5 Reasons Why You May Not Want To Get a Job

For most of us, when we graduate from high school or college, we assume it’s time to go out and get a job.
But like many things the masses do, it doesn’t mean it’s the best option, particularly in today’s employment market. In fact, getting “a job” may NOT be your best option

1. Having  A “Job” Is Essentially Trading Your Time For Money

Because you only get paid when you’re working, you are essentially “renting” yourself and trading income for time.  The key is to separate your value from your time by either adding a way to increase your income with an added commission or some payment based on results not just time.

2. Limited Experience

A job only gives you experience at that job. You might think it’s important to get a job to gain experience.  But if your skills ever become obsolete, then your experience won’t be worth much.  Ask yourself, “What will the experience you’re gaining right now be worth in 5 years?”  Will your job or skills even exist or be in demand?

3. Employment Security

Many employees believe getting a job is the safest and most secure way to support themselves. Look at the increasing number of layoffs and contractors in the workforce along with the amount of work being outsourced to other countries.  Does having only one source of income truly give you employment security? Could your job be digitally outsourced to the Internet (consider on-line university classes and buying books from Amazon instead of a local bookstore).

4. The Value of Relationships

Many people find that their jobs are their primary social outlet.  They hang out with the same people working in the same field. Yet relationships are the key to get a job and increase your value to others in the business world. In today’s world, it’s what you know AND who you know that counts.

5. Getting  A “Job” Versus Doing A Job

Realize that you want to earn income by providing value — not just offering your time.
You can apply this concept working with an employer or by starting your own business in addition to working for a company.  The key is to find a way to have multiple streams of income along with one that offers residual income.

Stop looking for a job and focus on providing valuable services. Employers and customers will be calling YOU for work.

Now more than ever, understand that YOU are the CEO of your life!

The Hidden Ingredient – Fast Food Secret Revealed!

In our day-to-day pursuit of a great career, a balanced life and yes, even a great lunch, we have so many options.

But if you take a close look, even with all these options, there’s something special that brings people into their “favorite place”. It’s usually not the price or just the quality of the food – it’s the “culture” or the RELATIONSHIP the customer has with the food brand or its employees.

Consider Jack in the Box, with 2,200 locations in 18 states, just one of over 50,000 fast food restaurants in the US. It’s “Munchie Mobile”, a 34-foot long truck is inspired by 1970s van art. On the outside is a menu displayed on a flat-screen TV, while the inside is equipped with a grill, fryer and toaster.  The “cool factor” of this showing up at an event is amazing.

If you study the “Jack” branded spokesperson, you get the feeling that he’s connected to you as part of your family. The TV ads, the napkins and even the cups have messages that are endearing.  Think Southwest airlines. Jack in the Box and Southwest are in different businesses, yet both focus on building strong relationships with their customers.

Periodically, I stop by a local Jack in the Box in San Diego just to experience the “brand”.  Almost every time I stop in, I’m greeted by Nancy. I never have to ask for my extreme sausage sandwich without cheese. She just confirms my preference and makes me feel like I’m a VIP customer. Her attitude always comes with a genuine smile and a “how’s your day going comment” that makes me feel that my business is truly appreciated.  Stop and watch her for 5 minutes, and you’ll see her dedication to delivering the food fast and always with a genuine attitude of “we appreciate your business”.

Price and product are secondary to what is a great employee-customer relationship.

Now more than ever, truly remarkable companies and people are focused on building great relationships.

Anyone that has ever run a restaurant knows that, it’s not the new customers that keep you in business, it’s the RETURN VISITS from EXISTING customers.  In a global employment market, price, availability and quality are important, but true greatness comes from building great relationships.

A few years ago, I flew to London on Virgin Atlantic and arrived in England late due to delays at the departure gate.  As I walked off the plane, I was handed a letter auto-signed by Richard Branson that apologized for the delay and offered me 10% off on my next flight – a $90-$150 gift.  Six months later, I was in Australia on a Virgin Atlantic flight. I never checked competitive airfares.

If you want to get inspired by seeing the amazing power of relationships, watch The Pixar Story, a documentary of the history of Pixar Animation Studios. Pixar is the studio that produced Toy Story, an animated movie that earned $361 million worldwide.  It’s available on Netflix – here’s a preview – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aU1fVeYzYlI.

