I took a number of marketing courses in my MBA at Melbourne Business School (MBS) and it was during my Consumer Behaviour course with Brian Gibbs that we got the best, single-page overview of the marketing process.

Framework for Marketing Management

Gibbs called this the ‘Framework for Marketing Management’ and it’s an excellent summary of how marketing is done:

[Note: The diagram above is one that I made based on my notes from the course.]

It works like this:

• The marketing concept says you begin by looking at your customers, company, and competition – these are the three Cs. Let’s say your company makes pens:
  • Ask yourself what it is that your customers need. How can you satisfy that need? In real life a lot of research would go into answering questions like these. Then consider what your customers do to satisfy those needs. What factors contribute to their decision making process? Again, more research would be done.
  • Also look at your company. Can you make the pens your customers want? Do those types of pens fit with your company’s corporate objectives? For example, if you’re Montblanc, you won’t be making cheap plastic pens anytime soon even if some your customers say that’s what they want in a writing instrument.
  • Don’t forget to analyze your competition as well. How will your competitors respond to your product (say, when you introduce a new version)? Also ask yourself who else satisfies the needs of your customers. For example, should you be looking at companies that make markers and pencils as competition?
• Once you’ve done that, you segment your customers according to primary bases, such as their identified needs. For example, Group A wants cheap plastic ballpoint pens, Group B wants fancy liquid ink pens, and so on. You also segment by secondary bases, which are often things like demographics. You keep slicing and dicing using a combination of bases till you get useful segments; i.e. those you can target properly. For example, you could further segment Group B by age bracket and annual income.
• Next, you decide which specific segments you’re going to target (and why). For example, Montblanc may be targeting only, say, richer and older people from Group B. They know they can communicate well with these people, they can defend this segment from the competition, and ultimately that’s the area of the market they want their company to operate in.
• That sets you up with the positioning of your product. Getting your positioning right is incredibly important because it’s the key to your entire plan. So, for example, Montblanc may position themselves in the luxury space as a company that sells excellent writing instruments that have the highest level of craftsmanship. In effect, their pens are high-end gifts, much like hand-crafted jewellery. They would then position themselves appropriately in the luxury gift jewellery markets, but not in the broader writing instruments market.
• Once you’ve got your positioning done, you figure out how you’re going to to create, capture, communicate, and deliver value to your customer. This value is created by the existence of your product, captured by its price, communicated through your promotion, and delivered by where you place (or how you distribute) your product – these are the four Ps.
• Finally, as the market grows and develops, you will need to tweak these four Ps to maintain your positioning. Then, at regular intervals, you will need to re-do your three Cs because the market will change and you will need to change with it. Repeat ad infinitum…well, at least as long as your company continues to exist.

It All Comes Down to Positioning

As you may have gathered, a good way of remembering the entire marketing process is to think of the just the three Cs and four Ps. However, if you want to distil it further, you can bring it all down to positioning.

Positioning is a summary of the first part (analysis & strategy: the three Cs) and a guide for the second part (planning & implementation: the four Ps).

From the consumer behaviour point of view, it is also the psychological epicentre of the marketing process. That’s because positioning – with the help of the four Ps – is what translates the ‘actual product’ into the ‘perceived product’ within the consumer’s mind (they are often not the same).

So while a Montblanc pen is in essence just a writing instrument, in the mind of the consumer, it is much more than just that. And it is the pen’s positioning that will determine what qualities above its ability to put ink on paper set it apart from its competitors.

Thanks for Sharing, But What Was the Point?

This one-page overview of the marketing process is useful in many ways:

• It provides a great sanity check for what you’re doing in your job. For example, the Web & New Media Strategy that Melbourne Water developed over the last year followed pretty much this process. That strategy now forms the basis of my day-to-day work. So, if we hadn’t done the three Cs right, for example, I would have had a hard time getting the four Ps done properly.
• It’s a great way to analyze the marketing, branding, and product positioning that’s going on around you all the time.
• It brings good overall project management and business strategy rigour to whatever it is that you’re doing.

Oh, and if you’re a job seeker, it’s particularly useful because it provides a good framework for when you get asked questions about the company’s products or services.

Ever wanted your resume to stand out – and I mean really stand out – from the others? How about making it an infographic?

