cancel culture is a force to be reckoned with. And by that, I mean be careful with the topics you choose to address. It’s easy to be mocked, doxed and dropped from social media — all it takes is one wrong comment.

According to Forbes, “Your personal brand should be an easy daily filter that you create content and reach out to your audience with.” The article quotes Jason Wu, founder of CoinState. “Be the master of your craft, skillset or industry before starting a personal brand. Then your content will amplify who you are.”

In other words, avoid mistakes like the one made by Olivia Jade. She’s the daughter of actress Lori Loughlin who did prison time for getting her kids into college through false claims and a financial bribe. Olivia was a successful online fashion and culture blogger until her mother’s deceit landed on her. Then she made the mistake of using her social media platform to say that she really wasn’t at USC to attend classes. In the end, she lost followers, endorsements and a lot more.

The point? Have some experience under your belt before promoting your personal brand.

Have you found your PLACE?

It’s pointless to tell digital natives to avoid social media until they achieve some maturity. But, as the story above illustrates, social platforms are eternal, and establishing a trashy personal brand while young can come back to haunt you. So, parents need to keep a watchful eye on how kids are promoting themselves, knowing that colleges look carefully at this content.

When it comes to establishing a personal brand, there are tons of articles out there on how to do this. You can spend a day on Google and find lists like this:

What motivates me? What am I good at? What is unique about my personality, talents and style? What do I excel at? What bores me to tears? What do others say drew me to them?

All good and well. But here are a few constants we all encounter on the road to the true self:

Failure happens. You will lose jobs, face financial insecurity and have to reinvent your career. Some of the most successful women I’ve met in my life have transformed themselves as a result of loss. It’s only failure if you don’t get back up and re-start your engine.

La Jolie MLN launching in April 2021

Follow our journey on Instagram or Facebook La.Jolie.MLN

Website coming soon

: www.lajolie-mln.com

We would love to hear from you. Let us know your thoughts and any topics you would want to hear about. [email protected]

Next blog Jan 31: Doing Business By Doing Good

About Daisy Malek-Shadid

As a little girl, I would be asked what I want to be when I grow up. I would confidently reply, I want to be a clothing designer and a respected leader. Fast forward 30 years, after working in the corporate world, traveling, getting married and having children, the aspirations of my youth inspire me today. I want to create clothes that make women feel both feminine and powerful, beautiful and strong, sophisticated and elevated. It takes a moment to make a first impression. Dressing well sets the tone, so one can own that moment.

It is important to La Jolie MLN to give back to the community, to women who don’t have the same opportunity as others. And, for that reason, 10% of every purchase will go toward our goal to donate 100 dresses to Dress for Success, a non-for-profit organization that supports underprivileged women to achieve economic independence by providing various services - one of them professional attire for interviews and new employment. For more information about “Dress for Success” please visit their website at dressforsuccess.org.

#feminine power #brand #your value #4Ps #La Jolie MLN #MLN

1 note · View note

bettsrecruiting1 · 4 years

Text

5 Musts for the Perfect Post-Interview Thank-You Note

youtube

Maybe you just killed your third and final interview, or you finished your initial phone screen with a recruiter with flying colors. Wherever you are in your job interview process, now it’s time to follow up with the perfect post-interview thank-you note.

When is it acceptable to ditch a thank you note? Absolutely never. Even if you’ve decided you’re moving onto other opportunities instead, you should still send a thank-you as a courtesy.

The truth is if you don’t send a thank-you after an interview, you might already be ruling yourself out of the running for your dream job. Hiring managers often see the lack of a thank-you note as a sign that the interviewee isn’t invested in the opportunity or the interview process. Many see it as just plain rude.

Don’t believe us? Just check out this recent blog from a hiring manager on why she will never hire a candidate who doesn’t follow up with a thank-you. As she explains, a thank-you email or card signals that you want the job and gives your potential employer a preview of your working style.

Ready to make a positive final impression that will last for days after your interview, all while setting you apart from other applicants?

Tips when writing your post-interview thank-you note

1. Thank them for their time – in a timely fashion

This is your moment. Seize it while you can. Make your thank-you timely—send it while the key takeaways from your interview are still top of mind. A quick thank-you note immediately shows recruiters and hiring managers that you’re seriously committed to landing their open role.

Sending your thank-you soon after your interview also shows that you know how to prioritize – which will serve you well in the role should you get an offer.

2. Remind them why you’re great

If you were successful in the interview, you did a great job conveying what makes you a great fit for the position. The thank-you note is a great chance to make sure the message didn’t go in one ear and out the other. Take this opportunity to reinforce your conviction that you’re the right person to help the team meet its goals.

In most interviews, the recruiter or hiring manager will cover the goals for the position, key characteristics they’re looking for in their ideal hire, and sometimes, added bonuses that would make a candidate the perfect fit. Your thank-you message should touch on all of those goals and traits and how your experience and skillset aligns with every one of them. The best thank-you messages sum up your timeline for achieving or supporting their goals as a new hire.

3. Reiterate your excitement

Reminding them why they should want to hire you is key – but don’t forget to also reiterate how excited you are to jump into the role and the company. After all, as important as confidence is, a degree of humility is important too. Companies and team leaders don’t want to work with an egomaniac. But they do want to work with someone hungry for the kind of opportunity they’re offering.

In your thank-you, declare your passion for the company’s mission. Marvel at how nice the office is. Tell the hiring manager how well you got along with everyone on the team that interviewed you. Striking that balance between communicating your value and your excitement is key.

4. Touch on interview highlights

Whatever your thank-you is covering, make sure it’s fun to read. A great way to do this is to refer back to something that stood out to you in the conversations you had during the interview. Was there a surprising moment in the conversation? Did you and your interviewers learn anything particularly interesting about each other? Throw it in your thank-you note. This is also a great way to show you were paying attention.

Want some examples? Maybe your potential employer has a ping pong tournament every year. Finish your message with something engaging like:

And I look forward to winning more than new business. My friends call me Zhang Yining when we play ping pong.

Or, if you want to take the strictly-business route, you could go with something like:

I was glad to learn you and the team have fully invested in a consultative sales approach rather than the age-old hard selling model, and I’m eager to start talking to prospects about their needs and goals.

5. Close with next steps

The last thing you want to do is to make your thank-you note sound final. If the interviewer wasn’t clear on next steps, or if it was a final-round interview, then something along the lines of I look forward to hearing from you. But if you have clarity around what the next steps are – and hopefully you do – get specific. Add something like I’m excited to get the mock demo scheduled or I look forward to diving into the marketing assignment.

Finally, gratitude is everything. Sending your thank-you letter shows you really want the job, while simultaneously demonstrating your respect and appreciation. It’s an important first step to building meaningful professional relationships rooted in respect and trust.

Example of a solid thank-you email

Here’s an example of a great post interview thank you note for a sales role:

Hi [insert name],

Thank you for taking the time to discuss your Account Executive position today. I’m positive I have the consultative approach necessary to build relationships and revenue as your organization moves into the cloud technology space. I’m fluent on cloud technologies and the benefits of SaaS software, and look forward to walking your customers through every step of their digital transformation.

I’m also excited for the chance to work with such a great team at such an exciting company. Your customers are doing inspiring things, and I hope I get the chance to help facilitate their efforts. And of course, I’d also love the chance to hear your band play sometime.

Thanks again,

[insert name]

It might seem old-fashioned, but following up on a job interview with a great thank-you email is still crucial. It’s your chance to show you truly have a strong interest in the position, and that you’re not just going through the motions. The candidates that make themselves stand out are the ones that end up getting the job, and a solid thank-you is one of the best ways to do that. Good luck!

The post 5 Musts for the Perfect Post-Interview Thank-You Note appeared first on Betts Recruiting.

from Betts Recruiting https://bettsrecruiting.com/blog/3-musts-for-the-perfect-post-interview-thank-you/

1 note · View note

maritzaerwin · 3 years

Text

Cover Letter Example For a Supervisor Position: Example + Tips

You’ve gained respect for your competence in your field. Coworkers admire you, and you’ve already played the role of trainer, mentor, and informal leader. Now, it’s time to make things formal. You’ve decided that you are ready to move up the career ladder. If that’s the case, your next goal may be to become a supervisor.

That’s a big leap, but it is definitely something that can be accomplished. However, you will need a new resume and cover letter to best present yourself to potential employers. Even if you are gearing up for an internal position.

To help with that, we have a sample cover letter for a supervisor position. Scroll to the bottom for extra helpful writing tips!

Supervisor Cover Letter Sample (Word version)

Download this sample (.docx)

Cover Letter Example For a Supervisor Position (text version)

Dear Ellen James,

My name is Nicole Hartmann and I am writing to express my sincere interest in pursuing your open position for 2nd Shift Production Supervisor. I have more than three years of experience working in automotive manufacturing, have successfully taken on many leadership roles, and am confident I am an ideal candidate for this position.

At present, I am employed at Automag Industries as a second shift line leader. My job involves supervising the other workers on my line, providing them with training and guidance, and ensuring that production quotas are met. I’m also responsible for recording breaks and lunches, training new employees, and conducting quality checks. Additionally, I have my own production responsibilities as well. I’m proud to say that my line meets or exceeds quotas 100% of the time. We’ve also been accident and injury-free for more than one year.

The employees on my line have ranked my performance as superb or excellent in their annual assessments. I have a low turnover rate and am very proud that many of the workers who began under me have also become line leaders.

In addition to working in the manufacturing industry, I am also a student at the University of Washington. I’m pursuing my BS in Manufacturing Management. Because of this, I am particularly excited about the opportunity to take the next step into a supervisory position.

If you have time next week, I’d like to meet for an interview. I plan to reach out again via email to see if we can set something up. I look forward to learning more about your company, and how I might be of service.

Sincerely, Nicole Hartmann

How to Write a Cover Letter For A Supervisor Position

Now, here are some excellent tips to really produce an attention-grabbing cover letter for yourself. Remember to follow the standard business letter structure — introduction, body, closing paragraph. Aim for 3-4 paragraphs.

Verify That You Have Permission To Apply

Many people apply for their first supervisor position at their current place of employment. If you are pursuing an internal position, there are some extra steps you should take. First, get clearance from your current department head before you apply. That’s a matter of professionalism. Next, when you write your cover letter, add a quick note that you have the approval to pursue the position. By doing this, you ensure that there are no conflicts or unpleasant surprises.

Focus On Results

The key to proving your capabilities as a supervisor is to show that you can get results. Focus on details such as quotas, productivity metrics, team attendance rates, low turnover, accuracy, and quality. If possible, quantify your achievements. Limit mentions of administrative tasks to those that indicate you have mastered the required skills.

For example, you can write something like:

As a senior warehouse associate, I was responsible for ensuring high order fulfillment accuracy rates. I’ve helped some of the junior staff to better understand the labeling process and subsequently, order fulfillment accuracy rates increased by 15% within a month.

Make Your Skills Relevant

What if you are applying for your first position as a supervisor? Remember that even if you haven’t held the job title, there are skills you have, and experience you have gained, that will likely help you succeed as a supervisor.

Consider your current experience, and list anything that showcases leadership ability, working independently, training others, or otherwise taking on additional responsibilities. Mention these in your cover letter to highlight your potential as a supervisor.

PRO TIP:

Regardless of the type of supervisor position you are applying for, the position will require you to ensure instructions are followed and tasks are completed. You will want to cover specifics in your cover letter about your ability to inspire others while communicating with a variety of people.

Debi Douma-Herren HR Consultant & Career Strategist LinkedIn

Prove You Can Lead

Supervisors must command respect, motivate people under them to be productive, and provide mentoring to help their team members pursue their own career goals. To do this, you must have a strong sense of empathy, great communication skills, and the ability to provide coaching. Include examples of these things in your cover letter.

