Job Search Tips: How to Find Out if Hiring Managers Are Checking You Out

Job Search Tips: How to Find Out if Hiring Managers Are Checking You Out

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How You Can Plan for and Capitalize on the Recovery

How You Can Plan for and Capitalize on the Recovery
See details at http://bizmore.com/portal/message/4224
Ideas from a group of business experts:

If the recession is indeed "very likely over," as Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke suggested recently, what then should executives and managers be focusing on and thinking about right now -- to put their businesses in the best possible position to capitalize when the economy picks up steam again? Conversely, what would they be wise not to be thinking about and focusing on any longer?

That is the trillion-dollar question many of us are asking now. While most agree that the recession is indeed over, managing the recovery may require skillful maneuvering. Here are some tips to help small- and medium-sized business managers not only survive but thrive during this transitionary period.

Reach out to your customers. Many are still shell-shocked and, as such, are fearful of spending. Let them know that your products/services are better than before and that they will need them now more than ever. Most important, ease them back into purchases. Offer to let them try out one new item before selling them the entire catalog.

Continue to manage your spending. Many of us have been in lockdown mode this past year when it comes to expenses. While it still makes sense to be mindful of the company budget, it may be time to ease up on the purse strings a bit. In a thriving economy, you need to spend money to make money. While we are not quite there yet, it might be time to test the waters by spending on some company needs (vs. company wants).

Businesses are starting to get busier and before too long, we will find ourselves out the recession. There are many employees out there that have been waiting patiently for new jobs and opportunities to become more widely available. Managers have enjoyed record setting retention levels over the last 18 months and some have mistakenly taken this for granted.

First, reflect back to what you learned during the recession so that those lessons are embedded in going forward. We have seen companies learn “organization" lessons in three areas.

Culture: we learned how to be bold, fast, and decisive. Keep that culture going.
Communication: we learned how to be more transparent, open, and candid. Keep the communication lines open with all employees.
Customer: we learned how to serve and target key customers. Keep personalizing the customer experience.

A crisis is a terrible thing to waste, do not waste it by making sure that what you learned gets embedded.

Second, plan on going forward to fully differentiate yourself. Make your culture an outside/in activity. Begin your culture change with your customer expectations and your firm brand. Know what it is you want to be known for by your best customers and translate that expectation into leadership and management actions.

Then, be very attentive to talent. Make sure that your employees are not only able and willing to do the work, but find meaning in the work. One of the great risks coming out of recession is that the gratitude attitude among employees will create a false positive. Employee retention and survey scores may be artificially high because employees are grateful to have a job. But, memories are longer then recessions and if you treated employees badly durin ghte recession, they may leave coming out. Work to help employees find meaning in the work that they do so hat they will be not only competent and committed, but contributing fully.


Seek out new opportunities. Some of the best businesses have been created during the worst times. Take advantage of the emerging new economy to see what more your company can offer. Consumers and businesses will have changed in the aftermath of the recession and change often leads to opportunity.

Reward loyalty. Your employees have stood by you and your company during the recession and many have endured setbacks including lost wages and benefits. Show them you appreciate their sacrifice. While it’s probably too soon to dish out Wall Street-type bonuses, a gift card or luncheon can go a long way.

