To Get The Job, Get Out Of The "Stranger" Category

A Fortune 400 company advertised a position in their government affairs office. According to the published ad, the successful candidate would be someone who spoke an Asian language fluently, had lived in Asia, and had worked for a government agency.

The person who got the job had never worked in government, never lived in Asia and couldn't speak a foreign language of any kind, Asian or otherwise. The successful but unqualified candidate had something the qualified candidates didn't: she had a relationship, a professional co-signer, whose intervention made all those pesky "minimum qualifications" requirements melt away.

Having a professional co-signer can launch less qualified candidates past better qualified candidates. It happens every day. It happens in large Fortune 400 companies like the one above and it happens in the small mom and pops.

Until my Linked Liberals group on Linkedin started having a big discussion about job search, I had no idea that so few professionals in their 40s and 50s have somehow failed to notice that the hiring process is not "fair" and that the best candidates don't get the jobs unless they have professional co-signers who vouch for them.

The sooner you realize that life isn't fair and that the hiring process isn't meritocratic the sooner you'll spend your time looking for a professional co-signer instead of spending your time playing the low percentage game of sending resumes to strangers.

I've said this in my previous few blog posts but I haven't fully defined what I mean by the word "stranger".

Harry Beckwith has correctly observed that people don't like to do business with strangers if there is a non-stranger available. So what is a stranger? A stranger is someone who is both unknown to you and unknown to anyone you know. In other words, a stranger is 3 degrees from you. To get the job, you don't have to be the hiring manager's best buddy, you just have to get out of the 3 degrees away category and get to the 2 degrees away category. That happens when a mutual friend or colleague - this is your professional co-signer - introduces you to the hiring manager. The hiring manager immediately warms to you when your professional co-signer introduces you to him.

In my next post, I'll address some misconceptions about working with headhunters.

Higginbotham At Large welcomes comments as long as those comments are not anonymous or pseudonymous. Readers and "lurkers" may remain anonymous but there will be no anonymous or pseudonymous comments at Higginbotham At Large. No Ring of Gyges for you.

Tweet Unto Others As You Would Have Them Tweet Unto You (and other marketing advice)

I’m neither a Luddite nor a technophobe nor a late adopter but I was able to predict what a mess Twitter would become because I am old enough to remember the last time technology made it possible for people to never have an unedited, uncensored, unbroadcasted thought. Remember CB radio?

And some of Twitter’s worst offenders are the so-called “social media marketing experts” who, it turns out, were probably irritating CB radio operators in a former life.

From the start, while I admired the technology of Twitter, I knew what happened when you put a microphone in the hands of anybody who wanted to broadcast so I knew what would happen when anybody could tweet to anybody foolish enough to follow those tweets. No, I’m not talking about those harmless but trivial tweets that say something like “I’m at the Town Center mall. Anybody want to meet me for a cup of coffee?” I actually had a cup of coffee with my old schoolmate, Rick Lee, as a result of one of those tweets and it was nice. Rick and I hadn’t talked much since high school so we had a lot to catch up on.

No, I’m talking about the people who want to take the “social” out of “social media”, people who see every new surface as a place to splash a logo and every new technology as a way to extend their marketing careers for a few years by selling themselves as “new media marketers”.

Ever since a friend of mine warned me that he had given my name to a professional society made up of techies and engineers and scientists who want a one hour speech on the topic of “Marketing In The Electronic Era” I’ve been thinking a lot about what I might say to them if, indeed, I get the invitation. I might tell them this: Tweet unto others as you would have them tweet unto you.”

I might tell them what I told a non-profit group recently – that Elvis Presley’s old manager, Colonel Parker, was on to something when he protected Elvis from media overexposure. There’s an old show business axiom that says, “Leave them wanting more.”

I’m not one to block and tell but a few months ago I blocked several of Charleston’s “marketing experts” from tweeting me because they seemed to think if they tweeted a dozen times every day whether they had anything to say or not that they had “marketed” to me.

