The Emerging Professional

From the Round Table to the Tweet?

In college, I was an English major, a "worthy procrastinator," and avoided coffee like the plague. These three characteristics led me to stay up well past my bedtime working on almost due papers. I'd stare at my screen bleary eyed and make desperate attempts to draw parallels between two (often disparate) or three characters or events. The results were mostly good (with the exception of a disastrous paper in which I tried to compare the AIDS virus to a sports metaphor without appropriate knowledge of either); the tendency to seek connections between old and new became ingrained.

I still seek to compare and connect much of what I see with what I've read about or observed before.

Last week, I attended the New York "Twestival," a charity event and gathering of Twitter users and an off-off Broadway play. While I have no paper deadline in sight, I still couldn't help but see a potential connection worthy of public debate:

Is Twitter the millennial equivalent of the Algonquin Round Table?

As you may know, back in the 1920's, a group of writers, actors, critics and wits met daily for quips, lunch, and back stabs at a round table in Manhattan's Algonquin Hotel. Regular attendees included Dorothy Parker, New Yorker founder Harold Ross, and Robert Benchley. Many of the members wrote about their adventures in newspaper columns published across the country, and they became famous for their insights.

As I gazed upon the hundreds of "Twitterati" at the Twestival, I couldn't help but wonder if we're on the cusp of a new kind of Round Table: people are rapidly becoming "micro-famous" for real-time, sometimes insightful, often thought-provoking messages of 140 characters or less. Will this, in the future, have the same type of lasting legacy as the Round Table that brought us the New Yorker and oft quoted Dorothy Parker gems such as "Men never make passes at girls who wear glasses?"

If you are participating in this brave new Web 2.0 world, how you choose to share your knowledge is entirely up to you. Do you see your status updates on Twitter or Facebook as the equivalent of writing a newspaper article?  Should you guard your privacy and hold your tongue? We'll cover these and other issues in upcoming posts.

I think some caution is warranted: Who hasn't heard of the employer that made a decision to axe a prospective or current employee based on what was found online? But I'd love to hear your perspective--especially as it relates to Facebook's recent change in membership agreements. Facebook now has the right to "freely use anything people add to the website even after members delete material or close accounts."

Will you keep your fingers quiet, be your own censor, or rush head-first into this brave new world?

I'm on the edge of my seat.

Send (or Techtiquette Part II)

I don't love writing posts on "what you must do" topics. I hate to feel like I'm on a soapbox. And sometimes I wish I could get over my insistence on why spelling remains in style. But I think this is really important, and if you do this well--you can stand out.

If you're like me, you think nothing of sending 30-50 e-mails a day. You've probably cracked jokes about your ability to send e-mail in your sleep.

Don't. Or at least not until you read this gem: Send: Why People E-Mail So Badly & How to Do It Better

Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence (ever heard of "marshmellow experiment" for assessing smarts?) describes this gem by David Shipley & Will Schwalbe as the Elements of Style for the digital age.

Ever witnessed a career gone bad as the result of a simple e-mail? I can still remember a senior-level executive wandering down the hall at work asking "how do I take the 'reply all?' command back?" And the college senior who was so hurt by not getting invited to an interview that he wrote the recruiter to say that it was "their loss." (As it turned out, he suffered a bigger one: the company forwarded his message to a network of other recruiters--and he was shut out of campus interviews he'd worked towards for years.)

But beyond the negatives, Send provides invaluable tips on e-mail etiquette: how to title your messages, how to make the best use of a CC or a blind CC, and how to ensure that they will be read.

If you don't have time to buy the book, check out [email protected] and have a look at their e-mail Etiquette 101 tips...and stay tuned. Coming soon: When to send an e-mail, and when to pick up the phone or seek out face time--advice from a Google Exec.

To your success,
Chandlee

Getting Hired at a Start-Up: How to Be More than Lucky

If you are in the market for a new job and the Fortune 500 crowd isn’t appealing—or available,
you may want to consider a start-up.

The speed and intensity of start-ups are appealing to many job candidates. Interns and entry-level hires often extol the common virtues of working in an early-stage company: you get to assume diverse functional responsibilities, you are valued for your ability to take initiative and figure things out on your own, and you are able to work closely with senior leadership from the get-go.

