What Angry Birds Can Teach You About Getting Hired - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career

What Angry Birds Can Teach You About Getting Hired - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career PART IV (Become the ‘Yellow Bird’!) Authors Note: This is the fourth in a series of blogs in which author of the best-selling “Headhunter” Hiring Secrets: The Rules of the Hiring Game Have Changed . . . Forever! and professional “headhunter” Skip Freeman draws an analogy between “Angry Birds,” the wildly popular online game, and another, far more important gameâ€"the hiring game. Previous blogs in this series are: The Pig’s Lair (Part I); Are YOU the ‘Red Bird’? (Part II); and How to Become MORE than just the ‘RED BIRD’ (Part III). At the end of Part III of this blog series, I said that the next installment (this one) would consider the characteristics of the “blue bird.” But just this week I encountered a situation that so clearly illustrated the necessity for quickly moving beyond being just the “red bird” and adopting the characteristics of the “yellow bird” that I simply had to postpone the “blue bird” until the next installment. For those of you who are “Angry Birds” aficionados, you may already know the characteristics of the “yellow bird;” for those of you who are not, here are those characteristics: Differentiating characteristics The “YELLOW BIRD,” when tapped, flies off at warp speed, crashing through the barriers the pigs have set up to keep you from getting the egg. In other words, unlike the “red bird,” who merely “loads” himself into the “sling shot” and “fires” himself off willy-nilly, HOPING to crash through the barriers the pigs have set up, the “yellow bird” is wily, aggressive, assertive and knows precisely how to break through the barrier and attain his desired goal! As we’ve already seen in this series, many (if not MOST) job seekers start out as the “red bird,” usually by responding to, say, an online posting, and never advance beyond the “red bird” stage during their entire job search. That is, they, like the “red bird,” “load” themselves into the “sling shot” and “fire” themselves off willy-nilly at a companyâ€"HOPING thatâ€"somehow!â€"they will break through the “barriers” set up by the company! That somehow they will hear back from the company and get an interview. Not a very sound strategy and certainly not a very reliable way to achieve the objective of getting an interview for a new job in today’s job market. A brief aside . . . This past week I spoke to about 300 juniors and seniors at the University of Alabama about the hypercompetitive, brutal job market of 2011. I asked the audience, “Who plays Angry Birds?” and the majority raised their hand. I next asked, “Can anyone tell me about the ‘red bird’?” One young lady quickly responded, “A bird that is pretty useless!” And there you have it! “A bird that is pretty useless,” and that is how many job seekers today position themselves, how they BRAND themselves. As noted in previous blogsâ€"and as is certainly worth restating hereâ€"companies are NOT in the business of hiring people. They are in the business of making money. So the ONLY way for anyone to get hired in this economy is to brand themselves as someone who can make a company money or save a company money (or, ideally, accomplish both of these things). (See Part III, “How to Become MORE Than Just the RED BIRD!”) And, just for the record, companies don’t hire job seekers, either. They hire revenue and profit producers. Now to this past week’s example of how a “red bird” quickly learned how to become a “yellow bird.” Changing highlights I received a LinkedIn InMail from a job seeker with this subject line: “Looking for a job.” This person immediately branded himself as a “red bird”! He had “flung” himself out there, HOPING something would happen. I responded to his InMail and suggested that he consider subject lines such as, “Driver of new business,” “Profit Producing Performer,” or “Successful marketer in the age of Twitter.” (You see, according to this person’s LinkedIn profile, he was in MARKETING! Unfortunately, however, I couldn’t tell from his profile precisely what he had done. I could see what he NOW does, but I was left clueless about his past accomplishments and achievements, if any.) In my response back to this applicant, I told him that, with the subject line “Looking for a job,” he had just BRANDED himself as “weak” and “desperate,” not as a proven marketer with prowess and significant accomplishments that could be expected to tweak the interest of a potential employer. I also noted that he wasn’t marketing himself as a marketer shouldâ€"yet here he was claiming to be a marketer! (I admit I was a little hard on this young man, but I really felt he needed a dose of “reality”!) To his credit, he wrote back, saying, “Skip, I am duly embarrassed and you are right.” It wasn’t long before I noticed that he had revamped his LinkedIn profile to include the fact that he had launched three new products in 20, achieving over $1 million in sales! Additionally, a notable industry publication awarded one of the products the distinction of “product of the year” in a particular category! (Talk about “hiding your light under a bushel!”) Take charge of your personal brand development Now, THAT is BRANDING! That is showing that you can MAKE A COMPANY MONEY or SAVE A COMPANY MONEY! Branding yourself as someone who can make a company money or save a company money enables youâ€"like the “yellow bird”!â€"to go after the company at warp speed and crash through the barriers they have set up to keep you from getting the job. To be successful in today’s brutal job market, you MUST become the “yellow bird”! You MUST power yourself up with quantifiable accomplishments and achievements. You MUST define, specifically, how you can MAKE A COMPANY MONEY or SAVE A COMPANY MONEY, or ideally, accomplish BOTH of these things. Once you do this, the chances of winning that job go from hope to reality. Next: The “Blue Bird” Job Search Methodology Author: Skip Freeman is the author of “Headhunter” Hiring Secrets: The Rules of the Hiring Game Have Changed . . . Forever! and is the President and Chief Executive Officer of The HTW Group (Hire to Win), an Atlanta, GA, Metropolitan Area Executive Search Firm. Specializing in the placement of sales, engineering, manufacturing and RD professionals, he has developed powerful techniques that help companies hire the best and help the best get hired. What Angry Birds can Teach you About Getting Hired - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career Part 3 (how to become MORE than just the ‘red bird’) Editor’s Note: This is the third in a