Here’s a news flash: your Twitter followers don’t want to be marketed to. Shouldn’t the people who portray themselves as “marketing geniuses” or “marketing gurus” actually know something about humans and that humans are likely to block their tweets if those tweets become annoying?

For the record, I have never called myself a marketing guru or a marketing genius. Some men are born to marketing, others achieve marketing while still others - like me - have marketing thrust upon them. I had marketing thrust upon me about 100 years ago when my general manager fired the ad agency and suddenly put me in charge of all things communications. His reasoning was that I did some freelance writing so I, presumably, knew how to write so, thought he, I could write radio ads, TV ads, newspaper ads, billboard ads, brochures, etc., and manage a budget. I'm sure the boss figured that if I screwed up he could hire back the ad agency. I won't pretend that I didn't make mistakes but he never rehired the ad agency so, over the years as I moved to other companies and on to GM jobs I retained the marketing function for myself.

If I get invited to speak to the techies about “Marketing In An Electronic Age” I may tell them it’s much more important for a marketer to know people than to know technology. It’s not cell phones and computers and Apple iPads that make buying decisions, it’s the people who own those devices who make buying decisions. If you don’t know people, if you don’t have empathy for people, you can’t market.

Here’s a good use of Twitter – one that’s welcome to followers who voluntarily signed up to follow exactly such tweets: a restaurant that tweets EXACTLY one time each day to tell followers their special of the day. Now that’s a good use of social media because there’s a kind of relationship and trust between a restaurant and its “regulars”.

Again, I won’t name names but here is a poor use of social media: a certain retail clothing store that used to send out expensive mailers advertising their spring and fall sales now has a Facebook page on which they “announce” these sales. But there’s a problem. You have to actually go to their Facebook page to see this info because, apparently, nobody at the store knows how to create an “event” or an invitation so that Facebook will actually SEND this announcement to page followers who have – let me remind you – signed up to receive such notifications. This is an example of knowing neither humans nor technology. Humans – even humans who like to spend money with you – won’t go to your Facebook page or your website to look for your sales and your marketing.

Oh, and there’s another problem: the retail store’s clerks don’t ask customers to sign up for the Facebook page. And there’s no computer on the retail sales floor where they can show customers what they’re signing up for. Customers have to remember to go home, look at the page and then sign up.

Humans won’t do that. Not many of them, at least. When I first checked the retailer’s Facebook page they had 52 followers or fans. Yesterday I checked it and they have 49 followers.

You can’t save money replacing post cards with social media unless you actually use the social media properly. To do this, you have to know something about the technology but you have to know even more about humans and how humans behave, think and feel.

Now, if I speak to a group of scientists, engineers and techies, I might have to establish my own techy bona fides so I might have to tell them that I worked in the R&D area of a Fortune 400 hi-tech company for years before some of my own R&D brethren realized I wasn’t a marketing guy. Why? Because I was the guy in the room who was always predicting how end users and retailers would react to various proposed courses of action. I used to think being human was the only qualification needed for having empathy for humans but that was before I knew about sociopathy, Asperger’s and engineers.

There goes the speaking gig.

But if there were a speaking gig maybe I should tell them what I learned from recruiting marketing people for clients: that advanced degrees and 20 years of highly-paid marketing jobs at IBM or Ford don’t make someone a marketing guru. Maybe I should tell them that even so-called marketing geniuses who taught marketing in college might not know that an advertising schedule isn’t a marketing strategy.

Or maybe I should tell them that they are going to hear sales pitches from so-called marketing gurus who haven’t read a book on marketing or branding since college. No, I’m not making that up. When I interview people I always ask them to tell me what they read and how that reading has influenced them or informed their work. You’d be appalled at how many so-called marketing people don’t actually read anything about branding or marketing and then get mad at me when I cut the interview short and tell them they’re not what I’m looking for.

In fact, you’d be appalled at how many so-called marketing people can’t read a very simple case study on a fictitious company and identify the obvious marketing challenge that I went to great pains to describe.

