By Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter
Today’s show is about keeping your job search confidential.
Good morning, it’s Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter. It’s Monday morning at 9am eastern and that translates into a dose of No BS Job Search Advice. This is a time where I’d like to spend about 15 minutes talking with you about some element of job hunting because, to me, it doesn’t have to be hard, difficult, painful, or even take so long.
Yes, the skills needed to find a job are different than the skills needed to do a job. But even more important than that is how often the mistakes you make sabotage your job search. So, what I’ve done with this show, my other one, which is called Job Search Radio, also in iTunes, but available on the web at webtalkradio.net and other podcast directories.
What I try to do with my podcasts is talk with you so I can give you No BS Job Search Advice. So, I can give you direct and pointed information that’s going to help you with your search so you don’t hurt yourself and you can get to work more quickly. Now, today’s show is brought to you by two sponsors.
So, rather than put yourself at risk and exposing yourself by posting resumes on job boards, I thought I would talk with you about a couple of the alternatives that you need to employ more often when looking for a job while working for someone else. Now, the first thing is many job boards afford you the opportunity to post your resume, but pay for an additional upgrade, which allows you to hide your name and hide your email address when posting. Now, what this does is causes people to contact you through email and use this long, obscure email address to reach out to you, but it hides who you are.
Now, why I start off by suggesting that comes from an episode with a client of mine many years ago, who told me about two positions they were looking to fill. This is the case I asked, so how did the jobs become available? I said, well, we were looking for people for different roles on one of the job boards. I won’t mention what board it was.
And we saw their resumes there. So, rather than get caught short, what we’re going to do is start looking for their replacements. And if we find the replacement before they get a job, we’re just going to let them go.
Now, looking for a job and putting your name out there does expose you to risk. It’s like telling the wrong person at your office that you’re looking for a job and they go right to your manager because they want your job and or leaving your resume at the Xerox machine, as used to happen with people with Xerox and fax resumes or email resumes. You know, something you find the resume at the fax machine or a resume left in the copier and lo and behold, management brings you to their office and you get fired.
You get a stern talking to you. You get a warning and who needs it? So, better to put yourself in the position of hiding your identity wherever you can by paying a modest amount for obscuring your name and email address. So, that’s the thing number one.
Number two is many of us or many people use LinkedIn very aggressively to look for work. So, one of the things you need to do is before you do an update on LinkedIn to improve your profile, you want to make sure that you’re not sending out one of those automated notices to people about an update. Why? Because if you’re like most people, what you’ve done is set your defaults in a way that causes people to get notified whenever you do an update and you’re in a situation where you’ve probably connected with people at your office, maybe even your manager or your boss’s boss.
So, you don’t want them to get activated. After all, there’s this search tool that firms use and recruiters use called entelo, e-n-t-e-l-o. And they have a premium feature that notifies us when there is a higher probability that a person’s profile is one of an individual who’s aggressively looking.
That criteria, the criteria or one of the criteria they use is how whether a person has just recently updated their profile. So, what you need to do is go to your privacy’s controls. And the way you do that is you go to account and settings, which is where your picture is in the upper right in the current version of LinkedIn.
You go to the drop down, go to privacy and settings. And toward the middle and the bottom, there’s an area called privacy controls. And again, in the current version, it’s the first item there, turn on or off your activity broadcasts.
So, turn them off. So, this way, people who might cause you a problem will not be notified that you’ve done an update. So, that’s the second thing that you do.
The next thing you need to do is be careful what you display online. So, if you join one of the online job search groups, make sure that you, shall we say, hide that badge from your LinkedIn profile. Why expose that to the light of day if that’s a new group for you? It’s a real easy way that management can figure out that you’re looking for a job.
Next thing is don’t use your company email address for your resume. Don’t have people email you at the office. After all, when you stop and think about it, you don’t control the servers for keywords that are often being looked for.
And organizations often block certain domains and send them right to the admin area where management is notified that you’re looking for work. So, number one is make sure you use a personal email address for all your communications. Don’t have calls going to your office number.
