Communicate With Relevance and Connect With Your Audience

One of the biggest secrets in marketing is the more relevant your communication, the more willing people are to respond. You can read and study everything you want about marketing, but if you are not communicating with relevance to your audience, nothing else really matters. When you apply for a job, or when you work for someone, you need to make your communication as relevant as possible. I’d like to tell you a quick story about someone I hired four years ago who communicated to me with relevance. One day, I received a phone call from a man in Europe, telling me he intended to move to the United States for work. He told me he’d researched our organization and was impressed. He told me what areas of the organization needed work. He communicated in ways that were relevant to me and despite the fact I didn’t know this person, I opened up and began speaking about our company. He then told me if I would like to speak further with him, I was welcome to fly him to the United States for more discussions. When I took him up on his offer, he discussed with me what he felt the organization needed, and he continued to communicate with relevance. I ended up having this person come to work in the U.S. I had him live in my house for six weeks of training, and even paid all sorts of immigration and other expenses to bring this person over. He now manages one of my most important companies. Since he started with the company, his salary has doubled. This person never sent me a resumé. This person never applied in response to an advertisement. This person contacted me, the CEO of the company, by calling and doing everything he could to make a connection. This person never would have been hired had he simply sent a résumé or gone a more traditional route. He might not even have been hired had he volunteered to fly himself over. Making our organization pay for the flight got the company invested, and certainly made me pay attention. This person probably never would have been hired had he not researched exactly what our [Read more]

The Importance of Disconnecting from Your Work

Some of the happiest, most well adjusted, and most effective people I know are also people who have a profound ability to disconnect from their work. They can disconnect rapidly and put themselves in another state of mind which does not involve work. People who come to mind include Richard Branson, who set records in balloons, captains of industry who leisurely golf their days away, men in bars who slap each others’ backs while drinking martinis and making deals, or CEO‘s of companies in their early 60s who run marathons. One of the most important things you can do for yourself is learn to disconnect from your work. Many people never do this, or don’t know how. You see these people walking around with telephones in their ears wherever they go, getting up from dinner to talk on the phone, screwing around with their Blackberries at any given moment, and, in general, working every second of the day. I have a secret for you: The most important and successful people never behave like this. The most important people simply do not work when they are not working. If you are working all the time, you are not being nearly as productive [Read more]

Remain Calm

For a portion of one summer when I was younger, I had a valet job at the Grosse Pointe Yacht Club outside of Detroit, Michigan. I worked during the lunch hour and spent most of my time sitting in a small air conditioned shed in a corner of the parking lot waiting for cars to pull up. When a car would pull up, I would fling open the door to the shed and run over to the car, hand the person a ticket, and park the car. One day, I was sitting in my little shed and [Read more]

