By Special Guest Blogger and MENG Chairman Richard Sellers
I think Yogi Berra is a brilliant career coach. Really, I do.
Let’s start with one of his most famous quotes:
“You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you are going, because you might not get there.”
I’ve reviewed more than 125 resumes written by senior marketing executives during the past two years and more than half have a fatal problem: Generic excellence.
You need to point your career in a specific direction and write a great story. What do you do better than anyone else that will make the hiring executive money? No one is uniformly excellent…and no one believes that anyone is great at everything.
Lesson: Make a decision about your core direction and support it, just like you do for any brand you’re marketing. You’ll be a much stronger candidate.
“It’s like déjà-vu, all over again.”
They want me to do exactly what I did in my last job. This isn’t necessarily good or bad, depending on the direction you set. What you need to understand is that recruiters are paid to find someone who already has proven success doing exactly what the job specs are. Don’t be upset, that’s their job.
Lesson: if you want to do something different, you need to find the next job via networking, not recruiters.
“It ain’t the heat, it’s the humidity.”
We usually can do the job we’re trying to get. That can be considered the heat. Yet, can we handle the humidity? You know: Can we work with the CEO or survive in the culture? Will you fit in? If not, regardless of your marketing skills, you’re looking at a short-term failure and being back on the market within two years.
Lesson: Don’t just sell your ability to do the job. During the interview, you have to make it clear that you’ll thrive in their specific humidity. That’s often the difference between getting the offer and being an unsuccessful finalist.
Lesson: If you don’t fit the culture, you need to run from the job because the humidity will cause you to fail.
“I wish I had an answer to that because I’m tired of answering that question.”
Lack of preparation is a killer. I’ve had senior-level marketing executives stumble when I asked them obvious questions based on their resume. How can this be? The discouraging answer is that many job searchers stop before completing their preparation. Remember, Yogi has been interviewed more than you have, and even he has trouble with some questions.
Lesson: You have to be successful in spring training to open the season in the majors. Practice…practice…practice hitting both fastballs and the less-expected curves. Of course, get some good coaching.
“It ain’t over until it’s over.”
Duh. Of course. Yet, how may times have you thought you had an offer coming and literally stopped your search? For many of us, this offer never came, or when it came, we were smart enough to turn it down…and we had to start all over. The momentum was gone. We lost from one to three months because we thought our search was over, but it wasn’t.
Lesson: Don’t stop just because you think the job hunt is completed…because it often isn’t.
You can find more quotes to improve your thinking from my favorite career coach, Yogi, right here.
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Photo of Yogi Berra by JoeyPeter.