Edit The Letter Carefully

Supervisors must pay attention to detail, and produce results that are free from error. The first place to show that you are capable of these things is in your cover letter. Double-check your writing, and fix any errors you find. Then, have a friend read to verify that you are communicating your thoughts clearly and accurately.

Final Tip: Make Your Attractive and Professional

Your entire application package should be attractive, easy to read, and attention-getting. This will help to make your application memorable and show that you are very serious about pursuing the position of supervisor. You can accomplish this by using a professional cover letter template to ensure that your formatting and layout are attractive and exude professionalism.

The post Cover Letter Example For a Supervisor Position: Example + Tips appeared first on Freesumes.com.

Cover Letter Example For a Supervisor Position: Example + Tips published first on https://skillsireweb.tumblr.com/

0 notes

bigyack-com · 4 years

Text

‘Techlash’ Hits College Campuses - The New York Times

In 2006, Google bought YouTube for more than $1 billion, Apple was preparing to announce the first iPhone, and the American housing bubble began to deflate. Claire Stapleton, then a senior at the University of Pennsylvania, faced the same question over and over: What did she plan to do with that English degree? She flirted, noncommittally, with Teach for America.Then, a Google recruiter came to campus and, Ms. Stapleton said, she “won ‘American Idol.’” The company flew her out to Mountain View, Calif., which felt to her “like the promised land” — 15 cafeterias, beach volleyball courts, Zumba classes, haircuts and laundry on-site.But for Ms. Stapleton, now 34, the real appeal in a job at Google was what seemed to be a perfect balance of working for income and according to one’s conscience. Naturally, she said yes to an offer in the corporate communications department.“There was this ambient glow of being part of a company that was changing the world,” Ms. Stapleton said. “I was totally googly-eyed about it.”More than a decade later, college seniors and recent graduates looking for jobs that are both principled and high-paying are doing so in a world that has soured on Big Tech. The positive perceptions of Google, Facebook and other large tech firms are crumbling. Many students still see employment in tech as a ticket to prosperity, but for job seekers who can afford to be choosy, there is a growing sentiment that Silicon Valley’s most lucrative positions aren’t worth the ethical quandaries.“Working at Google or Facebook seemed like the coolest thing ever my freshman year, because you’d get paid a ton of money but it was socially responsible,” said Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci, 21, a senior at the University of Michigan. “It was like a utopian workplace.”Now, he said, “there’s more hesitation about the moral qualities of these jobs. It’s like how people look at Wall Street.”

Investment Banking, but Worse

The growing skepticism of Silicon Valley, sometimes referred to as the “techlash,” has spared few of technology’s major players. In 2019, Facebook was fined nearly $5 billion by the Federal Trade Commission for mishandling user data. Amazon canceled its plans for a New York City headquarters after residents, union leaders and local legislators contested the idea that the behemoth should receive $3 billion from the state to set up shop. Google, in 2018, faced internal protests over its plans for a censored search engine in China and handling of sexual harassment. (High-ranking Google employees have stated that the company never planned to expand search into China, but also that plans for a China project had been “terminated.”)The share of Americans who believe that technology companies have a positive impact on society has dropped from 71 percent in 2015 to 50 percent in 2019, according to a 2019 Pew Research Center survey. At this year’s Golden Globes, Sacha Baron Cohen compared Mark Zuckerberg to the main character in “JoJo Rabbit”: a “naïve, misguided child who spreads Nazi propaganda and only has imaginary friends.”That these attitudes are shared by undergraduates and graduate students — who are supposed to be imbued with high-minded idealism — is no surprise. In August, the reporter April Glaser wrote about campus techlash for Slate. She found that at Stanford, known for its competitive computer science program, some students said they had no interest in working for a major tech company, while others sought “to push for change from within.”Belce Dogru, who graduated from Stanford with a degree in computer science last year and is completing a master’s program at the university, said: “There has definitely been a shift in conversation on campus.”Stanford is the second-biggest feeder school for jobs in Silicon Valley, according to data from HiringSolved, a software company focused on recruiting. Some companies pay as much as $12,000 to advertise at the university’s computer science job fairs; recruiters at those events didn’t always have to make a hard sell. “It felt like in my freshman year Google, Palantir and Facebook were these shiny places everyone wanted to be. It was like, ‘Wow, you work at Facebook. You must be really smart,’” said Ms. Dogru, 23. “Now if a classmate tells me they’re joining Palantir or Facebook, there’s an awkward gap where they feel like they have to justify themselves.” Palantir, in particular, has drawn the ire of students at Stanford for providing services to U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (also known as ICE). Last summer, a campus activist group, Students for the Liberation of All People, visited the company’s office, a 15-minute walk from campus, and hung a banner nearby that read: “Our software is so powerful it separates families.” Similar protests took place at the University of California, Berkeley, Brown and Yale, according to Recode. The protests, and the attitudes they reflected, were also covered in The Los Angeles Times.Audrey Steinkamp, a 19-year-old sophomore at Yale, which sends about 10 percent of each graduating class into tech, said that taking a job in Silicon Valley is seen as “selling out,” no different from the economics majors going into consulting who are “lovingly and not-so-lovingly called ‘snakes.’”That is especially true, some of the students said, when a classmate chooses to work for Facebook, whose products have spread disinformation and helped influence a presidential election.“The work you do at a place like Facebook could be harmful at a much larger scale than an investment bank,” Ms. Dogru said. “It’s in the pockets of millions of people, and it’s a source of news for millions of people. It’s working at a scary scale.”Many students still believe that technology can help change the world for good. As Ms. Glaser put it for Slate, some of them are opting out of the Big Tech pipeline and trying, instead, “to use technical skills as an insurance policy against dystopia.”“Students have an opportunity to look at where they can have the most impact that’s in line with their values,” said Leslie Miley, a former director of engineering at Google and Slack. “The fact of the matter is Google, Facebook, Twitter are not in line with those values because they’re huge companies beholden to a lot of different masters.”

Still Got That College Spirit

Anna Geiduschek, a software engineer who graduated from Stanford in 2014, was working at Dropbox last year when she received an email from an Amazon Web Services recruiter. She replied that she wouldn’t consider a job with the company unless Amazon cut its contract with Palantir.“These companies go out of their way to try and woo software engineers, and I realized it would send a powerful message for me as a potential employee to tell them no,” Ms. Geiduschek, 27, said, noting that top tech companies sometimes spend roughly $20,000 to recruit a single engineer. “You could basically cut them off at their supply.”Her recruiter responded: “Wow I honestly had no idea. I will run this up to leadership.” Days later, Ms. Geiduschek received another template email from an Amazon hiring manager, so she scheduled a call and aired her grievances by phone. Some engineers are sharing screenshots of their protest emails on Twitter with the hashtag #TechWontBuildIt. Jackie Luo, an engineer, sent an email to Google saying that she wouldn’t consider a job there given its plans to re-enter China with a censored search engine. Kelly Carter, a web developer, emailed a Tesla recruiter with her concerns about the company’s anti-union tactics. Craig Chasseur, a software engineer, emailed the H.R. department at Salesforce to critique the company’s contract with ICE.These protests echo mounting public concerns about the power of these corporations. But it’s not clear whether they have moved the needle for prospective hires. Former recruiters for Facebook told CNBC in May that the acceptance rate for full-time engineering job offers at the company had dropped precipitously, as much as 40 percent. After the article’s publication, Facebook disputed the figure; the company “regularly ranks high on industry lists of most attractive employers,” a spokesman said. Data published the same month by LinkedIn showed that tech firms continued to hire at high rates, especially for entry-level employees.But at campus career centers, students are struggling with the dual, and sometimes dueling, desires for prestige and purpose. “It started with millennials, but now Gen Z-ers are getting educated because they want to do good in the world,” said Sue Harbour, the senior associate director of the career center at the University of California, Berkeley, which is Silicon Valley’s top feeder, according to HiringSolved. “And as we’ve seen tech companies grow, we’ve also seen the need for more tech oriented to social responsibility.” Some recent graduates are taking their technical skills to smaller social impact groups instead of the biggest firms. Ms. Dogru said that some of her peers are pursuing jobs at start-ups focused on health, education and privacy. Ms. Harbour said Berkeley offers a networking event called Tech for Good, where alumni from purpose-driven groups like Code for America and Khan Academy share career opportunities. Ms. Geiduschek said she recently left Dropbox for Recidiviz, a nonprofit that builds technological tools for criminal justice reform.But those so-called passion jobs are more challenging to come by, according to Amy Binder, a sociologist at the University of California, San Diego, and the lead author of a 2015 paper about elite colleges “funneling” graduates into certain kinds of “prestigious” careers.“For other sectors like tech it’s easier to get on the conveyor belt and fill these positions,” Dr. Binder said. “I graduated from Stanford in the ’80s, and even back then there was talk on campus about people selling out and going to investment banks, but those jobs are still getting filled. The self-incrimination hasn’t stopped the juggernaut.”Dr. Binder said elite schools have long steered students toward certain “high-status” industries — the C.I.A. in the 1950s, finance and consulting in the aughts and tech today. It’s a “prestige system,” she said, that universities enable. “As tech firms get more negative reviews in the media and it becomes clear what their political toll can be, students may have more circumspection about taking these jobs,” she said. “At the same time, they’ll continue taking these jobs because of the security and reputation that comes with them. And universities will keep sponsoring all this recruitment.”

Good Luck Changing the Culture

For years, students were told they could tackle ethical concerns about technology from the inside, working within the mammoth structures of companies like Google. Ms. Stapleton said that was part of the company’s allure: its ostensible commitment to empowering even its youngest employees to weigh in on critical problems.She spent 12 years at Google and YouTube on various teams, including internal communications, where she wrote company talking points. Her weekly emails to staff, she said, were the stuff of corporate legend. At a 2012 all-hands, Larry Page, one of the company’s founders, called her onstage to celebrate her work as colleagues presented her with a wooden plaque that read: “The Bard of Google.”Then, in 2018, Ms. Stapleton helped organize a Google walkout, after reporting in The New York Times revealed that the company gave a $90 million severance package to the Android creator Andy Rubin, who was accused of sexual misconduct. Twenty-thousand workers left their desks in protest. Within six months, Ms. Stapleton said, she was demoted and pushed to resign. In December, she wrote about her experience in an essay for Elle. Google maintained that Ms. Stapleton was not sidelined for her role in the walkout. “We thank Claire for her work at Google and wish her all the best,” a Google spokesperson responded. “To reiterate, we don’t tolerate retaliation. Our employee relations team did a thorough investigation of her claims and found no evidence of retaliation. They found that Claire’s management team supported her contributions to our workplace, including awarding her their team Culture Award for her role in the Walkout.”But Ms. Stapleton said her story should give bright-eyed students pause about whether Big Tech and altruism are aligned.“I don’t know if Google can credibly sell young people on the promise of doing good in the world anymore,” she said. “That’s not to say there aren’t wonderful people there and interesting things to work on. But if you care about a company’s values, ethics and contributions to society, you should take your talents elsewhere.”Mr. Miley, who left Google in 2019, echoed her sentiment: “It’s hard to change a system from within when the system doesn’t think it needs to be changed.”A spokeswoman for Google said the company continues to see job application numbers grow annually, and noted that the practice of having employees raise concerns about policies, whether on data privacy or human rights reviews, is part of the corporate culture. The outside attention those concerns may draw is a reflection of Google’s growth and evolution from a search company to a larger entity with many products and services, the spokeswoman said. But even companies with a market cap of over $970 billion (Google’s parent company, Alphabet) or over $614 billion (Facebook) aren’t immune to the punches of potential talent. John Sullivan, a professor of management at San Francisco State University who also advises companies on recruitment, estimated that criticisms of Uber’s sexual harassment and discrimination policies cost the company roughly $100 million, largely because of talent lost to competitors.Sarah Soule, a professor and senior associate dean at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, said in an email that there is a long history of students protesting questionable corporate ethics, with several cases of protest directed toward recruiters, yielding powerful effects.Take the case of Dow Chemical Company, which in 1965 accepted a $5 million Department of Defense contract to manufacture the flammable gel napalm during the Vietnam War. When recruiters turned up at New York University, they were met with hundreds of angry student demonstrators, The Times reported.Brendon Sexton, the student government president at N.Y.U. at the time, demanded a moratorium on Dow’s campus recruitment efforts in 1968. “They don’t care that a sin is being committed here,” he told protesters near the job interview site. Public pressure continued to mount, fueled largely by young activists. The company halted its production of napalm a year later.Ms. Geiduschek said the behavior of tech companies is especially difficult to challenge because their products are ubiquitous.“It’s hard to avoid spending your money at Amazon. I sometimes do it, especially in that Christmas-season binge,” she said. “If you want to sway this company to do the right thing, you have to attack it at places that are higher leverage, where it hurts.” Read the full article

