CheckMate

It’s that time of year again and a good time for the annual reminder - the beginning of the new year is always a good time for a move, so you want to get prepared for it now and stay focused on it even among all the fun of the holiday season.

There are a number of specific things you can do - really the same basic ones, but with a little different emphasis during the holidays.

First, make sure your resume is updated, tuned up, and in outstanding shape. Louise Fletcher, who runs Blue Sky Resumes, addresses this very well in a post today called Start to Plan the Change Now!. Although Louise is talking primarily about resumes, her advice applies to moving to a new position in general, in particular the need to operate with a sense of urgency and not put things off until after the new year. One specific caution from Louise: if you are looking for professional help with your resume and wait too long, “…any professional resume writer worth his or her salt will have to turn you down because they are overwhelmed with all the other people who are also in a rush to find a new job.”

Next, network - with all the get togethers, exchanges of greetings, and just more running into people in general, there’s no better time to renew old connections and make new ones as well. There are some great guidelines from Debra Feldman in a post on the Career Hub site (another Louise Fletcher project) called Tis the Season to Network. Personally, I like this one because I think it’s another one of those “obvious” ones that gets overlooked all the time:

“To reap the full benefits of networking purposefully, you must be alert and stay sharp. Don’t overindulge in food or beverages. Conduct yourself professionally at all times.”

Last, and most important (What else would you expect me to say?), keep in touch with and stay in front of recruiters. We are actively looking right now to fill positions which begin after the first of the year.

As Louise said so aptly, “…if you have been dallying with the idea of a move for some time, why not start getting prepared now?”

I’m going to go back to Jim Stroud again today because Part II of his Ethical Behavior in Recruiting series is just too good to pass up.

In this installment, Jim has a guest post from Yvonne Catino, a technical recruiter, where she blasts the practice of recruiters submitting a candidate for a position without the candidate’s permission.

Yvonne provides some fantastic advice for candidates on how to deal with recruiters, including some questions you should ask any recruiter who’s talking to you, and I would strongly recommend reading the entire post.

Let me contrast what she rightly complains about there with what we do:

- We only submit candidates with their permission.

- We schedule interviews with candidates.

- We interview at length any candidate that is going to be submitted.

- We tell candidates why they should choose us to represent them.

Candidates should expect those things from recruiters, and we recruiters should be able to expect them from each other as well.

Simple - you can’t.

Absolutely spot on question from Jim Stroud today in a post called Ethical Behavior in Recruiting, Part I. Jim describes the shady manner in which someone he talked to represents himself as an employee of a company that he actually only does contract work for, and then goes on to relate that to similar practices he’s seen from some of our fellow recruiters, such as posting listings for positions that really don’t exist.

Not a subject we normally talk about here, but this seems like a good time. As a candidate, you can be confident that all the listings you see from us are for real positions with an existing requirement. Make sure you can say that about any recruiter you deal with.

Jim sums it all up right here:

“I believe, as recruiters, we have a responsibility to represent any position in an honest manner.”

Exactly.

There’s an interesting story from the AP yesterday called “More Americans have extra spending money” which quotes a new report from The Conference Board.

Lots of information in that short article, but here are a couple key points. First:

“The percentage of U.S. households with discretionary income rose to 64 percent last year from 52 percent in 2002…”

And, more importantly, particularly for someone interested in a financial services career:

“More than three out of every four discretionary dollars flows to householders earning $100,000 or more,” Lynn Franco, director of The Conference Board’s consumer research center, said in a statement. “And their discretionary income is more than 2.5 times above average.”

While as a financial advisor you can deal with people across a broad range of income levels, the group described above is certainly right in the “sweet spot” for many advisors. And what this means is that even with rising gas prices, a turbulent market, and so on, many people, especially those in that income range, actually have more money to spend…and invest.

I was recently reading Driving Change: The UPS Approach to Business - a great new book for anybody with an interest in business operations in general or UPS in particular. There’s a ton of interesting information in the book, but one fact really jumped out at me:

“What’s remarkable is that UPS was committed to national growth even while American business was spiraling down toward its nadir. The company, in fact, would grow from 650 employees in 1932 to 1,650 employees in 1934 (my emphasis), many of these people being hired to work in New York at UPS’s facility at 38th Street and First Avenue.” (p 28)

I’ll admit to being completely shocked when I read this. Not only did UPS grow, but they more than doubled - 2 1/2 times the number of people in two years, smack in the middle of the Great Depression.

Now I wasn’t around back then, but like many of us, I’d heard all the family stories, seen the movies, and read the history, so the idea of a company actually growing during a time when people were hungry, selling apples on the street, the great dust storms were raging - all that terrible stuff that no one who ever lived through will ever forget - is just incredible. Even when you read about UPS during that time, the story you normally read is about how they started their air freight operations arm in February 1929 - clearly not the best of timing - and had to close it down in April 1931.

Things are not anywhere near what they were back then, but with all the current talk about bubbles and recession, this is an outstanding story to remember, especially if you are an aspiring financial advisor. The demand for talented advisors will continue regardless of the ongoing fluctuations of the economy - in fact, if anything, I think it will increase, the key word here being “talented”. Think about it - it’s a lot easier to make money in a growing economy, but the truly talented people are the ones who can continue to do well when things aren’t so hot. And those are the people the firms we deal with are always looking for.