Take the Groundhog Day Out Of Your Job Search
Every year around this time, we get ready to celebrate a unique holiday.
No — not that sports holiday — I’m talking about Groundhog Day. You know, the one where a groundhog is coaxed out of his burrow to predict how many weeks of winter are left before the arrival of Spring.
The holiday has become so popular that we even made a Bill Murray film around it, where a meteorologist from Pittsburgh relives the same Groundhog Day endlessly until he learns a lesson about who he needs to be. it’s definitely a funny movie and one of my favorites because it illustrates the age-old adage of “lessons are repeated until they are learned”.
The coronavirus pandemic began 10 months ago, creating our own sense of Groundhog Day. Depending on who you are, today is either the 2nd of February or the 336th of March, 2020. Whether you are still lucky enough to have a job or I’ve been biding your time with Netflix and whatever else can consume you during this lockdown, every day has almost seemed the same.
Around the time the pandemic began 10 months ago, I also sought to help job seekers. For the first time since I started my small but mighty venture, My community, Albert’s List, found itself in the midst of the worst recession ever recorded. With millions becoming unemployed due to a pandemic, many found themselves jobless and on the search for new work.
Among the things I did to help job seekers included holding resume workshops and mock interviews. Since March 2020, these events have been attended by hundreds of individuals and I’ve had the opportunity to see many resumes and witness many interview answers — all from experienced professionals right down to the new college graduate. To nobody’s fault whatsoever, they all have a pattern.
Everyone is selling themselves short.
I’m not sure whether it was our grandparents sharing that humility was the key to success or that we have truly entered the age where we diminish ourselves due to the social media achievements of everyone else, but this pattern is disturbing. No doubt many of us already sit on our couches in quiet desperation as employers pass on us for the internal candidates, resumes remain ignored, or the ever-growing number of new unemployment claims climbs per week. Yeah, it sucks, but at the very least in this chaos of a pandemic mess we can still control what is around us — and among those things is how we present ourselves.
It’s Not Your Fault
We can chalk up this Groundhog Day to a lot of different things. From colleges never teaching us how to properly brand ourselves to most of us not being marketers, it’s truly difficult to quantify our accomplishments at work since we live so much in our heads and not so much in the minds of those who manage us. Yet, in the most competitive job market in a generation, too many of us are opting to stay on the sidelines, not by choice, but almost by design.
So what can we do to actually change our outcomes? As a career services business owner, my answer is many — and you can see them in this PowerPoint presentation — but I wanted to give you the summary.
- Know what’s at stake: Many of us are finding a job just to find a job. Understandably, rent is due. But even with that in mind, the default context of any business is to stay in business and your ability to be hired is predicated on value you can bring. The sooner you understand what a business wants from you, what’s at stake for them, and you can articulate that, the sooner you can get hired.
- Don’t tell a lie: Of course, Albert, you tell me. Why would anyone want to lie? The unfortunate cases that’s interviewing is as much about telling the truth as it is about withholding it too. Yes, you may have been laid off during COVID-19, but you need to present that information in a strategic and meaningful manner. Sounds like a bunch of disgusting alphabet soup, but that’s what I have for you.
- Understand your wins: A lot of us go to work to do work, but how many of us truly know what we are accomplishing? In the way that I’ve observed resume reviews and mock interviews, the answer is “not much”. After all, we have been conditioned to believe that work is about getting the work done and less so about the accomplishments that such work creates for ourselves or the company. At the crux of this is why so many of us are sitting on our couches at home in quiet desperation hoping that somebody — not named us — will notice what our value is and finally give us that chance.
You can read more at the slide deck I shared above. I thankfully had the chance to share this with several groups of job seekers in the last couple of weeks and I am glad to share it with you in this newsletter.
But how can we change?
It was only when Phil Connors lived his own Groundhog Day a few hundred times that he realized that changing — in this case like job seekers, discovering their humanity — is what ultimately helped him escape the nightmare he had put himself in. I think that job seekers can do the same by understanding what makes them tick and stand out in these times. They deserve better. Heck, you deserve better.
But unlike Groundhog Day, unless job seekers start to live and walk in their potential, we’re going to be suffering forever — and nobody — in good economic times or bad, deserves to be caught in that experience.
Best of luck!