That being said, the same organizational attributes that make a start-up sexy can often make it difficult to get hired in the first place: hiring is often placed on the back burner simply because it takes too long—and there isn’t enough time to move through the process.

Several years ago, I was a career counselor at the University of Pennsylvania and received a unique first-hand glimpse at the hiring process from a Wharton School alum who had just received generous angel funding. When asked about his hiring process, this was his response,

When we first started we got some great press in major news outlets and we received an enormous amount of resumes which we just stacked up—the pile grew to over two feet. One day, we were finally ready to interview candidates and I said to my partner, ‘How do we make the first cut? What should we look for?’

He grinned at me, walked over to the pile and said, ‘I have a minimum criterion for all of our candidates: they all have to have one thing in common. They have to be lucky.’

He pulled out two inches of resumes, and threw away the remaining ones. And that is how we started the hiring process.

My take-away from this anecdote: there is less uniformity in the hiring process in a start-up environment, particularly as the Federal reporting requirements for employers with a small number of employees are less stringent than in large organizations.

If you want to work in a start-up, you’ll want to be more than lucky—you need to be noticed and in the right place at the right time. Here are three tips to get started:

1. Companies don’t know how interested you are until you tell them. Learn all you can about what the company is doing and mention your interest when you apply.
2. Make it easy for a company to hire you—i.e. if you have a contact within the organization, submit your materials to that person—but also monitor the “careers” website of the organization and submit your materials that way. (This streamlines the process for them, and speeds up the hiring process).
3. Be persistent in the follow-up—and be prepared to get started if an opportunity becomes available.

(Note: These tips are transferable, and can be used in the general job search as well.)

Making Generational Stereotypes Work for You

Make no mistake about it: life on Wall Street may never be the same after the events of recent weeks--and your career may be affected by the trickle-down effects of this change in the American landscape.

If you are seeking a job in this market, be patient and cautiously optimistic - employers across multiple sectors still need employees; you'll just need to put deliberate effort into researching opportunities and positioning yourself for hire. The good news: there are great ways to leverage technology so that you can conduct an efficient and effective job search. I'll be sharing many of these strategies with you in the coming days, but today, I'd like to focus on "stereotypes."

Demographers, trend setters, and the press love to talk about generational characteristics by making use of stereotypes. Today, an enormous amount of press attention has been given to analyzing and understanding millennials; here's one press release comparing Gen Y attitudes on work to that of Baby Boomers circa 1982.

I feel particularly sensitive to coverage of Gen Y based on experience as a Gen X'er. I too, graduated from college in the shadow of an economic downturn. Reality Bites was the movie of the day, and the press had a field day characterizing "Gen X" as a unilateral group of slackers. I recall sitting in the lunchroom at my first job in DC with my colleagues: we took turns acting angry and disaffected and mocking Saturday Night Live: "I'm angry, I'm just really angry," one person would say. "I don't know why, I just am. Everything makes me angry." We laughed, and then we went back to work. In reality, we were happy--unless we had to travel for work and give away our Nirvana tickets. We worked hard to prove to our employers that we weren't like the stereotypes, and we were rewarded when our organization moved to a generous employee incentive plan with quarterly bonuses.

While my colleagues and I chose to work hard to avoid being compared to our generation, it's easier to make it work for you.

Over at Fast Company, my friend Lindsey Pollak discusses "Why Your Company Needs Millennials: 5 Reasons to Love Gen Y Workers." Lindsey does a great job of addressing stereotypes and providing tips on how many of the negative buzz frequently used to label millennials can--and should--be reframed in a  positive context. My suggestions: read and re-purpose her suggestions for marketing your own skills--or counteracting complaints about "your generation."

As for myself, I can only say my life has been vastly improved by using the tools of the millennial trade: I'm off to hop on Facebook and continue planning my college reunion weekend with friends--given that we've been following each other's profile updates, playing games with one another and sharing pictures for months...there will be less "reunion stigma" than there was five years ago. I can't wait--especially since my college friends aren't yet into Twitter and we won't be texting each other to say, "She wore what?!"