Personality and the job seeker

There was an interesting snap-shot in today’s issue of USA Today which I read over an under-cooked “All American” Skillet breakfast at the Holiday Inn North of Boston. I guess I shouldn’t complain too much about the breakfast, after all it was complimentary. One of the ironies of travelling; the more you travel, the more points you get to encourage you to travel in your spare time too. Trading-in my allegiance for a complimentary breakfast was a deal I was willing to make on an empty stomach.

Enough about breakfast. The newspaper was reporting a survey conducted by Accountemps. It noted a change in workers attitudes from 2004 through 2009. According to the survey, the perceptions of those elements that are most important to your next job have changed as follows:

Industry knowledge -21%

Technical ability -6%

Certification -4%

Personality +30%

I can assume the people who found employment in the last while have noticed that knowledge of the industry is significantly less important now than it was 5 years ago. Does this make sense? I think it does. Even though we’re in a recession with accompanying layoffs, there is still high demand for people with particular skills. These skills include social media guru, environmental officer, electrical power engineer, etc. Jobs which either didn’t exist or for which there was no demand five-years ago. I often speculate that the jobs that will be in high demand five-years from now haven’t even been invented yet, so the fact that industry experience has dropped considerably is not surprising.

Technical ability dropping 6% is a surprise, but then, the drop was small. I could speculate that the reason technical skills are less important is that many design and manufacturing jobs have been shipped overseas.

The requirement for professional accreditation or certification having dropped is also a surprise. Here again the drop is minor. The unfortunate element of this statistic is that many of the re-training programs which are promoted and funded by the Government focus solely on certification. There is a drop-in centre for unemployed knowledge worker that focuses almost exclusively on providing on-line certification programs. The findings presented in the survey suggest those people who spend the period of unemployment focusing exclusively on re-training and re-certification should not make it their sole focus.

I am not surprised the personality elements have increased so much over the past five years. During my unemployment I was the director of the “hire tech | higher tech" (www.2ht.ca) program. This program, which was run entirely by volunteers, was unique in its approach to finding jobs for knowledge workers. One of side-effects of the program is that it forces you to examine your personality. Do you work well with people? Can you hold your side of a conversation? Can you complete a coherent thought on a complex topic? I remember one hiring manager telling me the importance of cultural fit. He said “I can teach a smart person how to program in Java but I can’t un-teach him about being a jerk”.

The increased emphasis on personality is consistent with the accompanying drop in technical skill and industry intelligence. As I mentioned earlier, many of the positions being staffed today didn’t exist a couple years ago so nobody has extensive skill or experience in this field. What would make a difference to a hiring manager looking to staff these positions? How about a positive attitude? Maybe the ability to learn, educate and evangelize. Gone are the days when a guru could spend years in the lab inventing stuff with little interaction with the outside world. Hermits may produce radical technology, but boosting that persona isn’t going to make it in today’s industry.

You can read the full study here (www.accountemps.com/PressRoom?id=2538). What do you think about these results? Is there another message to the unemployed hiding in the data? Please leave a comment, below. You can also tweet me, I’m Tim_Warland.

Beating unemployment

What a month has been November. After looking for work for over a year and being unemployed for eleven months, I finally connected with the job market. I accepted an offer from AppliedMicro (AMCC) and start today. It's an exciting role managing next generation products. This is exactly the type of position for which I obtained an MBA five years ago.

By the time I accepted the offer I had received another offer from a different ottawa-based company. I received both offers within an hour last Wednesday. I had also obtained sweat-equity positions in two other start-ups, submitted a funding proposal to the Government to earn $68,000 for the Ottawa Talent Initiative and was working on a second proposal. I was also booking an interview with another company for the following week.

My recent interviews went really well. I learnt to create a dialogue about what I can do, then work with the hiring manager to determine how this would fit with the organization. As a result, the jobs I talked about were customized for me.

This is what I learnt during my time off
1) Being busy is good. Sitting around waiting for the phone to ring is not. At times I got depressed but having work-like projects were key to my sanity
2) Get connected. Attend networking events, phone old co-workers for a coffee meeting. It's hard to get out and in front of people but realize that people are the key to the jobs
3) Think about what you're good at and how it adds value to a business. Jobs are evolving quickly, being unemployed involves changing to meet their needs. It's not what you call yourself or what you did before, it's what you can do now.
4) Get out of the house. I owe a huge debt to my parents for weekly lunches, my buddy for the weekly Guinness and most of all to my girlfriend for her unwavering commitment. She was there when I needed someone to hold me an tell me everything will be OK.

In hindsight, the time I spent at the Ottawa Talent Initiative was somewhat distracting. The idea was right and I used the opportunity to connect with hiring managers from different companies. It also helped me stay fresh and work-ready. I just spent too much time trying to find other people jobs and solve the employment problem and not enough time on me. The advantage was that I built a fantastic new network and got more involved in the high-tech business community.

I intend to remain connected with the high-tech community. I'm going to attend networking events and venture talent fairs (part of the lead-to-win program). I'm also going to continue to volunteer to finish a research project I started with Carleton University. We are going to determine the extent to which poor social skills limit a high-tech worker's ability to find employment.

It's nice to feel wanted and connected to the system again.

In this down economy so many people are suffering through unemployment. Send this link to them. It might provide the inspiration they need. If you have faced unemployment or know someone who has, why not share your observations here so we might all benefit.