Daily Endeavor Blog

What hiring managers use as your “resume” is changing. It’s becoming less backward-looking and more about the present. It’s not just where you’ve worked, it’s a deeper look into you. Very quickly, it’s becoming the conversations you’re in and what you have to say. If they can find you, the person considering you wants to know: what are you really into?

Why the Resume Exists

While most people think of resumes as something indispensable for job seekers, it’s in fact the hiring managers who initiated and have come to depend on them.

As originally conceived, the resume played a critical role for a hiring manager — a sorting mechanism for their time. The resume does not determine whether someone should be hired. The utility of a resume is as a filter. A resume answers whether a person should be considered — Is this person worth spending more time on?

The resume excels at being the quick look in the rear-view mirror. We all know it well — it’s a list of employment, usually full-time. Within that skeleton, there are three types of information that a hiring manager can use to sort people into worth-more-time or not.

• Area of work (subfield experience, functional expertise)
• Reputation of what you worked on (company, project)
• Results (numbers, measures)

In other words, resumes are a short-hand for the arc of a story. They answer in brief: What did you do? With who? How did it work out?

If you’re considering someone for a team, and you know nothing about them yet, it’s easy to see the utility of a resume. It provides an initial reference point for comparison. It can start to give a sense of patterns over time. It can begin to answer the amount of growth required of the person in order for them to thrive in the new role.

What Hiring Managers Really Want to Know

Hiring managers face two hard problems that resumes can’t wholly solve:

1. they need to discover talent, and
2. they need to distinguish between them once they’ve found them.

Since they’ve been around, resumes have always been necessary but not sufficient on both counts.

Besides the most well-known complaints (easy to spoof, keywords are grossly inadequate, they’re free to replicate so thousands can show up for an open job), resumes have always had structural limitations in the questions they can quickly answer. After getting a historical baseline, hiring managers have filled the gaps in other (time-intensive) ways, usually through interviews and references.

So if you were going to make a hiring manager’s job easier for them, let’s figure out: what else do they want to know? (Or better, put yourself in their shoes — what else would you want to know if you’re considering someone to join your team?)

Even more helpful than the potential hire’s full-time role 3 or 10 years ago, when distinguishing candidates TODAY it’s immensely helpful to know what they’re really into right now. Where someone is investing their attention now is the best proxy for what truly motivates them, and as a result, a more distinctive predictor of whether they might thrive in the specific role at hand.

Think: what is this person so into that they’d talk about it even if they weren’t getting paid? What’s something either they’re learning quickly or teach a lot about? Hiring managers are looking for a fast and reliable way to gauge a candidate’s intrinsic motivation.

Current genuine interest is not the only input for a hiring decision, but it’s a huge one. Current genuine interest fuels a person’s willingness to expend the real effort required to grow and get the hard work done. It also helps signal what else — people and insights — they can bring to the table.

Beyond the historical list that a resume provides, hiring managers want to know:

• What are you genuinely interested in?
• What have you learned about it lately?
• Who are you learning from (and who’s learning from you)?
• How fast do you learn? Is it superficial or is there clear-thinking that’s leading to a point of view?

The hiring manager faces the needle in the haystack problem — and if you want to be readily hired, part of your job is to help them solve it. They’re trying to find a very specific person for a very specific role. Put another way, once they find you, the person considering you for a job is trying to discover if what you’re really into is what they really need.

As a job seeker, your job is to help make your answers to these questions as easily discoverable as possible. Your resume, built for a different purpose in a different era, isn’t going to get you there. Here’s what will: showcasing what you know, a few sentences at a time, around a very specific job (i.e. in a way that makes it easy for hiring managers to find you).

Remember, hiring managers are awash in a sea of resumes. They’re trying to separate the wheat from the chaff — they want to discover the few bits you’ve said online that are relevant to their open role without wading through the noise of all the other conversations you’re in. They want to quickly see who’s sharp at being an analyst in management consulting or doing curriculum development for new teacher development.

This is by the way precisely how Daily Endeavor and our partners can help you. At Daily Endeavor you can showcase what you know.

The main question for you: what have you done recently to make your interests and insights discoverable for hiring managers with a very specific job in mind?

Daily Endeavor is a free online guide to jobs to help people figure out what they want to do next professionally. It’s the first step in the job search.

The website is a continually improving collection of job reviews that are collectively and publicly written by people who have had them. Of the three major stages job seekers pass through – What do I want to do next? Who do I know in that area? Who’s hiring now? – All the job boards, like CareerBuilder, The Ladders, and Monster, solve the third; LinkedIn and Facebook solve the second (though LinkedIn is growing to do a good job on more than that); and Daily Endeavor solves the first.