Have them go into your mobile instead so that this way you’re not caught in an awkward situation where you’re talking to someone at work from the desk phone. So, you’re kind of tied in there. And, in point of fact, you need to be talking to them away from the desk.
So, having them call your mobile instead of your desk phone allows you to very simply say, bear with me for a second. Let me just walk to a place where I have a degree of privacy. Or, could you hold on one second and close the door? So, it’s just a lot more comfortable for you if you have them contact you by phone.
Now, some will tell you to do the job search purely from home. After all, firms do have policies against employees using their equipment for personal use. So, being respectful of that, I wouldn’t necessarily go to the extreme of doing it at home.
But I’m not going to use the company Blackberry. I’m not going to use the company mobile phone. I’m going to use a personal mobile for the contacts.
Now, some will tell you to schedule interviews off hours. That’s the ideal set of circumstances. And if you can do that, that’s terrific.
But some firms won’t comply with that. After all, from their standpoint, they’re trying to be courteous to their own workers. And they don’t want them around from seven in the morning until seven at night interviewing and doing their job.
They want people to have a work life balance. So, you have to kind of manage the interviews in ways that don’t conflict with your professional schedule. So, you know, you can do the long lunch hour on occasion.
You can do the phone interview at a lunch hour. So, you’re away from the desk and doing it on your own time and doing it on your personal mobile. Do things along those lines so that this way, you’re able to keep the search more clandestine.
And the next thing I just want to mention is as much as networking is important, you need to know really the person you’re speaking with to know if they’re an ally or an enemy. So, I use that example of the person at the office who notifies your boss that you’re looking and they start monitoring your emails more aggressively for anything that confirms that. Because they’re looking to move up within the organization, too.
And they’re looking for an edge or an advantage that permits them to be elevated in a hiring manager’s mind. So, recognize that not everyone at work is your friend. As much as you want to network, it may not be appropriate for you to network with people in the workplace.
Now, the former employees, as long as they’re not too close to your boss, as long as people that have already long gone or that you’ve worked with previously, there’s no issue with. But the people who might place you at risk for getting fired or getting disturbed talking to are a problem. Because the impact of that can adversely affect your references when you need them.
So, you don’t want to put yourself in that position. So, one other thing, just because, again, it can cause a conflict, is with social media. It’s one thing to tell people one-on-one that you’re looking for a position.
It’s another thing to put it on social media because it’s searchable. So, that message that says, Hey, anyone know about a job at . . . or I’m looking for a position. Anyone have anything that would fit my background? This is what I do.
Remember, you might be connected to your boss, your boss’s boss, or someone who could hurt you. So, you don’t want to put out messages like that. You want to do one-on-one, rather than through public broadcast.
So, those are a number of ways that you can keep your search confidential. And if you found that kind of information on this show helpful, come over to my website, which is TheBigGameHunter.us. I’ve got a ton of stuff there that will help you with your job search. So, by going over to the site, you can search videos I’ve done for YouTube, and other podcasts of this show.
If we’re not already connected on LinkedIn, send me a connection request. The address is linkedin.com/in/TheBigGameHunter.
I accept connection requests from people worldwide, except if you’re a third party recruiter or in a country known for scams or spam. I won’t do it.
So, this is Jeff Altman. Hope you found the show helpful.
Take care
Better Than Applying Through The ATS
ABOUT JEFF ALTMAN, THE BIG GAME HUNTER
People hire Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter to provide No BS job search coaching and career advice globally because he makes job search and succeeding in your career easier.
You will find great info and job search coaching to help with your job search at JobSearch.Community
Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/TheBigGameHunter
Schedule a discovery call to speak with me about one-on-one or group coaching during your job search at www.TheBigGameHunter.us.
A Great Indeed.com Resume Hack
He is the host of “No BS Job Search Advice Radio,” the #1 podcast in iTunes for job search with over 3000 episodes over 13+ years.
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