0 notes

nancydsmithus · 5 years

Text

15 Questions To Ask Your Next Potential Employer

Robert Hoekman Jr

2019-09-20T12:30:59+02:002019-09-20T10:34:39+00:00

In my book “Experience Required”, I encourage in-house UX professionals to leave companies who refuse to advance their UX intelligence and capability. There are far too many companies these days who understand the value of UX to waste your time being a martyr for one who will only frustrate you. Your best chance of doing a good job is to avoid a bad position.

Smartly, during a recent Q&A about the book, an audience member asked how we can avoid taking these jobs in the first place. What kinds of questions, he wondered, can you ask during an interview to spot red flags before the company stabs the whole flagpole into your sacred UX heart?

Know What You Want To Know

There’s the usual stuff, sure, such as asking why the position you’re applying for is currently open. What the company’s turnover rate is like. Why that turnover rate is so low or high. A little Googling will easily enough net you a decent list of broad questions you can ask any employer.

But what you really want is to get UX-specific. You want to hone in on precisely what your life might be like should you take the position.

Your best chance of doing a good job is to avoid a bad position.

“

Sadly, I lacked a great answer at the time to the question about interview questions, so I let it eat at me until I woke up at three a.m two days later and started writing notes. That morning, I emailed my reply to the moderator.

Ask A Great Question, Then Shut Up

To devise the list below, I considered what kinds of things I’d wish a company knew and understood about UX prior to working with them. I can operate in all kinds of situations—as a UX and process innovation consultant, this has been my job, and pleasure, for nearly 13 years now—but I want to know from the start, every time, that the effort will be set up for success. These questions aim to uncover the dirty details that will tell me what I’m walking into.

Much like a good validation session or user interview, these questions are open-ended and designed to draw out thoughtful, long-winded responses. (One-word answers are useless.) I strongly recommend that when and if you ask them, you follow each question with a long, stealthy vow of silence. People will tell you all about who they are if you just shut up long enough to hear them do it. Stay quiet for at least ten seconds longer than you think is reasonable and you’ll get the world.

People will tell you all about who they are if you just shut up long enough to hear them do it.

“

I’d ask these questions of as many individuals as possible. Given that tech interviews are often hours-long and involve many interviewers, you should be able to grab yourself a wealth of good answers before you head out the door to process and sleep.

If, on the contrary, you are given too little time to ask all these questions, prioritize the ones you’re personally most concerned about, and then consider that insufficient interview time might be a red flag.

Important: The key to the answers you receive is to read between the lines. Listen to what is said, note what is not said, and decide how to interpret the answers you get. I’ve included some red flags to watch out for along with each question below.

The Questions

Let’s get right to it.

1. How does this company define UX? As in, what do you believe is the purpose, scope, and result of good UX work?

Intent

Literally every person on Earth who is asked this question will give a slightly, or wildly, different answer than you expect or hope for. At the very least, the person interviewing you should have an opinion. They should have a sense of how the company views UX, what the various UX roles have to offer, and what effect they should have.

Red Flag(s)

The UX team has a very limited role, has no real influence, and the team, for the most part, is stretched so thin you could put them on a cracker.

2. How do the non-UX people on your product team currently participate in UX decisions? Follow-ups: Describe a recent example of this kind of participation. What was the UX objective? How was that objective vetted as a real need? What did you do to achieve the objective, step-by-step? How did it turn out? What did you learn?

Intent

Find out how the entire product team approaches UX and how collaborative and supportive they might be in acquiring and acting on good research insights.

Red Flag(s)

They don’t participate in UX decisions.

3. What UX roles exist in the organization, and what do they do?

Intent

Determine where you’ll fit in, and how difficult it might be for you to gain influence, experience, or mentorship (depending on what you’re after). Also, build on the previous question about who does what and how.

Red Flag(s)

UX people at the company are heavily skilled in graphic design, and not so skilled in strategy. The current team members have limited influence. Your role will be similar. Strategy is handled by someone else, and it trickles down to the UX team for execution.

4. Who is your most experienced UX person and in what ways does that experience separate them from others?

Intent

Determine the range of UX intelligence on the team from highest to lowest. Is the person at the top whip-smart and a fantastic leader? Does that person mentor the others and make them better?

Red Flag(s)

The interviewer cannot articulate what makes that person better or more compelling than others. If they can’t answer this question, you’re speaking to someone who has no business making a UX hiring decision. Ask to speak to someone with more inside knowledge.

Noteworthy, but not necessarily a red flag: If you learn that the most experienced person on the team is actually someone with a very sleight skill set, this can mean either there’s room for you to become an influencer, or the company puts so little value on UX that they’ve selected only employees with a small view of UX. The latter could mean you’ll spend all your time trying to prove the value of bigger UX involvement and more strategic work. You may like that sort of thing. I do. This would not be a red flag for me. It might be for you.

5. What are the company’s plans for UX long-term? (Expand it? Reduce it? How so, and why? Is there a budget for its expansion? Who controls it and how is it determined?)

Intent

Map out your road for the next couple of years. Can you rise into the role you want? Or will you be stuck in a cul-de-sac with zero chance of professional growth?

Red Flag(s)

We plan to keep doing exactly what we do now, and what we do now is pretty boring or weak. Also, we have no budget—like, ever—so if you want to bring in a consultant, attend a seminar, hire another person, or run a comprehensive usability study with outside customers, well, good luck with that.

6. How do UX professionals here communicate their recommendations? Follow-up: How could they improve?

Intent

Learn how they do it now, and more importantly, whether or not it works.

Red Flag(s)

The interviewer has no answer, or—far worse—has an anti-answer that involves lots of arm-waving and ideas falling on deaf ears. The former can, again, mean the interviewer has no business interviewing a UX candidate. The latter can mean the UX team is terrible at communicating and selling its ideas. While this can be overcome with your much better communication skills, it will almost certainly mean the company has some baggage to wade through. Poor experiences in the past will put other product team members on defense. You’ll have to play some politics and work extra heard on building rapport to get anywhere.

7. Who tends to offer the most resistance to UX recommendations and methods and why? Follow-up: And how much power does that person have?

Intent

This person will either give you the most grief or will give you the great opportunity to improve your communication skills (remember: design is communication!). Knowing who it is up front and how that person operates can tell you what the experience will be like.

Red Flag(s)

Executives, because they distrust UX. If you lack support at the top, it will be a daily struggle to achieve anything substantive.

8. What do UX practitioners here do to advance their values and methods beyond project work? Please be specific.

Intent

See how motivated the UX team is to perpetuate UX values to the rest of the company and improve how the team works.

Red Flag(s)

They don’t.

9. What do you think they should do differently? Why?

Intent

Discover how your interviewer feels about UX. This is, after all, a person who has a say in hiring you. Presumably, this person will be a big factor in your success.

Red Flag(s)

Keep their noses out of product development, stop telling the engineers what to do (speaks to perception of pushy UX people).

10. Describe a typical project process. (How does it start? What happens first? Next? And then?)

Intent

Find out if there is a process, what it looks like, and how well it aligns with your beliefs as a UX professional.

Red Flag(s)

You’ll be assigned projects from the top. You’ll research them, design a bunch of stuff in a vacuum with no way to validate and without any iteration method, and then you’ll hand all your work to the Engineering team, who will then have a thousand questions because you never spoke to each other until just now.

Bonus Question

How and when does the team try to improve on its process? (If it doesn’t, let’s call that a potential red flag as well.)

11. How has your company learned from its past decisions, and what have you done with those learnings?

Intent

UX is an everlasting experiment. Find out if this company understands it’s supposed to learn from the work and become smarter as a result.

Red Flag(s)

No examples, no thoughts.

12. If this is an agency who produces work for clients: What kind of support or backup does this agency provide for its UX recommendations, and how much power does the UX group have to push back against wrongheaded client ideas? Follow-ups: How does the team go about challenging those ideas? Provide a recent example.

Intent

Find out how often you’ll be thrown under the proverbial bus when a client pushes back against what you know to be the right approach to a given problem. Your job will be to make intelligence-based recommendations; don’t torture yourself by working with people who refuse to hear them.

Red Flag(s)

The interviewer says the agency does whatever the clients demand. You will be a glorified wireframe monkey with no real power to change the world for the better.

13. How does the company support the UX group’s work and methods?

Intent

Determine how the company as a whole thinks about UX, both as a team and a practice. Is UX the strange alien in the corner of the room, or is it embraced and participated in by every product team member?

Red Flag(s)

UX is a strange alien. Good luck getting anyone to listen to you.

14. What design tools (software) does your team use and why? Follow-ups: How receptive are people to trying new tools? How does evolution happen?

Intent

Know what software you should be familiar with, why the team uses it, and how you might go about introducing new tools that could be better in some situations.

Red Flag(s)

Gain insight into how the team thinks about the UI portion of the design process. Does it start with loose ideas drawn on napkins and gradually move toward higher-quality? Or does it attempt to start with perfection and end up throwing out a lot of work? (See the next question for more on this.)

15. Does a digital design start low-fi or high-fi, and what is the thinking behind this approach? Follow-up: If you start lo-if, how does a design progress?

Intent

You can waste a lot of hours on pixel-perfect work you end up throwing out. A company who burns through money like that is also going to be the first one to cut staff when things get tight. No idea should be carried through to its pixel-perfect end until it’s been collaborated on and vetted somehow, so you want to know that the company is smart enough to start lo-fidelity and move gradually to hi-fidelity. Hi-fi work should be the result of validation and iteration, not the start of it. A lo-fi > hi-fi process mitigates risk.

Red Flag(s)

All design work starts and ends in Photoshop or Sketch, and is expected to be 100% flawless and final before anyone sees what you’ve produced.

Running The Interview

In an unrelated Q&A years ago, a hiring manager asked how to spot a good UX professional during an interview. I answered that he should look for the person asking all the questions. I repeated this advice in Experience Required.

Now you can be the one asking all the questions.

And in doing so, not only will you increase your odds of being offered the gig, you’ll know long before the offer shows up whether to accept it.

If you, dear reader, have more ideas on how to scavenger-hunt a company’s red flags, we’re all ears. Tell us about it in the comments below.