When most people are asked “What do you want to do next?” they respond with “What are my options?” They don’t want to know who’s hiring tomorrow, at least not as their first step. They want to understand the types of jobs that exist and which ones might be right for them.

This need, which was continually the headline in hundreds of client conversations at Endeavor Prep, is critical and unmet for nearly every student in business school, law school, graduate school, college, and increasingly high school. We originally thought this pain was primarily felt by students, but as the economy tanked and our average client age increased, we learned it’s also the central need for people switching types of work in their 30s and 40s, and even those starting their encore careers.

Because there’s no easy way to learn about 99% of the types of jobs that exist (e.g. Research in Strategy Management Consulting, or Co-Founder in Microinsurance), people do the best they can and fill the void with informational interviews. They try to get meetings with people they know who can explain a little bit about what they do.

Informational interviews are great, but of course have some real limitations if you want to learn about a lot of areas, especially if those areas are varied. Organizing one-on-one meetings is really time consuming for both people involved. And most of all, your potential to learn is limited by who you know.

We’re building the world’s largest set of do-it-yourself “informational interviews” online so everyone can quickly explore, vet and “follow” jobs and professional categories during their job search.

If you’re looking for a job, Daily Endeavor enables you to explore the universe of options even if you don’t know a lot of people. Our goal is to democratize access to careers — we want you to be able to learn about professions regardless of who you know.

There’s more to say and more to come. For now, go ahead and check out Daily Endeavor. It’s the first step to get you started in your next job.

In an interview with New Work City, Kaomi Goetz at WNYC makes the case this morning that “co-working” offers community to solo workers. I’d like to take the case even further. Coworking can be a literal life preserver, not just for entrepreneurs or freelance contractors, but also anyone actively conducting a job search.

As Dan Gilbert points out on This Emotional Life, one of the root requirements for happiness is connection with other people. We are not a solo species. And yet one of the dark spots shared by starting a company, working freelance and navigating a professional transition is the swift and surgical removal of a daily flow of social interaction.

Coworking offers an alternative to the social starvation. Like the barcamp movement, coworking recognizes that the expertise you seek is sometimes in the room around you. Coworking spaces allow individuals pursuing their own path to also fill their work life with people.

Free Agent Nation

Over 10 years ago, Daniel Pink wrote a seminal piece in Fast Company that chronicled more and more people beginning to work on their own terms and schedule. The widespread web enabled this shift to start to occur.

By the early 00′s, lightweight, inexpensive tools and web services (e.g. weblogs, wikis, skype) started to kick in to make working remotely even easier. Bootstrapping new companies began finding the best people wherever they lived and happily funded bandwidth instead of office space. For years at Socialtext well over 70% of the company, including myself, lived thousands of miles away from our High Street home in Palo Alto.

With the rise in remote working came the rise of solitude. When Brad Neuberg, Chris Messina and Tara Hunt began promoting coworking a few years back, they gave voice, and a beginning antidote, to working alone. Check out the video for more backstory.

Job Search is Social

One of the most difficult parts of making a professional transition is keeping your social game fresh. Conversation is at the heart of any job and any job search. When you’re working, there’s a constant stream of conversations every day. When you’re in between jobs, the stream can become a trickle.

Consider becoming a member at a coworking space to keep yourself out of the social cave. Most have lite plans where you can go once per week or a few hours per month. The routine of getting up, going to the office and working at a desk can help the search feel more like an explicit project you’re undertaking (which it is). Given how most opportunities come from other people’s networks, you’re likely to meet new people that can help, if not directly meet people who are hiring.

Most importantly, working somewhere consistently, even if on a limited basis, will give you the opportunity to have real conversations with people. This is the most valuable experience of all to keep active.

As Peter Chislett, Deputy Mayor of New Work City says, “it’s not the space, it’s the community. It’s the connection with other people.” I believe it.

Coworking resources

For other coworking spaces, check out:

• Coworking for a global listing

• New Work City

• HubSF

• Hub Berkeley

• The Network Hub in Vancouver

• Centre for Social Innovation in Toronto

• Affinity Lab in DC

• Conjunctured in Austin

• C3/Cambridge Coworking Center

Last week there were a few particularly intense and nourishing days moving between events — Mark Hurst’s Good Experience Live (GEL) Thur/Fri, then LaidOffCamp NY‘s Friday night panel and full event on Saturday where I had a great time MC’g both, followed by an Endeavor Prep Bootcamp we ran on Sunday. It was 4 days of people investing in what’s next.

