Author: Guest Author

I Got a Contact Name. Now What???

People often tell me they were on LinkedIn, or went to a networking group, or met someone when they were out-and-about and got a name of a potential contact for their job search, but don’t know how to reach them.

“What good is the name without their phone number or email address? It doesn’t do me much good if I can’t connect with them!”

It’s great if you are given a phone number and/or email address with a name, however, with a little creativity and initiative you can certainly find other ways to get in touch. Here are some ideas and techniques to make those connections:

~ Call the main number! Often people forget the simplest and most obvious solution to getting in touch with a new contact… call the company and ask for them! It’s ideal to have a direct-line phone number to the person you’re trying to reach. However, if you don’t, it’s generally pretty easy to find the main company phone number (either from their website online, a phone book, or calling 411), call and ask for the person by name. Generally a phone receptionist won’t put you through to anyone if you ask a general question like “May I speak to the Accounting Manager, please?” However, if you ask for someone by name, they will always put you through. Even if the person works at another company facility than the one you are calling, they generally have the overall company directory and can put you directly through to that person. Call and ask for them by name.

Additionally, if you call after business hours, many companies have an automated answering system with a company directory that will often tell you the extension of the person you are trying to connect to. That’s often a great way to gain the direct-line number of someone.

~ Google! As with so many things… Google is a tremendous resource to find contact information. More than half of the time I'm trying to find contact information, I’m able to do it by searching their name and company name through Google. If, for example, I’m trying to find John Mansky at XYZ Company… I simply search: "John Mansky” “XYZ Company”

I make sure to put his name in quotes to avoid unwanted results like John Smith and Bill Mansky

Scanning down the list of results, I often find some document or site that has their phone number and/or email address. If there are too many results, I may try to narrow the search by trying his name with their web domain. For example: “John Mansky” “xyzco.com”

Their email address is likely to include their web domain, so if the address is “john.mansky@xyzco.com” the search is likely to find it.

If that doesn’t work, I may do a search to find ANY email address at that company to discover what their standard email format is. For example, I may simply search:
email “xyzco.com”

If someone else’s email address pops up that is in a format of 'firstname.lastname@xyzco.com’, for example, I know it’s a very high likelihood that my contact’s address is in the same format. If it’s wrong, their email server will simply bounce the email back to me and no one is the wiser. If it does bounce back, I simply try other common formats like:

firstinitiallastname@xyzco.com
firstname_lastname@xyzco.com
firstinitial_lastname@xyzco.com
…or other combinations.

~ Check emails4corporations! Another great resource to help you find the standard email format for the company where your contact is employed is emails4corporations. Someone has compiled a tremendous list of standard email formats for companies all over the country.

You can find them at: http://sites.google.com/site/emails4corporations

Enter the company name in the search box at the top right corner of the homepage and it will show you the company, email format, address, and phone number. It doesn’t cover every company, however, is a great help if yours is included.

~ Try JigSaw.com! JigSaw.com is probably the worlds largest ‘Rolodex’. It includes the business card information of millions of people. It rarely lets me down and is the last resort resource for me when trying to find someone’s contact information. You can either use it by paying for the service, or for free on a give & take point system. So it take a little money or some effort on your part. However, for me as a recruiter, or you as a job seeker, I believe it’s a very worthwhile resource when you need contact information you can’t seem to find anywhere else.

~ Paid Services. Certainly there are a number of additional paid services (Spoke, ZoomInfo, and others) available online that can provide the information for you as well, however, I’m generally a big fan of “FREE”. It’s pretty rare that I can’t find someone’s contact information through one of the means listed above. Try those and then depending on how badly you need it, a paid service may be worth it.

Generally, I don’t recommend contacting someone directly through LinkedIn’s system. Many people receive a lot of communications through there and have become conditioned to treat them like Spam. It’s generally best to reach them by phone, a professional voicemail, or email first. However, if none of those works, as a last resort, you have nothing to lose by trying the LinkedIn contact system as well.

As always, make sure your communication is professional, well prepared, and succinct!
You can gain more help with that by reading Keys to a great email in your job search! or What to do in an effective networking call!

Be creative, take the initiative, and find the way to connect with those job search contacts!

Author:

Harry Urschel has over 20 years experience as a technology recruiter in Minnesota. He currently operates as e-Executives, writes a blog for Job Seekers called The Wise Job Search, and can be found on Twitter as @eExecutives.

View the Original article

Thoughts about fear…

By Tracey Rissik

A friend forwarded on a great email this morning, on the topic of fear – and how it can impact out lives. I’m not going to reproduce it all here, but there were 2 paragraphs that really resonated :

It’s amazing what we can accomplish if we refuse to be afraid. Fear – whether it’s of pain, failure, or rejection – is a toxic emotion that creates monsters in our mind that consume self-confidence and intimidate us from doing our best or sometimes even trying at all.

and

….   For most law graduates, passing the bar exam should be no more difficult than walking across a board 20 feet long and two feet wide. The trouble is, they don’t walk normally because they’re intimidated by the illusion that the board is suspended 100 feet in the air and that getting across is a life-or-death matter. What’s the worst thing that could happen? Embarrassment, inconvenience, and expense – but none of these is fatal.