(cc, il)

0 notes

stevedonnellyfaith-blog · 5 years

Text

An Abnormal Job Search (Post 79) 3-11-15

The Friday before last my job search took an unexpected turn as my employer offered me a severance package, which I accepted. It has been a difficult workplace since last August when the plant manager resigned and was initially not replaced, then later replaced by a contract employee. The plant performance began to drift and communication has remained poor. I was distracted by Nicholas’ health issues and couldn’t seem to find the right recipe for our team’s success. My employer came to the same conclusion and we parted ways amicably.

Their decision came at an opportune time for our family as Nick’s health is now good. His doctors have told him to return to normal life. I had already made the decision to look for another job as my current work hours and conditions would not have cooperated with Natalie’s return at the end of the summer. I had been praying for help in finding a new position. God answered my prayers with an intensity that surprised and disconcerted me.

Job loss triggered an emotional jambalaya of fear, confusion, depression, relief and embarrassment. I had not been unemployed since I resigned my military commission and entered the private sector decades ago. As plant superintendent, I had done all the hiring for the plant last year, so I had interviewed close to a hundred unemployed people recently. Now I knew I would be in the candidate’s chair across the interview table, an uncomfortable thought.

The strangest emotions in the stew were relief and peace. I had evidently been carrying a heavy burden of worry about both the overall plant performance and each individual detail for which I had been responsible. If you notice a knock in your car’s engine and your tires are bald, driving can become a stressful experience … until your vehicle is totaled. Other worries invade, but the burdens about the engine knock and bald tires are suddenly released and there is a peaceful feeling too. I felt an almost disconcerting feeling of peace during my exit interview. I knew at that moment that the work I had done at the plant was completed and no further adjustments, phone calls, calculations or discussions would be required or desired. It was done. I breathed a heavy sigh of relief and then all the other bad emotions began a fist fight in my stomach.

The interview process has been up and down over the last week. I had two interviews for consultant jobs that don’t look like they are a fit for me. They were both very similar to work that I had done in my previous position, but I was unable to convince either potential employer that I actually enjoy flying around the country to interact with clients. Doing the actual work would have been fine, I am sure, but considering the hotel rooms and car travel gave me an empty feeling … kind of the same feeling that I had been suffering with during my year as plant superintendent. Still, having interviews not work out is disheartening even when it is for the best.

Part of my issue seemed to be a prayer that I had offered back in February when I was on vacation in Ohio. I knew then that I would be seeking greener pastures, but I was worried that I might make the wrong decision. I prayed that Jesus would select the opportunity for me that would best fit my needs. I prayed that he would prevent me from being offered any job that wasn’t the best one so that I wasn’t tempted by pride or the chance to amass material possessions. Essentially, I asked him to lock all the doors but the one He selected for me. It seemed at the time to be a safe strategy because I already had a good job. I wanted to make sure that if I chose to leave my employer, it would only be for the right opportunity.

Retrospectively, praying for a chorus of slamming doors seems to have been a pretty ill-advised prayer strategy. I expected to reach for Jesus’s hand from safely inside the boat, but instead, my shipmates unexpectedly tossed me overboard. Now I would really like for Jesus to give me a hand, really soon if he can oblige. Did I say that I could use a hand from Jesus? I imagine that Peter felt pretty nervous when the waves reached his armpits. I definitely would not have climbed out of the boat myself, but I believe that Jesus intends something good for me that requires this particular experience. Endure it I will.

The job search continues to be the oddest I have ever experienced. One of the potential employers is a company that I have an odd connection to. Here is the story:

The group of consultants that I was working with about four years ago knew that I was interested in moving back to Ohio if an opportunity presented itself. Whenever they would run across something that they thought I could do, they would give me a call. One of the consultants named Jonathan had a distinctly British accent, because he was, in fact, British. One day on my commute home I thought I heard him call Catholic Answers Live and ask a question. It surprised me that a British Jonathan might have been the first caller I ever recognized on a Catholic Answers – I expected to hear Rene Solorzano, Rudy Adames, or another one of the Men of St Joseph.

Anyway, in the same time period Pam was having trouble with her chemo and difficulty sleeping. She was waking up each night at about 4 AM after dreaming vividly about, Jesus, Mary or purgatory. I was on my commute by that time, so she would call me on the phone and relay her nightly dream. They were puzzling and I looked forward to them. Usually they involved her being asked to pray for some unknown person who had been robbed, shamed or killed. I would often arrive at work and later discover another staff member had been robbed during the night or had a family member die. It was oddly coincidental how Pam’s dream would predict some circumstance that I would later discover.

This went on for several weeks, until finally Pam called me with a dream so odd that I couldn’t puzzle through it at all. She said that I was supposed to go to Ohio to help a man with his pool and that another man needed help with his roof and windows. I was disappointed. Her dreams had seemed to be leading me towards opportunities to pray for my coworkers who needed help. This one just seemed silly.

I arrived at work and noticed an email from Jonathan the British guy asking me to give him a call. I usually would have put off calling him until later, but I wanted to ask him about whether he had called Catholic Answers. I picked up the phone and dialed his number on the east coast. “No,” Jonathan informed me, I had heard a different British bloke. Jonathan was not a Catholic. I was disappointed for a second time that morning.

Jonathan then went on to explain that he had called about two companies in Ohio that might be a fit for me: one was a small manufacturer of pool products and the other company was maker of roofing material and windows. I was stunned. I expressed my appreciation to Jonathan and explained that my wife had a serious medical condition that would prevent me from interviewing for the foreseeable future. We hung up.

I put my head down on my desk and teared up. Jonathan had described two opportunities to me that perfectly matched the puzzling dream that Pam had described not two hours earlier. Yet, I was in a situation where I could not act on her dream. Still, the match between the dream and the phone call was too close; coincidence was not a possibility. I had been communicated to in such a way that could serve no purpose other than to emphatically confirm for me that God exists. That confirmation was very helpful on the journey that I still had ahead of me.

Within two months of the phone call, Pam would suffer a stroke during her second brain surgery. After the operation, she needed extensive rehab and something in her spiritual consciousness shifted. Pam’s morning dreams ceased, and she instead developed a fascination with the television show Big Bang Theory. Life changes that way. I got no more looks into the mystical universe, but Sheldon was pretty funny. Pam passed away about six months after her second craniotomy as her tumor grew back unchecked.

We flew Pam’s remains for burial in Maryland, where my journey began with her. I was surprised at who attended the service. While we were dating, Pam and I had had a falling out with the couple, Jim and Joan, who introduced us. We reconciled with them after about a decade later, but were never as close. They attended the service. Joan died two months later of a brain tumor.

Terry, my oldest friend from childhood, also showed up. He was in our wedding party, and then fell off the face of the earth. He drove down in the middle of the night to attend the funeral and surprised us. Nobody recognized him after a quarter century. His father had died of a brain tumor when we were about ten years old. Pam’s death brought the pain back for him, but it reignited our friendship as well.

We got together several months later when I dropped Natalie off for the summer. He hadn’t been to my folk’s house in 23 years. We watched the Indians play and talked about our lives. He mentioned his employer and my jaw hit the floor. Terry worked for the pool manufacturer from Jonathan’s call and Pam’s dream. Life is funny that way. Terry began to text me late at night when he was feeling down.

Life got pretty busy again with Stephen and then Nick’s illnesses. I made a few trips East but didn’t run into Terry. Finally, when Nick got healthy again, I was ready to find a new job. I started lining things up including two interviews with consultants that were interested in my background. Neither one would get me to Ohio but each would get me away from the bad work situation I was in. Maybe Jesus’s path included a way station on the way to wherever I was headed.

Then Terry texted me in the middle of the workday which he had never done. He had noticed that his company was trying to hire for the position in which I am most comfortable and for which I am most qualified. Did I have a resume? I forwarded mine immediately, but was sort of disappointed. I was sure the opportunity would come to fruition after I would already have other offers. I didn’t think I could turn down an opportunity to safely escape the bad employment situation that I was currently enduring. Shortly, thereafter I was called to the Plant Manger’s office and let go.

All in all, my situation is very strange. Whenever I am waiting for news from one of my interviews, I hear from Terry’s company instead. Things move forward in that one direction and backward with regard to all other opportunities. Terry’s boss is flying me out on Saturday for a week get a feel for their business. There is a portion of my personality in open rebellion against anything with the aroma of good news, but it is the company from Pam’s dream. In a way the whole situation appears to have climbed out of the pages of a Narnia book. Still, the question remains: do I trust and submit to Jesus? Yes, I think I do.

Note to the young – this is not how normal job searches work.

#God #Jesus #The Holy Spirit #The Virgin Mary #Job Search #Faith #Grace #Peace #Prayer #Vocation #Opportunity #Catholic Answers Live #dreams

0 notes

personalcoachingcenter · 5 years

Text

Do You Want the Corner Office Someday?

New Post has been published on https://personalcoachingcenter.com/do-you-want-the-corner-office-someday/

Do You Want the Corner Office Someday?

Do you want the corner office someday? In this episode of HBR’s advice podcast, Dear HBR:, cohosts Alison Beard and Dan McGinn answer your questions with the help of Mike Troiano, a partner at G20 Ventures, host of the podcast #AskTrap, and a former executive. They talk through what to do when you’re falling off the executive track, you’re moving up but don’t believe in the company’s strategy, or you have a rival who could block your path to the C-suite.

Download this podcast

Listen to more episodes and find out how to subscribe on the Dear HBR: page. Email your questions about your workplace dilemmas to Dan and Alison at [email protected].

From Alison and Dan’s reading list for this episode:

HBR: What Makes an Effective Executive by Peter Drucker — “An effective executive does not need to be a leader in the sense that the term is now most commonly used. Harry Truman did not have one ounce of charisma, for example, yet he was among the most effective chief executives in U.S. history. Similarly, some of the best business and nonprofit CEOs I’ve worked with over a 65-year consulting career were not stereotypical leaders.”

Medium: How To Be An Executive by Mike Troiano — “Back in the day you became an executive over time, carefully cultivated in the corporate hierarchy like a meat-eating houseplant. But that’s all changed now. Corporate hierarchy ain’t what it used to be, and if you go off and start a company, you get the title overnight.”

HBR: How to Get on the Shortlist for the C-Suite by Cassandra Frangos — “Rotating around the organization gives you a balance of experience. It also pressure-tests you in multiple environments and delivers a broader perspective. At Cisco, we prepare candidates for top slots by using executive assessments to identify strengths and development areas and by giving individuals strategic assignments to fill experience voids and provide greater exposure opportunities.”

HBR: What Sets Successful CEOs Apart by Elena Lytkina Botelho, Kim Rosenkoetter Powell, Stephen Kincaid, and Dina Wang— “Typically we see ‘take no prisoners’ CEOs last only as long as the company has no choice but to submit to shock therapy. These CEOs often get ousted as soon as the business emerges from crisis mode—they lose the support of their teams or of board members who’ve grown tired of the collateral damage. It’s no coincidence that the careers of turnaround CEOs are frequently a series of lucrative two- to three-year stints; they put out the fires and then move on to the next assignment.”

TRANSCRIPT

DAN MCGINN: Welcome to Dear HBR: from Harvard Business Review. I’m Dan McGinn.

ALISON BEARD: And I’m Alison Beard. Work can be frustrating, but it doesn’t have to be. We don’t need to let the conflicts get us down.

DAN MCGINN: That’s where Dear HBR: comes in. We take your questions, look at the research, talk to the experts and help you move forward. Today we’re answering your questions from listeners who want to be executives. Our guest is Mike Troiano. He’s a venture capitalist and a former executive and CEO. Mike, thanks for coming on the show.

MIKE TROIANO: Thanks for having me, Dan. Good to be here.