series of blogs where author of the best-selling “Headhunter” Hiring Secrets: The Rules of the Hiring Game Have Changed . . . Forever! and professional “headhunter” Skip Freeman draws an analogy between “Angry Birds,” the wildly popular online game, and another, far more important gameâ€"the hiring game. Previous blogs in this series are: The Pig’s Lair (Part I) and Are YOU the ‘Red Bird’? (Part II). As a quick review: We are on level 1 . . . the game starts . . . and the first bevy of birds is set to goâ€"three bouncing, flipping red birds. We pull back the sling shot, let a red bird fly, sit back and watch what happens. The bird (job seeker) sails through the air, the screen moves from left to right, the lair (company) comes into view, the bird (job seeker) hits somewhere and “hopefully” we achieve a breakthrough by knocking down some of the barriers surrounding the lair (company), enabling us to find a way in and get to the pigs (influencers and decision makers). (By the way, we are NOT suggesting that influencers and hiring managers are pigs! This is simply an analogy of the game.) Load up So, what do most people do when they first decide to look for a new job? They “load” themselves into the “sling shot,” become a “red bird” and “fire” themselves off willy-nilly at a company after finding some posting online, sending in their résumé and hoping they will achieve a breakthrough by getting an interview with the company. For the first nine levels of the game the only bird you encounter is the red bird and it has rather limited capabilities: It can fly through the air, hit a barrier and, depending upon where and how it hits, it may or may not break through the barrier(s) and enter the lair (company). Becoming average I see day-in and day-out people with exceptional capabilities simply positioning themselves as the common red bird with limited abilities, which ensures they will limit their abilities to knock down the barriers and break into the company. Let’s start with your basic branding document in a job searchâ€"your résumé. As a preface, here is a critical “Headhunter” Hiring Secret: companies are NOT in the business of hiring people. Companies are in the business of making money! We all have limited resources, including companies. Thus, you will only get hired if you can make them more money than what they can make with the alternative uses of their cash. Hiring is not the business U.S. companies are currently sitting on $1.9 trillion in cash, the most since 1959. We constantly hear politicians and the news media clamoring for companies to use the money to create jobs. That’s not why they exist. In a capitalistic economy, companies are not instruments of social justice. They are businesses. And, whether you (or I) think that is “right” is totally beside the point. What must be accepted is this: It is one of the rules of the hiring game and a job seeker ignores it at their own peril. What this means is that there are only two reasons you will get hired. You must show a company that you can: • Make them money; or, • Save them money Ideally, of course, you would be able to do BOTH of these things for a company. And where (and how) do you begin showing a potential employer how you can do either (or both) of these things for them? Your résumé! Our executive search firm, The HTW (Hire to Win) Group, receives approximately 200 resume a day. Over 90% fail to address how the individual can “make a company money or save a company money.” Let me provide two examples from just this past week: This first example is from a professional who sent in his resume for a National Accounts Manager’s position we are recruiting for that has a base salary of $0K to $120K: Regional Sales Manager (2009- Present) • Managed accounts in U.S., Canada and Mexico • Analyzed and improved packaging efficiencies for largest customer • Product manager for new product in development • Planned and coordinated inventory for largest customers • Worked with Distributors to increase sales to end users • Primary Liaison between Customers and Manufacturing This person tells us what they did, but what he failed to tell us is HOW he did it! What was the end result of his actions? What are the pertinent “numbers”? What percentages of increase do his actions represent? What are the dollar amounts involved? This person has been excluded from further consideration for the position. (See “How Do You Get Hired? First, Don’t Lose!) Here is the other example. This is from a person who has a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering and is interested in an opportunity for an Instrumentation and Controls position with one of our client companies. The base pay for this position is $80K. Electrical Engineer â€" XYZ Company â€" 2007 to present • Design, build, test and troubleshoot electrical and electronic components • Experience with AC and DC systems • Implement methods to increase production rates • Experience working with assembly line in the production of control systems • Experience working with drills, thread machines and other production tools • Handle electrical and mechanical devices required for the production unit • Experience handling batteries, controllers, converters, regulators, motors, generators, relays, shunts, rheostats, etc. • Responsible for quality assurance of the systems produced Again, how much did this person’s efforts and methods increase production rates? What impact did they have on quality assurance of the systems produced? Did their troubleshooting save the company (or the end user) money or prevent lost productivity? As a job seeker, it is critical that you brand yourself with quantifiable accomplishments and achievements that are translatable into pertinent DOLLARS, PERCENTAGE and NUMBERS! (And, coincidentally, every communicationâ€"résumé, cover letters, direct mail letters, LinkedIn InMails, etc.â€"should contain these quantifiable measurements. Without branding yourself as someone who can “make a company money or save a company money” you simply will NOT get hired. You simply will bounce off the “barriers” set up by the company, much like the red bird does off the pig’s lair. The moral of this blog? You MUST become MORE than just the “Red Bird”! Next Week: Part 4 The Blue Bird Author: Skip Freeman is the author of “Headhunter” Hiring Secrets: The Rules of the Hiring Game Have Changed . . . Forever! and is the President and Chief Executive Officer of The HTW Group (Hire to Win), an Atlanta, GA, Metropolitan Area Executive Search Firm. Specializing in the placement of sales, engineering, manufacturing and RD professionals, he has developed powerful techniques that help companies hire the best and help the best get hired.