[Source: ‘Resume / Infographics’ by Michael Anderson]

For more, read ‘16 Infographic Resumes, A Visual Trend’ by Randy Krum on the Cool Infographics blog.

I am very tempted to convert my own resume into this format. I wonder how long it’ll take and what software I can use to do it.

I’ve been at Melbourne Water for over six months but haven’t yet blogged about what I actually do there. So, thanks to the end-of-year holiday season that has given me the time to get back into blogging, here goes.

What Do I Do There?

My job title is ‘Websites Manager’ and that role sits in the External Affairs team which itself is part of the broader Communications & Community Relations group.

My tasks include:

• Managing all of Melbourne Water’s websites (i.e. the main site and various sub-sites)
• Developing and implementing a Web & New Media Strategy for organization (this includes getting the organization involved with social media)
• Helping knowledge specialists from across the business create and maintain their web content
• Proactively seeking content to place on the web (this includes content that site visitors want to see and content that we want site visitors to see)
• Liaising between our web solution provider and the rest of the business (including, sometimes our own internal IT department)
• Managing the Website Advisor (who focuses primarily on the online needs of the Waterways group)

More generally, my job involves three things:

• Tactical management: Managing web content and being the go-to guy for everything related to the web (and, increasingly, multimedia and social media).
• Strategic management: Finding out what our current online presence is, determining what we want that online presence to be over the coming years, and figuring out how we’re going to get there. This includes doing things like a complete site overhaul and pursuing new online models of stakeholder engagement (specifically, social media).
• People management: Overseeing work done by the Website Advisor and managing the web team’s relationship with the rest of the organization.

That’s a lot to do but I’m having an awesome time doing it. If it didn’t keep me so busy, I almost wouldn’t call it “work”.

What’s it Like to Work There?

It’s awesome. I love the people, I love the culture, and I love the commitment everyone has to their work, to Melbourne, and to the planet in general. It’s really great to work alongside people who are experts in their fields (many of them are geeks like me) and who love the work that they do.

I really appreciate the fact that the organization truly cares about, and cares for, its employees. And I love that we don’t have to leave our lives (and the rest of the world) at the doorstep when we step into the office.

I love the range of work that the organization does – everything from:

• sourcing and storing water,
• treating and providing water (to Melbourne’s private water retailers), and
• taking care of our rivers, creeks, wetlands, and (soon) coastline,
• to collecting, treating, and safely disposing of our sewerage.

Finally, I am impressed by the importance and emphasis the organization places on good communication and stakeholder engagement. Indeed, excellent stakeholder engagement is a core strategic objective for Melbourne Water. I am particularly empowered by this focus because so much of that communication and engagement is moving into the online space (including social media) and that’s specifically what I am responsible for (and really enjoy doing).

So, You Like it, Then?

Yes, very much so!

The AFR’s BOSS magazine recently published the results of its biennial rankings of MBA schools in Australia:

• List of 18 Schools Ranked in Survey
• Overview article: ‘Standard Bearers’ by Rose-Anne Manns (difficult to read online)

I haven’t bought the magazine and read the detailed results myself yet but Manns’ article lists the top five schools as follows:

1. Melbourne Business School (University of Melbourne)
2. Monash University Graduate School of Business (Monash University)
3. Macquarie Graduate School of Management (Macquarie University)
4. Australian Graduate School of Management (University of New South Wales)
5. University of Western Australia

The rest of the article was too painful to read online so I only skimmed through it and, therefore, have nothing further to say. Clearly they want us to go buy a copy of their magazine.

By the way, 22 business schools and 1,732 b-school alumni took part in the survey that these rankings are based on.

Excellent slideshow on social media by Marta Kagan (of the The Secret Diary of a Bonafide Marketing Genius blog). Language is NSFW…well, depending on where you work and what your team/organization’s culture is.

Enjoy :)

[Via A Blog Around the Clock]

A couple of weeks ago Scott Arbeitman wrote about the technology gap between the street and the enterprise. Carl Joseph replied to that with one of the most painful technology-related quotes I’ve heard (painful because of how true it is):

“Every day you get to use new technology and are exposed to new, exciting things…then you go to work.”

I’m not sure who actually said that, but if you work for a large corporation, then you’ll know what this feels like.

How do I Deal with Such Restrictions?