DAN MCGINN: How hard is it to identify whether somebody has the personality, the characteristics to make it into the executive suite?

MIKE TROIANO: It’s hard. There’s an expression in VC, you want to pick the right race and bet the right horse.

ALISON BEARD: What are some hallmarks of an inspiring C-suite candidate?

MIKE TROIANO: I really like people who have strong empathy for the customer that they intend to serve. After that, it’s really the ability to build a great team. A leader is someone people follow and you really look is this someone who looks for people better than them, smarter than them, more capable and finds ways for them to flourish, or is it someone with their kind of thumb on the people that report to them?

DAN MCGINN: One of the common threads in our letters today is that people are thinking ahead. The people who make it, are they that calculating or are they thinking about their career like a chess match?

MIKE TROIANO: The most important thing you want to do to get to the next level is to be effective at the level you’re at. So, it’s not like dressing. They say dress for the job you want. Yes, dress for the job you want, but perform the job you have. That said, in today’s economy we’re all responsible for our own professional development and I think it’s really important to have a sense of where you want to go and a sense of what are the capabilities, experiences, skills, relationships that you need to accumulate to get there.

ALISON BEARD: Let’s get started. Dear HBR, I am a global C-level executive in the making, settling for smaller roles for too long. I have more than 20 years of experience in my field and I’m great at what I do. But my resume makes it seem like I’m a job hopper. That’s mainly because in my early career I was a single parent and poor money manager. I chased pay rather than experience. In the past few years, my career has basically just happened to me. I took my current job because it was close to home and better for my family life and my boss is amazing. But she’s not seeking to grow the company to a level that will keep me satisfied and inspired. Coming up on three years here I feel stagnant. I realize that my current role and income are not where they should be. I thought I was making moves that would position me well financially. Go figure. How do I scale up in my career to match my degrees, certifications and years of experience? I don’t want to come across as ungrateful to my boss, but I do want to practice my craft in a larger, global organization that will allow me to grow and stretch myself. What should I do? Ambitious lady. Mike, what do you think?

MIKE TROIANO: Self-confident. That’s good. This struck me, the first thought that I had was just that this need to balance agency and loyalty. What you get hopping around in the language of the question-asker, is some degree of power over your destiny. The ability to make choices and decide what you want and I think in the overall noble effort to try and stick around and demonstrate loyalty at this firm, it feels like she’s sacrificed that fully. So, none of us have jobs in the way that my father thought about that idea. What we have are networks and gigs. And you need to be investing in those networks throughout your career and to do so, is in no way disloyal to your current employer.

ALISON BEARD: I think the real problem here is not whether she should look for new opportunities. I think she absolutely should if she feels stagnant. She wants more responsibility, she wants to move into leadership roles. I think that’s terrific and she should and shouldn’t feel disloyal to her boss. She can have a conversation with her about why she’s doing it. I feel like the real struggle might be moving where she wants to go, given a resume that doesn’t look great.

DAN MCGINN: If she really aspires to be in the C-suite, her resume right now has a lot of roles at companies that are not really putting her on the path towards that. Can her next move potentially make up for that? If she were to get into the right organization, could one job if she stayed there for two or three years overcome 20 years of kind of jumping around without a lot of intentionality?

MIKE TROIANO: I would say no.

DAN MCGINN: You’re looking for, when you do a C-suite search you’re looking for sort of full sweep of a career as opposed to what did you do the last two, three, four years?

MIKE TROIANO: Yeah and that doesn’t mean people haven’t failed or made mistakes, or gone down tangents. It’s that they have awareness of those things and they overall sum to a narrative that leads logically to whatever this next stop in the journey is. I will say that reading this letter, the only thing that indicates her to be someone who aspires to that is that she says she aspires to that. Like all the other things that seem important to her, really have less to do with that C-suite aspiration. So, I would sort of say, well why? Why do you aspire to that? Is it because it represents some tangible achievement that’s validating in some way, or are there emotional drivers behind that aspiration? My last class, my last day at HBS, I had a professor and he said something to us that I will never forget, which was you’re a group of high achievement people. Measure your achievements in life by what you sacrifice to accomplish them. And it was profoundly good advice. That at the end of the day it’s not a question of whether you want to be in the C-suite, we all do. Who doesn’t?

ALISON BEARD: I do not. [LAUGHTER]

MIKE TROIANO: Most people, a lot of people do. But the question is less so that and more are you willing to pay the price to do that? There are lots of tradeoffs involved with that kind of role. And that’s really the way to think about the question. It’s not just: Do I aspire to be at the top? Certainly. The question is are you willing to pay the price to achieve that outcome?

ALISON BEARD: How does she position herself as an attractive candidate when her resume is a little bit shaky and she’s not at the level she really wants to be at?

MIKE TROIANO: We all need to package ourselves for the opportunity we want. Be explicit and specific about the job you want to go to. Once you’ve done that then you have the ability to say, OK, what are the specific skills and experiences required to be successful in that job? What is a hiring manager for that job specifically looking for in the right person to fill that role? And then it becomes a question of how do I package my experiences, the things that I’m good at, my trials and tribulations over the course of a career? How do I package those things in a way that demonstrates my ability to meet those criteria? And it really is a packaging exercise. I mean at the end of the day I could spend my career 11 different ways. Part of your role as someone advocating for themselves and trying to advance your own career is to be able to put that together into a narrative that aligns with the narrative that a hiring manager is looking for, for a particular opportunity. So, I would say build your story from the opportunity back.

ALISON BEARD: It reminds me of pieces that we’ve published on how to onramp again after you’ve been a stay at home parent, positioning her weaknesses, the idea that she’s been in lots of different jobs as a strength. So, she has this really broad network. She’s been in lots of different organizations and I do think there’s a way to package that effectively. But I also think that not every organization is going to see her as their next rising C-suite star and so she needs to maybe temper her ambitions a tiny bit and just not get discouraged. Because it will take time to find that company that recognizes her for what she aspires to be.

DAN MCGINN: So, if we think about really tangible moves she can make here, maybe instead of saying global C-suite executive as her next step, she needs to think about aspiring small company executive. The idea that she needs to sort of scale her level and ambition to match the experience base she’s building from right now.

MIKE TROIANO: Boy, I hate to sort of limit people in that way. We can all do whatever we want to do. That’s one of the great things about capitalism such as it is.

DAN MCGINN: I’m an aspiring global supermodel right now, so. [LAUGHTER]

MIKE TROIANO: I aspire to a think full head of luxurious hair. I guess I’m pushing back a little bit on whether that is the right aspiration for anyone, to just say that I want to be a global C-suite executive as opposed to I want to lead an organization that does, that achieves some outcome. What do you want to achieve? Why do you want to achieve that? Are you willing to pay the price necessary to do so? I think those are important questions for someone at this stage of career. It sounds like maybe she’s struggling a little bit to try and figure out what’s next. I would say defining it in more specific and actionable terms is the first step towards figuring out what’s right for her to do next.

DAN MCGINN: So, Alison what’s our advice to this woman?

ALISON BEARD: So, we want to assure her that everyone should maintain their own career and manage their own destiny. So, it is not disloyal for her to keep her network open and to look for new opportunities. As she’s looking she should evaluate all aspects of other possible jobs against her current situation. The size and ambition of the organization, her boss, the impact that it will have on her family life, not just pay. When she’s interviewing she should also realize that she needs to package herself. Try to figure out a way to market her weaknesses, the fact that she’s had lots of jobs as strengths. So, we think it’s great that she’s aiming for the C-suite, but we’re not sure that she’ll necessarily be able to jump there immediately and it’s possible that a role in a global organization isn’t realistic. So, we just advise her to be patient and to take a step back and just think about exactly what she wants to do and why and find the organization that’s right for her.

DAN MCGINN: Onward. Dear HBR, I’m a young senior manager at a struggling mid-sized firm. I’ve been promoted quickly in three years, partly due to my good work, but honestly also due to the company’s troubles. Recently I took a great new leadership role. Then the next day, I was handed a layoff target and knew unreasonable growth targets. My team sees me as an executioner. The C-suite here lacks vision for success and isn’t willing to hear me out regarding the challenges we face. Their plan is to repeat the same actions that have been leading us to dismal results. I don’t want to leave my new team. Still, I’m considering looking for another job. I feel set up to fail and I’m worried about my own career. What do you think? Should I lean into the current opportunity, or should I actively seek other employment? My job is way too hard to do both well.

MIKE TROIANO: Well my first thought is competent people shouldn’t have to work for a company they don’t believe in. The whole point of going through whatever you’ve gone through to get to this point is that you have some degree of flexibility that you’re not sort of stuck, frozen into this company where you just, you don’t buy into whatever they’re trying to achieve. That seems like just the sort of, you die a little bit each day in that kind of role. I don’t buy this idea that you can’t do both well to that. Find a way to invest some of your time and energy looking out into the world to understand what’s happening and building the relationships that will advance you in your career.

ALISON BEARD: I completely agree with you. The first reaction that I had to reading this letter was you are on a sinking ship and you do not believe in leadership. And another VC that I worked with quite a bit, Jeffrey Bussgang says that one of the first things that he looks for when he’s investing in a company is the management team. And if you don’t believe in the management team, it’s not worth your money and it’s certainly not worth our letter writer’s time.

DAN MCGINN: I’m going to mostly disagree with both of you.

ALISON BEARD: Wow.

DAN MCGINN: He should be looking for another job, but it might take a while and in the interim, this is actually a great opportunity for him. And I’ve seen instances in which people on sinking ships have actually advanced their career.

MIKE TROIANO: I just want to react to that. It’s a cliché that in difficulty lies opportunity, but it’s a cliché for a reason. So, I buy your argument. I think it’s critically important though that he at least understand where people are coming from. There’s no harder conversation to have in business than we won’t be requiring your services anymore. And I think if you’re going to take that step as a manager, you have almost a moral obligation to give people an honest reason why you’re taking this action. It sounds like the layoffs that he has to do are not really performance related, but they relate to some aspect of the strategy or shift. And he needs to really understand that so he can communicate it to people who are in a really hard spot. And he owes those people a fair and honest rationale for why the company’s taking these actions. And if he doesn’t understand it himself, he’s not in a position to provide that.

DAN MCGINN: I’ve never fired anyone or laid anyone off, so I have no firsthand experience at this. At the same time, for our listener, I’d argue that there’s large chunks of the economy in which people are working where they don’t believe in the strategy of the company, the company’s, you know, it would be great if everybody were working at successful companies where they were heading in the right direction and there were lots of faith in the leadership vision. I think that’s idealistic. A lot of people work at companies that are like Dunder Mifflin. That’s the reality.

ALISON BEARD: Wow. That’s a really negative perspective.

MIKE TROIANO: Holy buzzkill.

ALISON BEARD: I agree with you. I think you have to find something to love in your work or on your team to make it worthwhile, or you need to get paid a ton of money. So, I feel as if, if he doesn’t have any of that, he’s not enjoying the work because he’s having to fire all these people, and then with the skeleton team he has left, he’s trying to hit unrealistic targets. He doesn’t believe in the vision and he doesn’t mention the fact that his salary is knock-it-out-of-the-park, and he seems to think that he does have other options. I just feel like that might be the way to go.

DAN MCGINN: So, it would be OK for him to stay if he’s being paid a ton?

ALISON BEARD: I mean it’s a factor.

MIKE TROIANO: But boy, you spend a lot of time doing whatever you do at work. If it’s something that you don’t, you honestly don’t believe in or don’t care about at some level, or particularly if you’re suffering, inflicting the challenges of that strategy on other human beings, I just got to believe that takes its toll. And the ancillary benefits that overcome that limitation, boy they got to be pretty compelling to stick around.