Learn to hedge. Many of us lost sight of this in the years preceding the recession. We overborrowed and overspent. While the recession may be over, it can easily reemerge. Don’t repeat the mistakes of the past. Make sure your company maintains sufficient liquid reserves such that no matter what happens, now or in the future, it will survive.
Clearly recessions are macro events with micro implications. Bernanke’s assertion that the recession is very likely over should be considered as one input into your own determination of the micro conditions for your particular business. Ask yourselves these questions:
• 1. Are your customers in greater need of your products today than they were six months ago?
• 2. Do you anticipate that your customers will have more economic resources - cash or other - to invest in your business?
• 3. Is your market smaller, the same or larger? How have changing conditions changed the profile of your customer base?
• 4. How have your competitors fared in this downturn? Have they dropped offerings you could deliver
• 5. With this reset in mind, what is the expectation of your customer base? Lower investment upfront? Smaller purchases? Or, is there pent-up demand that will rise when conditions improve?
Then do some scenario planning:
How are you prepared to handle an increase in sales volume? Do you have access to the inputs? At what cost? Have delivery times changed?
• 1. Labor: Can you scale up without making long-term commitments? Can you use part-timers, consultants or lesser-priced employees?
• 2. If you business requires training, do you have the right training system in place? Quiet times are a good time to invest in streamlining systems and training.
• 3. In the event of a prolonged downturn or flat cycle, are there opportunities to consolidate the market – acquire a competitor and reduce costs?
Recoveries can be rocky but with a plan to address the uncertainties, you’ll be ahead of the game regardless of where things go.
The key to business success is relationships – relationships with your employees so they will do good work and provide ideas, relationships with your customers so they will be loyal and tell you how to get better. Therefore, the best thing to do as the recovery takes hold is to do whatever necessary to repair important relationships that were harmed by actions you may have taken during the economic crisis that you thought were necessary to survive.
One way to repair relationships is to apologize. Research in consumer behavior shows that when businesses admit mistakes and problems, apologize, and provide some credible indication of what steps they have taken so the problem doesn’t recur, customers are quite forgiving. Employees, too, understand the economic stress companies have faced. They also can by won back by heartfelt expressions of sympathy and concern and concrete actions to show that the relationship matters. Figure out who matters, and be sure they are still with you – customers, suppliers, creditors, employees – and, if not, win them back.
Businesses are starting to get busier and before too long, we will find ourselves out the recession. There are many employees out there that have been waiting patiently for new jobs and opportunities to become more widely available. Managers have enjoyed record setting retention levels over the last 18 months and some have mistakenly taken this for granted.
It will be very important for managers in companies of all sizes and industries to consider who on their teams are likely to stay as things improve, and who may not. These types of assessments or “Talent Reviews” are an essential part of a strong overall Talent Management Strategy, and should be implemented in one form or another in good times or bad. They can actually be pretty simple as long as they cover some key points:
• Assess everyone in your team.
• Determine their likeliness to stay (usually relying on informal data).
• Revisit their training and development plan.
• Identify their goals for advancement.
• Calibrate their goals with the needs of the business
I am concerned that managers are not paying enough attention to this and that more teams will unravel because of turnover than need be in the coming months. The managers that focus some attention and effort back to individuals within the workgroup and to the team itself, will always outperform peers, but as the job market opens up, that gap will only widen."

Marketing Strategies that Drive Sales

By Doug McQueen
Advertising cutbacks are a reality today, but that doesn’t necessarily have to mean a decline in new leads or business. For companies that have a lead generation slump due to spending cutbacks and the poor economy, there’s hope--guerrilla marketing.

Guerrilla marketing is a term for strategies that generate new business at a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing. Most of these strategies leverage resources for little or no money. A clever marketing department can use it to generate more leads on a small budget.

Here are 10 guerrilla marketing strategies to drive your sales:

1. Generate exposure with borrowed interest: When you “borrow interest,” you attach your message to a high interest event, person or product and ride the tide of traffic for free. Here are three ways to borrow interest:
• Release a YouTube video tied to a recent event. In the first week after Michael Jackson’s death, over 35 million people watched a YouTube video of prisoners dancing a tribute to him. While this video didn’t advertise a product, your video can.
• Bump up your Google’s Adwords placement with “borrowed” copy. Many companies use Adwords to increase traffic to their site, but don’t know that Google doesn’t always place the highest bidder’s ads at the top. Often it rewards high click-thru ads by pushing them up the list, at no extra charge. One technique to get pushed-up is to borrow and repurpose the copy from successful ads. The interest borrowed here is from both Google and the community of searchers.
• Leverage a local event. The concept of borrowed interest can be applied almost anywhere. In July 2009, 125,000 prepaid, high-interest visitors attended the Comic Con convention in San Diego. Costumed characters such as Batman roam the venues and outlying areas passing out flyers. Are there local events that you could be visiting?
2. Monthly press releases: Companies advertise to create top-of-mind awareness so that when a person is ready to buy, they think of you first. Press releases do the same thing, but for free. Newsworthy releases typically cover the following: new hires, product releases, new alliances, large contracts awarded, new territories covered, favorable independent lab results, or a summary of and link to a white paper or article on your website. Your release should follow a professional press release format and should be written in news-based style and not as an advertisement. You can use a news release service or build your own list of editors to distribute your release.

