Thank you to the wonderful UX Speakeasy folks (Bennett King, Shilpa Lewis, Aaron Irizarry and whoever else I forgot). You guys did a great job putting on an awesome conference. Very educational, and wonderful networking opportunities.
Here are some great resources that I referred to during our presentation: How to get a Great UX Job.
Read up and improve your lot in life!
I’ll upload the presentation later.
Cheers!
The UX Speakeasy Conference is on March 31 at the San Diego Zoo – rumor has it, they’re going to let me out of my cage because the Zoo is a safe place.
The most important reason I’m there? To do a UX Drinking Game session!
But that’s not all.
Myself and Dylan Campbell, a great recruiter out of Los Angeles, are going to present a workshop about all aspects of interviewing and writing your resume as an User Experience Designer:
From Application To Interview: How To Get A Great UX Job
The process of getting a great user experience job isn't as hard as you would think. This workshop covers all aspects of the interview process,from presenting a great resume and portfolio, what to expect during an in person interview, and how much flexibility companies have in salary and compensation. Also covered are questions to ask during the phone screen and in-person interviews, how to spot trouble signs, and what else to look for so you can find the right culture for your skills and career.
One of the breakout sessions will also include the UX Drinking Game: “If a conference invites two guys to talk about something they know nothing about, drink.” The attendee that comes up with the best reason to drink will win a George Foreman Grill.
I’ll be posting some of the materials, plus some great resources, tomorrow during the presentation. As extra credit, there’s an automatically rotating web page that shows drinking game items.
And of course I’m at San Francisco International Airport writing this — apparently, a surfboard isn’t an acceptable carry on item.
Cheers.
Jobvite is the full-time gig, and they're nice enough to let me blog. I talk all the time to recruiters and how they recruit. One of the most recent topics was Twitter, and how it’s a great platform for finding jobs in the so-called hidden job market. Here’s the repost.
Twitter works.
How do I know? The senior visual designer I work with, Kenneth James Hamer, got his job through Twitter. Five recent high quality applicants I had for an interaction designer position came through the channel in a time where interaction designers are in high demand.
How hard is it finding a job through Twitter? It's not. You don't have to be clever. You don't have to tweet ten times a day. You just have to listen and pick your spots.
For Kenneth, it started with a single message after several informal conversations.
"Hey, could you look at my resume? I want to get your opinion about it."
He didn't ask about a job – he asked what I thought of his resume. Kenneth knew that I was hiring freelancers for other work at the time (he did his research), and he worked at building a relationship that included several Skype calls. He understood that the results might not be right away. We were just having a conversation anyway.
Several months passed, and now he's working at Jobvite.
Twitter works.
Here's how you can make it work for you.
Twitter is a flood of information; what you want to do is turn it into a manageable stream.
Watch your feed and start a list of people that you enjoy reading. I literally call mine "Stuff I Follow." People you follow might post a relevant article, sage advice about a career, a funny comment or even a job posting. Favorite posts and add them to your own personal lists. Pare down the list so it's at a pace that can be browsed comfortably in a few minutes.
There are several tools that help you manage that flood. TweetDeck is my favorite because it allows me to filter my feeds by certain search terms. Flipboard has an amazing social client that helps you read through tweets.
Next, understand whom you're following. LinkedIn is a great resource for this, and all it takes is a simple name search. Then, not only do you get to know the person's professional background, but also if the person is approachable. The main thing is to identify that the users are ones who can help you make a job connection.
Find people that tweet articles about your industry and start following them. Target users that have between 500 and 5,000 followers and over 5,000 tweets. Not only do they have a great audience, but also they're very experienced with the platform and can show you the ropes, if you listen. Most people in that range not only engage but also encourage conversation with their audience.
The best way to find content is to search for hashtags. These are keywords that are used to find categorized content on Twitter. Most job categories have most hashtags defined for them. Additionally, people will include hashtags for specialized tweets (Job postings will carry the #jobs or #careers hashtag, for example). There are also hashtags for Human Resources (#hr), Java developers (#java), Marketers (#marketing), Social Media (#socialmedia) and more.
But there's a catch. Most of those job postings are a) posted by automated bots and b) don't carry the cache of a personal referral. Those probably won't get you hired, but it shows who's hiring.
Another place to look is people that have several lists of Twitter users. I have 15 lists that categorize User Experience professionals by geographic region. Several Twitter users are subscribing to these lists.
True engagement begins with a one-on-one conversation. It might be a comment about something posted or a straight direct message asking for tips or advice.
People love to talk, and conversations on Twitter are short, personal communications. You can start a conversation with, "I consider you an industry expert. Can I get your opinion on this?" Nothing works better than flattery.
The key is starting a real conversation that has banter that can become a personal acquaintance. You want to develop a sense of trust that will extend the Twitter conversation to a professional relationship.
Twitter is a great personal branding platform. If you acknowledge the other party's brand, that person becomes very approachable.
Remember that your ideal audience includes recruiters. Many companies that are hiring use Jobvite and Twitter to advertise and track applicants. People that use Twitter are open to referrals on the network, because they understand that the platform is a great place to grow professional contacts. And they'll remember someone much more if they've had previous conversations with you.
Those that engage become employee referrals – like my friend Kenneth.
"Our own employees are some of our best recruiters," said Janet Van Huysse, vice president of human resources at Twitter. The company has hundreds of employees on their own social network, in essence, turning all of them into "employee recruiters" interested in bringing great resources into their organization.
Our CEO, Dan Finnigan, presented at SXSW a few weeks ago and indicated in his presentation that even though seven percent of the people that apply for jobs are employee referrals, the hire rate is 40 percent of the candidates.
That's huge.
