A number of my friends of long standing and colleagues are looking for jobs. (Friends of long standing is another way to say old friends without calling them old They all have over 20 years of experience. The way they used to find jobs–through recruiters–is not working. Sure, recruiters have some openings, but most organizations are not advertising and not using recruiters even for senior-level jobs.
Here’s what I know about:
Network with everyone you know. Don’t forget school and previous employer alumni groups.
Make sure you are on the job boards suitable for your potential positions.
See if any local or national associations or user groups have job boards you can use.
Use social media to connect with people.
I’m sure there are more options. Do you have any ideas? My friends and colleagues would like to know. Please comment. Thanks.
So the economy isn’t so hot right now and you’re looking for a new job. Not the easiest of circumstances. You’re calling people to network. You’ve updated your resume. Maybe you’ve even called me. I looked for you on LinkedIn, but I can’t find you because your name is Tom Smith and there are several other people with your name in my area, you all do similar work, and each of you have 10 or 12 connections, and I can’t tell which one is you.
Dear colleague: Please fill in your LinkedIn profile. Please fill in your FaceBook profile. Please fill in any profile on any social media network. How can I network with you if I can’t find you?
Once you’ve filled in your profile, add some people. I can’t believe you’ve been working for 10, 20, or 30 years and have 10 people as connections. You don’t have to be me–I’m a promiscuous networker . But, please, add people who are your colleagues. You can add people with whom you have social relationships. You can add your family. (Do you think I’m not going to add my daughters when they graduate from college?) You can add all your friends from college, even if you haven’t talked to them in 20 years. (What a great way to network, catching up with college friends. You think they don’t know about jobs?? Sure they do.)
I don’t care how old you are. I don’t care that you haven’t thought about social media before. If you are unemployed, you have a responsibility to make it easier to network with people to find that next job. Your responsibilities:
Make it easy for people to find you online, at least at social media outlets
Help people know which Tom Smith you are
Listen to your children about how to use the Internet
I want to help my friends find jobs. I want to help acquaintances. But I can’t help if I can’t find you. Yes, call. Yes, send resumes. Yes, use recruiters. But for heaven’s sake, use social media. Use it, don’t just play with it.
One of the nice things about the social networking sites such as LinkedIn, is that they allow me to reconnect with people I worked with years ago. I recently re-met a colleague from my undergraduate days, and a colleague I worked with 25 years ago.
I mentioned to one of these colleagues’ peers that I’d know this person for over 30 years. His response was, “You don’t look old enough to retire.” !!!! My silent response: I’ve got news for you, buddy: people who start to work at 22, work for 43 years if they retire at 65. Maybe you missed addition in elementary school.
What I actually said was, “I’m not. Hey, with one in college and one soon to be, Mark and I may never retire. Even if I was ‘old enough to retire,’ why would I retire when I’m still learning and having fun?”
If this had been the only couple of conversations about ageism over the last couple of months, maybe I could ignore it. But when I met a colleague of long-standing (an old friend) at a conference, his hair was dark brown again. I asked him why. “I’d been passed over for a promotion to the C-level, so before I started my new job search, I dyed my hair to look younger.” Another C-level colleague asked me to explain to his staff we’d known each other for a few years, not the 15 years we’ve actually known each other and worked together.
Once I have more than one hand’s worth of data, including, Age and Agile Are Orthogonal, I decided I wasn’t nuts about this, and people in our industry are discriminating about people over 40 or 50 or 60. (Until they meet me
HR folks: you and I know it’s illegal. Hiring managers, not only is it illegal to discriminate based on age, it automatically removes people from your consideration who may turn out to be some of the best employees you can hire. Some benefits of hiring a mature candidate can be:
With any luck, the candidate has emotional maturity. That makes the candidate more able to ease into a team.
More often, I see more mature candidates who are happy where they are. They don’t want your job. They don’t want to backstab you to get ahead. They want a reasonable job for a reasonable pay. Moving up the ladder makes no sense to them.
They want to do good work, and they know what that is.
They know how to pace themselves.
They know (more than young candidates) how to evaluate options and not just pick the first option that appears.
Not all mature candidates are perfect. I’m certainly generalizing here. But let’s be clear: Turning 30 or 40 or 50 or 60 does not prevent someone from being a great employee. Will you have trouble getting that person to work a lot of overtime? I hope so–lots of overtime means lots of mistakes. Will you get someone who may have more adaptability? I hope so. Will you get someone who doesn’t have to be taught what a good job is? I hope so. I can’t guarantee these things, but in my experience, a more mature candidate can be a great employee.
Don’t discriminate based on age or what you think the person requires for salary. At least do a phone screen. You won’t be able to hire someone cheap to work all hours, but remember, you get what you pay for. Don’t rule a candidate out because you saw the date he or she graduated from university. You might get someone with one year of experience many times, see What’s a Year of Experience? But you might just find a great candidate who can help your team jell and help create a great product. Ageism is not helpful. Don’t help make it part of our industry.
Last week, I was working with a client in the Netherlands, talking about how to hire for an agile team. We started discussing how the management team reviews resumes. One of the managers said he looked for people under 40, because otherwise the candidate was “too old.”Well, I past 40 a long time ago, so I asked him how old he thought I was. (Yes, it was unfair and a trick question, because no man ever answers either “does this make my hips look fat” or “how old am I?” honestly.) However, the question did help him rethink his assumptions.I explained that when I started working 30 years ago, we had to test as we went along–we had no testers. If we didn’t want to manually run tests, we built regression test suites. We obtained review on every work product. We made sure our work didn’t break what was already there–every day. We had to. The costs of making defects were too high to not use the preventative ideas that the agile community has adopted.When you’re hiring for an agile team, the real question is: Can the candidate work in an agile way–the way your team works? It doesn’t matter how old the candidate is. It only matters if the candidate is willing to create chunks of working product, or is willing to learn how.
They all have over 20 years of experience. The way they used to find jobs–through recruiters–is not working. Sure, recruiters have some openings, but most organizations are not advertising and not using recruiters even for senior-level jobs.