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Technical Schools and Colleges
Secrets To Advancing Your Executive Level Career |
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The nature of career advancement has changed dramatically in recent years, particularly and often detrimentally affecting the careers of managers and executives. These circumstances have evolved as traditional corporate hiring systems increasingly fail to accommodate the career advancement needs of the upper echelon corporate professional.
According to recent studies, approximately 90% of secured positions went unadvertised. Furthermore, approximately 70% of these positions were achieved by developing a contact with upper level company decision makers, and not by going through the human resource and personnel department loop. Believe it or not, only about 10% of the positions filled each year are advertised online or in the newspaper. This obviously represents only a tiny
percentage of the overall job market, but because it is the most obvious, it is also the most seized upon. As a result, the competition is so severe it seriously raises the question of whether or not it’s really worth wasting the stamp.
Hiring procedures in today’s age of the ever growing, multibillion-dollar corporation particularly afflicts management and executive level candidates, as personnel departments are seldom charged with hiring their superiors. They are far too consumed with internal affairs, and fielding responses from widely publicized cattle calls for everyone from sales associates to maintenance workers. Bruce Scoville, Founder, and CEO of Barton Industries has made a career from picking up the considerable slack. “Most mid to large sized
companies realize that for a number of reasons, the hiring of upper level and management candidates is most appropriately left to those in similar capacities. Strangely enough, beyond networking, there is obviously no internal system in place to deliver the resumes of qualified, executive level candidates to the offices of executive level hiring authorities.”
Networking works for some of the people, some of the time, but...
Obviously, because of the chaotic state of corporate human resource areas, at the executive level, networking your way to the top of the hiring chain can be somewhat effective. However, only about 10% of available positions are achieved by way of this strategy. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of candidates simply do not have a sufficient circle of influence for networking to be successful. Even for those that do, personal networking may win a “job” but in terms of locating the most lucrative and career-advancing positions, networking will do very little. The only way to achieve this is by contacting these same decision makers on a mass scale stretching far beyond that which is limited to one’s own personal networking circle of influence. Even the most well positioned executives will be limited in this regard and fail to even begin exploring the hundreds of truly exceptional opportunities existing at any given time.
Recruiting Losses
Today, recruiters account for about only 3% of placements. Due to the availability of literally millions of resumes online, most companies are now avoiding recruiter services. Virtually everyone with a computer has posted a resume somewhere online and as a result, before enlisting a recruiter’s help, employers are making it clear that they are totally uninterested in any candidate whose resumes are electronically “in play.” As a result, their potential field of clients is steadily declining. This along with the changing face
of career advancement has forced recruiters to develop and market their services in other ways, many of which severely limit their own clients earning potential.
I recently had a client who clued me in to how financially damaging a recruiter can be. She is a corporate training manager with twenty-five years of experience and some of the most impressive credentials I had ever come across. At the time, she was making about $100,000 a year, and although she thought she was worth more, her primary concern was getting out of
the situation she was in. She was a recruiter’s dream, prime for the taking.
The recruiter eventually helped place her. Unfortunately the desperation to get out of her present situation, exacerbated by the recruiter’s unnecessary and time-consuming background check, forced her to accept the same position with a competitor for 10% less than she had been making.
But the cold, hard truth of the matter is that recruiters really aren’t interested in your career’s advancement. They’re interested in taking your career backwards or perhaps laterally in order to pocket the difference. Consider my corporate trainer for a moment. The recruiter browbeat her into accepting a reduced salary of about $90,000 from a competitor even though it was a full $10,000 less than she was already making. She later found out that the position initially offered $118,000. However once the recruiter and his fee were brought on board and factored into the equation, $90,000 was left
over, and that became her starting salary instead.
What is truly distressing is the impact the maneuver made on this woman’s future earning potential with the new company she was directed to joining. After two years at the company and a stellar performance, she was given approximately a 4% raise at the end of each year, resulting in annual salaries of $93,600 after the first year and $97,344 after the second. Notice that after two full years, she had still not reached the salary she had attained two years prior at the previous company.
