Three articles popped into my inbox this morning that are worth a read if you’re a jobseeker or if you’re in HR:

U.S. Jobseekers Exceed Openings by Record Ratio (NYTimes)

This chart pretty much sums it up. What it makes me think is how important having an inside connection is - with all those people applying for every job, you need some kind of edge - and a personal recommendation is one of the strongest advantages you can muster.

Career Couch - Dissecting Why You Were Passed Over for a Promotion (NYTimes)

The take-away here? Don’t be defensive. Useful tips on how to manage the situation and leverage it to improve your chances for being promoted next time around.

Economic Downturn Leading to Decline in Employee Commitment, Morale, Watson Wyatt/WorldatWork Survey Finds Workers Expecting Decline in Value of Rewards Programs

Even those who are in jobs currently are feeling the stress of the downturn. The good news? People who feel they’re working for an ethical, sustainable company tend to feel more commitment to the company and purpose, and are more likely to stay within a company and recommend their friends. More incentive for companies to pursue CSR and sustainability agendas!

Buried in Time Magazine’s September 21 issue, whose lead story was “Out of Work in America” (sigh…), is a feature section on service in America. The section includes a few interesting articles - such as “The Responsibility Revolution” about responsible consumers, “25 Responsibility Pioneers” (which includes a number of our past and present clients), and an interview with President Obama and Michelle Obama around the concept of service in the United States.

While a lot of the content in there and initiatives featured are not new news to people who’ve been in this space for awhile, we take it as a heartening sign that these great companies - RecycleBank, Interface, CleanFish, among others - are getting national mainstream attention.

Another interesting theme that runs throughout is the idea of bringing public responsibility and “citizenship” back to the fore - Time’s poll reported that 68% of respondents thought most Americans do not live up to their responsibilities as citizens, 75% would pay $2000 more to buy a car that gets better gas mileage, and 46% think teh government should require stores to charge for plastic bags in order to encourage use of reusable bags.

This is, of course, all well and good, and more evidence of a heartening trend towards social responsibility at large. We just have to hope that people will actually go out of their way to do and pay for these things. Thomas Friedman’s 2007 editorial on Generation Q comes to mind- how millennials are replacing online activism and mouse-clicking with actual committed activism. There’s a lot to act out on and communicate to businesses and decision-makers - it’s on all of us to make sure we’re not just sitting back and hoping someone else will buy organic or lobby their company to initiate greener practices.

All in all, worth a read - if mostly for the inspiration from the 25 Responsibility Pioneers who’ve taken their beliefs to heart and to business to try to offer consumers more responsible options.

Image: Time Magazine

This morning, my brother sent along this article on the importance of emotional intelligence as a hiring criterion - though it’s 3 years old, the take-aways hold more true than ever.

Demonstrating that you are emotionally intelligent will go a long way towards lowering the barriers between you and the hiring manager - if they feel you are someone they can trust and connect with on a personal level, they are much more likely to hire you. The opposite is also true - coming across as rude, unreliable, or disengaged will likely give the hiring manager an excuse to cut you loose from the process.

The article’s guidelines for demonstrating your EQ are below - if you’re interested in more reading, check out the class “Emotional Intelligence” by Daniel Goleman (he also just put out a new book, Ecological Intelligence).

Read the full article: `Emotional intelligence’ a new hiring criterion
By Erica Noonan, Globe Staff  | September 10, 2006

Pay attention to key EQ buzzwords in the job description, (“innovative,” “flexible,” and “friendly,” for example) and incorporate them into your cover letter and resume.

Know yourself, and learn everything possible about the values and culture of the company you hope to work for. “It’s not emotionally intelligent to force yourself into an office culture where you won’t be happy,” said Edelson.

Demonstrate reliability and trustworthiness. One of Edelson’s favorite stories is about a 23-year-old woman who wrecked her car en route to an interview for a sales position at a pharmaceutical company. Instead of being a no-show, she called and explained the situation, and got a ride to the interview. “She was determined to show them she was reliable and would show up when she said she would,” said Edelson. (Impressed, the firm hired her on the spot.)

Never fib about anything. Don’t say you’re fluent in Spanish when you haven’t spoken a word since high school. Assess your skills realistically, but follow with a pledge to improve quickly if the job requires proficiency.

Send a thank you note to show off your good manners, another component of EQ. Handwritten, via snail mail.

A recent NYTimes article highlighted yet another dark side of the recession -”Job Search Firms: Big Pitches and Fees, Few Jobs” explained how companies are trying to exploit the panic jobseekers are feeling with scams and offers to “guarantee” a job for a chunk of money.

What these companies are targeting is people’s desire to find a job immediately - which makes a lot of sense, given that bills need to get paid.