Today with all the social networking tools like Twitter and Facebook, it’s easy to collect “contacts”. But to truly be successful in business and in our personal life, it’s the power of relationships that can take us from good to great.

We are all in the “people business”.  Nancy at Jack in the Box is an expert. Her remembering that I like my extreme sausage sandwich without cheese, highlights the secret to winning in business today. 

The Truth About Fake Job Postings

Many of my clients report that they have applied to job postings that are a perfect match to their qualifications but never hear anything from a potential employer. Perhaps it’s a fake job posting. Why would a job board allow ‘fake’ job postings?

1. Thousands of jobs are posted on sites each week. The job board can’t tell fakes from real jobs. The only requirement is that someone pays for the listings.

2. Employers and Recruiters use these listings to gather resumes for future needs. If they buy 30 job postings, but only use 20 and the unused postings expire in 30 days, they run some fake listings to collect resumes for future hiring?

3. Non staffing companies post fake jobs to collect names for on-line solicitation calls and sales leads to sell to other companies.

4. Some recruiters make a fake employer site including a corporate logo that redirects resumes directly to the recruiter to get candidates before the employer sees them and the recruiter loses a commission.

5. If someone has already been chosen for a job, the employer wants to appear to be offering the opportunity to everyone who is qualified.

6. Staffing firms want to appear to be “the connection” for jobs – more job postings equal more interested candidates.

7. Large firms sometimes post 700+ openings but many of them are actually “wish lists” for “potential” jobs IF a contract is awarded.

8. Recruiters want to get your resume and send it to an employer without a job requirement thinking that they will get a commission if a match is made tied to a typical 1 year” finder’s fee” contract provision.

9. In extreme cases, identify thieves post fake jobs looking for resumes where people list their social security number or they get applicants to disclose this confidential data over the phone as part of “verbal application”.

For the most part, most postings are real but it’s important to know that some are not what they seem to be. The lesson here is: Be selective in who you apply to and don’t rely on postings as the foundation for your job search. Focus on building relationships where you are dealing with real people instead of digital strangers.

Social Branding as a Component of Your Job Search

Your personal brand is the collective impression people get not only from you and your marketing efforts, but from their interactions with you. By adding a social branding component (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook etc.) to your personal brand as part of your job search, you can leverage technology to promote yourself in a viral way by expanding who knows you related to on-line referrals and the search capabilities of the web. To enhance your personal brand with social branding technologies, consider incorporating these 4 ideas:

1. “Become What You Want To Be Right Now.” Who you are and what you want to be is as unique as a fingerprint. Act as if you are already a specialist in your area of expertise and you will become that person.

2. “Speak Your Message In Their Language.” Everyone in the virtual employment marketplace is talking at once so your brand has to rise above the noise. Your message, the nutshell of who you are and why people need what you have to offer, has to be short and shareable.

3. “Look The Part And Be The Part.” Your visual identity is a symbol that carries the weight of 1000 words. It’s a combination of elements you own (your name, logo, tagline, etc.) as well as elements you come to own through repeated use like writing/speaking styles and even the way you dress. Consider UPS. The color brown is part of their brand.

4. “Branding Is A Process, Not An Event.” Peoples interests change and technology tools change. Social branding is a dynamic process requiring you to be aware of what’s happening in your field. Become a student of your employment marketplace to ensure you know the latest trends and what your competitors have to offer.

Study the concepts of personal AND social branding and leverage them to reach your employment goals. Now more than ever, you need to be remarkable or you’ll be invisible.

Do Work That Matters!

A giant chalk board decorates the side of a bar in San Diego. It’s part of global art project called “Before I Die”. The bar owner says the 98 slots usually fill up in a day and when he sees it’s full, he wipes it down so that everyone who walks by has the opportunity to write something.  As I read the board comments, I was surprised how many of them embodied thoughts of something that the person was passionate about. It made me think about how many people jobs have but few seem to have a career linked to something they are passionate about.

Now more than ever, your job search needs to be more than just a process to discover what’s “available” but rather the building of a “bridge” to get what you want – something you can truly be excited about! Consider your income as fuel for what you really want to do, not as a goal in and of itself.

The Harvard Business School did a study on the financial status of its students 10 years after graduating and found that:

• 27% of them needed financial assistance.
• 60% of them were living paycheck to paycheck.
• 10% of them were living comfortably.
• 3% of them were financially independent.