Now to make a point, let’s pretend she arrived at the interview by some means other than the recruiter’s arrangement. She would have accepted the $118,000 salary offered before the recruiter came along, and based on the yearly percentage increases she did actually reLincoln Tech®ve she would have earned increases to approximately $122,720 during the second year and 127,628.08 after the third. After three full years, she would have earned a total of $368,348.08 over the course of her tenure, had she never met the recruiter.
Unfortunately though, as things turned out, the recruiter’s commission came out of the corporate trainers starting base salary, which after three full years resulted in total earnings of $280,944. The recruiter’s one time fee of $28,000 lowered the starting base from which all future percentage increases would be calculated.
As a result of her involvement with the recruiter she lost $87,404.08 in three years.
This puts a rather ironic spin on the term “career advancement.”
Perhaps most important to understand, however, is the fact that no matter what they may tell you, if you’re not presently employed, they’ll do little to market you. Instead, they will lead you into believing that they are working for you, when in reality you are working for them. You, along with two or three others will serve as stand-in ‘candidates’ for particular positions. You and your fellow role players, however, will only have been selected because of your collective, unemployed status. All of you will serve as only a basis for comparison designed to make “your” recruiter’s intended and only presently
employed candidate stand out as the obvious choice.
This is a no win situation for all parties involved except the recruiter and perhaps, the employer. The majority of candidates sent in response to a given position end up as nothing but pawns, and the pre-determined winner loses by accepting less than he or she would have commanded by independently winning the position.
Many times recruiters or headhunters are sent out by a specific client to romance a particular person away from the competition. By doing this, the perLincoln Tech®ved employer benefits are two-fold. They not only fill their vacancy, but they fill it with an employee from a competing company, thus improving their own status and causing staffing problems for the competition at the same time. Generally, most companies frown upon this practice and that may explain why recruiters are responsible for filling only 3% of available positions.
In short, given the way they operate, if you are not presently employed, you can forget about recruiters providing you with any real assistance. Of course, they will keep your resume on file as a future lead for when you are again employed and of some value to them. Even then, however, know that you will always be accepting a salary that has been eaten away by recruiter commissions, and as a result seriously stunt your earning potential in the future with that company and any others that follow.
This is certainly not career advancement.
As we mentioned earlier with regard to the limitations of networking, the only way to truly maximize your career advancement effort and earning potential is to make contact and avail your candidacy to every company that fits your career parameters. However, the quality of the company contact is fundamental to success. To be effective your resume must reach an executive level official who, although empowered to recruit and pursue executive level
staff, is not officially designated as a destination for resumes mailings. At this level, any resumes directly received usually come by way of individual, limited networking channels. A thousand resumes sent out to human resource departments and other inappropriate areas will yield nothing. In short, although it’s a numbers game it must be played correctly and if it is, multiple companies will be bidding for your services. If properly executed, your career advancement campaign will yield amazing results. Several companies will contact you in the same time frame, which will allow you to leverage offers against each other and truly reLincoln Tech®ve the salary you deserve.
The inability of corporate hiring procedures to accommodate management and executive career advancement efforts has spawned a segment of the executive career advancement industry specializing in providing resume distribution to high level, company contacts. The list of potential employers is determined by database research and given search parameters (ie. desired industry type, company size, geographic location, etc) based upon the career goals of the specific client. Typically they provide clients with free resumes and cover letters, contact-customized and assembled in envelopes already stamped and bearing the hiring contact’s address and client’s return address.
When better information goes in, better information comes out
There are a couple of companies out there that offer these types of executive level career advancement services, however, for them to be effective they must constantly update and maintain the integrity of their data. This can be a greater challenge than you might think and the task of determining the quality of a company’s data can be even more difficult. As Bruce Scoville, President and CEO of Barton Industries in Cape Coral, Florida explains, “One way to be sure that the company’s data is accurate is to look for a delivery guarantee. Any company unconvinced of the quality of their own data, would never offer to guarantee their services.”