In the green sector, there are a lot of factors contributing to the reality that green jobs growth is happening by fits and starts and is hard to predict: companies are seeing funding wash in and out, start-ups that are hitting it big or failing to meet expectations, and stimulus funding is creating buzz.

As we’ve seen it in recent months, jobs in the green space are being landed by some combination of strategic searching, serious networking, inside connections, and a lot of serendipity. It’s a fight against entropy, and the results in terms of who’s getting jobs are, at times, essentially random.

There’s no guarantee for a job right away, but folks who are best preparing themselves are those who are getting education, volunteering, networking,* and trusting that in the coming months, things will pick up and the promise of green jobs will become more of a reality. Hang in there!

* Some upcoming networking opportunities - check out our Partners page for more info:

• RMI2009 - BGT members get a 10% discount, or just check out RMIQ, an evening networking/mingling event here in San Francisco.
• West Coast Green - BGT members get a 20% discount on full pass. We’re sponsoring the Green Jobs Pavilion - come find us on the Expo floor!

We’ve recently had a couple of marketing/sales positions come up in solar, and were amazed by how many candidates came in. For one of the positions, we had nearly 200 people apply within 72 hours of posting the position.

Clearly, differentiation in this space is really important. Having experience in and expertise in solar will automatically bump you up to the top of the bunch when so many people are applying.

A first step in that direction: Check out the website of Intersolar, “the most diverse international business-to-business trade show in the United States for the global solar industry.” Intersolar happened a few weeks ago here in San Francisco, and featured 444 different exhibitors, 17,000 trade visitors, and 170 speakers.

If you want to get oriented in the solar space, exploring the conference’s website is a great place to start. They’ve posted video from the event, an event directory and there’s event a job board.

From the site, create a list of target companies that interested you in some way. Find them on LinkedIn. Who’s working in the role that you’d want to be in? What’s their educational and work background? Which associations are they part of? Are you connected to anyone who’s there? Start to create a profile of who’s currently in these jobs … and then start working towards getting those qualifications yourself!

Jobseeking can be a lonely, self-centered process.  People often sit alone day after day, slogging through job boards, online applications and career fairs where the continual refrain is “apply through our site.”  It’s easy to start to feel like they are constantly asking favors of friends and friends-of-friends to connect them to organizations who may or may not be hiring. Highly-qualified candidates begin to question whether they do indeed have much to offer since rejection, or even worse silence, seems to indicate otherwise.  If you fall into this category, please remember that it is an extremely challenging time to be looking for a job - be it green or otherwise!

Amidst all the statistics about skyrocketing unemployment and mass layoffs, the story that is often missing is the psychological toll brought on by a prolonged job search in a bad economy.  Jobseekers feel powerless, that their skills aren’t valued, and that their voices aren’t being heard.  As a career coach at Bright Green Talent, I have seen this time and again with the most impressive people you can imagine.

One of the most important messages I try to convey is this: Just as critical to a successful job search as resume polishing, cover letter writing and networking is finding ways to empower yourself.

The best way to do this can sometimes seem counter intuitive but is tried and true — helping others.  Rather than asking all of your contacts for connections, help another jobseeker find career opportunities.  Join a mentoring network through your alumni association or nonprofits groups such as Upwardly Global.  Find a volunteer project where you can contribute your unique skills to help an organization grow.  Join Net Impact and take on a leadership role in your local chapter.

I should emphasize that this is not an argument for creating good karma.  It is because the simple act of helping in and of itself is a way to move yourself in the right direction - from helpless to helper.  This action has a variety of benefits that have been studied at length within positive psychology but when it comes down to it, we feel better about ourselves when we help other people.  If you are a jobseeker, it is critical to understand that this will not only help you cope after long days of seemingly wasted time, but will also keep you articulate and sharp for when you get a chance to ‘pitch yourself’ in an interview or networking event.

For our own part at Bright Green Talent, we’re always trying to find ways to help our social and environmental impact reach around the world to the places where it’s needed most.  We recently launched a campaign in which, for every 50 resumes that are registered with us, we’ll sponsor the education of a child in Madagascar for one year.  Yes, having more resumes on hand helps us place people into meaningful careers with environmentally-minded organizations more quickly — recruiting is, to some extent, simply a matter of being able to find the right people at the right time.

Beyond that, we believe this campaign plays into the concept of empowering jobseekers to feel that they’re part of a larger movement of good work. Education - both about environmental issues and to promote economic security and development - is key to promoting stewardship of the world’s natural resources. Spreading education and opportunity to others, is one of the most important tasks we can take on whether employed or not.

So if you are a jobseeker, find ways to pay it forward.  Your actions are more powerful than you can ever know both for the receiver and for yourself!

