Category Archives: Career success stories

Career success stories, CV, Job Boards/Online, Personal branding, Uncategorized, Uncovering opportunities

The SlideShare presentation that got me hired

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I received this in a SlideShare newsletter last week. It’s a great example of a creative campaign to get hired (for a job that wasn’t being advertised – it was being tweeted).

Yes, it’s American; yes, she works in PR; and, yes, this won’t apply to everyone for every role. But there are some very important lessons to be learned from Laura’s story:

  • The impact of technology on the job search is unrelenting and you need to a) keep up, and, b) start using it to your advantage
  • Thinking creatively about how to market yourself usually creates a very good impression with a prospective employer
  • You create your own opportunities to stand out from the crowd

So read Laura’s story and think about how you could market yourself more creatively…

Resumes are Old School, Use SlideShare & Twitter to Get Hired

Laura Gainor wasn’t always the PR & Social Media Strategist at Comet Branding and this is the story of how that came to be.

When Laura found out she and her husband were moving from Charlotte to Milwaukee, she reached out to companies in the area, including Comet Branding who tweeted about a job opening.

Laura set out to get herself hired by launching a #LauraGainorToMilwaukee campaign that mixed in Twitter, FourSquare and SlideShare.
Laura and her husband had already planned a trip to Milwaukee. She made a poster out of the Comet Brand logo and posted pictures of the poster in various venues at Milwaukee with a Foursquare check-in and a tweet. The campaign was fun, spontaneous and creative and showcased Laura’s personality and creativity.

But Laura also wanted to showcase her experience as well as creative and strategic talents. So she uploaded a presentation to SlideShare and periodically tweeted links to that presentation.

“SlideShare allowed me the opportunity to publicly explain what I did and how I did it, to get the attention of Comet Branding,” said Laura.

Laura pulled together photos to create a virtual resume as well as screenshots of her Foursquare check-ins from Milwaukee. “My goal for my SlideShare presentation was to create a story about who I was, my professional experience, showcase my talents that would make me a good fit for Comet Branding, as well as pull together my #LauraGainorToMilwaukee story into one place,” Laura explained.
The very day Laura’s presentation was uploaded, it made it to SlideShare’s ‘Most Popular’ and was passed around on SlideShare and the Twittersphere. She got tweets and direct messages from all over.
There were even teachers downloading the presentation to show their classes and example of presenting yourself as a brand to possible employers.

Comet Branding also noticed Laura. They contacted her to setup a first interview. On March 1st she went in for a second interview and was immediately offered the position!

Laura says, “I feel very honored to have had my first day in my new desk at Comet Branding on Wednesday, March 3rd.”

If you are looking for a job, take a lesson from Laura’s book – showcase yourself through a presentation and use Twitter or Facebook to get the attention of the company you want to work at.

Career success stories, General Career Management, Job Boards/Online, Job Search Resources, Personal branding, Uncovering opportunities

Lessons from LinkedIn’s founder

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I read an interview with Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, last night. Successful internet entrepreneurs seem to have that proverbial ‘overnight success’; but, like anyone else, his career has been an interesting journey.

He graduated with a Master’s degree in philosophy from Oxford and initially saw his career path as academia, “But I realised academics write books that 50 or 60 people read and I wanted more impact.”  He decided that an entrepreneurial career would provide him with a bigger platform.

He returned to California in 1993, just at the start of the internet boom, and began to pursue a career in software. However, he had come up with a checklist of skills he wanted to acquire. He purposely set out to acquire them and, within four years, which included stints at Apple and Fujitsu to develop the skills he sought, he launched his first internet venture – a dating website called SocialNet.com

Whilst there were other online dating services, this was way before the terms Web 2.0 and social networking had been coined. You can see where Hoffman was going….

SocialNet.com wasn’t a great success. Hoffman realised that his early adopters were only customers for about three and a half months – either they found someone in that time or they got frustrated and moved on to try something else.

He realised that, “The ideal characteristic of a startup is where people don’t fully understand if your idea is any good or not but where you prove it is in two or three years.” (That certainly describes my experience with LinkedIn – I signed up in 2006 because it looked interesting, but it took a couple of years to realise its full power and its benefits).

In 1999, Hoffman moved to PayPal, becoming part of the founding board and then a full-time employee as VP of Business Development. He played a key role in the sale of Paypal to eBay in 2002.

From there the rest is history. He took what he learned from SocialNet and founded LinkedIn. It’s now pushing 50 million members worldwide and Hoffman’s goal is to sign up “25 per cent of the globe” (that’s his estimate of how many people could be described as ‘professional’).

He also likes to point out that “Every individual now is a small business. You no longer work for one entity for a lifetime. Part of the mistake is that you think you have to go and search and find a job. But there is a massive ecosystem of people out there who might come and find you.” And LinkedIn has certainly facilitated that!