The study also looked at goal setting and found that:

• The 27% that needed financial assistance had absolutely no goal setting process in their lives.
• The 60% that were living paycheck to paycheck had basic survival goals to just get by.
• The 10% that were living comfortably said they knew where they were going to be in the next 5 years.
• The 3% that were financially independent had written out their goals AND had clearly defined steps to reach their goals.

Perhaps the JOB SEARCH process needs to be changed to a GOAL SETTING process tied to matching a career to work that gets you excited. Take the time to architect the lifestyle and the career you want and see what happens. You’ll discover that there’s something magical about writing things down that empowers the subconscious mind to alter your thinking and your motivation to take action.

Make your “Before I Die” chalkboard a written plan of clearly defined steps to reach a career goal that gets you excited.  Look at it before you go to bed and when you wake up. Then use the magic of 30 days to develop a pattern of thinking that proves that “when you change your thoughts you change your world” and “you become what you think about most often”.

Job Search- Insights from Olympic Competitors

What can we learn about job search from athletes who compete in the Olympics?

Watching their amazing athletic abilities on TV make what they have achieved seem so easy. Yet when you read about what they did to make it to this event, you realize that “you never get anything good for nothing”. Add the pressure of competing against world-class professionals and you can’t help but be impressed with how a person can achieve greatness despite seemingly impossible odds.

Consider these insights translating their effort into what it takes to find a job in today’s employment marketplace.

Motivate Yourself With Goals, Not Just Tasks.

Athletes generally train for years to get a chance to compete for a medal. The long hours of practice and daily effort eventually take them from being good to being great! Often times what seems like luck is really the result of chance favoring the prepared mind or body. Nastia Liukin, Olympic Gymnast – It’s really important to set goals for yourself. Not just a long-term goal like the Olympic games, but something that’s short term, on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Even if you’re not a high-level gymnast, you have to figure out what works for you. If you want to run a mile, you have to work toward that. Success doesn’t happen overnight. It’s important to always keep trying.

Keep your eye on the prize. Sure, it’s easy to get sidetracked when you’re searching for a job online but in order to make strides toward your goal, you’ll need to remain committed and focused on your goals not just daily tasks. Tyson Gay, Olympic Sprinter – You can’t lose focus by looking to the side to watch other runners. Scoping the competition doesn’t just break you mentally—it throws off your form, too. Instead, pick a point straight ahead of you, lock your gaze, and power toward it. I keep my eye on the finish line.”

Commit Yourself to DAILY Effort.  Study the “greats” in almost any field and a pattern of daily effort to perfect a skill if more often than not, the common denominator that takes you from average and ordinary to EXTRAORDINARY! Katie Uhlaender, Olympic Skeleton Slide – During the summer, she had a packed schedule. From 9:30 until 12:30, she was the track running sprints. Then she took a break for lunch before hitting the weight room from 3 until 5:30. Afterward, she did her stretching and spent time in a cold tub. By 7:00, she’s was eating dinner and by 8:00, she was studying past races.

Focus on YOUR world not THE world. While we can only imagine what goes through swimmers’ minds as they race in the pool alongside other tremendous athletes, the odds are they’re only focused on what’s happening in their lane. Out of the corner of their eye they may see competitors right behind them, but they stay focused on what they need to do to win, not what someone else is doing that they can’t control.

Listen to Olympics winners during an interview after they have won a gold medal and it’s apparent that they all have one thing that ultimately separates them from their competitors – it’s DESIRE and the resulting effort that made them the best at what they do. A great interview question is “What are you doing to find a job”?  Your answer will tell the interview if you are just looking for work or if you are excited about a TALENT that you can offer a company that is in demand and marketable.

Computer Coding- The New Employment Literacy?

As digital technology plays a more central role in daily life, the movement to make code literacy a basic part of education and ultimately a commonly used tool in business is gaining momentum. What if we were to expand our notion of literacy to encompass not only human language but also computer language? Could a widespread ability to read and write code come to be as normal in the workplace as the ability to speak and write a language?

Instagram‘s CEO, Kevin Systrom, has recently evolved as one of the greatest Silicon Valley success stories. Unlike Mark Zuckerberg, the man responsible for acquiring the popular photo sharing app for $1 billion, Systrom received no formal engineering training. Systrom is a self-taught programmer. While working in the marketing department at Nextstop, which Facebook acquired in 2010, he spent his evenings learning to program.