3. Publish articles: Publishing articles does three things for you: it generates long impression times, improved perception of expertise and leads. Your name, phone number and email should appear at the end of each article so readers can contact you with questions. It’s often cost effective to have reprints of articles mailed to your prospects or to be used as a sales tool. Also, email your prospects recent articles to accelerate selling cycles with higher credibility.

When applicable, submit your articles with incredible photographs. They have a higher likelihood of getting published with great photos.
4. Vehicular welcome wagons: Can your company vehicles generate demand for your business? Think about ways you can roll out the welcome mat for fellow commuters and pedestrians. Here’s a catchy “welcome mat” for a taxidermist that works quite well to generate conversation and business:


The taxidermist’s own creation, a stuffed, mounted coyote, hangs on the back of the owner’s company truck as a business advertisement.
5. Join free directories: You can find 10-20 free online business directories in less than an hour and get yourself listed. Google “free business directories” to get started, then try to narrow the search down to directories in your industry.
6. Become newsworthy: Create a newsworthy story and send it to your local TV stations, radio stations, newspapers and industry editors. Stories tied to community pride often get picked up by the media. For example, a bank president once offered CDs that would provide interest rates equal to the ending point spread of the Super Bowl (for the first three months) if the home-town team won the game. The local news coverage was all over it. The bank enjoyed three exciting weeks of coverage leading into the game. New account activity exploded and it did so with customer pride.
7. Establish customer advisory boards: Companies with a customer advisory board enjoy improved loyalty, referrals, leads, strategic direction, ideas for business and an inside track to earning a higher share of their total purchases.

To create a customer advisory board, hold quarterly luncheons in exchange for feedback. Use a third party to chair the board so that you can focus on listening and learning in the course of the event.

These boards give employees a strong dose of customer insight. If every employee from production to accounting is effectively on the sales team, these forums help make the whole company better at selling and servicing.
8. Guerrilla e-marketing System: The key to e-marketing is to integrate all the ways you touch prospects (your website, newsletter, emails, banner ads and articles) so that they act in concert with each other; displaying one theme, one brand identity and one message. Building a website, newsletter, and auto-respond email system is not expensive, but make sure your message is rich, yet simple. Nothing kills time and selling cycles like confusion.
Also, create a video for your business website. People don’t want to read websites, they want to view them. Hire a production team or shoot the video yourself and edit it on the software that comes with a Mac. Once the video is complete, host it on Youtube and place it on your site.
9. Use expert endorsements: Validate your product with an expert’s stamp of approval. A famous chewing gum uses “4 out of 5 dentists agree.” What can you use? When companies stamp it, seal it, shine it up and promote it, it sells faster and at a higher price point.

Here are some possibilities for endorsements: industry certifications, recognized figures, labs, certifying bodies and experts with initials following their names such as BBB, Phd, MD, DDS, MS, CPA, RN. There are two ways to grow a business: Improve the price or improve the volume. Endorsements do both.
10. Referrals: Referrals are the easiest form of growth, the fastest form of acquisition and the lowest cost marketing technique. Most people know this and yet they don’t ask for them. Companies that hold staff accountable for referrals beat their competition each time a referral is granted. In those moments market share begins to migrate and relationships are solidified.

Here’s a sample referral dialogue:
a. A customer says thank you after a business delivers a service.
b. Rep says, “I appreciate that very much.” (pause) “Excuse me, would you happen to know of anyone else who might benefit from my company?”
c. Client says, “Ummm, yes. I might know a few people.”
d. “I get almost all of my business from referrals. Could you help me please?”
e. “Sure, I think John Doe and Mary Smith could use you.”
f. “Would it be possible for you to call them to recommend me? I don’t want my first call to be an interruption.”
g. “Sure.”
h. “Thanks so much. If they say yes, could you forward me their number so I could call them right away?”
i. “Absolutely.”
Referrals not only add to a company’s prospect list they also solidify loyalty between the referring client and the business. Once that call is made, it locks in a memory of preference and a set of beliefs that you will continue to perform.
Your guerrilla marketing plan should include elements that you know will work for you. The sooner you take action, the sooner you begin to create positive results. By the way, if you found this article helpful, would forward it to a friend?
Doug McQueen shares his time lecturing CEO’s and business owners. He is a writer, lecturer and successful business owner/operator living in Encinitas, CA Doug runs Your Results Marketing Co., a full service marketing company that helps businesses sell more efficiently with proven neuro-science languages and their positive effect on decision making and memory.