Career management lessons:

  • Figure out where you can make the most impact with what you do.
  • Come up with a ‘checklist of skills’ to be the best in that field. Audit yourself – do you have all those skills or do you need to acquire them?
  • Test your ideas and, if something doesn’t work, don’t consider it a failure; learn from it.
  • (At this point it helps if you can make a huge pile of money from an IPO, but that’s not essential.)
  • Apply what you have learned.
  • Develop and maintain your professional brand (including LinkedIn profile!)

I leave the final comment to a quote from Hoffman: “Life is not like a chess plan. It’s more about what opportunities you find yourself facing and how you respond to them.”

Career success stories, Establishing career goals, General Career Management, The labour market, Uncovering opportunities

Ten careers that didn’t exist ten years ago

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This article at Carerbuilder.com isn’t a scietific survey, but it does make you think about how technology, social and environmental trends are shaping careers.

It contains an interesting example of a career shifter: the customer service rep who became a full-time blogger and more than doubled his salary!

And ten years ago, who’d have thought you could get a job as a Green Funeral Director or a Social Media Strategist?

Dom Sagolla, co-creator of Twitter, is also quoted as saying his success is down to his efforts to position himself at the intersection of two emerging new industries – iPhone apps and social media.

Nice work if you can get it! Rather than trying to predict the next big thing to get into, look for the convergence of two industries – the intersection is going to create a real hot spot and demand for people who can capitalise on it.

Career success stories, General Career Management

When getting fired turns out to be a good thing

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I have two small children so I have seen all the Pixar movies. I watched ‘The Pixar Story’ over Christmas out of a curiosity for how they make the films, and also learned something interesting about the career of John Lasseter, one of the co-founders.

John loved cartoons as a child, went on to study animation and even got a job as a sweeper at Disneyland. After winning awards for two short films he made at the California Institute of Arts, he got his dream job as an animator at Disney in April 1980.

The studio arranged a screening of Tron for employees and John was amazed by the potential for computer animation – especially being able to move the background by computer whilst animating characters by hand. The studio gave John his feature length directorial debut on a film called ‘The Brave Little Toaster’ using computer animation.

At the screening of the final cut, Disney’s CEO, who had remained stony-faced throughout, asked what a feature made entirely on computers would cost, to which John replied it would be about the same as a regular animated film. The CEO said the only reason to use computers would be if it made production faster or cheaper, and then walked out.

Five minutes later, John was summoned to his office where the CEO said to him, “Your project is now complete, so your employment at Disney is terminated.”

He was stunned and devastated. Colleagues admitted Disney just didn’t know what to do with him.

He was subsequently hired by Lucasfilm’s Computer Division, where the team of computer scientists went on to develop an imaging computer they named Pixar. Inspired by John’s vision of a computer animated feature, they went to George Lucas to pitch the idea, but he didn’t want to make the $30-$40m investment required.

Coincidentally, Steve Jobs at Apple had become aware of their work, and he suddenly found himself out of a job when the executives he’d hired to take Apple to the next level fired him. Steve Jobs then invested $10m in Pixar as it was spun out from Lucasfilm.

They did some interesting work to pay the bills, but were nowhere near raising the funds required for a feature film budget. Then the money started running out. Jobs was losing about $1m a year keeping Pixar running. Disney, having subsequently developed some painting and texturing software, tried to hire Lasseter back as a Director to help them make sense of this new medium. A Pixar colleague described John’s choice, “Does he go back to Disney as Director, or stay at his own company bordering on collapse?”

John decided to stay. Note to employers: treat your employees well when you are exiting them, because you never know when you’ll need to hire them back.

Instead, Disney commissioned Pixar to produce Toy Story, striking a deal with them so that Disney would provide distribution and marketing.

Toy Story

 

This arrangement served both companies well, and was extended to a 50/50 deal with Disney in 1995 when Pixar floated, but then relationships soured.

It was only when a new CEO came on board at Disney in 2005 that he saw the future of animated features lay in CGI and all the best people to do it were at Pixar.

In 2006, Disney paid $7.6bn to acquire Pixar and as part of the deal John Lasseter became Chief Creative Officer, overseeing all of Disney’s output, theme parks and attractions.

Career Management lessons:

When you’re career seemingly takes a turn for the worse, the ultimate outcome may be far better than you ever expected, but you just don’t know it yet. This is expressed by Steve Jobs, coincidentally, in his 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech , where he talks about “joining the dots backwards” (using his experience of getting fired from Apple and going on to become involved in Pixar as one example).

If you love what you do you will be able to find a path to pursue that love no matter what. John Lasseter’s ability to inspire the Lucasfilm team with his enthusiasm for an animated feature was instrumental in achieving that goal.

Don’t be surprised if a former employer seeks you out and attempts to woo you back. Evidence suggests that around 25% of people return to a former employer at some stage in their career. Just consider how that employer handled your departure and whether your values match with those they demonstrated when you left – if there’s a mismatch, going back might not be a good idea – even if it looks like an easy option.

Very few of us are going to start companies that we can sell for billions of dollars (or pounds) – but discovering what ‘your thing’ is and making it your life’s work is going to make your career extremely rewarding nonetheless.