At my workplace, in order to keep up with the rest of the Internet world, I not only bring my own personal laptop to work I also bring with me my own personal wireless broadband Internet connection. And, despite the fact that my laptop is ancient and the broadband connection is painfully slow (relative to my workplace’s connection), I still get a better Internet experience on it than I do on my work computer.

Why? Because even though my laptop has half a gigabyte of RAM, a slow 30GB hard drive, no built-in wireless adapter (yes, it’s that old), and Windows XP, I get to run on it the latest versions of Flash, AIR, Silverlight, IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Seesmic Desktop (along with numerous other applications) and I get to access whatever I want to on the Internet.

On my work computer, meanwhile, I am stuck with no AIR or Silverlight, IE6 as my only browser (I do have a version of Firefox on it but that doesn’t run Flash so it might as well not exist), and restrictions on which websites I can access. What makes this harder to live with is that my computer’s hardware is pretty good (it’s a docked laptop with a dual monitor setup) and my Internet connection speed is excellent.

It’s Not All Bad

I have to admit, though, that I am being somewhat unfair to my workplace. Aside from making us run IE6 and blocking parts of the web (including sites like Slideshare because it’s “personal storage”), they do let us access webmail, all the social networking sites (indeed, according to our IT department, Facebook is one of the five most popular sites at work), and most online media sites (like Flickr and YouTube). Compared to other large organizations – particularly government departments – in Australia, that’s pretty awesome.

In fact, they’ve gone a step further and have provided us (the Web Team) with a special media desktop (for converting and editing video) and a special Internet laptop (with all the latest software and applications installed on it). Bits of the Internet are still blocked on these PCs because you’re still going through their proxies, but that’s not such big a deal.

So What’s an Employee to Do?

One way for tech-savvy employees to get around these restrictions is to do what I’m doing: circumvent the IT department entirely by creating a parallel setup for yourself. With recent technology improvements like cheap netbooks, powerful smart phones, and readily available mobile broadband, this is easy and relatively inexpensive to do. I suspect a lot of Gen-Y will take this route.

The other option – the much harder one – is to get your IT department to get rid of these restrictions and, dare I say, modernize itself. Unfortunately, that’s not easy to do. Slate’s Farhad Manjoo makes a good case for it, though, in his recent article, ‘Unchain the Office Computers!’:

…workplace IT wardens are rarely amenable to rational argument. That’s because, in theory, their mission seems reasonable. Computers…can be dangerous things—they can breed viruses and other malware, they can consume enormous resources meant for other tasks, and they’re portals to great expanses of procrastination. So why not lock down workplace computers?

Here’s why: The restrictions infantilize workers—they foster resentment, reduce morale, lock people into inefficient routines, and, worst of all, they kill our incentives to work productively. In the information age, most companies’ success depends entirely on the creativity and drive of their workers. IT restrictions are corrosive to that creativity—they keep everyone under the thumb of people who have no idea which tools we need to do our jobs but who are charged with deciding anyway.

The Role of the IT Department

One of the most important parts of Manjoo’s argument, however, is this:

What’s worse, because they aren’t tasked with understanding how people in different parts of a company do their jobs, IT managers often can’t appreciate how profoundly certain tools can improve how we work.

This is often the root cause of the problem because most IT departments are divided into roughly three parts:

• IT Operations: the people who keep the systems running
• The Project Management Office (PMO): the people who oversee updates, upgrades, and all the organization’s IT projects
• IT Planning: the people who plan for the future

What is often missing is the fourth part:

• In-house IT Consulting: the people who liaise directly with different parts of the business and use the latest technologies to improve the way those people work

Without that fourth part, IT departments have a hard time keeping up with what people in the organization believe are the most effective and efficient ways of doing their work. They also don’t keep up with the latest technological solutions for various business problems.

Modernizing the IT Department

So, if employees want to take the route of modernizing the way the IT department looks at new tools and technologies, they need to start by modernizing the IT department itself. And, to do that, they have to look at IT as two different groups:

• IT as a service delivery department: the people who provide us with our computers and networks
• IT as a partner in business: the people who proactively help us do our job better

And if they’re lucky enough to get a CIO who thinks that way as well, things should start to change.

I haven’t been blogging much these last few months. That’s because three months ago my wife and I moved into an apartment that has no land line and only a satellite cable TV connection. (We didn’t think to ask about the former before moving in here because, really, when was the last time you heard of a house that didn’t have a land line connection?) What this means is that, till just recently, we didn’t have Internet access at home; certainly not cable and ADSL, but not even dialup!

