Discuss.

Be ready to discuss this and more at the Social Recruiting Summit at 2:30 PST next Monday.  If you can’t be there in person, you can still follow and contribute to the discussion, use this;  Spy.

g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

When these things happen, that are largely out of our individual control, its easy to stress out, get down, lose faith, and complain a lot. You could do any or all of those.

Or you could look for opportunity.

Call me crazy, but I think times like these are among the best times for you to have the greatest impact on your career. All thats required is equanimity, attention, and a few tools. What follows are my reasons why these are good times for your own personal career innovation, and what you can do about it.

Leeway, Openness to Ideas, Accessibility – why now is a good time for some career innovation

In bad times, there is often more leeway given for people to talk about the bad times. Granted this is not always true, but generally people are given the chance to talk with their managers, with their peers, or in organizational meetings. Take this as an opportunity for reflection on what you really want from your career. You have more freedom now to be bold, go for your ideals, and explore things you’ve always wanted to explore.

Often, executives, managers, decision-makers and “people in charge” of your destiny are a lot more accessible and physically present. Depends on the company, but generally they feel bad about the bad news, and unless they work for AIG, they really care about what happens to the company and its people – you. They are therefore more approachable, and open to meeting.

The decision makers are likely grasping for ideas and solutions themselves, thus they are more open to new ideas, or a fresh approach that may help them solve their problems.

Given that the chess board is laid out this way, now set your game plan, and execute.

Career Innovation Map

Map out, literally, what you want and all your current options for getting there. I’m a huge advocate for mindmapping to graphically represent complex sets of interactions and get some clarity. Doesn’t matter if you use Mindomo, Freemind, Mindmeister, or paper and pen. Take a quick look at this demo of mindmapping then do one with yourself as the central theme. The idea here is to map out all the potential career scenarios that could come your way. Its also a place to document areas in each scenario for you to have impact. This is a career wish-list of sorts, so be bold. Put you in the middle of the map, and each branch is a potential scenario for where you could take your career. This is an exercise in being expansive and innovative in thinking about your professional life. In my experience you end up with a lot more options than you thought you had. Plus, you can more easily identify the logical steps necessary to carry out each option. Now you’ll be ready to act no matter what ends up happening.

Update your personal brand

If you’re not sure what I mean by ‘personal brand’, do yourself a favor and check these guys out. Chris Brogan, Guy Kawasaki, Dan Schwabel, and Seth Godin. They all understand the direct impact of what you say and do, on you. Even better they clearly lay out options for actions you can take now.

If you don’t have time to go to each of their sites now (be sure and do it later) and flip through this slideshare by Dan Schwabel. Even a cursory run through will paint a picture for you of what personal branding is and what you can start to do about it.

| View | Upload your own

Personal brand is something you are always impacting whether you’re aware of it or not. Now is your chance to be more intentional and more visible. Here’s some tools to help.

VisualCV: this site allows you to have a media rich resume online for free. VisualCV is indexed by Google (therefore findable), and easily shareable via a unique URL, like this Visualcv.com/joshuakahn
Some other nice features are that you can display your work visually, with links, and images. You can also share your VisualCV via URLs, direct email, and can track how many have seen your ‘public’ CV. The site also allows you view/save your resume in PDF form with one click. Emurse.com is another popular option with similar features. Zolio is on the scene now in beta but is still building features.

LinkedIN, Facebook: I’m always amazed at how many LinkedIN profiles I see that are woefully incomplete. Look through some of these articles on getting the most out of LinkedIN and follow the advice there. In short, get your profile to 100%, link any of your sites there, display your email and be open to networking.

Twitter: There probably not a more central tool for getting out a message. The beauty of Twitter is that you can use it to communicate to people in Twitter and outside of Twitter. Most social networks have a “status update” or allow you to display an RSS feed to your connections in that network. This allows you to use Twitter to communicate to all your networks at once. If you really want to get funky with this “write once, post everywhere” theme, check out ping.fm.

Social Networks in general: If you’re like me, you probably have a long list of social networks that at one point or another you’ve checked out. You might be more or less active in these, but I would encourage you to go to each one and make your profiles and pictures consistent across all of them. In each one, where you can, include the links to your LinkedIN profile, Twitter handle, or other sites of yours. You don’t have to be real active in each of these places, but you can still automatically push your communications into each area.

Execute your plan

Now that you have your scenarios and career wishlist mapped, and your personal brand content and communication structure set up, take some action.

Remember how those “people in charge” are more accessible now? When an executive says, “if you have any questions or concerns about the current situation, my door is open” that’s your cue. Set meetings with those directly responsible or even dotted line responsible for your career. Bring your career innovation plan. Present it as, “in case you were wondering what to do with me”.  Be honest, be bold, tell them what you could do to help, ask for what you want.

Best case: they take your ideas, note your initiative, and your risk pays off. You get what you want, or something close to it. Bottom line, you’ve had an impact on the direction of your career.

Worst case: they are restricted by circumstances and can’t help you directly.  However, you have a hopefully honest assessment of your place in the organization currently from someone you may not generally have access to, and you are now perfectly prepared for investigating opportunity elsewhere.