Perspective is an antidote to fear. Most things you fear will never happen, and even if they do, you can handle it.

I’ve been going through a lot of fear – in my head – recently, mainly around perceived lack of financial success, and a couple of weeks ago it go to the point where it was really impacting my ability to focus on my business.

Through chatting to a wise and wonderful friend, who gently questioned things I was asserting (she just asked, “Is that really true?” – very powerful…) I realised that

  • this fear was just in my head – I have a business that gives me a decent income
  • by focusing on “lack” I was forgetting about the abundance I have in so many areas of my life, and this led to unreasonable dissatisfaction, spiralling into fear
  • if I focus on things I want, and things I love about my life, I’m far more likely to action in those areas. Fear paralyses me and stops me doing pretty much anything.

So – you’re not alone if you get confounded by fear – but you can take a few steps to lessen its hold on you – so good luck

View the Original article

Note from Katie:  To learn about a powerful clearing technique (Loving What Is), check out any of Byron Katie's work – just type in her name on YouTube, or visit her website.

Is Social Media Killing Authenticity?

By Jonathan Fields, Awake @ the Wheel

Every social media rulebook hails authenticity as the bastion of success in the world of digital interdigitation.

Yet, I have to confess something…

I wonder if the more ubiquitous social media becomes, the harder is to bear the burden of being authentic IRL (in real life)?

Because, with increasing frequency, you’re not the only person reporting on your every move anymore. When I’m at an event, a gathering, meeting or just having lunch, I’ve come to learn that every word out of my mouth is fair game for social media attribution and distribution. Maybe by the person on the other side of the conversation. Maybe by the person at the table behind me. Or, just a passerby.

And, that freaks me out a bit. Because when I put the message out there, I give it context.

But, when others translate it to social media, especially media that only allows for cherry-picked snippets…who knows?

This used to happen when I was in mainstream media on a fairly regular basis. I’d be interviewed for 30 minutes, then a few sentences or seconds would make it into the interview or segment. I learned, very quickly, how easily it is to be misquoted or have a snippet of a thought quoted out of context, with the meaning dramatically altered.

So, I trained myself to be increasingly politic when doing media interviews.

I was what I’d call cautiously authentic. Tactically transparent.

I said what was on my mind, but always added in a few beats before my thoughts left my mouth to try to frame it in a way that closed as many doors as possible to misquoting and mis-contextualizing. In fact, I began to encourage almost all media, save live TV or radio, do interviews by email, so I could craft and frame the message exactly as I wanted it to appear…and create a paper trail of the full conversation.

In my early days of blogging, I didn’t feel this same need to live-edit my speech.

There was a sense of freedom, of respect, of the desire to want to treat each other right. And, without the time or space limitations of traditional media, there was the ability to include the entire conversation. To keep the context in.

But, I wonder if that’s changed over the last few years, fueled by:

(1) the mass-adoption of social and communications tools that force aggressive truncation of messages, like twitter, texting, wall updates and beyond, (2) the near-pervasive expectation that not only anything you share in social media, but anything you say or do in person, even in real-life public or private, is fair game for publication and distribution,(3) a widespread sense of a lack of the need to provide context, edit, vet information or be accountable, and. (4) mobile access to tools that make sharing information as easy as hitting a few buttons on your cellphone.

I was recently at a conference and said something to a friend that, without knowing our relationship, could easily have been taken as biting or even a bit warped. But, between us, we were just messing around, building on a history we had, it was like a series of inside jokes. Someone behind us, though, overheard the exchange then turned and said, “dude, that’s going on twitter.”

Seriously? SERIOUSLY?

I’m totally cool having what I said shared, as long as it’s framed in the nature of my relationship with the other person and the broader context of the joking conversation. Sadly, the chance of that happening in 140 characters is near zilch.

And, that realization has led most folks to now agree that when it comes to social media, you’ve got to be willing to lose control over your message. But, the corollary to that is, you’ve also got to be willing to exert more control over how that message leaves your mouth to give it the best chance of being framed and shared in the way that fully expresses your intent…even if your preference is that it not be shared at all.

Which means I’m left back in my days of live-censoring my conversations, for fear of being miscontextualized, but this time, it’s not just about my conversation with a single reporter…

It’s about every word out of my mouth, because EVERYONE’S now a reporter!

This growing knowledge has slowly drawn me from being fairly free, transparent and authentic with how interact not only online, but out in public or on the phone and in email to being more cautiously authentic. Tactically transparent. It’s led me to include the line, “The content of this e-mail is off the record, unless agreed otherwise” at the end of every email I send.