Christina Gilyutin, Bright Green Talent’s Director of Development and Chief Career Counselor, attended Stanford University before heading over to the University of Michigan’s Erb Institute of Global Sustainable Enterprise, where she earned a joint MBA/MS in Natural Resources and Environment.

From Net Impact SF’s site, in regards to last week’s green jobs event:

Penned by Carolyn

Watching this one minute video review of the energy bill in the House, one word resonates again and again: jobs. The potential for job creation in moving towards a clean energy future has become a rallying cry for proponents of the Waxman-Markey Bill — because who can argue with job creation when unemployment has officially hit 9.5% nationally?

In the past couple weeks, the Labor Department announced $500 million in grants for green jobs training programs. States and cities have also started to distribute stimulus dollars for training programs. If you’re interested in who’s getting funding and how, sign up for updates from Green for All — they’ve been giving a number of conference calls to keep folks in the loop and share information nationally about training programs. Most of the money that’s being doled out focuses on helping blue-collar workers transition into the green economy — providing “pathways out of poverty” as the nation undergoes energy retrofits, solar system installation, and more.

But some concerns remain. Yesterday, the New York Times brought into question the effectiveness of retraining programs in giving trainees a leg up in the job search. As the Times wrote, “a little-noticed study the Labor Department released several months ago found that the benefits of the biggest federal job training program were ’small or nonexistent’ for laid-off workers. It showed little difference in earnings and the chances of being rehired between laid-off people who had been retrained and those who had not.”

Hopefully, the green jobs training programs will avoid the pitfalls that have led to the concerns raised by the NYT article, and will lend a hand to folks from all backgrounds and work histories — we hear from a lot of people who are looking to transfer technical skill sets and haven’t yet found a clear pathway in helping them do so. We have to believe that, with all the energy and enthusiasm focused on the green sector right now, there couldn’t be a better moment for these programs to succeed in training the next generation of environmental leaders.

To that end, we’ll continue to provide advice and resources to our jobseekers (keep an eye out for Bright Green Seminars starting in the next couple months), and we’ll support our partner Solar Richmond as they seek stimulus funding to support their amazing solar installation training program.

Stay tuned… more exciting developments are surely on the way.

Penned by Carolyn

As companies have emerged from recession-induced hibernation, shaken off hiring freezes, and started to cautiously advertise job openings again, they’ve found an entirely different landscape than when they did their last round of recruiting.

Jobseekers who’ve been haunting job boards for months have started to dive on any vacancy that they come across. Companies are seeing floods of barely-if-at-all qualified resumes come through and have found themselves trying to tackle the hiring process when they’re still hesitant about hiring, understaffed in their HR and other departments, and with vastly reduced recruiting budgets.

We speak with hundreds of candidates each week who’ve been on the other side of this stunted hiring process — most have sent in a resume and never heard back, and a few have made it through up to 8 rounds of interviews before the company decides they’re not ready to hire.

Here are a few symptoms and solutions for making the hiring process run more smoothly in this economy, and for ensuring that bridges aren’t burned between high-quality candidates who might still be interested in a company when the economy picks up.

1. The Mountain of Resumes
The problem: Companies are getting swamped with resumes every time a job is posted. Jobseekers whose background is totally irrelevant to the job description are sending in resumes because they’re desperate and “it’s worth a shot.”

The outcome: Increased time spent on reading through resumes, decreased percentage of quality applicants, and a strain on those in charge of the hiring process (HR and recruiters). Those who are high-quality, relevant candidates are wondering why they’re never contacted and start to form negative perceptions of the company. More people call up demanding to know what’s happened to their resume. Lots of time and energy is wasted.

Solutions:

• Write a tighter job description that gets into the nitty-gritty specifics of what a candidate has to have done (not “could do”) in order to qualify for an interview. Some applicant tracking systems allow you to create these applications online and will sort the responses according to whether the job seeker fits your description — this will automatically sort the “best fits” to the top where you can read them and get back to them promptly.
• Require more documents for your application — such as a cover letter, two writing samples and a resume, or a couple mini-essay questions built into your website application. Creating a slightly higher bar will make jobseekers reconsider as they
  “spam” out their resume — and as people are asked to communicate why they’re a good fit for the specific job, they’ll make your determination easier as you read through their application.
• Encourage employees to use their networks to get referrals. A lot of companies are hiring quietly right now without posting a public job description simply due to lack of time and money to put towards a full-blown process.
• Hire a third-party recruiter to read through all the resumes and present you with the strongest fits.

2. The Lack of Communication
The problem: We often joke with our candidates that applying for jobs online seems like dropping a resume into a black hole — unfortunately, this joke has lost some humor in recent months as the majority of our candidates say they have 10+ applications out that they’ve never heard any indication on.