What Happened Then?

It took Telstra (the only phone company that services this area) about six weeks (yes, six weeks) to give us a connection from the telephone exchange to our apartment building. However, we don’t have an outlet in the wall for a phone jack so we can’t actually use that line. Even worse, the electrician who came in to install that outlet couldn’t find where in the wall our telephone wire was so he wasn’t able to connect us. That was about a month ago and, since then, we’ve been waiting for our real estate agent to do something about this – specifically, getting the building plans from the owners and giving them to the electrician – but nothing’s happened yet.

I finally got sick of the situation so, a couple of weeks ago, I went and got us a mobile broadband connection from 3 (specifically, a USB wireless modem) and that’s what’s letting me access the Internet now. We then went a step further and bought a wireless router for the modem so now both my wife and I can access the Internet at the same time. It’s slow, but at least it works.

What about blogging from work, you ask? Unfortunately, work has been really busy (though incredibly enjoyable) so I haven’t had the mental energy to do any writing in the evenings (whether at work or offline from home). The only blog posts I have managed to finish are the ones I wrote on a weekend and published from the office the following work week.

So, Catching Up…

What all this is leading up to is the fact that I have lots of catching up to do. The way I’m going to do that is by giving you a bulleted list of all the stories I’ve wanted to talk about these last few months but haven’t been able to discuss. The stories range from basic, on-the-ground advice (and lists) to more high level discussions on a particular topic. They’re all good to read, though.

Jobs, Careers, & MBA

• You Suck, Interviewer [Ask a Manager]
• It’s here: the You-Suck-As-An-Interviewer Automatic Letter Generator [Ask a Manager]
• Interview Questions to Ask When Hiring a Manager [Ask a Manager]
• 4 Dumb Job Interview Questions (and 3 Possible Answers) [Clue Wagon]
• How to Make Sure You Don’t Take a Job That Sucks [Clue Wagon]
• Schmoozing 101: Tips for Shy Techies [Computerworld]
• How Newcomers Can Influence Established Groups [PsyBlog]
• Latest research reveals the business schools employers prefer to recruit from regionally strong business schools [AME Info]
• 100+ Career Blogs ALL Professionals MUST Read [Career Rocketeer]
• State of Australian Corporate Career Websites [Michael Specht]

Social Media

• The Manager’s Guide to Social Media [SmartCompany]
• Facebook privacy: a guide [Ars Technica]
• 10 Harsh Truths About Corporate Blogging [Smashing Magazine]
• The Big List of Big Brand Corporate Blogs [Debbie Weil]
• 73 Ways to Become a Better Writer [Copyblogger]
• 9 Ways People Respond to Your Content Online [Lateral Action]
• Writing a Social Media Comment [PR Communications]
• Twitter 101: A Special Guide [Twitter]
• 62 Ways to Use Twitter for Business [Web Worker Daily]
• Twitter Postings: Iterative Design [useit.com]
• The Importance of Social Media Audits [Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang]
• The Five Biggest Mistakes in Measuring Social Media [ClickZ]
• 360i Publishes Social Marketing Playbook [360i]
• 2 Million More Australians Go Social in 2009 [comScore]
• A new connection for Australians [Sensis]

Online Design, UI

• 8 Dimensions of Excellent Landing Pages [Search Engine Land]
• Building Respect for Usability Expertise [useit.com]

Online Marketing

• Do You Know Where Your Audience Is? [Search Engine Watch]
• A Checklist to Choose Which Internet Marketing Channel is Right for Your Business [seomoz.org]

General Life Advice

• How to Make Your Packed Lunch More Appealing [Lifehacker]

In order to get what can loosely be called a ‘web strategy job’ in Australia I did quite a bit of research and analysis on how different companies hire for that position and I thought it might be useful to share what I’ve learnt. This serves two purposes:

• Others who are looking for jobs in the same area might find my analysis useful.
• Those who know more about this area than I do can improve my understanding of it.

Here’s hoping this blog post accomplishes a bit of both.

What Do You Mean by ‘Web Strategy Job’?

