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!

Penned by Christina and Carolyn

At Bright Green Talent, we’re all in favor of not taking things too seriously and making sure there’s always enough laughter going around. Thus, we recently headed out to an amateur stand-up comedy night at a local club. During the show, we realized that there were some real overlaps in the Venn Diagram of stand-up comedy and interviewing…

Here’s what we came up with to help you avoid those moments of scattered, forced laughter (or blank stares) from the crowd:

10. Know your audience and cater to them. If you’re in a room full of women, don’t make sexist jokes.  Same goes for an interview or cover letter - figure out what you can say that will resonate with the reader.  Sensitivity and judgment will go a long way in warming the interviewer up to you; lack thereof will quickly get you blacklisted.

9. Just the right amount of eye contact… Not too much and definitely not too little!  In an interview, don’t look up or out the window too much when you’re considering a question…better to look down at your notes. We’ve had people disqualified for jobs because of wandering gazes.

8. Energy! The comedians who were too loud and energetic for the crowd seemed overbearing; those who were lethargic seemed like they were unprepared, nervous or just didn’t care.  Find the right balance of energy between sluggish and overzealous so that you can express both your passion and your composure.

7. Be confident and natural in what you are saying. Sounding too rehearsed will not bode well.  If you give canned answers that mirror your resume or cover letter exactly, it can appear as though you have no more to offer than what they already read about you in the application.  (Though practice does make perfect in this case - “mock interviewing” with friends is one of the most effective ways to prepare for an interview.)

6. Be concise. Know where the story is going and get there!  (With the appropriate tangents along the way…) For the comedian, if it’s obvious that your joke isn’t funny to the audience, don’t beat a dead horse — change tacks.  This goes for interviewing too — if something you’re trying to express about your experience or passion is drawing blank stares (or worse, offended looks), carefully exit from that strand of conversation and strike out in a new, hopefully more successful, direction.

5. Timing is everything. Hey, delivery matters.  Just look at Jon Stewart.

4. Incorporate others only as much as they want to be incorporated.  Actually, this comparison doesn’t actually work: Interviews are considered successful when they are a conversation between two people rather than drawing a clear distinction between interviewer and interviewee.  Whereas for a comedian, the audience may prefer to be passive and that’s okay!

3. Work with whatever makes you, you. The best and most successful comedians are those with a memorable, distinctive style which they have made “work” for them.  This is true for the rest of us as well.  Know your strengths and quirks and make them work for you.

2. Don’t be negative about previous employers. At this show, we saw an elementary-school-principal-by-day reference how ridiculous her students and parents were — with a fair number of expletives laced in — while her husband was enthusiastically filming the performance.  We couldn’t help but think if that video ever got in the “wrong” hands of her colleagues, school parents, or anyone else, she would likely lose her job and her reputation would take a serious hit.  There is never a need to un-constructively criticize an organization just to prove dedication to a job opportunity; rather, emphasize the things you would change and how you think the experience has prepared you to contribute to a new organization.

1. If you make people laugh, that is a very good sign! Interviews can be tense situations.  If you find that you have a good enough rapport with your interviewer, finding some (appropriate!) humor can take the edge off and make you seem poised, confident and likeable…all good things when they are evaluating whether they want to work with you!

Image: http://www.timeoutsydney.com.au/

Last night, I stopped by San Francisco Green Drinks (sponsored by the RMI2009 conference), which has become the place to “see and be seen” if you’re involved in a green business or organization in San Francisco. The event is jammed every month with folks who work on green from all kinds of different angles - activism, carbon investment funds, sustainable jewelry, nutrition, you name it.

Green Drinks is great for wide exposure and catching up with other greenies you know, but given the crowded space and the noise level, it’s not going to be great for an in-depth conversation about your professional background or talking about why you want to work for that person’s company. By the same token, I met about 4 different people last night who I’ve connected & worked with online and finally got to put a face to a name and connect with them on a more personal level, even if just by way of a brief conversation.

I liked Seth Godin’s post below - though he’s talking about the quality of interactions in terms of marketing, the same goes for networking. As he says, “There’s a huge correlation between how much interaction there is and how powerful a medium is (at least among successful media). Telephones changed the world because the interaction is so real. As you get more interactive, though, you exchange less dense media.” Chatting with a bunch of different people for 3 minutes at a network event is like Twittering to a big group at a low cost to you, but there’s a lot more value in following up with them on a “high bandwith” interaction like volunteering together or collaborating on a project.

O.K., not a perfect analogy, but the take away lesson is this: Leveraging different types of networking - online & offline - will help you balance quantity of interaction with quality of connection and allow people to get to know you on a variety of levels.

The bandwidth-sync correlation that’s worth thinking about (by Seth Godin)

Check this out. Every once in a while a cool graph pops into my head.

Here are a dozen or so forms of communication, arranged on two axes.