ALISON BEARD: One thing I will agree with you on Dan, he does say it’s a great new leadership role. It sounds like it’s maybe the first time he’s had a chance to manage a team. And so, if there’s learning that is one other thing that can keep you in a job. If you’re still learning and growing and it’s going to position you well for your next position, wherever that is, whether it’s at an organization, another organization or in this one, I think that is not a bad thing to stay for.

DAN MCGINN: I may be projecting here. So, I came to HBR from an organization that was failing. Because it was failing in downsizing, I got promoted into an editing job and if I hadn’t stayed there for a year after getting that promotion, I probably wouldn’t have gotten this job. So, I knew when this was going down that I wasn’t going to be there for five years. I wasn’t going to be there for three years. But I definitely got the sense that hey, this title and the experience that I’m going to get for a short period of time will definitely give me a different trajectory when I jump from here. And it proved to be the smart decision.

MIKE TROIANO: I would ask whether you would have stuck around in that job if the failures of strategy above you had serious negative consequences for the people below.

DAN MCGINN: That’s an interesting question. So, I didn’t have to personally lay anybody off, but I certainly saw friends and I was kind of a beneficiary of layoffs in a certain way. I was taking jobs of people that were getting jettisoned. It’s definitely a complex set of emotions. I was job hunting, but I knew that it was going to take a while and for the time it took, performing this higher level job was going to be to my benefit.

ALISON BEARD: That sort of brings me to a point I wanted to raise. There’s a huge emotional fallout, not just for the people leaving, but for this team that remains. So, how do you energize that group of people to do well, to perform when they’ve just seen half of their colleagues laid off?

MIKE TROIANO: Yeah, that’s exactly right. You don’t want to give the people who remain a sense that you’re amputating the finger one knuckle at a time. So, you have to at least be able to manufacture in your own mind some sense of mission and forward progress and help people understand how the difficult choices the company has just made and implemented against the people they used to have lunch with, at the end of the day is the right thing for the collective at some level. And again, I think it’s really hard to do that if you don’t buy into that strategy yourself. You know, it’s a tricky thing. There’s a new word I heard, workism. It’s this sense that I will derive my fulfillment and self-actualization through the work that I do. This is a relatively modern kind of phenomenon and I may be revealing myself as a closet workist in this view, but I do think that you should expect more from your job than just compensation and some level of peer relationship.

ALISON BEARD: The flip side of the workism argument though is that people shouldn’t act this way and that they can find other places to derive meaning and have fun, and enjoy their lives and just view a job as a job. So, our letter writer could take that tack.

MIKE TROIANO: That’s right. Needs to look within himself perhaps and see if he’s a workist or a lifestylist. At the end of the day it’s, the most important thing is just that you can be in your kayak at 3:30, good for you. But that’s not executive track. Executives are workists in this economy and at the end of the day, it’s a choice.

ALISON BEARD: So Dan, what’s the takeaway?

DAN MCGINN: So, we split a little bit on this one. Mike and Alison feel strongly that if the situation is, our listener doesn’t agree with the company strategy, thinks that the company’s heading in the wrong direction, has tried to communicate as best he can with the leadership about these views and not gotten any kind of listening, or any kind of response that it’s time to look for a new gig. It’s just going to be a negative environment. It’s probably going to take a sort of emotional toll on our listener and that he should just get out. Alison did offer one caveat that if he’s paid a lot of money, maybe it’s OK to stick around.

ALISON BEARD: Or learning.

DAN MCGINN: Or learning. [LAUGHTER] But mostly it’s about the money. I had a slightly more nuanced view. I saw this as a both/and kind of problem. He should absolutely start job hunting, but he should realize that it could take a while and during the time that it does take a while, there could be an opportunity here at least to perform a bigger job. This overall negative situation could set him up for a higher job because the time he’s going to be spending as a senior manager here at a young age. And that even if this is not a situation anybody would want to go on for a long time, from a resume standpoint, if not from an emotional standpoint, the time he’s spending in this unpleasant position could have some net benefits for him. Did I characterize your position fairly at least?

MIKE TROIANO: Well, you implied that we lacked nuance, but that’s a fair summary.

ALISON BEARD: Let’s go to the last question. Dear HBR, I’m a newly promoted manager two levels away from my CEO. I was especially glad to see this long-planned advancement go through because my company has seen a lot of change recently. Both my direct boss and her boss moved onto other organizations right before I was promoted. We have new leadership and I feel energized. This is a big opportunity for me to work more directly with management and demonstrate my own leadership abilities. Here’s my hang up. There’s another more senior colleague in the same functional area as me who seems to be vying to manage our team. We both report directly to the same C-suite executive. But this woman has a more senior title and decades of work experience on me. Although not at all in the area I lead. My boss has included her in our regular team check-in meetings. He mentioned that she’ll serve as a resource. He even said that she might be a proxy for him in the future if other pressing issues come up. I don’t want to be seen as an obstructionist, or non-inclusive, but I also don’t want to fall into any traps by including this colleague in too many meetings or decisions. I fear that could lead to her making a case to formally step in and take over our team with me reporting directly to her. My instinct tells me to do the bare minimum and not invite this person to opine on our work. I know I need to tread carefully, particularly since my boss has explicitly invited her to share input. How would you walk this tightrope?

MIKE TROIANO: Well, I think she’s missing some information which is what was the boss’s intention in creating this semi-ambiguous relationship? I think it’s perfectly acceptable for her to talk with the manager and say listen, I’m a little anxious about some of the ambiguity in the chain of command here. And I want to understand my role vis-a-vis this other person and how do you see her helping us be more effective, helping me be better at my job? Is there a particular weakness or limitation that you envision her shoring up on my part? So, I’d just like to understand what that is. I think it’s really important to understand what was the intention of the other person, particularly when the other person is a superior in this case. If you have concerns from there then at least they’re informed concerns as opposed to this situation which is partly anxiety caused by this other person. But it seems like some of the anxiety is because she’s not exactly sure what her manager wants in creating this ambiguous relationship.

DAN MCGINN: Our letter writer says that she’s thinking about not inviting the rival to meetings, to sort of quietly take steps to try to subvert her. How dangerous does that seem as a tactic?

MIKE TROIANO: I think that’s a mistake. Only because you’ve gotten specific requests from the manager to incorporate this woman and find ways to leverage her expertise. And running counter to that only risks painting you as someone difficult and non-productive.

ALISON BEARD: We should reassure our letter writer though that these feelings of anxiety or even envy at this colleague who seems to be in the boss’s good graces, is totally natural. And studies show people when they feel this way, either disparage or distance themselves from that person. So, it is completely natural, but I think you’re right. It’s a mistake to react that way. What she needs to do is definitely talk to her boss. Also, just think about what she brings to the table, the value she adds. So, she has a bit of competence going in. And then try to collaborate with this woman.

MIKE TROIANO: I agree completely. This is a totally human response and as such, the manager should have anticipated it. Like I blame the manager in a way for creating this situation where she’s on sort of shaky ground. I’m not sure what the deal is. So, 100 percent legit on her, but the shame on him.

DAN MCGINN: If our letter writer approaches the boss and tries to have a candid conversation about this, the way you suggest Mike, isn’t there a chance that the boss isn’t going to put cards on the table? If the boss is thinking about maybe relegating our letter writer to a less powerful role, or making other changes that are going to be negative, might the boss just kind of be vague or sort of say, well we’re going to see how this evolves. I could imagine a less than 100 percent candor in that kind of interaction. Is that something the listener needs to be aware of?

ALISON BEARD: I feel like there’s also a danger in having that conversation that she’s showing a little bit of weakness. So, I think it does have to be done really carefully.

MIKE TROIANO: Always. There’s always costs and benefits to this kind of dialogue. People are smart and have good intuition about other people more often than not, particularly professional people in this way. And so, yes it’s entirely possible depending on the way you ask the question that the manager may be, get a little cute in terms of the way they spin things, or the way they talk about it, but usually you can kind of see through the, between the lines, if you will. And you’ll know more than you know now. Even if you have to make leaps of inference based on what they say, the way they say it and what they don’t say to understand their true intentions. So, I feel like you’re generally in a better position having had the conversation than you are not knowing.

DAN MCGINN: I wonder if our letter writer, in trying to figure out what kind of behavior she’s going to show in this situation, needs to have sort of the possibility in the back of her mind which she’s raised directly in the letter, this rival of mine might be my boss in a few months and anything I do should keep that in mind.

MIKE TROIANO: Yeah, that’s only prudent. And I think that’s probably the next conversation. Once you understand the larger context of the manager’s intention, trying to reach out to this other person, to make sure that that relationship is productive, is probably the right next step.

ALISON BEARD: I think even if this person isn’t going to become her boss, she needs to learn to work well with her as a peer, understand what strengths she brings to the table, even learn from her in some respect. How does she go about getting over her worry and building bridges with this woman?

MIKE TROIANO: Yeah. I would say not by masking her true feelings. One of my kids is an actor and one of the things I’ve learned about acting is it’s not about pretending really well that you said, it’s about making yourself said. And so, I think a genuine, authentic effort to understand what does this other woman bring to the table that I lack? What can I get from them either in my own professional development or in the pursuit of my objectives? Make a good faith effort to try and figure that out. And once you’ve made that effort you can usually find some place to collaborate. Some way for, to work together for mutual benefit.

DAN MCGINN: Adam Grant likes to talk about the fact that rivalries in the workplace can sometimes be really productive for both parties. It makes you work a little bit harder. It sort of, there’s a chemistry that happens. This can create better performance.

MIKE TROIANO: I think that’s right. I think there are two flavors of rivalry. Productive rivalry which is what you’re citing, and unproductive rivalry. And I think policing that and making sure that you stay on top of that is the responsibility of the rivals. And you want to make sure that you’re seen as holding up your end of that bargain and I think if you can do that, absolutely. A little healthy competition never hurt anybody.

ALISON BEARD: Have you, have either of you ever seen people go from office rivals to best buds who help each other and have each other’s backs?

DAN MCGINN: I haven’t seen anybody go from rival to best buds, but I’ve certainly seen examples in which rivals can collaborate successfully on projects and benefit each other as opposed to sort of tearing each other apart. So, I think that professional collaboration is a completely reasonable outcome to hope for in this.

ALISON BEARD: So, maybe she should find a particular project to work on very closely with this woman?

MIKE TROIANO: Yeah, I think respect is the bridge between those two states of being with another person. Every sales organization in the world has regional managers that are in constant competition with one another and that dynamic can be very productive for the company that employs them. I found when those people have good working relationships it’s because they respect each other. So, it’s important to have that.

DAN MCGINN: Mike we know that the listener has to go to regular check-in meetings where this rival is also there. Sometimes the boss will be there. Sometimes he won’t. Meetings seem like they could be a particularly dangerous environment for conflict to be apparent to other people through body language, or through just the dialogue. What would your advice be to our listener as she goes into these meetings where people will have the ability to observe what she’s thinking and how she’s interacting with this person?

MIKE TROIANO: I think one of the ways to rise above the political moment is just to be explicit about what you’re trying to accomplish in a meeting. Being thoughtful as you go in about what are we trying to achieve here, and put that objective kind of on the other side of the table. So, rather than head to head kind of conflict dynamic, you want to make it so you’re both kind of on the same side of the conference table and the enemy, the opportunity, the whatever, the focus is something that’s a third party. And how do we work together to accomplish that?

DAN MCGINN: Whenever somebody aspires to the C-suite they know that they face this funnel that a lot of people are sort of working their way up the organization to these relatively few spots. Do you think that dynamic is influencing the sense of envy and the negative feelings in this situation?