Employees will prep you, as the job seeker, on interviews, giving you an added advantage. It's stacking the deck in your favor.
Join Twitter and embrace the conversation. The investment will pay off.
Can you imagine being asked this during a job interview?
“Can I read all of your private messages and private status updates so I can inspect them before I hire you?”
Before social media, this would be an almost impossible task, and something most employers wouldn’t have thought as possible.
Now not only is it possible, it’s easy to ask for. But still wrong.
Asking for that information during a job interview is against the law and could be considered discrimination. Facebook has enough controls where you can hide this information fairly easily. By giving the user name and password your employer, you are giving them full access to all information to your account. As quoted from the Jobvite blog post by CEO Dan Finnegan:
At this point in our history, I think most people know that it is illegal to ask job candidates about their age or religion. You cannot ask someone if they are married, have children or are pregnant. You cannot even ask their citizenship. Clearly, asking someone to access their private Facebook profile would provide answers to most, if not all of these kinds of questions.
During interviews, you can’t even ask this information — you have to steer clear because the you are supposed to judge them on their qualifications.
Doing a Google search on a candidate is one thing: this is publicly available information that is easily found. But the first thing I have always said is, “Sure, if it’s on the internet, it must be true.”
You can determine if they’ve bought an house, what their credit score is and where they have lived fairly easily through background checks. But that usually requires some kind of signed document allowing the company to do so, and that gives the applicant the chance to decide if they want to work there. I generally don’t interview at companies that require drug tests because as a Libertarian, I feel like that’s an invasion of my privacy, even if I don’t use drugs.
I once heard of a situation where a company wanted the phone records of a consultant to remove billable time from the bills. Even with the consultant using a company phone, they couldn’t do it as to risk legal action from the consultant because it would disclose possible personal phone numbers. Seriously — would you want your boss to have a record of every phone call you made so they could possibly call those people?
But to able to go through personal messages and friend lists? Really? How could that even be legal?
If I’m sitting in an interview, and they are asking for my social media user names and passwords during the interview, how much privacy am I going to have when I work at the company?
Where does it stop? Are they going to insist on reading my social media messages once a week? Are they going to insist on drug tests? Are they going to want to see my credit card statements?
We spend one-third of our waking hours at our jobs, building personal relationships that go beyond the paycheck. But, there has to be an expectation of the separation of work and personal lives, and the last thing I want is a level of distrust between me and my employer that requires them approving every single photo or private message I send to a friend.
I think it’s in companies’ best interests to not know what every employee does in their off hours, especially if they are productive in their organizations.
I like working a Jobvite because our technology helps people find jobs for their friends. Studies have also shown that employee referrals means more profitable companies. That’s the power of the Jobvite (or for the matter, any social media) platform — connecting people to change their lives through better opportunities.
The recruiters I talk to go through great lengths to give reasonable protections of privacy for their applicants, and encourage the use of social media only for positive purposes. I wish all people considered the same.
“Hey, I have this idea — let’s split it. What do you think?”
I get that a lot, because I’m one of those unicorn types: I can design, write and code to a level that gets people money. A lot of money.
For example, I personally wrote the PHP code for the UX Drinking Game. I can build a demo from scratch to a point where investors think it’s real. That said, there’s nothing more frustrating than taking all the risk and giving up half the return, because most business people aren’t ready to really do what it takes to make a startup work.
That’s why I love Eddie Kim’s story about Triptrotting and the sacrifices the founders made:
They couldn't afford to hire a PR team, so Aigerim and Shana contacted the press themselves. Soon, there were articles about Triptrotting being published in several reputable sources. They hustled. Through their hard work, the number of registered members, Twitter followers, and Facebook likes grew exponentially.
These two girls sacrificed their social lives. Their nights and weekends were devoted to Triptrotting. At the Idealab office, they were the first ones in the office every morning, and the last ones out every night. Even when funds were tight, they persisted. Shana and Aigerim went through a stretch where they paid themselves nothing. They got the attention of Mark Suster (Launchpad LA) and raised their next round of funding through Launchpad. They engaged in many meetings with many investors.
A day before their scheduled meeting with Google ventures, Shana had an "a-ha" moment. Her new idea would drastically improve Triptrotting's business model and it would change the way they described the business. They needed a new deck and a new presentation. This was no time to make last minute changes, but they improvised. Shana, not being an expert in Photoshop, used Microsoft Paint to design a mockup of the new Triptrotting feature. Funny right? Well, this mockup was good enough to excite Google Ventures.
Just 1.5 years ago, they were clueless, google searching "how to start a business." Today, Triptrotting has raised $1 million dollars in funding from some of the biggest names in the tech industry: Google Ventures, Mark Suster, Bill Gross, Dave McClure.
They did what it takes. Are you prepared to do what it takes?
They still publish encyclopedia’s?
The Britannica, the oldest continuously published encyclopedia in the English language, has become a luxury item with a $1,395 price tag. It is frequently bought by embassies, libraries and research institutions, and by well-educated, upscale consumers who felt an attachment to the set of bound volumes. Only 8,000 sets of the 2010 edition have been sold, and the remaining 4,000 have been stored in a warehouse until they are bought.
According to the article, it took only 11 years for Wikipedia to take over:
Since it was started 11 years ago, Wikipedia has moved a long way toward replacing the authority of experts with the wisdom of the crowds. The site is now written and edited by tens of thousands of contributors around the world, and it has been gradually accepted as a largely accurate and comprehensive source, even by many scholars and academics.
I kind of want to buy the last copy. That would be cool. I have no idea where I would put it though. My iPad or Kindle maybe?
Patrick Neeman is Director of User Experience at Jobvite, a social recruiting platform and runs both the UX Drinking Game and Startup Drinking Game | More | Contact