So what exactly does a ‘web strategist’ do? Well, it depends on the industry and company that job is in. In general, though, a web strategist is someone who takes care of everything a company does online. This includes:

• managing the company’s online presence (website, intranet, social media presence, etc.)
• figuring out what the company should be doing in the online space over the next few years; i.e. creating a web strategy and making sure it is aligned with the company’s business, marketing, and communications strategies
• implementing that strategy

This job can be in different departments and at different levels of seniority within a particular company. To explain this further I have come up with the How Companies Build Their Online Presence table (below). The columns on this table represent company size and the rows divide companies into those that consider their online presence to be strategic and those that don’t (yes, this is an artificial, binary division while, in reality, there is a range here). [1]

The text in the cells describes the solutions that these companies implement in order to build and maintain their online presence (yes, I am generalizing here). The jobs that I spent the last few months looking for are the manager-level web strategist/online manager positions described or implied in the green coloured cells.

Interestingly, over the last year, I have worked in companies in all three of those green-coloured areas:

• Shell is a very large company that uses its online presence strategically (both internally and externally)
• Melbourne Business School is a medium-sized company that uses of its online presence strategically (and increasingly so)
• Linfox is a large company that doesn’t use its website strategically but makes very good use of its intranet

Melbourne Water sits in the strategic row and is a large company.

Where the Web Strategist Fits in All This

As mentioned earlier, the web strategist jobs in those green-shaded boxes exist at different levels within different companies. That is why, over the last few months, I applied for jobs that spanned a range of tasks, skills, and seniority levels. In some small companies, for example, the primary driver of the web strategy is the specialist consultant hired on a 3-6 month contract. In some larger ones, the strategy is driven by a small group of people who are, in turn, led by the web/online manager.

There are pros and cons to being in each of those positions. For example, a short-term specialist-level consultant may not have the time, influence, or opportunity to have a major impact on a company’s overall web strategy. That said, this consultant sits outside the internal politics of that company and can be more blunt and direct about what that company needs to do without having to worry too much about what people think of him. A full-time online manager in a large company, meanwhile, many find corporate inertia working against her for the first six months but, once things get moving, will benefit from it. And because this manager knows the inner working of the company, she may get things done more quickly and more effectively.

The sweet spot for me was to get a middle management position in a good-sized company that made good, strategic use of its online space. There is huge potential (and lots of fun to be had) in this role because companies in this position are often quick to move and are willing to make a real impact online. Fortunately for me, this is exactly where Melbourne Water sits.

What About the State of the Job Market?

Of course, all this analysis is useless if it doesn’t help you get a job – particularly if no one is hiring for the position you really want to get. Because of that, I was also looking for less-than-perfect jobs or jobs on the periphery of where I wanted to be. The idea was that I would work towards the role I really wanted.

Speaking more generally: One good thing about this type of job is that every organization needs a website regardless of how the economy is doing (and Australia’s isn’t doing that badly). As a result, web strategists, website managers, and specialist online consultants are still getting hired. And though there are very few perfect jobs out there (and many companies are hiring less senior people to do the same job that more senior people were doing last year) I did come across a whole bunch that were great places to start. Read my previous blog post for more on that.

Further Research

So that is a summary of what I have learnt about web strategist jobs in Australia over the last couple of years. I encourage you to do your own research on this topic. To do that, I recommend the following three things:

• Subscribe to online job feeds from Seek, MyCareer, CareerOne, and SixFigures. This will teach you a great deal about the state of the job market and will help you adopt the lingo that hiring managers and recruitment firms use to match candidates to open positions.
• Talk to people who are in the industry and find out more from them. This is particularly useful if you are targeting a narrower segment in the market (e.g. web strategy jobs in the education sector). Also read their blogs, interact with them online, and get in touch with them through LinkedIn or your own networks (then meet up with them for a coffee or something).
• Talk to recruitment agents who recruit in this area. I mentioned three firms and three recruitment agents in my previous post but there are many others – you just need to find the ones that work best with you.

And when you learn stuff, blog about it so all of us can learn from your experiences.

