The Inner Game of the Job Search

A few weeks ago, I did a couple of posts about women in their 50s having a tough time finding a job. There are of course puh-lenty of external factors: society’s view of older women, technology advances driving rapid change in how one conducts a job search, and a recession.

But, there is also the internal game that has to do with how confident we are within ourselves and the kinds of unconscious messages we send based on the stories we believe about ourselves. If I lack confidence in myself, that is likely to show up in subtle and not so subtle ways my job interviews. And, the rest of my life as well, but that is another story.

That’s the unfortunate thing…we believe we mask these things so well. Or, perhaps, we aren’t trying to hide them because we are unaware of them. But the truth is they are usually quite visible to others.

Rats! What’s a girl to do??

This week, I’ve engaged in a conversation about the Inner Game of the Job Search with Nancy Oelklaus, a coach and author of Journey from Head to Heart: Living and Working Authentically. It has been an ongoing conversation that continues in the Forums on WomenBloom.

We are talking about ways to surface these internal limiting beliefs that get in our way as well as a few strategies for dealing with them.

Job searching is challenging enough without us stumbling over ourselves.

The Late 50s Job Search Challenge Revisited

Yikes, as luck would have it, the day after my post about job search challenges for 50 somethings, a friend sent me a link to an article on CNNMoney.com called Out Of A Job And Out Of Luck At 54. It confirms my last post on the job search challenges us midlife women (and men) face as we hit our 50s.

This article paints a grim picture. Consider they say, among the unemployed age 55 to 64, nearly 42% had been fired or laid off, up from 32.2% a year ago, according to federal statistics for April. According to AARP, it took those age 55 and older an average of 21.1 weeks to land a new job in 2007, about five weeks longer than their younger counterparts, according to AARP.

We are apparently viewed as expensive hires, salary-wise and health cost-wise. Those finding jobs are taking lower pay, and many simply are told they are 'over-qualified'.

All this at a time when many of us need to be stashing money away in 401Ks and savings for retirement.

The other point of the article which speaks to the conclusion I came to after my lunch with Kate McLagan at Right Management, is that many of us have rusty job search and networking skills. We aren't knowledgeable about how to work with the online world of job searching and how to craft effective resumes and cover letters.

Getting help with these things is the best advice I can offer. Don't wait until you've been through weeks of searching to figure out your skills are rusty.

And, another helpful resource is a list AARP has published, Best Employers for Workers Over 50. They also have a list of 6 Tricky Interview Questions For Older Workers that addresses that 'over-qualified' gambit.

Awareness is the first step to being prepared. I'll be continuing to address this subject.

The Late 50s Job Search Challenge

I know a couple of women, late 50s, who are having trouble finding jobs. Both have much work experience, a healthy personal network and seem like very capable people. One took off a few years to care for elderly parents and has been looking for a job now for well over a year. The other quit a job a year or so ago and has been looking since then. Both have had interviews where it was down to them and someone else, but no sale. Needless to say, they are getting discouraged.

This troubles me. A lot. After all, it could be any of us. Why is it that they are having trouble?

I am working on some articles on the topic which will be showing up on WomenBloom over the weeks to come, but I wanted to comment on a lunch conversation I had yesterday with Kate McLagan, VP for Client Services for the Right Management company in Austin, Texas about this issue of older women having a hard time finding employment.

I came away realizing that it takes quite sophisticated job search skills these days to have success. Ladies, ladies, ladies. This issue is partly a societal thing, but a significant responsibility is on us to stay current if we want to be relevant.

Kate points out that job search strategies are a much different beast than they were a mere 5 years ago. That made me wonder how many of us 50 somethings are up to date on our job search skills. And let me tell you, ‘job search’ encompasses a huge number of skills and competencies. I realized shortly into the conversation I wasn’t as current as I should be.

Some of the pearls of wisdom I gleaned:

• Basically a job search is now a sales and marketing campaign with you selling yourself.

• You don’t get a job with a resume. But, there is an art to making networking work for you. Find help with this to keep from wasting time.

• You have to begin by getting your verbal and written strategies/materials in place. This includes distilling your particular gifts into 3 or 4 ‘diamonds’. If you skip this step, you can count on doubling the time it takes to find a position.

• Too many times, we are ‘trying to get a job’ rather than figure out what our role in the company could be. We are aiming at some box defined by a job description, rather than thinking about (and helping the hiring manager see) the broader picture of how our particular gifts fit with the organization’s goals.

• We need to understand broader trends that are driving change in our industry to keep ourselves current.

There is more but the basic idea is we need much more sophisticated skills these days to find work than many of us have. Or, many of us realize we need.

For my two women friends, it has been from 3 to 5 years since they engaged in their last job search. Things have changed. Get help.

Finding your Inner Tech Diva

OK. Us middle aged women aren’t exactly known as tech divas. There are digital immigrants, and there are digital natives. As you might guess, immigrants may learn a language and culture well enough to get along but, most likely, they will never be as comfortable with it as the natives.

Think: you vs. your teenager, and your respective relationships to ipods, texting, twittering, Facebook, etc. Now, wild guess as to which one of you is the digital native?? :)

Nevertheless, the human resources and staffing folks insist that it’s very important we get on board with this tech stuff in order to stay relevant in the workplace as we get older. We will, after all, be managing or be managed by digital natives. We need to understand their world even if we don’t entirely embrace it.

So, in that spirit, a priority of WomenBloom is to help us all get up to speed on what’s happening in the tech world.

Today, Gentle Bloomers, we are going to talk about something called ‘Readers’ and tell you how they can help you.

Do you have news sites, or certain blogs you enjoy reading? Maybe you’re signed up for email notifications for new information from those sites. Or, maybe you don’t do either because the thought of opening the floodgates of information from the web makes you tired.

Well, Readers are like an email inbox that sits on the web and receives the latest information from your favorite news, blogs and other sites. Once it’s set up, you simply go to your Reader as often as you care to and see what’s new on your favorites. If you use Google Reader, which is tres simple, you simply would go to Google's home page, and click Reader to see the latest.

You can either read the latest article or blog post in the Reader itself, but you have the option of clicking through to the actual website or blog if you want to.

Benefits:

• No more going to each site individually to check whether something new is going on.
• If you’ve been going the email notification route, Readers mean fewer emails clogging your inbox.
• You can process more information from the web easier because it’s all in one place.
• You control the ‘when’ of checking for new information

Here is a great Readers for Dummies video that explains in plain English what readers are and how to set one up for yourself. It’s easy, really. If I can figure it out, any of you can.

G