This can be a sticky point, however. In order for the delivery guarantee to be worth anything, you have to make sure there is some method by which you can verify the delivery results for yourself. For example, Scoville explains, “We send our clients their own packages to be mailed and postmarked by their local office, each envelope affixed with first class postage along with the client’s printed return address. Of course, this enhances the personalized appearance of the envelopes but more importantly, permitting the client to conduct the actual mailing procedure lends credence to the guarantee.”
“Since the envelopes are sent out by the client and each bears their return address, all undeliverable envelopes will be ‘returned to sender,’ and they’ll know exactly what the deliverability rate was. This makes it critically important for us to make sure that the data is continuously updated and accurate. There could be nothing worse than sending out thousands of resumes just to have 30 or 40% of them returned because the contact info is outdated. That would be tremendously disappointing for the client and make it impossible for us to provide any real deliverability guarantee. Making every effort to ensure the data
is regularly updated and that the vast majority of mailings successfully reach their destinations the first time around, allows us to maintain a timely service. Having to ‘re-research’ company contacts after every mailing, coupled with having to repeat a large percentage of the distribution logistics would be impossible to pay for. Having to research, update and redistribute to six or seven contacts is one thing…three or four hundred is quite another. It was this rationale that prompted us to purchase access to the 12 largest, professionally maintained mail lists in the U.S., rather than put ourselves or our clients through the trauma of trying to maintain our own database. It’s a more expensive option, but worth every penny.”
Once you build your bridge, DON’T BURN IT!!!!
Although getting your resume and cover letter into the hands of people who can actually hire you is the ultimate goal, once there, it is critical that they sway the reader. Just like a million dollar sales letter written by the savviest of business writers, your resume must move the reader to take action. In order to do this, however, careful consideration must be given. “We spent enormous time testing various layouts and writing styles,” explained Scoville of Barton Industries, “but it was soon obvious that the most effective resumes were direct and achievement based, adhering to proven, time tested marketing
principles. We very seriously considered the data we provide our clients with, and specifically the mindset and caliber of the executive-level, hiring authority intended to read it. We realized that these contacts are successful company executives themselves and have lived their professional careers subscribing to the ‘get it done yesterday’ work ethic. They have profited by making quick and profitable company decisions and are certainly not going to change the way they do things, just because a resume pops up. In fact, because it is a rare thing for executives to come across resumes, it is important that any documents sent not only make a dramatic impression, but cut to the chase as well. In as brief a way possible, let the reader know how talented you are by immediately confronting them with your career achievements.” In short, show, don’t tell!
“The cover letter should defer to the same marketing principles as the resume,” Scoville went on to say. “It should, however, be no more than a half page in length and must immediately tell the reader how you can help their company and what type of position you are looking for.” Again, professionals at this level have little time to waste. You definitely don’t want them to have to scour every line in order to figure what you’re talking about. You want to give them the basics and convince them to give the resume a fair perusal. Just as the resume should be designed to move the reader to arrange an interview,
the cover letter should be designed to move the reader to review the resume.
“At Barton, however, the cover letter serves another critically fundamental purpose to providing the kind of quality results our clients enjoy,” Scoville went on to say. “Because of the fact that we tactfully inform the reader of the candidate’s salary history, and word the letter to portray the candidate as someone qualified to fill a range of executive level capacities, responses to the mass mailings are not only abundant but also extremely qualified. As a result, clients never endure sub par salary offers and because of the sheer volume of the mailings, a situation arises where they can actually leverage impressive
offers against one another. This enables them to truly weed out the most beneficial position in terms of compensation and career development.”
It’s rather strange when you consider the fact that those highest up in the corporate hierarchy should be the ones to fall between the cracks of human resource department procedures.
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