- – - – - – - – - -

[1] The words ’strategy’ and ’strategic’ are used very loosely in everyday speech while, in actual fact, they mean something very specific. Let me clarify that here: when you say something is ’strategic’ you necessarily mean that it is relative to your competitors. Take your website’s ‘Contact Us’ page. If, along with your office address, you were to give your office’s Melways Map reference, this would not be considered ’strategic’ because this is common practice. If, instead, you embedded a Google map that showed your office’s location exactly (assuming, of course, that your customers found this useful and that it helped your business) this would be a ’strategic’ move since few companies tend to do that and this gives you an advantage over your competitors. Note, however, that if you had decided to include that Google map without considering your competition, it would simply have been a ‘plan’. A ’strategy’, on the other hand, is action taken specifically with your competition in mind (i.e. in order to gain an advantage over them).

My perseverance has paid off: after applying for 33 jobs over an 8 month period, I am now the new Websites Manager at Melbourne Water. I’ll write more about this job in a later blog post but right now I want to present the stats I accumulated and the lessons I learnt during this process.

Active Job-Search Period

The 8-month period during which I was looking for a job featured the following non-hiring periods:

• the global economic downturn – 2 months, from mid-October to mid-December
• the Christmas holidays – 1.5 months, from early December to mid-January
• my trip to Pakistan – 1 month, from early February to early March

So, for all practical purposes, I was unemployed and actively looking for jobs for about 4-5 out of those 8 months before I got hired.

Types & Levels of Jobs

The 33 jobs I applied for during this period were of these types:

• By management-level jobs (13) I mean those that involved project management, stakeholder liaison, team management, and strategic planning.
• By specialist, consultant, and business analyst jobs (15) I mean those that involved working as a knowledge or domain specialist within a larger team. The specialized skills required for these jobs included SEO techniques; web writing and online production skills; social media awareness; requirements-gathering experience; a consulting background; and general website/intranet redevelopment experience. Naturally, all of these skills were also required for the management-level jobs that I applied for.
• By junior-level jobs (5) I mean those that I turned out to be overqualified for. In most cases this happened because the company in question didn’t think the online channel was of strategic value to them and was therefore looking for a relatively junior person to create their web strategy and maintain their website and intranet. In most of these cases I withdrew my application once I found out more about the job.

I very nearly got one of those specialist-level jobs but the company I was interviewing with instated a hiring freeze (due to a newly-announced restructuring plan) the day after my final interview. The interview had gone really well, though, and I was confident that I would had been selected.

Also, those 13 management-level job applications include my successful application to Melbourne Water.

Reasons for Rejection

The reasons I was given for not getting 32 of those jobs included:

• By too little experience (3) I mean the job was too senior for me. In one case, for example, I was told I didn’t have experience in working with ad agencies on large multi-channel marketing campaigns.
• By experience mismatch (3) I mean I had enough overall experience but the company was looking for someone with a slightly different set of skills. For example, they were looking for more sales/marketing oriented people than technical or communications oriented ones.
• By cultural mismatch (4) I mean I had the right experience and skills but I wasn’t the right person for that particular job, team, or company.
• By too much experience (5) I mean I was overqualified for the job. I usually discovered this during the preliminary phone discussion with the recruiter at which point I would withdraw my application.
• By job already filled (3) I mean that, by the time I applied for the job, the company had already hired a candidate (either on its own or via another recruitment firm).
• By no answer (8) I mean I simply didn’t get a response for the company (2 cases) or the recruitment agent (6 cases) to whom I had applied. In some cases I got no answer even after telephoning them a number of times and leaving messages asking for a call-back.
• By no good reason given (3) I mean I got a generic and completely useless reason for my application being rejected. For example: “Thank you for your recent application for the above position; we have now had an opportunity to consider all applications. Very careful consideration has been given to your application and whilst you have many relevant attributes, unfortunately, on this occasion your application has not been successful.” In some of these cases I asked for further detail but I almost never got any.
• By too many candidates (1) I mean the recruitment firm had already filled its quota of interviews for that particular job.
• By hiring freeze (1) I mean the company stopped its hiring process before making an offer of employment because senior management instated a hiring freeze.

Finally, I interviewed for seven of these jobs:

• Twice I got rejected after a single interview
• Five times I got rejected after multiple (usually two) interviews

One of the experience mismatch jobs and three of the cultural mismatch jobs were the ones that I went through multiple interviews for. The fifth was the hiring freeze one.