Tech Management - Communicating Change

In times of change -- which these days means pretty much always -- the leader's role calls for imparting clear, informative communications. Unfortunately, say experts Ron Arden and Paul Batz, not all CEOs come equipped with built-in communications skills. Some know what to say and how to say it purely by instinct; most have to learn. Others resist counseling and assistance, thinking it's enough for them alone to know what's happening in the company. They generally leave the communication side of things to other people.
"This attitude can be a major disadvantage these days," Arden says. "For all organizations, it's become an absolute necessity for the leader to communicate effectively with anyone who has a stake in their company, whether they be staff, shareholders, clients, the board or potential investors. When things are changing, staff needs information and motivation to keep up, to know what's going on, to meet changing objectives, to make decisions that will ultimately affect the bottom line and the well-being of the organization."
"A chief executive needs to make change personal because it's personal to the people who are being asked to change," Batz notes. He cites the example of one CEO's efforts to alter an organizational culture from production to performance.
"Until this time, employees had focused primarily on their specific duties, with little regard for the big picture. Now, just because the CEO was talking 'performance,' they didn't really get the need to set new goals beyond their usual boundaries."
True change occurred only after this CEO explained that he'd be leaving in a few years and wanted to make sure that the business endured. Once he provided a context for change, employees were much more inclined to listen.
Context is crucial, say the Vistage communications experts. Regardless of the project or initiative, it's vital to address the broader elements needed to achieve success, including:
• What are the reasons behind our proposed change?
• What are our goals?
• Who does the change affect?
• What are the likely repercussions of change throughout the organization?
• How will we all benefit from change?
At the same time, the leader has to convey his or her own stake in the change initiative. This includes making such statements as:
• "I'm personally committed to seeing this project through to completion."
• "I understand that these proposed changes may have a negative impact on people."
• "I welcome an open discussion about how you feel regarding this change project."
• "I hope you'll feel free to share your ideas and suggestions about how to make it work."
"Change is always based on market forces and customer realities," Batz says. "So when employees are asked to change their personal and group behaviors to accommodate these realities, the message has to provide enough information to make the change tangible at all levels in the company."
Arden adds: "Remember, it's not just the message of change you're trying to get across. You also need to let people see how you feel about change -- your optimism and the strength of your convictions about the path the organization has embarked upon. Employees listen to what you say but they watch you, too. They draw their own conclusions based on what they observe."
Even when change is affecting the company adversely, to get employees to face the situation along with you calls for the right kind of communication.
"It's a fact that, generally, the CEO's priorities are very different from their employees," Arden notes. "The average employee cares less about the company's bottom line and more about their own bottom line -- primarily, job security. The dominant motivator for them is to tune into their favorite radio station, WIIFM (What's In It For Me)."
People dragged into change do so kicking and screaming. Why? Change equals uncertainty. "The trick is not to hide this fact but to acknowledge its scariness and point out the potential rewards if people come along with you. Obstacles, mid-course adjustments, uncertainty -- all of these are part of any significant change effort."
For this reason, Arden adds, being honest and caring is the best approach. "If you as the leader acknowledge all of this, you're doing no more than telling the truth. Make it clear to employees that this is a normal part of all change. The message, 'Hold on, it's going to be a bumpy but exciting ride,' will alleviate some of the pressure and ease the tensions of uncertainty."
The goal is always reducing ambiguity and uncertainty. "Think of communication as a pre-emptive strike against rumor and gossip," Batz says. "By sharing truthful information -- in a complete and timely manner -- you diminish the hurtful effects of the grapevine." And make no mistake about it: your company has a grapevine. Every company does.

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