Be Committed to What You Do

I am about to provide you some of the strangest job search and career advice you will ever receive from someone who’s in the recruiting industry. One thing you should know about me is that I’m a straight shooter. If I see a pattern repeat itself enough times, I know it’s something that must be true. The pattern I’m about to explain to you is so powerful it could change your career forever. I know it has changed mine. The secret is commitment. When I was in my 20s, I had a girlfriend who watched soap operas. She was committed to those shows. She would watch them every single day, and if she could not watch them, she would record them. I’m ashamed to admit that I would sometimes watch the soaps with her when she would catch up on the missed episodes. The one thing I quickly realized about soap operas was that they were all about commitment, in that none of the characters could commit. Each person on every one of the shows would get into a series of relationships, be tempted by others, get out of relationships, get married, cheat, and so forth. This was all the soap operas were ever about. The characters would inevitably suffer hospitalizations for nervous breakdowns or horrible accidents (caused by their distractions). Then there would be horrible, drunken, public confessions and all sorts of other malfeasance. Moreover, the people on these shows would always be led to believe that, no matter how good their situation was, the grass was greener elsewhere. Several years later, when I got into the employment market and started recruiting, I began noticing this same soap opera pattern with clients and coworkers. People would leave a job for any lapse, no matter how small. If they were criticized by an employer, I would see them start looking for another job. If someone heard another employer was paying more, they would send a résumé. If their current company or firm were getting bad press, they would start looking for another job. The reasons were innumerable. Some might seem proactive, while others were purely reactionary. One thing seemed clear to me: There was a major lack of commitment in the marketplace. People could not or would not commit themselves to a single employer–or to anything for that matter. Commitment is key in order to experience any form of success. You should not do any sort of job if your heart isn’t in it and you can’t commit. If you are a public relations intern, you need to be committed to that job. If you are the president of a corporation, you need to be committed to that as well. Not being committed to your career will only have negative consequences. Several months ago, I was speaking with a proofreader in my company who resigned because she had found a better job across the street, one that paid more. The amount of the pay increase was minimal. I was actually prepared to give the woman a raise, a higher amount than her new job. In our meeting, the young woman explained she liked working for our company, but she needed to make more money because her husband had been unemployed for some time. I told her I was very sorry about this and asked how she became aware of the new job. She was a nice girl and I was interested in talking to her about this. The job she was doing at our company was very demanding and had required her to take work home at night and to work very hard for the most part. In response, she told me she’d been freelancing for the other company for some time, and this was how she came to entertain a new full-time job offer. Once she told me this, I was no longer interested in trying to keep this person at our company. I knew immediately she was not committed to our company to the degree I wanted her to be. She was not someone I wanted on my team. Your boss (and we all have bosses) wants employees who are committed to what they do. Whenever I hear people tell me they are just doing something until they can find something better, I know they will never really succeed. When I see people leave a job for trivial reasons, I also know that they will probably not reach the success for which they’re striving. When I see people watch the clock and leave at 5 p.m. every day because they are not really interested in what they are doing, I know those people will probably have mediocre careers. Commitment shines through, and it is easy to see when it’s not there. Each morning, I read the Wall Street Journal. I spend at least forty-five minutes reading it cover to cover. Most of the stories in this publication are about Fortune 500 companies and other such organizations. At least once a week, I see something along these lines: John Smith started out as a repairman for a local office of X company in 1977. Today, he is CEO of the same company, with 18,000 employees in 26 countries and revenues of $4.2 billion last year… It’s not coincidental I keep seeing stories like this in the paper. Without a doubt, the people who are rising up in these situations are those who are the most committed. When they join a company, they join and remain in a committed fashion. They show up to work. These are the kinds of people who grow within corporations. They usually keep their jobs, but if they ever lose a job they will find another job quickly. Their commitment attracts success. Being committed also has financial rewards. I have several people working for me on salary, whose incomes have consistently risen (more than tripled) in the past three to four years alone, because I know they are committed. I know their hearts and souls are in the job. I have recruiters working for our company who make two to three times the money of the average recruiter because of their level of commitment to the job. It’s very common for people who’ve held too many jobs within a short span of time to never find a job in their industry again. This happens to [Read more]

Instead of Seeking Praise, Seek Criticism

Several years ago, I had a girlfriend who would fly off the handle at the slightest criticism.  It didn’t matter who was criticizing her. She would call people ugly, smelly, short–whatever attack she could muster in response to what she perceived as criticism. She would also do everything within her power to avoid being criticized. In school, for example, many mornings she would work until 4 a.m. to ensure she got a perfect grade in her class. In her personal life, she made sure to only associate with people she knew would never criticize her. [Read more]

Your Job is About the Transference Energy

A few years ago I was in India and was interested in going to see what is called ‘‘an energy healer’’. I was interested in this because I had been to several seminars where I had heard about people changing outcomes and healing others with energy by transferring energy from the universe. I went to see a Reiki energy healer and they did something called ‘‘balance my Chakras’’. This was an experience in itself, but the real knowledge I got out of energy and its place in our lives between people happened when I was sitting in the lobby waiting [Read more]

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