Think about the future world of work. The potential for innovation would be many times greater if every student had a firm grasp of programming concepts and how to apply them. Look at the new innovations of the past 10 years, and you can see that coding is destined to become a new form of widespread literacy as the world of work is becoming focused on a digital capacity to deliver products and services. Those who don’t know how to code may end up being in the same position as those who can’t read or write.

The code literacy movement began in 2011, when CodeAcademy (http://www.codecademy.com) started teaching basic programming skills for free. A no-cost, on-line capability to learn code may very well be the catalyst to give future job searchers a new skill set to differentiate themselves from their peers.

Just as a child tends to learn multiple languages easier than an adult, coding may very well become a fundamental skills set and a prerequisite to being functional in the business world. Watch a 5 old child play with an iPhone and you’ll see them intuitively using interaction patterns that adults often have trouble with, even when they’re computer-literate. Kids can easily memorize huge quantities of facts about complex abstract systems, so it stands to reason that they have the potential to learn how to code.

However, the human capacity to learn is not what will determine the future of coding literacy in the work place. If coding becomes necessary to interact with a computer and deliver a product or service, then you will likely learn to code. It is no different than if you were dropped off in Thailand without a translator. Out of necessity, you’d learn the local language.

Success going forward in the employment marketplace will be primarily determined by your marketability and remarkability. With the job market evolving like a fast moving target, your employability will be closely linked to how you can stand out among your competitors, deliver relevant skills and how well you anticipate what will be in demand.

Kevin Systrom graduated in 2006 from Stanford University with a B.S. in Management and cofounded Instagram in 2010. Today at age 28 he’s worth an estimated $400 million. Perhaps being bi-lingual in speaking and coding will offer you a competitive edge and a reputation as a strategic thinker with life skills that will ensure your long-term employment security in a digital world.

Klout Your Way to a New Job

Most people look for posted job openings as their primary focus in a job search. However, statistics confirm that REFERRALS are the # 1 way to get an interview.  Consider using your web presence and your influence to motivate others to give you job referrals.

Take a look at Klout.com established by a San Francisco start-up in 2008. Klout scrapes social network data and creates profiles on individuals who are assigned a “Klout score”. 100 million profiles are currently being tracked. Klout is not an “opt-in” service, but if you register with Klout, you enable your social networks to be accessed and evaluated to get a Klout score. Data from your social networks is used to give you a Klout Score based on (1) True Reach: How many people you influence (2) Amplification: How much you influence them and (3) Network Impact: The influence of your network. Klout also builds profiles of individuals who are connected to those who register at Klout.

The 2012 Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World have recently been announced, and this year, the list underscores a shift from well-known people within well- known companies to individual people who are personally influential. Influence is quickly becoming more valuable because of how it impacts the actions of others instead of just creating an awareness of someone generated by public relations and mass marketing. Now, a simple tweet can reach millions in a second and the internet’s metric tracking capabilities give us the opportunity to measure how people who are active in social media actually influence each other online.

Taking a closer look at Klout scores reveals another interesting perspective. Not all people with high Klout scores are celebrities or in the music or movie industry. 50% of the 2012 “Time 100” have Klout Scores ranging from 95 to 23. The average Klout Score on the list is 62.  Alexei Navalni, a Russian lawyer, politician, and political activist has a Klout score of 81, higher than the average of all U.S. politicians on the list (80).  Billionaire Eike Batista, listed by Forbes Magazine as the 8th richest person in the world, has a score of 77, higher than Warren Buffet (64). The only person with a perfect 100 Klout score is Justin Bieber, an 18 year old pop star.

Almost equally important as someone’s score, are the lists they are a part of. Klout Lists are a great way to discover and interact with people in your “influence network”. Klout essentially makes it easier to connect with new people through social media by helping you find influencers in your areas of interest.  Find the influencers and then work on getting referrals to get an interview and land a job. Recognize that relationships are the key to getting a job referral, not just contacts. Focus on using your talent to influence opinions, processes, perspectives or the actions of others. Then quantify your results with Klout and measure the effectiveness of your job search related to building relationships that lead to referrals.

Analyze a “Disruptor” to Find a Job

Finding a job in today’s job market requires a lot more than just looking on job boards for available positions.Consider how identifying a “Disruptor” can help you find a job.  A disruptive innovation is typically a technology that helps create a new market and eventually goes on to disrupt an existing market, displacing an earlier technology.