How this Fits with my Job Application Philosophy

In my opinion, these are fairly decent statistics. I say this because they reflect my job application philosophy which includes the following heuristics:

• Only apply to those jobs you think you have a good chance of getting. This is, of course, based on the job ad, an optional detailed position description, or simply a verbal description of the role.
• If, while writing the cover letter, you find that you’re not convincing even yourself that you can or really want to do this job, abandon the application.
• Don’t apply to too many ‘reach’ jobs that might be just out of your skills and experience range. You’d only apply to these types of jobs if you though you could grow into the role quite rapidly.
• Don’t apply to too many ‘backup’ jobs for which you are qualified but from which you won’t gain anything other than a little more experience and line on your CV. You’d only apply to these types of jobs if the hiring company had a great brand, was one you really wanted to get into, or was one in which you could see yourself getting promoted through relatively quickly. For example, if Google offered me a junior-ish job I’d jump at it!
• Take the time to tailor both your resume and cover letter to match the requirements of the job at hand. Assuming, of course, you fit the basic requirements in first place.
• Do your research on the company and make sure that (a) you can do the job, (b) you want to do the job, and (c) you would work well in that company.

What Have I Learnt From All This?

Aside from the obvious “it’s no fun to be looking for a job during an economic downturn” I have learnt that perseverance, smart application techniques, and patience all pay off in the end. I have also learnt that it’s crucial to look for cultural fit between you and your potential employer and that it’s important to identify both good and bad recruitment consultants and recruitment firms.

The perseverance bit is important because I’ve learnt that lesson the hard way. This is now the third difficult hiring period I’ve been through in my life. The first was back in 1998 when Pakistan and India tested nuclear weapons because of which the number of overseas work and study visas awarded to Pakistanis was slashed considerably. The economic sanctions that were subsequently imposed on Pakistan didn’t help the local job market either. The second was when the dot-com bubble burst in the US in 2001. I was working for the Pakistan branch of a Silicon Valley consulting firm at the time and had just received my US work permit visa. My plan had been to go join that company in Silicon Valley but, instead, I quit my job and started working for a Pakistani firm instead. This actually turned out to be a fortuitous occurrence because that Pakistani company was the one that got me into creating web strategies and developing and using Content Management Systems.

Having patience is also important because in the past I have made one or two hasty career decisions that, in hindsight, I wish I hadn’t made. I don’t actually regret having made those decisions because I love where I am in my life and in my career. It’s just that I could have been further along my career path had I not gone with the first option that came my way.

I have also learnt that cultural fit between employer and candidate plays a key role in the hiring process. I already knew this in theory, of course, but it’s good to see it being played out in practice as well. I am really happy, for example, to have received a few specific rejections because I realized that, even though I could have done the jobs themselves, I wouldn’t have had fun doing them. This is also why I rarely get disappointed or upset when I don’t get a job that I’ve applied for. This is particularly true if I’ve had a couple of interviews with that company and, as a result, know quite a bit about my manager, my team, and the company in general. Also, I generally interview well and am honest about who I am during the the recruitment process. So, if after multiple interviews the company decides they don’t like what they see then they’re probably right in not hiring me because I wouldn’t fit in there.

On a more practical note, I have learnt that it is important to quickly identify ineffective or bad recruitment consultants and recruitment firms and then stay away from them. This is easier said than done, of course – especially if those recruitment firms keep advertising good jobs! The flip side of this is that it’s important to identify good recruitment consultants and recruitment firms and then stick with them. For example, I had excellent experiences with Michael Page (specifically with Angela Van Hazel), Hudson (specifically with Sarah Blaney), and RDBMS Resource Solutions (specifically with Jessica Burns) and I would highly recommend these firms and those recruitment consultants to anyone who is looking for a job.

What Now?

So the current job search phase in my life has ended. My contract with Melbourne Water is for 13 months, however, so I’ll be back to looking for a job within the year…but that’s okay. The more time I spend in the industry – getting to know companies and building networks of contacts – the easier it will be for me to get my next job.

Meanwhile, though, I’m going to work hard, do a good job, and have a lot of fun. I’ve been at Melbourne Water for just over a week but I already love the place and the people who work there (cultural fit rocks!). The future looks bright.

Alison Green from the Ask a Manager blog recently wrote a good article in the US News & World Report called ‘Why You Didn’t Get Hired’:

The job looked perfect for you. The description matched your experience and skills so perfectly, you could almost visualize yourself at your new desk. But now you’re staring at a rejection e-mail and can’t figure out what happened.