At GEL, Scott Heiferman kicked off with an upbeat talk about how he sees people increasingly turning their backs on desperate marketing, and instead turning toward each other, much like we did before industrialization creeped in to most corners of life last century. Scott captured the idea in a poignant phrase:

Instead of DIY, it’s increasingly DIO

Instead of do-it-yourself, it’s increasingly do-it-ourselves. His idea is right on. In my experience when people want to do anything that’s hard or truly new, it never happens alone. Instead of the lore of the lone genius in the tower, there’s always a circle, a team, a network, a community of supporters and promoters that are co-creating along the way.

This idea became the theme for me throughout the weekend, underscored especially by the hundreds who showed up for LaidOffCamp. Attendees with expertise to share led 30 sessions throughout Saturday. It was DIO in action. Not only did a small group of us self-organize to produce the event, a much larger group came to breathe life into it. I’m glad Chris Hutchins was able to make it too, to see what he’s spawned.

For a piece of the events, here’s Chris Russell’s (JobRadio.FM, Secrets of the Job Hunt) podcast of a session I moderated with Deb Berman, Dr Doug Hirshorn, and Matt Wallaert:

Some people crave routine, others feel suffocated by it. Different periods in life demand different routines. I can remember the feeling in college when I finally nailed the routine that allowed me to get everything done I wanted to and at the same time enjoy life. Once in stride, it feels great. Foraging however during a transition to a new schedule can be frustrating. I’m still in one of those transition periods now.

Christine Huang over at PSFK pointed me to Daily Routines, an archeological dig of how artists and others construct their days. While these are anecdotal for but one period of life for some of these folks, they’re an interesting read nonetheless. At the time, Toni Morrison preferred early mornings for prime thinking time because she wasn’t on Mom duty yet. Franz Kafka was all about the night.

A few to check out:

• Thomas Friedman

• George W. Bush

• Joseph Campbell

• Charles Darwin

• Toni Morrison

• Franz Kafka

• John Grisham

• Ernest Hemingway

If you’re been through a layoff, looking for a job, and looking to connect with other past employees, head over to Socialtext. They’re making their wiki service available for free as an impromptu alumni network for companies that have had deep cuts (e.g. 5%). It’s only hours old and already PeopleSoft, DivX and Yahoo have started to self-organize.

World 2, come in. World 2, this is World 1, do you read me?

Jessica Hagy has the talent to distill. Like a lot of it.

She unfurled a beauty yesterday that nails the main correlate to a sense of entitlement: disappointment. High expectations are good. Expectations of guarantees are more than risky; they’re guaranteed to come up short.

We’ve all known a few people who, when they finish school, say “Ok world, I’ve slogged it out, now drop off all the riches right into my lap and be off with you.” Armchair critics will respond with “too self-involved” or some other quick explanation.

Sure there are always one or two overly entitled people who need a Reality Check, but the vast majority of people are following perfectly healthy self-interest based on what they know. What looks like entitlement in many cases, may in fact be individuals trying to follow their own path the best they understand it.

Straddling two worlds

Graduates are in one of the few life positions (the other is probably before/after having kids), where they’ve mastered one world and are on the precipice of a new, highly different one — one they know very little about. How could they? They haven’t lived in yet.

When transitioning from one world to the next it’s easy to overestimate how valued your experience will be. You have great experience, it’s valuable. Rather, the calibration is difficult, especially given all the cues going on. After all, you’ve just accomplished every academic task set in front of you for 20 years, you’re at the top. That’s a huge achievement and milestone, and everyone around is saying so (and they’re right).

It’s also easy to underestimate the enormous volume of others (millions) who headed off into World Two each year before this one. They too are looking for spots, but they haven’t been on campus for a year or more, so they’re not on the radar.

It’s not your fault. It’s the nature of the transition, or more specifically, the nature of living apart. The mis-estimations are due a complete lack of mixing between the two worlds. For example, I truly don’t know what it’s like to be a parent because I haven’t been one yet.

When combined, these two — mis-calibrating how some hiring managers may view you and underestimating the large number of others vying for similar spots — can look a lot like entitlement. But I don’t think they are. They’re natural perceptions that can arise in anyone when heading from one world to the next.

This brings us back to Jessica’s graph. She’s right. When there’s real sense of entitlement, disappointment reigns. Yet even when there’s not entitlement at play, but instead people honestly trying to negotiate the very large college to career transition, there’s still often a big set up for disappointment.

Let’s change that.