MIKE TROIANO: Always. I work with a lot of startups as a VC and I think one of the benefits of a company that’s growing fast is it tends to create new avenues of opportunity and new ways to express whatever your talents and gifts, and proclivities are. It’s much harder to do that in a more static company or company where, because those hard funnels I think are more prevalent in companies that are lower growth, or that are stuck in a certain area. The good news and the bad news is I think there are very fewer and fewer steady state companies. We live in a context of tremendous change in the world and I think for a business to survive it has to be in a constant state of evolution. And that tends to create new opportunities and avenues. So, when you find yourself in that sense of kind of zero-sum game, look for ways to create a new game. And that idea might be something that helps the letter writer as well. Where are the avenues for me to pursue whatever my own aspiration is? Maybe it’s in the context of this one opportunity inside the organization, but being more thoughtful about other places that I can contribute may expand the scope of my responsibility and may reveal new opportunities for advancement that I wasn’t even aware of in my current role.

DAN MCGINN: So, Alison, what’s our advice?

ALISON BEARD: So, we think that she should start by having a conversation with her boss. What is his intention in getting the colleague more involved in her work? If she better understands what he’s after that might ease some of her anxiety. We think it’s a mistake to try to exclude or undermine this colleague. She needs to show that she’s collaborating. We think she should actually build bridges to the woman. She needs to figure out what she brings to the table and appreciate it, while also highlighting her own strengths. They should find ways to work productively together. And especially in meetings, she wants to focus on shared objectives. She does feel that her organization is sort of a zero-sum game. We think that she should look for a new game, new opportunities, other areas that she can grow and excel beyond this woman’s purview.

DAN MCGINN: Mike, thanks for coming on the show.

MIKE TROIANO: It was great being here guys. Thank you.

DAN MCGINN: That’s Mike Troiano. He’s a partner at the venture capital firm G20 Ventures and his advice podcast is called #AskTrap. Thanks to the listeners who wrote us with their questions. Now we want to know your questions. Send us an email with your workplace challenge and how we can help. The email address is [email protected].

ALISON BEARD: On our next episode we’ll be talking about unwanted roles with Francesca Gino.

FRANCESCA GINO: There is the resistance to telling the person who proposed it that you don’t want it, but then you take on roles that you really end up hating.

DAN MCGINN: I’m Dan McGinn.

ALISON BEARD: And I’m Alison Beard. Thanks for listening to Dear HBR:.

Source, N;

#Coaching from around the web

0 notes

reputationiseverything · 4 years

Text

email marketing campaign strategy

A visitor hits your website and wants to talk to you. What does that person start searching for?

Your Contact Us page.

It’s a page on your site that pushes visitors from browser to buyer.

Some companies don’t use them at all, and those that do have them often push these critical pages to the back burner during website revision projects.

That stops today.

I’ll share a step-by-step plan you can follow to strategize and revise this lowly web page. And I’ll use plenty of examples to spark your creativity.

Let’s get started.

What Is a Contact Us Page?

Think of a Contact Us page as a sort of digital business card. Sure, it’s short and concise. But if someone wants to reach out to you, they’ll use this page to do so.

About Us pages: Use this resource to explain your company’s history, goals, and direction. If someone wants to know how you became a leader in your field, the data is ready to go.

Help pages: Customers with critical product or service questions lean on this page to get their answers.

Employment pages: Job seekers need private, protected spaces to learn more about open opportunities.

A Contact Us page is different because you’re telling people more about getting in touch with you.

Your page should also embody your brand and entice that click. If your Contact Us page is the blandest one on your website, you’re not alone. The best contact us pages contain some value proposition, even when they don’t have a lot of text.

Do You Need a Contact Us Page?

A Contact Us page can’t be skipped because it is a trust signal. Share location information and highlight your phone number and email, and you’ll demonstrate to wary consumers that they can reach you at any time.

Trust and transparency matter in marketing. Contact Us pages start the process.

Five Key Contact Us Page Elements

You know you need a Contact Us page. But you have no idea what to put on the page. Push past the writer’s block, and follow this recipe for success.

A converting Contact Us page contains these critical pieces:

Your company name: Don’t beat around the bush. Use your full company name.

Your physical address: This can get tricky for multi-location companies. Maps often solve the problem (and more on that in a minute). If you share only one address, use the one associated with your corporate headquarters.

A map to your location: Google Maps hold immense power for marketers. When customers know where you are, even when they’re looking at a mobile device, your conversion rates can skyrocket. Boost that power by adding a Google Map to your Contact Us page.

Your contact information: Include a phone number, email address, and a quick data-collection form. Customers need plenty of calls to action. Fight off spam with a CAPTCHA as well.

Links to relevant pages: If you know customers have product questions, show them to your Help page. If you have plenty of job seekers, highlight that Jobs page.

Don’t be tempted to clutter up the page with more details and data. Keep things clean and streamlined with this list.

Build the Perfect Contact Us Form

If you’re looking for a way to streamline customer conversations, forms are key. If you build forms correctly, routing questions is a snap.

Your form could include several fields, including:

Name

Location

Current customer (Y/N)

Question

Email address

Phone number

You might be tempted to add all of these fields to your form. The more data you have, the better, right?

Not always.

When customers face a sea of questions, they tend to click away. Form completion rates and added fields are inversely related.

To keep those conversion rates up and deliver exceptional user experience, only ask critical questions.

10 Exceptional Contact Us Page Examples

I’ve talked a lot about what should and shouldn’t go on a Contact Us page.

These ten companies have lessons anyone can apply.

Streamlined and Simple: Scorpion

Scorpion offers internet marketing services to law firms, hospitals, franchises, and more. The company shows off robust design skills on all other web pages. But this one is remarkable in its simplicity.

Customers answer one simple question with a dropdown. The answer routes them to an appropriate secondary form.

Customers can also skip the hassle of forms altogether, call the number in the top-right corner of the screen, or visit one of three locations listed at the bottom of the page.

Brand Promise First: BarkBox

A subscription service for happy dogs should have a dog’s photo on a Contact Us page. And that dog should look happy. BarkBox has that element covered.

Customers have three different contact options sitting below that big image. They can search FAQs, start a live chat, or send an email. It’s a simple, streamlined interface made for busy dog lovers.

Personality Plus: Kick Point

This Canadian marketing firm kicks off the About Us page with a chatty, conversational tone.

Keep scrolling, and that clever voice keeps speaking. When you reach the bottom of this page, you know just how these employees talk and write.

The cleverness doesn’t impede clear communication. You’re told the company’s address, email address, phone number, and more.

Crisis Communication: Powell’s Books

Powell’s puts customer communication front and center on this Contact Us page. Timely content about shipping delays comes first. Keep scrolling, and you’re taken to email addresses and phone numbers.

Typically, converting Contact Us pages are short. But you can break the rules when the unexpected happens.

Arresting Graphics: Parker Lee

People hire Parker Lee to design logos, websites, and other branded elements. He puts those skills to work on this visually arresting Contact Us page. The page begins with a brand statement, but scrolling past that is a snap.

A simple form with just four fields appears, and a clever map rounds out the page.

Forms Do the Hard Work: Six Leaf Design

This company emphasizes sales on this Contact Us page. A three-field form, with a tiny multiple-choice quiz, gets potential customers a price quote.

A blue button for anxious customers leads right to a 20-minute consult appointment. For companies hoping to emphasize lead generation, this is a smart model to follow.

Friendly Faces: Byte

Who will customers talk to when they reach out? Byte answers this question with photos of real-life customer service reps ready to respond to questions.

Choose from multiple contact formats, including text, email, Facebook message, and email. All of this data is streamlined, so white space surrounds the page.

Product Photography: Freshly

Freshly offers meal-kit delivery services, and an enticing product takes up about half of this Contact Us page. Putting the product first could attract customers to jump into a purchase.

The contact box is the clever bit. Customers can chat, call, text, or skip to email.

This is a simple, friendly interface that puts the product first.

Multi-Location Mastery: Wendy’s

How do you handle inquiries when customers have dozens of locations to choose from? Wendy’s handles this question with a “Find Wendy’s” button at the top of the page.

Customers with questions can text or call a number displayed in big, black text. It’s nearly impossible to miss. A clever, short form rounds out the page.

Short and Sweet: My Own

I put best practices to use on my website’s Contact Us page. I use a drop-down to route questions, and I ask customers to fill out just three fields.

I keep the branding light on this page, but the colors remind my guests that they’re still on my site.

I also link to relevant social media sites to follow me through those platforms. My digital marketing consulting contact form is similar. Short and sweet with just the information I need to know.

We’ve walked through several examples of pages that convert. And we’ve shared quite a few tips you can put to use right now.

But there’s more to learn.

As you’re working on your Contact Us page, be sure to:

Be a good journalist. Put the important stuff first. Your visitors are there to connect with you. Make those opportunities easy to find and deliver an exceptional user experience. Save the rest for last.

Promote your page like a pro. Put a link to your page in your email signature and link it to your social media accounts. Make sure customers know you’re interested in a connection.

Link to your page. Customers look in the top-right corner of a page for Contact Us links. Make sure each page on your site connects to that critical page.

Before you publish your Contact Us page, be sure to avoid:

Cluttered design. Don’t fill the space with tons of graphics, jokes, or text blocks. Respect what your consumers are there to do – contact you.

Overconfidence. Use A/B testing to find the design your customers want. Don’t be overconfident about your design prowess — you might be surprised by what works!

A desktop-first mentality. Test your site on mobile devices. Try out the form fields. Plenty of customers will visit you on the go; make sure their experience is a good one.

It takes time to design a Contact Us page that converts. Don’t be afraid to slow down, test, and head back to the drawing board. You can’t afford to make mistakes on such an essential piece of your website.

Conclusion

Your Contact Us page is one of the most critical assets on your website. People head here when they want to reach you. Make that communication as quick and painless as possible.

Publish with confidence, and watch those conversion rates. If you don’t see the response you want, change it!

With experimentation and vigilance, you can develop the right Contact Us page that works for your customers, your company, and your community.

Is your current Contact Us page lacking? What can you change to make it more effective?

FaceBook

0 notes

prevueassessments-blog · 5 years

Text

10 Reasons Hiring Managers Fear Pre-Employment Tests

Like most anxieties, the FEAR that hiring managers have about using pre-employment evaluations is not anything more than False Experiences Appearing Real. In this column I react to the top 10 anxieties I always hear from HR managers, executives and business owners. A few of the fears are real. Some are only exaggerations. And others - they are not really correct. Beginning with number 10:

10. We don't have a budget for analyzing. Luckily the ROI on pre-employment evaluations is many-fold once you consider the expense of a bad hire, estimated to be 1 to 2 times annual salary for lower-wage workers and upwards of 10 times annual salary for managers, executive and professionals. In low-wage, higher turnover industries like hospitality, studies indicate it costs roughly 300 to 700 times an hourly worker's rate every time you need to fire and replace them when you take the effect of a bad hire on a guest's very first experience. Ranging in costs from as little as $25 for screening tools to several hundred for job match tests, the cost of the pre-employment tests are going to be a fraction of the cost spent trying to save a poor hire. Pre-employment evaluations are an investment in productivity and innovation, not an HR lineup item.

9. I read my report and do not agree with what it says about me. Face validity is very important. That means if you read the report it describes your own to a"t." But face validity isn't an excellent predictor of job match. If it was every candidate that says he'd be a terrific match would become your next super-performer. Tools like DISC and Myers-Briggs have very strong face validity but other psychometric tools that are normed against the populace and employed for job potential and fit are more sophisticated. Selection evaluations measure innate personality traits, or your core personality. With experience and training, you may have learned new skills that cover up potential shortcomings. That's why it is very important to utilize both the pre-employment test and interview to discover the natural fit, learned match, and potential for growth. If you do not agree with a result, simply ask your consultant for an interpretation. I can count on one hand how often a candidate or employee does not agree after they know how to use the results correctly.

