Career

Are You Interviewing For A Position Or As A Person?

by

After seventeen years and counting in IT, I’ve done a lot of interviews and held a lot of jobs.  I try to share my experiences, of course, which is why you get a lot of my brain dumps here.

One of those experiences that has turned into the career fertilizer I’m about to import, is that when you interview, you have to determine if you’re interviewing for a Position or as a Person.

This may seem a bit confusing – you’re a Person interviewing for a Position, right?  Well that’s you.  What’s different is what’s going on in the minds of your interviewers, even if they don’t always know it.

Read more

How To Get a Recommendation Cascade on LinkedIn

by

I’m a LinkedIn junkie, as you well know, so the fact I’m writing on it probably won’t surprise you.  But as always, I’m finding some new way to use it which I want to share.

What I want to share is what I call the LinkedIn Recommendation Cascade.

You want LinkedIn References.  You want your skills and expertise endorsed.  The best way to do that is to recommend others – which you have been doing regularly, right?  Recommend them for what they’re good at, they’ll do the same.

Assuming you haven’t been tapping into the collective LinkedIn wisdom out there, here’s what you do.

  1. Make sure you’re on LinkedIn.  If you’re not, then I am ashamed of you and you bring dishonor to the legion of people who can have in-depth analysis of Jungian symbolism in Naruto.
  2. Make sure your profile is complete, and the “Skills and Experience” section is very important.  List your skills and experience honestly, but be sure to be complete about it (they give you a lot of space).
  3. Make sure you’re linking up with people you’ve worked with.  I figure you’ve been doing this before, but I’ll encourage you.
  4. Make sure you give out as many recommendations as reasonable and as deserved to people.  I also go out of my way to do it 3-6 months after I start working with people.
  5. Make sure that you ALSO endorse people’s skills – a relatively recent feature added to LinkedIn.  you can endorse people for skills on their profile, and LinkedIn will often ‘bug” you to endorse people.  So go for it!

When you do this, other people will return the favor to you.  In fact, if someone owes you a recommendation, recommending them is not only appropriate, it’s a nice, socially acceptable nudge.

I’m finding that the Skills and Experience recommendations are becoming a big thing on LinkedIn since they’re so easy to do.  Make sure that you use those for those who deserve the recommendation, because it’s more specific and easier for people to return the favor.

Give it a try on your LinkedIn Profile.  Which is all set and up to date . . .

. . . right?

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.fantopro.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.

Pick Your Passion Portrayal

by

Passion is a powerful thing.  When given channels it can lead to miracles and amazing achievements.  Admittedly it can lead to terrible things, as any surfing of obscure movies on Netflix reveals,  but let’s focus on the good stuff for the duration of this column, OK?

We’re fortunate to live in an age where so many of us can leverage our skills and creativity on our own to create wonderful works, to manifest our passions.  Well, by “on our own” I mean through software and services like Photoshop, Lulu, Amazon, Bandcamp, etc.  But you get the idea; we can do publishing, composition, programming, etc. that we never could have a few years ago, and in ways that would be unthinkable a decade or two ago*.

Read more