But most of all, if I am invited to speak to a roomful of entrepreneurial engineers, maybe I should tell them that most so-called marketing gurus who want to market their widgets for them will want to build them the same website they built for a plumber and a gas station and an accounting firm and that these so-called marketing geniuses won’t know how to come up with a marketing strategy for their own unique business because they won’t first take the time to actually learn what’s uniquely different about that widget business and its prospective clients.

And, of course, I have to suck up to them by quoting HP co-founder, Dave Packard, who correctly said, “Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.” In other words, while engineers shouldn’t have to learn marketing they will have to learn marketing if they start their own company so they can spot the charlatans and the snake oil salesmen.

And, of course, wherever I go I quote Harry Beckwith who said, “Marketing is not a department.”

But if they remember to tweet unto others as they would have others tweet unto them I have served mankind.

Referrals and Relationships - Part Two

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“Marketing is not a department.” – Harry Beckwith

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I said in my last blog entry that readers who are in "R & R" (relationships and referrals) businesses need to turn their staff and their existing clients into a sales force because leveraging the existing relationships of your customers and employees can bring you that most powerful and most efficient form of new client acquisition: word-of-mouth.

Hire People Who Integrate Their Professional Lives With Their Social Lives

At a recent luncheon I invited a most unpleasant director-level executive to a meeting where she would have the opportunity to network with people who could support her organization. Some of her co-workers actually asked me to add them to my mailing list and inform them of meetings so imagine my surprise when this sourpuss told me she didn’t appreciate my using a professional relationship to invite her to a social function. This unsociable executive is an example of the kind of employee NOT to hire. Not only was she just downright unneighborly, she is trying to totally segregate her professional and social lives, robbing her employer of whatever benefit might be derived from her social network – if she has any social network.

Hire people who join things, people who meet and make friends easily, people who integrate their professional and social networks.

You might be able to get a feel for a job candidate’s ability and willingness to integrate his/her social and professional lives by looking at his/her LinkedIn profile and connections. Not only does the candidate’s LinkedIn profile show me how that person is connected to me, giving me a chain of “back door references” I can ask about his/her character and competence, a candidate’s LinkedIn profile gives me some idea if the candidate knows how to network. I’m not impressed with a job candidate who has 15 connections and belongs to no LinkedIn groups. On the other hand, if a job candidate has a network of 200 LinkedIn connections and belongs to all the LinkedIn groups that are appropriate to his/her industry and profession, I might be dealing with somebody who brings some word-of-mouth and referral potential to the table.

Frankly, in this day and age I have serious reservations about a job applicant who isn’t using LinkedIn to build both a positive professional brand and a sizeable, searchable professional network. Once onboard, staff members should be encouraged to invite each other to their LinkedIn networks so they can easily see how the company is connected to potential clients and who it is on the staff who has the relational bridge to a prospect.

For further reading on the subject of integrating your professional life with your private or social life, see Keith Ferrazzi’s Never Eat Alone. I suggest you make it required reading for your staff.

Frequently Mine Your Employees and Clients To For New Leads

Get in the habit of asking questions like these: What networking opportunities did you attend this week? Who did you meet? Did you collect any business cards? Did you make any interesting new LinkedIn connections? Did you meet anybody who might be able to benefit from our product or service?

Asking these questions yields immediate leads and teaches how to network. When your employees know they’ll be asked which meetings they’ve attended and whom they’ve met, they’ll understand that, at your company, marketing is not a department and that they need to be prepared for the questions. Most of your current employees probably weren’t born with the networking gene but it’s a behavior they can learn if you ask them the right questions.

Spend The Money In Your Ad Budget On Association Memberships and Other Forms Of Direct Contaact With Potential Referrers

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"Advertising is what you do when you can't talk to someone." - Fairfax Cone

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Some of my readers are in the kind of “R & R” (referrals and relationships) businesses where almost their entire universe of prospective clients and referrers is knowable and finite. I have to be careful here because I don’t want to identify any specific businesses, but I know businesses whose target markets are so specific and so public that they can literally make a list of their prospects by name and by title and organization.