And it’s set that line up as an automatic cognitive filter in my conversations. Yes, even friendly, face-to-face conversations.

Because, you just don’t how, when, where or why snippets might end up online and out of context.

So, in this odd way, I’ve been feeling a growing sense that the mass adoption of social reporting technology is increasingly encouraging me to stifle, rather than embrace a sense of complete authenticity.

Not because I have major skeletons in my closet that are freaking me out (note to self, buy more nails for that closet!). But, because, it’s become so much easier to become a target of misattribution, misquoting and mis-contextualizing when every person in every direction is potentially reporting on your every word and move (and, trust me, I’m really not that interesting).

Especially when the ADDention span and character limits of the medium increasingly encourage speed over depth and breath.

And, yes, I get that I now also have my own bully pulpit upon which I can fire back.

But, honestly…that’s just not how I want to spend my time.

Curious, anybody else feeling this?

Or, is it all in my head?

 

View the Original article

Tree-Hugging For Money

By Jonathan Fields, Awake @ The Wheel

“Who are businesses really responsible to? Their customers? Shareholders? Employees? We would argue that it’s none of the above. Fundamentally, businesses are responsible to their resource base. Without a healthy environment there are no shareholders, no employees, no customers and no business.” ~Patagonia founder, Yvon Chouinard

The conversation around corporate responsibility over the last few decades has been, almost entirely, from the mouths of two warring factions. Those who believe in maximizing shareholder wealth by any means necessary and those who believe in corporate citizenship, which until recent years has almost always been viewed in the context of people, with a smallish bit of lip service to the environment.

Then came Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth, followed this year by The Big Spill.

Longtime readers of this blog know I don’t get political here (at least rarely). Not that I don’t have opinions, this just isn’t my outlet for them. But, I do talk about business, and our responsibilities, dreams and quests as creators, problem-solvers, leaders and builders of legacy.

As a securities attorney, first at the SEC, then at a private firm in NYC, I was duty-bound by the law. And, so were board’s, officers and decision-makers of every public corporation. All were under a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder wealth. Without fail, the measure of shareholder wealth was stock price, profitability and dividend. In all but the rarest of circumstance, the notion of corporate citizenship was considered only as a “stunt” to create a perception that might engender a big enough bump in feel good vibes to generate more revenue than the stunt consumed.

I get the need to be profitable. You can’t have an impact without a voice. And, you can’t have a voice if you don’t have a viable means to sustain your efforts. Money matters.

But, I’m increasingly drawn to what Brian Clark might call the corporate responsibility third tribe.

A growing movement of C-suite executives who strive to build powerful, impactful organizations that profit and maximize shareholder wealth not as the result of the more traditional crush, dominate, slash and burn approach, but rather as a byproduct of a fierce sense of corporate citizenship. And, I am stunned at how profitable some have become.

Interface is an interesting example of this. After years in traditional carpet manufacturing, Interface founder, Ray Anderson refocused the company on sustainability, retooling nearly every process, shifting resources and vendors in the name of what he calls Mission Zero: “our promise to eliminate any negative impact our company may have on the environment by the year 2020.” And, in the process, the company created FLOR, a sustainable flooring product, lowered net greenhouse gas emissions by 82%, dropped fossil fuel usage 60% per unit of production, decreased water usage 75%…and decreased costs by $400 million, increased sales by 67% and doubled profits.

Similarly, Chouinard’s Patagonia continues to build on it’s legendary footprint as a leader in corporate citizenship with it’s “birth to birth” initiative:

“…we’ve teamed up with some Japanese companies to, basically by 2010, make all our clothing out of recycled and recyclable fibers. And we’re going to accept ownership of our products from birth to birth. So if you buy a jacket from us, or a shirt ,or a pair of pants, when you’re done with it, you can give it back to us and we’ll make more shirts and pants out of it.

Which is a different idea about consuming. Right now the world runs on consuming and discarding, and we’re saying that we’re taking responsibility for our products from birth to birth. Can you imagine if a computer company said, “When you’re done with your computer, we’ll buy it back from you and make more computers out of it.” Instead, they sell you computer and you can’t even get service from them!” From Chouinard’s book, Let My People Go Surfing.

It’s a different way of accepting responsibility.

So, as I look at what’s unfolding on our planet, when I look at the impact the “by any means necessary” approach to corporate growth has had on the world, when I meditate on my entirely selfish hopes and dreams for the world my daughter will inherit…these are the people and the companies I look to learn from. And, to emulate.

And, I wonder…

What might the world look like 20 years from now if a growing number of freshly-minted and not so minty-fresh entrepreneurs and corporate leaders did the same?

Just thinking…and hoping.

How about you?

View the Original article