8. We are just a small business. We are not sure why many managers believe they should not have the very same tools at their hands as big businesses. Online technology has leveled the playing area. Now small business owners as well as mid-managers have exactly the very same tools as senior level executives at Fortune 50 companies. And the best news is that technology has reduced the charge to a level affordable to almost any size company in any business.

7. We do not have enough opportunity to become certified. Online hiring evaluations make this a simple one to conquer. Certifications and instruction aren't required for many programs. Our reports are written so that even the most inexperienced supervisor can understand the results. And to make the report even more manager-friendly, our pre-employment tests come with personalized behaviour interview question manuals based on responses given by the candidates. We can't make it any simpler. (Of course, for any supervisors wanting to be skilled at reading the reports, we are always happy to oblige - and lots of managers take us up on the deal!)

6. It takes too long to find the results. This is the easiest fear to overcome. Results can be real time. We can set up a customer account at no charge to the company, many times at no charge. Reports can then be accessed in real time. In other words, the moment a candidate hits the submit button, then a manager can log into the system and retrieve the report. Unlike many of our competitors who need a two or three day (or longer ) delay in receiving results and then even more time to speak with a consultant, we're available once you need us the most. In the present job marketplace, when you have the good candidate waiting to get a job offer, you can ill afford any delays.

5. We do not need to upset that the candidates. Our customers gave us the response to this fear. "If a candidate balks at completing our hiring process and this is the time when he is supposed to be on his best behavior, what will happen the first time we ask him to do something he doesn't think is part of his job?" It is important to look at the assessment as equivalent to the interview and background checks. That's the way the EEOC appears at pre-employment testing. Resumes, program, interviews and even overall observations are all on equal footing. In case a candidate refused to publish his resume or provide permission to check references, then you certainly wouldn't forego these steps. The pre-employment test is merely one more area of the employee selection process. So what more can I add except when a candidate won't complete an appraisal, it will not cost you a dime to get your assessment but think about the thousands of dollars and hours of annoyance you will save if you'd hired him!

4. We heard candidates can fake the evaluations. Again, this fear is real - and - true. Just like during the meeting, individuals are increasingly more skilled at playing a job that can not be delivered once they are hired. The advantage of our semi automatic tests is that every assessment includes a"fake-ability" scale. Questions embedded at the examinations help supervisors assess how reliable the information is and in the event the candidate tried to manipulate his responses. Unless you are an extremely skilled aide, gut instinct is the only instrument you need to determine if a candidate would be the actual thing.

3. We spoke with our attorney and he said stay away from testing. Another variation of the fear is: I heard that companies have gotten sued as a test was utilized. It is correct that organizations who have used tests are sued. But it's also a fact that the more businesses have been sued because they did not. Every hiring decision carries a risk. But you have to know the facts. The EEOC at 2007 heard 77,000 discrimination complaints. Of those 77,000 just 304 involved assessments. And of these 304 the decisions which ruled in favor of this employee were related to the improper use of the assessment, not the validity of the assessment itself. Provided that the test is valid, reliable, non-discriminatory AND job-related, the use of pre-employment tests is a best practice which meets EEOC guidelines. If your attorney can not substantiate why he/she considers pre-employment evaluations should be averted with anything greater than it is his/her view, get a second opinion. We will be happy to consult with employment law attorneys who support the use of employee testing as a best practice and see the decision to use testing as good business practice.

2. We can't afford to turn away good candidates. The time is long-gone when you can manage to hire employees who can barely blink a mirror. For exactly the identical reason you wouldn't take a purchase from a seller with the incorrect parts, why can you hire a worker that does not have the proper skills or match in your own culture? But the significant benefit for utilizing assessments is that associations really expand their talent pool. Yes, you read that right. It's possible to expand, not shrink, your gift pool with evaluations. What's that possible? For the exact same reason that managers make hiring mistakes dependent on the interview independently they also miss high-potential candidates since they may interview badly but possess all the abilities and mindset you require, or more. Pre-employment tests can help find the diamonds in the rough. It is possible to ill-afford to turn a gifted employee when he presents. And let us have a drum roll please. The number one Reason managers fear pre-employment tests is:

1. We do not have enough time to test candidates. It's true. It will take the time to test candidates (but maybe not as far as you think). The incontrovertible data however confirms the time that it takes to test a candidate will be a drop in the bucket compared to the time you'll spend training, counselling and finally terminating the incorrect hire. With online hiring evaluations, most of the time spent in the process is offender time. All a manager must do is send the directions to this candidate and also process the report. That's it. And for businesses too short-staffed to handle the administration of those functions, we could perform all of the"grunt" work. We all want is a name and email - and - voila! Next time you hear from us you are going to have the candidate's completed report sitting on your inbox. The time saved with online hiring assessments will be a lot better used recruiting for hard-to-fill rankings and retaining the employees that you have. Want to know more info click prevue assessments

0 notes

remelitalia · 4 years

Text

A visitor hits your website and wants to talk to you. What does that person start searching for?

Your Contact Us page.

It’s a page on your site that pushes visitors from browser to buyer.

Some companies don’t use them at all, and those that do have them often push these critical pages to the back burner during website revision projects.

That stops today.

I’ll share a step-by-step plan you can follow to strategize and revise this lowly web page. And I’ll use plenty of examples to spark your creativity.

Let’s get started.

What Is a Contact Us Page?

Think of a Contact Us page as a sort of digital business card. Sure, it’s short and concise. But if someone wants to reach out to you, they’ll use this page to do so.

About Us pages: Use this resource to explain your company’s history, goals, and direction. If someone wants to know how you became a leader in your field, the data is ready to go.

Help pages: Customers with critical product or service questions lean on this page to get their answers.

Employment pages: Job seekers need private, protected spaces to learn more about open opportunities.

A Contact Us page is different because you’re telling people more about getting in touch with you.

Do You Need a Contact Us Page?

Trust and transparency matter in marketing. Contact Us pages start the process.

Five Key Contact Us Page Elements

You know you need a Contact Us page. But you have no idea what to put on the page. Push past the writer’s block, and follow this recipe for success.

A converting Contact Us page contains these critical pieces:

Your company name: Don’t beat around the bush. Use your full company name.

Your contact information: Include a phone number, email address, and a quick data-collection form. Customers need plenty of calls to action. Fight off spam with a CAPTCHA as well.

Links to relevant pages: If you know customers have product questions, show them to your Help page. If you have plenty of job seekers, highlight that Jobs page.

Don’t be tempted to clutter up the page with more details and data. Keep things clean and streamlined with this list.

Build the Perfect Contact Us Form

If you’re looking for a way to streamline customer conversations, forms are key. If you build forms correctly, routing questions is a snap.

Your form could include several fields, including:

Name

Location

Current customer (Y/N)

Question

Email address

Phone number

You might be tempted to add all of these fields to your form. The more data you have, the better, right?

Not always.

When customers face a sea of questions, they tend to click away. Form completion rates and added fields are inversely related.

To keep those conversion rates up and deliver exceptional user experience, only ask critical questions.

10 Exceptional Contact Us Page Examples

I’ve talked a lot about what should and shouldn’t go on a Contact Us page.

These ten companies have lessons anyone can apply.

Streamlined and Simple: Scorpion

Customers answer one simple question with a dropdown. The answer routes them to an appropriate secondary form.

Customers can also skip the hassle of forms altogether, call the number in the top-right corner of the screen, or visit one of three locations listed at the bottom of the page.

Brand Promise First: BarkBox

A subscription service for happy dogs should have a dog’s photo on a Contact Us page. And that dog should look happy. BarkBox has that element covered.

Personality Plus: Kick Point

This Canadian marketing firm kicks off the About Us page with a chatty, conversational tone.

Keep scrolling, and that clever voice keeps speaking. When you reach the bottom of this page, you know just how these employees talk and write.

The cleverness doesn’t impede clear communication. You’re told the company’s address, email address, phone number, and more.

Crisis Communication: Powell’s Books

Typically, converting Contact Us pages are short. But you can break the rules when the unexpected happens.

Arresting Graphics: Parker Lee

A simple form with just four fields appears, and a clever map rounds out the page.

Forms Do the Hard Work: Six Leaf Design

This company emphasizes sales on this Contact Us page. A three-field form, with a tiny multiple-choice quiz, gets potential customers a price quote.

A blue button for anxious customers leads right to a 20-minute consult appointment. For companies hoping to emphasize lead generation, this is a smart model to follow.

Friendly Faces: Byte

Who will customers talk to when they reach out? Byte answers this question with photos of real-life customer service reps ready to respond to questions.

Choose from multiple contact formats, including text, email, Facebook message, and email. All of this data is streamlined, so white space surrounds the page.

Product Photography: Freshly

Freshly offers meal-kit delivery services, and an enticing product takes up about half of this Contact Us page. Putting the product first could attract customers to jump into a purchase.

The contact box is the clever bit. Customers can chat, call, text, or skip to email.

This is a simple, friendly interface that puts the product first.

Multi-Location Mastery: Wendy’s

How do you handle inquiries when customers have dozens of locations to choose from? Wendy’s handles this question with a “Find Wendy’s” button at the top of the page.

Customers with questions can text or call a number displayed in big, black text. It’s nearly impossible to miss. A clever, short form rounds out the page.

Short and Sweet: My Own

I put best practices to use on my website’s Contact Us page. I use a drop-down to route questions, and I ask customers to fill out just three fields.

I keep the branding light on this page, but the colors remind my guests that they’re still on my site.

I also link to relevant social media sites to follow me through those platforms. My digital marketing consulting contact form is similar. Short and sweet with just the information I need to know.

We’ve walked through several examples of pages that convert. And we’ve shared quite a few tips you can put to use right now.

But there’s more to learn.

As you’re working on your Contact Us page, be sure to:

Promote your page like a pro. Put a link to your page in your email signature and link it to your social media accounts. Make sure customers know you’re interested in a connection.

Link to your page. Customers look in the top-right corner of a page for Contact Us links. Make sure each page on your site connects to that critical page.

Before you publish your Contact Us page, be sure to avoid:

Cluttered design. Don’t fill the space with tons of graphics, jokes, or text blocks. Respect what your consumers are there to do – contact you.

Overconfidence. Use A/B testing to find the design your customers want. Don’t be overconfident about your design prowess — you might be surprised by what works!

A desktop-first mentality. Test your site on mobile devices. Try out the form fields. Plenty of customers will visit you on the go; make sure their experience is a good one.

Conclusion

Your Contact Us page is one of the most critical assets on your website. People head here when they want to reach you. Make that communication as quick and painless as possible.

Publish with confidence, and watch those conversion rates. If you don’t see the response you want, change it!

With experimentation and vigilance, you can develop the right Contact Us page that works for your customers, your company, and your community.

Is your current Contact Us page lacking? What can you change to make it more effective?

The post Contact Us Page Tips: Move From Blah to Yeah! appeared first on Neil Patel.

Original content source: https://neilpatel.com/blog/contact-us-page/ via https://neilpatel.com

See the original post, Contact Us Page Tips: Move From Blah to Yeah! that is shared from https://imtrainingparadise.weebly.com/home/contact-us-page-tips-move-from-blah-to-yeah via https://imtrainingparadise.weebly.com/home

#IM TRAINING PARADISE - Home

0 notes