On the horizontal, they rank from asynchronous (meaning the creator and the responder are separated in time–like a letter) and synchronous (meaning the creator and the responder are in real time proximity to each other–like a phone call).

Up and down, I’ve charted the quality of the medium. Quality in terms of density of information exchanged. The 140 characters in Twitter is about as low density as you can get other than a stop light. A movie, on the other hand, is loud and bright and two hours long and there’s audience reaction and it is edited and designed to evoke a response.

To be clear, then: movies take a long time to make, but they’re high impact. Twitter takes a second to do, but there’s not a lot of info there. One on one coaching is high enough bandwidth that it can change your life and make you cry, in real time, and the Mona Lisa, while less bits per second than a TV show, has enough emotional bandwidth to matter, even if it’s 400 years old.

So, what can you learn here?

1. There’s a huge correlation between how much interaction there is and how powerful a medium is (at least among successful media). Telephones changed the world because the interaction is so real. As you get more interactive, though, you exchange less dense media. You can’t have a real time conversation online that carries the digital impact of a movie or some other high bandwidth entertainment.
2. The bottom left corner is the scrap heap. It’s hard to place a commercial value on this part of the grid and there’s not a lot of commercially interesting work being done here. People just aren’t interested in low bandwidth, non-interactive media. Graffiti, for example, rarely draws a paying crowd.
3. The top right of the corner is where huge value and difficult sales lie. Not everyone can pay for the scarce resources needed to deliver an in-person seminar or one on one coaching, but those that need and can afford it, love it.

If you had seen this chart three years ago, you obviously would have invented Twitter. Now that you see it today, what will you create?

Penned by Carolyn

In the “green” space, credibility is crucial, and things are changing rapidly as investment   washes in and out of the sector, companies make big eco-commitments, or they slink away from their environmental goals. A great way to stay up to date is to sign yourself up for a few newsletters in the space you’re interested in moving into. Being well-read is also a networking tool — you can know who’s growing, who’s been bought out, who’s making  headlines. Use these developments as opportunities to reach out to the companies or people involved and start a meaningful dialogue.

Here are our 30 favorite green newsletters - our criteria included quality of news/writing, relevance, up-to-date information, and lack of spammy-ness.

General Green News:
GreenBiz & the other Greener World Media newsletters
Mother Nature Network
SustainLane
Treehugger
Climate Change Business Journal
Green Options
Environmental Leader
Grist

Clean Tech/Renewable Energy:
CleanEdge “Clean Watch”
Rocky Mountain Institute
Renewable Energy Weekly
GreenTech Media
CleanTechies

Activism/Policy:
Sierra Club RAW
Sierra Club Insider
350.org
We Campaign
Green for All
WWF

Green Business/CSR:
Ceres
Seventh Generation
Green America (formerly Co-op America)
Terrapass
CSR Wire
Reuters Carbon

Jobs:
Bright Green Talent
Green Job List
CleanLoop CleanTech
Green Career Central

Feel Good:
Daily Ray of Hope (Sierra Club)

We’re always open to feedback - if you have other suggestions or thoughts, please share them!

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

Last night, Christina (our career coach extraordinaire) spoke at the San Francisco Net Impact monthly chapter meeting, which was focused around green jobs. Leonard Adler, head of www.greenjobs.net, organized the event and provided some really valuable insight as well — videos to come soon.

Probably the most interesting element of the event for us was the 20 minutes that the audience spent sharing their own tips, success stories, and warnings about searching for a job. Some really amazing insight was put out there, and we wanted to share some of their thoughts on staying positive and effective while you’re unemployed or jobseeking:

• If you’re unemployed, keep a schedule. Whether it’s walking your dog each day, going to the grocery store, keeping an active calendar of networking events, you can keep structure and motivation by sticking to a daily schedule.
• Seeking out volunteer leadership roles will give others a chance to see how you work and be able to recommend you based on work ethic, organization and other elements that might not come through when you apply or interview for a position.
• Networking is a two-way street: keep helping others by connecting acquaintances with similar interests or recommending other jobseekers for roles you know are open. Keeping this up whether you’re jobseeking or not is empowering and will keep your network connected and active.
• Get out in front of people. Jobseeking can make you spend a lot of time alone, and you can fall out of practice in terms of presenting yourself and your spiel. The more you interact with others, the better you’ll do when you eventually have to present yourself in an interview.
• It’s never too late to take an internship, especially if you need to gather skills to move into a new sector.
• Whenever you reach out to people you don’t know or peripherally know, do it thoughtfully. Find your common interests, point out your shared connections, or remark on something that’s happening in their company or industry. Not doing so is wasting a big opportunity to connect on an emotional, social level.
• Find free jobseeker support services — such as the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce’s weekly Job Forum.
• Don’t forget the basics. Applying for a green job is still applying for a job: make sure there are no spelling, grammar, or other basic mistakes in your resume. Tailor each resume and cover letter to the particular role.