The article makes a good read, particularly in the current hiring climate. Though, if you’re at all familiar with hiring, getting hired, or the recruitment industry then none of what’s in there will come as a surprise to you.

Why This is Useful Anyway

Still, the article gives a good checklist to go through before applying for any job. I know that I self-select myself out of a number of potential job applications for some of the reasons listed in the article.

For example, I can tell when I’m under-qualified for a job and, unless I can clearly and succinctly justify why the company should take a chance on me despite my (apparent) shortcomings, I don’t bother applying for that role. Note that I’m not underselling myself by doing this, I’m simply being a realist.

Taking Self-Selection a Step Further

Indeed, before I apply for any job with a company I’m not very familiar with I learn all I can about the company and its employees. Naturally, a lot of my research is online since that’s the area I work in but my research has, in the past, included locating people who work for that firm and, through them, finding out first-hand what the culture there is really like. And I have, on occasion, not applied for an open position that I was qualified for after completing this research and realizing that I wouldn’t be a good fit there.

My research continues well into the interview stage, by the way. For example, just by looking at the office and the employees who walk by when you’re waiting in the reception area can tell you a lot. Specifically, it tells you what the company values and what it prides itself on. To give you an example, one organization I interviewed at had a huge world map on the wall with a dot representing where all its major offices were (over thirty of them across four continents) and a set of clocks that were set to the local times of major regional offices. Obviously, being global was important to this company. This kind of information is not only useful for the interview but twice I’ve realized early on that these weren’t places I could see myself enjoying working at. (The proudly-global company wasn’t one of them, by the way.)

Later, during the actual interview, I try to figure out which of the items in the job’s position description are important, necessary, optional, and added bonuses as far as the interviewer is concerned. If you’re lucky, your interviewer will tell you their preferences explicitly. If not, you have to figure it out from the company introduction and the overview of the role than they often give you at the start. Figuring out what they really want from you becomes particularly challenging when, for example, you have multiple interviewers who have differing priorities. And these priorities could differ both from each other and sometimes from what’s written on the position description itself.

For example, I once went through a three-round interview process and made it down to the last two applicants but got rejected because the head of the department – i.e. my potential boss’s boss – preferred a web strategist with a marketing agency background over one with an IT background (despite my MBA). My potential boss, on the other hand, really liked me because he had a marketing agency background and so he was looking for someone to complement his skills, not reinforce them. Indeed, he said exactly that during my interview with him. So when I highlighted my technical background during my final interview – this one with the head of the department – I ended up giving her a specific reason to reject me. Still, what I loved about this company was that they were clear about why I didn’t get the job and they were willing to state this reason openly and unapologetically – something that a lot of companies don’t do, even if you ask them.

So What Have We Learnt?

The point of this post, then, is two fold. First, if you didn’t get the job you thought was perfect for you, there are two reasons for this: (1) there was someone for whom this job was even more perfect or (2) you figured wrong and the job wasn’t perfect for you in the first place (i.e. maybe you were under-qualified or over-qualified, maybe you didn’t fit the team culture, maybe you underperformed at the interview, etc.).

Second, it’s crucial to debrief yourself on why you didn’t get that job. And be honest because sometimes the reason you didn’t get the job is you (i.e. you messed up the interview, you didn’t have an accurate understanding of what the job was about, you weren’t qualified anyway, etc.) and not the company (i.e. they didn’t understand you completely, they were too quick to reject you and probably didn’t read your entire resume, they’re just plain wrong, etc.).

Final Thought

Actually, if I could add one more thing it would be this: Don’t get disheartened.

I’ve had my fair share of job rejections over the last few months but I’ve also rejected tens of applicants who applied to jobs that my company advertised and for which I was the hiring manager. I’ve actually been in situations in which I’ve had three applicants who I know can do the job equally well – with some minor, mostly inconsequential differences among them, of course – and I’ve had to reject two of them. And, on occasion, I haven’t had a clear-cut, easily explainable reason for why I chose one over the others. In other words, the applicant I hired basically lucked out.

So when I’ve been rejected for a job I really wanted and knew I could do incredibly well – this has happened to me twice in the last year, by the way – I’m pretty sure it happened simply because I was unlucky that time. And I know that it’s only a matter of time before things go the other way and I’m the one who gets lucky. Of course, I just hope this happens sooner rather than later!