A great example of this is the iPad, a product that could alter the course of how current businesses operate and potentially open up new employment opportunities as a result. Apple’s SIRI could potentially threaten Google by diverting search traffic directly to a specific website.

By just speaking to SIRI, using Google’s search engine can easily be bypassed. SIRI is not a search technology, but when SIRI takes a user directly to Rotten Tomatoes for a movie review, it allows end-users to bypass traditional search engines and provide them with information that may have originally required a specific search inquiry. Because SIRI is simply activated by your voice, end-users also bypass advertising links. Since Google gets the majority of its revenue from search advertising, the capability to bypass a traditional search engine could be a major problem for Google.

What appears to simply be a business threat from a Speech Interpretation and Recognition Interface (SIRI) may in fact be a clue for where to look for new employment opportunities. If SIRI or a similar Android technology becomes the dominant way for people to find information when they are mobile, a likely employment market for specialized applications is not far away. Web designers may want to consider a career broadening transition to specialize in mobilized sites that integrate other applications optimized for voice recognition software.

The lesson here is that job search is a PROCESS to discover a STRATEGY to find meaningful and in-demand employment. Don’t just look for posted jobs. Also consider matching or enhancing your skills for opportunities that represent something that adds value to future business needs.

Take your search one step further and go after jobs that are likely to become opportunities and offer potentially longer-term employment. You’ll have less competition and learn new skills that will make your expertise scarce and worth more. Disrupt your current way of thinking and forget about what’s currently available and focus on preparing yourself for what’s just around the corner.

The Rise of the Mechanical Turk

While most workers today focus on their local unemployment rate and the limited jobs that seem to be available, there are major changes in the world of work that are reshaping the way we need to think about earning income.  The Internet is changing the economy from companies with lots of jobs, to platforms that offer the capacity to generate multiple streams of income.

An amazing example of this is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing Internet marketplace that enables employers (Requesters) to coordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks that need human intervention to complete.  Tasks known as HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks) may include choosing the best among several photographs, writing product descriptions, or identifying performers on music CDs. Workers browse among existing tasks and compete for them tied to a maximum monetary payment set by the Requester.

The Amazon application supports the emerging category of micro work, where complex informational questions are broken down into discrete tasks that require human intelligence and distributed to individuals who perform those tasks for small payments. Micro work is already being used by large-scale corporate customers to distribute micro tasks to workers globally. HITs being offered include podcast transcribing, rating products and image tagging. Other common HIT types ask Turkers to write or rewrite sentences, paragraphs, or whole articles. Workers are paid from one cent per word to $10 for a project. HITs that reward people for linking to or commenting on a blog, or friending a person on Facebook are also common. It’s estimated that Turks currently support 100,000 workers in 100 countries.

Micro work is becoming an emerging category of jobs that anyone with a mobile phone can do to make a living. It’s estimated that the micro work market could be worth several billion dollars within the next 5 years. As I’ve travelled around the world to 28 countries, I saw that globally, many people don’t HAVE a job, they DO a job. They have many employers (customers) and they earn a collective income instead of a salary. Essentially they are hunters AND farmers. They find customers and perform work from day-to-day with their income primarily tied to the numbers of customers they have. Their day involves doing work AND finding new customers.

Step back from the statistics and the news reports, and you’ll see that salaried jobs and positions are evolving to being tasks and projects periodically needed by many employers at different times. In our new global workplace, people’s capacity to deliver a product or service is now as basic as having a cell phone and access to the Internet.

While attending a party, I was introduced to a blind man who was a multi-millionaire. He sold tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers.  He built a network of restaurants and small grocery stores where he sold vegetables for 50 cents that he imported wholesale for 25 cents.  His wealth came from selling his products to a large network of customers throughout the U.S. His secret to wealth:  selling a simple inexpensive product to a large number of repeat customers. His technology: a cell phone and a notebook. The lesson: Your income will be in direct proportion to the number of people you serve.

It’s never too late to be what you might have been. Rethink your mindset as it relates to YOUR world of work.

Ask yourself, “What would you like to do with the rest of your life?” It’s time to invest some time thinking about your lifestyle architecture. Decide what you want and then build a bridge to it. If you can become a millionaire selling tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers, anything is possible.  Perhaps it’s time to change your thoughts to change your world.