Thanks to Julie and Adam Menter and the rest of the SF Net Impact Professional Chapter for organizing the event. Like many chapters across the country, the group hosts monthly meetings for its members with interesting speakers and opportunities to meet people working for social responsibility in business. Learn more about Net Impact and join at www.netimpact.org.

More photos on our Flickr feed.

Penned by Carolyn

There’s been a fair amount of news and public service announcements recently about kids and cyber-bullying - the basic concept being that kids will say things online that they would never say to a friend or peer in person.

This phenomenon unfortunately sometimes applies to adults as well. In your jobsearch especially, e-mail etiquette is just as important as phone etiquette, the way you’d speak to someone in person, or how you’d present yourself in a cover letter.

We’ve had several cases recently of finding people we were excited about putting forward for a job… and then we received an email from them that was rude, out of line, or just so strange that we had to reconsider whether we really wanted to support that candidate.

A golden rule of online jobsearching and interaction: you’re still dealing with PEOPLE. There is a real person - with feelings, and an ego, and their own personality - on the other end of the communications you send out.

Think to yourself - If you met the recruiter or hiring manager in person, would you still communicate in the same way as you do on email? Make the same claims? Use the same tone? Be as pushy?

There is a thin line between assertiveness and aggressiveness that is even harder to walk in the online space. While we’re not telling you to be too meek or passive, it’s better to err on the side of politeness than rub someone the wrong way and get blackballed altogether by the company.

Penned by Carolyn

Okay, you’re more or less set up on LinkedIn? Good.

Before diving into specifically how to use LinkedIn (next week and beyond), I want you to step back and think about your frame of mind as you use it.

Following Michael Pollan’s advice on what to eat (“Eat food, not too much, mostly plants”), I put forth my own LinkedIn manifesto: Be open, not too open, and choose quality over quantity.

And putting a few disclaimers first:
- Some people disagree with me on the quality over quantity point. I’m going on what I’ve personally seen be effective in my almost-year at BGT.
- Everyone uses LinkedIn for the own purposes (business partnerships, advertising, jobseeking, etc), and will have different takes on what’s useful for those aims. I’m focusing on jobseeking.

Be open:
Yes, make sure you’re marked as “Interested in Career Opportunities,” have a public profile, a photo, a completed profile, etc. (See LinkedIn’s own tips on jobsearching through the site).

Not too open:
Know someone whose LinkedIn name looks like this? “Bob Smith BOB.SMITH@GMAIL.COM OPEN TO ALL CONNECTIONS”

These people make me shudder for a couple reasons: they look desperate, and they look like they don’t have a clear idea of what they’re looking for. If you want to connect with people you don’t know, they have to see the value in connecting with you. The age-old dating rule applies: while you need to be open and accessible, do play a little bit hard to get.

Drop the CAPS lock, the exclamation points. asterisks, etc. Your resume and experience should be able to market you. If they don’t, spend your time getting some experience instead of adding Wingdings to your profile.

Choose quality over quantity:
To me, flags are raised when people have 3000 connections. Or when they have 5. Find a sweet spot between those numbers, comprised of solid connections with people you’ve met or worked with. The point of LinkedIn is you can access all their second and third degree connections, so you don’t need to link to every person you ever come across. If you want to expand your networks quickly, join a bunch of groups that you’re interested in (like BGT’s — in order to be able to vouch for everyone in our personal networks, we link to our community through our group rather than through those 3000 connections with people we’ve never met).

Oh, and file this under Carolyn’s Serious Pet Peeves: If you are going to request to link to someone you don’t know, PLEASE add an introduction or reason you want to connect — it drives me nuts when people I don’t know at all request to link to me without any explanation — or, worse, they just mark that I’m a “friend.” If you take a minute and think about what you and that person share, they’re more likely to check out your information, link, and remember your name. Make people want to help you.

During my career coaching meetings, the topic of networking comes up pretty much every time because people:

1. Know they need to be doing it.
2. Are not doing it enough.
3. Have an averse reaction to it.

Let’s address #3 since that’s the most critical to deal with #1 and #2.  I tell people that it would be helpful to re-frame what networking means to them.  Rather than walking into an event assuming you are ‘on the prowl’ for a job and/or for someone who can give it to them, Why not just think of it as an opportunity to meet some interesting people, hear what they’re up to and perhaps talk a little about what gets you excited in the world? Huh.  That sounds a little more like a party than a networking event doesn’t it?  That’s the point.

I don’t want to make it sound quite so easy.  A true “re-framing” is difficult to achieve but the benefits to both your job search and sanity are endless. 

Also look for fun, interesting events that seem to be less stressful.  For one such example, join us when we host a rock-climbing event with Net Impact on April 21st - maybe I’ll see you there?!  We can network if you are.

We’re also out and about at GreenDrinks in San Francisco (which is moving to the first Tuesday of the month at 111 Minna), and will keep you posted with more details about a career fair/cocktail hour we’re sponsoring with them in late May.