The outcome: Again, bitterness. Candidates pin the unresponsive company as lacking humanity or basic etiquette and spread that impression. Won’t apply for positions in the future because they feel like their application is falling on deaf ears.

Solutions:

• Reject people, early and often. After meeting lots of folks who’ve told us they applied online for one of our positions and never heard back, we’ve started a strict policy of rejection when we don’t see a fit for a role. We go through every few weeks or month and shoot a batch note to the candidates we’ve reviewed and deemed not a fit to let them know that their qualifications aren’t quite right. You wouldn’t believe how appreciative people are to just know what their status is — they often thank us for rejecting them. If they’re talented and just not right for this role, they’re more likely to keep applying for other positions because they know it’s a dialogue and not a black hole.
• If you don’t want to send a note every few weeks, at least send a blast to all applicants when the position has been filled to close the loop.
• For less personalized updates, have your CEO or someone in the company write the occasional blog post on the state of the hiring process, whatever it may be — still looking, reviewing applications, rethinking the role.

3. Dragging Out the Hiring Process
The problem: Candidates are telling us that they’ve been through 5, 6, 7 rounds of interviews with an organization before being told they’re not the right fit — or worse, a couple have simply just never heard back from the company after such extended dialogue.

The outcome: We know that companies are unsure of budgets and anxious to actually take a step towards growing out their teams, but the risks of these messy processes are serious.

Candidates get very emotionally tied up in the prospect of potentially getting an offer, and the more they get to know everyone in the office, they more angry and hurt they are when after several months of interviewing, they’re turned down or told the company has decided not to fill the position. Your champions - people so passionate about your company that they wanted to work for you - may now perceive your company as disorganized and unclear on goals. Word from the disenchanted interviewee spreads, and the negative effects on brand can be serious. You may also inadvertently lose great candidates because you can’t get your act together - and it will take time and resources to woo them back after they’ have a bad experience.

The solution:

• Figure out if you are in a place to hire. Then check twice. Do you have the money for salary? Is it a priority for the company, or do you just want to see who’s out there?
• Sit down with your team ahead of time and carefully design the metrics against which you’ll measure candidates. Clearly define the hiring process- who candidates will talk to, for how long, in what context, and in what order. Set deadlines, and do your best to meet them.

Penned by Carolyn

We recently surveyed 430 jobseekers who are interested in moving into the green sector. A couple of the statistics from our results stand out:

• 50% of respondents are currently unemployed
• 61% have a Master’s or PhD
• 40% have an annual income higher than $80k; 24% have an annual income higher than $101k
• 83% have previous experience or some training/experience that would be relevant to a green company
• 69% say one of the strongest barriers to getting into the green sector is the lack of available jobs
• 41% say lack of proper training is a barrier to entry

With all the talk about green collar workers (blue collar jobs in the green economy) and the stimulus money that has been allocated to green workforce development, little attention has been paid to the demographic in this survey: highly-qualified, well-educated people that are willing and ready to move into the green sector.

So what’s the hold up? What are the challenges they’re facing as they try to channel their skills and background towards the green sector? Beyond the 69% who say there just aren’t enough green jobs (because, realistically, there aren’t enough of any kind of job right now, with unemployment rates at over 9% nationally), 41% of our respondents said they don’t have the proper training and 33% said they just don’t know where to look.

What this illuminates is a basic need for training programs and clear direction for jobseekers on how and where to find green jobs. In fact, this only reinforces our own anecdotal understanding of the state of affairs — people come to us every day just wondering how they can get into a sector that’s seeming daily more and more like a mirage. Of late, there’s more frustration in their voices, and people are wondering if all these green jobs evangelists are really just snakeoil salesmen.

But after two years in this space, we remain confident that the jobs are not an illusion — if they were, we’d pack up shop and head elsewhere rather than leading people on. The immense sense of hope and optimism hung upon green jobs was multiplied exponentially by the state of the economy and soaring unemployment rates. Yes, the sector is still growing even despite the economy (confirmed by a recent Pew report) and green companies are hiring, but not at a rate that can keep pace with the demand created from hundreds of thousands of people that have suddenly flooded into the sector.

The take-aways? Our same old line: there might not be a green job for you right now, but in 6 months or a year, when the dust settles from the economic collapse, there will be. The stepping stone in between, and how you’ll succeed in separating yourself from the crowd when that time comes, is training and preparation.

We’re not saying you’re not willing — over 30% of respondents said they’d take a week for training in greenhouse gas accounting or energy audits, and another 30% said they’d take a month. Most were ready to put up somewhere between $100-$1000 for the training.

Bright Green Talent and some of our partners are working on creating and facilitating training to help you get on the right path. In the meantime, there are lots of great resources to help you learn and network as we all ride out the storm. Hang in there — opportunity and a clean, prosperous future are waiting on the other side.