The gist of his post was “be careful who you idolize” in the recruiting world. Definitely something to keep in mind if you’re an avid consumer of recruiting/sourcing (or any) blogs. I guess I just wanted to expand a bit on that theme with a related, if somewhat tangential topic.

The stuff I write about, and train people on internal to my company, or share externally at networking events is all my particular take on a given technique or approach to sourcing. I do my best to write from my experience and hopefully the stuff I put out is useful to you. If not, why are you here?! Unsubscribe right away! Well, tell me it stinks, then unsubscribe.

Too often a vendor, or individual or company will hail some sourcing doodad as the answer to all your problems. This is almost never the case. The myriad factors involved in sourcing are too varied to all be tamed by one thing.

The point of all the techniques, tactics and tools that are out there is to find the most appropriate use for them, and just as important the situations when they aren’t useful.

Take what you read and test it, try other versions of it, give it a workout on your sourcing or recruiting projects. Improve on it, make it fail, take it apart, try to get at why it works or doesn’t for you. Along the way you’ll not only learn something about the machinery behind the tools tactics and techniques being offered, you’ll also teach yourself to spot BS a mile away. Be it from a vendor or self described guru.

One big challenge we have as sourcers is that we’re not generally conversant in the lingo of the people we seek. Even if we have experience sourcing talented people in a certain industry we’re still not doing the work that they do. In other words, we’re not exactly speaking the language they speak. We may know a few words, or phrases, but we don’t have context, jargon, acronyms, and syntax down pat like the prospects we seek.

Here’s a thought at how to peek into real conversations happening that may allow you to both learn the professional language of the people you seek, and find some of those people to boot.

First off is a little Google app called Spy. This app was created by a colleague of mine at Best Buy, Ben Hedrington. Ben’s a smart guy, you should follow him on twitter @benhedrington. Spy tracks content posted via Twitter, Friendfeed, Flickr, Google Reader, Yahoo News, and Blogs (via friendfeed). In the snapshot below I entered ‘SQL’ as my keyword, and set it to look at the last 30 minutes.

Click Image to see Spy in Action

As I’m writing this its scrolling through all posts with SQL in it. I’m learning about journals, conferences, individuals, and other SQL related stuff. Oh, and I’m learning about the people that post too. A real nice way to quickly find and connect with people in an industry.

Another interesting way to use Spy is to project it on the wall during a conference or any large meeting. Assuming you have Twitter savvy people in the room and they all use a standard ‘hashtag‘ in their tweets about the meeting, you can watch the collective consciousness of the room (or anyone using the key term) displayed on the wall.

The second conversation watcher is called Monitter. I just learned of Monitter the other day from Thomas Knoll, community manager for Seesmic. Monitter allows you to watch three different keywords and their ’stream’ from Twitter, again, relatively real-time. One really cool feature of Monitter is focusing on location. The picture below shows three streams following ‘Oracle’, ‘DB2′, and ‘SQL’ within 40 miles of Reston.

Click Image to enlarge

This takes the conversation watching idea to a new level. Notice RSS is enabled here as well.

What tools are you using to understand your target industry better?

Of course this is a lot of hooey.

Allow me to state the obvious reasons why.

You can’t join and consistently use every network

You can’t use every tool, all the time ( I know, I’ve tried)

Real Value doesn’t come from more (necessarily)

The irony is that by trying to do it all, without some discrimination and mindfulness, leads to less quality connections, and less productivity, less of what you were striving for in the first place.

So if you’re job and interests require that you use these tools to be productive and effective, or if you simply want to use these tools to accomplish your goals, you end up feeling a bit stuck.

In short, you suffer from Social Network Fatigue.

If this describes you then I hope you’ll see some value in the series of posts I’m working on to solve this problem. I’ll be tailoring the content to sourcing and recruiting people specifically, but the underlying principles will be applicable regardless of industry or purpose. By the end of the series I’ll have a simple, clear list of principles and specific tactics to follow.

Step One: map out all the places the digital you exists right now. Above is an interactive example of what I mean. It’s a mindmap that I’ve created using Mindomo, a web-based, free tool. There are many other mindmapping tools out there, but I wouldn’t recommend spending a lot of time looking unless you are going to be a heavy mind-mapper. For this particular use, this one is just right.

Simply start entering nodes for all the places you are or want to be on line. Categorize your places if that helps you, and also show the ways these places are connected. This one isn’t the complete picture for me personally, but it illustrates the idea. Visualizing it this way accomplishes a couple things…

1. you can see in one space all the places you are, you might be surprised.

2. you can use the connector tools to visualize how your places interact with each other and how your content flows through your network. This will be key in later steps as you start to be a bit more intentional about how things are connected and how you personally interact with these sites, push your content, and connect with people.

Personally, I’m using this map on my ‘Connect‘ page here on my blog to help people decide where they’d like to connect with me. Since not everyone uses the same sites and networks, it gives them options. More on this later. For now play with the map above a bit, its interactive. You can drag it around, zoom in/out, expand/contract the branches and the links are live beneath the icons. To see the full screen, click the red M in the middle.