It doesn’t make any sense at all for these R & R companies to spend much money on advertising. Advertising is what you do when you don’t know how to reach your customer – or you don’t know who your prospective customer is. But when you know who your prospects are – I mean you know their names, their job titles, and where they work – it makes no sense to spend thousands of dollars on radio ads, newspaper ads or slick magazine ads as if you don’t know who you’re trying to reach.

For instance, let’s say you’re in the durable medical equipment industry. Oxygen. Hospital beds. Wheelchairs. Maybe diabetic or ostomy supplies. While the end users of these products are not knowable, the gatekeepers who refer these end users to you are absolutely knowable and finite. Case managers. Discharge planners. Pulmonologists. Nurses with a specific certification in ostomy and skin care. You get the idea. In most markets there are only a handful of these professionals associate with each area hospital and you can absolutely make a list and then figure out how to create a bridge or leverage an existing relationship to these professionals.

Here’s where hiring employees who use LinkedIn comes in handy. After you’ve made a list of the professionals who can refer end users to your DME business, look up each of them in LinkedIn and see how they’re linked to someone on your staff or someone you know who would be willing to introduce that referral source to you. Put that link’s name next to the name of the referral source. Ask that connecting link to introduce you to the referral source. Set up a lunch or a coffee.

Also, when you find a target referral source in LinkedIn, consider joining some of the LinkedIn groups they belong to. Join some of the same groups then send a LinkedIn message introducing yourself. Who knows, maybe a real conversation will ensue.

Can’t find a connecting link or can’t find the referral source in LinkedIn? Then ask yourself what meetings that professional is likely to attend or what professional associations that person is likely to belong to. Join and attend as necessary. If you’re in the staffing business you need to belong to Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). If you’re in the DME business you need to attend sleep disorder support groups, ostomate support groups, Better Breathers support groups and you need to belong to sponsor events and meetings for National Association of Social Workers and Case Management Society of America. Someone from your staff needs to be at every meeting, gripping and grinning, exchanging business cards and inviting referral sources to lunch. Send the member of your staff who has the most in common, the greatest rapport with that professional group. Send your respiratory therapist to the Better Breathers and sleep disorders meetings. Send a nurse to the ostomy club.

Your sales rep probably can’t get an appointment with many of the people who make up the Known Universe of Referral Sources and Gatekeepers but if you show up at a meeting you just might find yourself having dinner, elbow to elbow, with someone you need to meet. Also, being seen at meetings gives your current referral sources a chance to be seen behaving friendly with you, an implicit professional endorsement or recommendation and a strong “visual” that makes you seem more trustworthy to observers who have not yet referred business to your company.

Consider Firing Or Repurposing/Redeploying Your Sales Rep

What many R & R (relationships and referrals) businesses need is not a sales rep but someone who can teach the entire staff how to get relationships and referrals that lead to sales.

I recently had the opportunity to talk to a VP at The Carlyle Group who told me about a recent group of acquisitions whose greatest need is for the licensed and certified professionals who run them to learn how to network.

Ideally, this kind of networking leadership would come from the owner or CEO but for reasons that mystify and elude me, some owners of R & R businesses would rather run expensive "ego advertising" than engage in activities that will actually lead to new business. I've seen small business owners spend tens of thousands of ad dollars making sure their high school pals and fraternity brothers or sorority sisters know they own a company or trying to look like the most successful member of the local Chamber of Commerce or Rotary Club while doing nothing at all to teach their staff how to network.

Maybe your sales rep can be repurposed and redeployed as the guy who teaches your staff how to network.

In summary: Hire people who know how to network, how to integrate their social and professional lives. Consider firing your sales rep and becoming or hiring someone to teach your staff how to network. Spend your ad budget on association memberships, on lunches, on opportunities to get face-to-face with somebody. Frequently ask your clients and employees whom they've met recently who can use your product or service.