Treating Your Career Like A Small Business

No one seems to take the time to consider that their careers are businesses. Your career is no different than any small business. You have a product (you) that you are selling to your audience (your employer). You need to run your career exactly like a business person runs a business. There is no greater skill to have with your career than to run it like a business. As a business, your goal is survival and to sell your product for as much money as possible. So too it is with your career.

Be a good business person and your career may go far, ignore the business realities and you are likely to run into trouble. I have been a recruiter for several years and have seen countless attorneys “go out of business” because they did not run their careers well. In fact, this is something I see on a daily basis while reviewing resumes of out of work attorneys. Just as companies make bad decisions that result in them going out of business, people also make bad decisions with their careers that result in them going out of business and finding themselves unemployed.

• They may choose to concentrate on a profession that becomes obsolete–They are trying to sell a product no longer in demand.
• They may have resumes that do not serve them well–They are not presenting/”packaging” their products correctly.
• They may choose to work in an area where there are no jobs–They are trying to sell a product in a geographic area where there is no demand.
• They may have done something bad that makes people not want to hire them–They have a bad “brand”.
• They may be too old to get a job–People are “tired” of their product.
• They apply to only a few jobs and do not get a job–They are not marketing their brands to a large enough demographic.

Your career is a business and you are a product. You need to understand that using simple business principles to market yourself is something that can be of massive benefit to you.

Before I go further, there are a couple of other things I would like to cover. First, I believe that working for other people is an incredibly smart thing. When you think about your career and working for other people as a business, you will quickly realize that there are few businesses that offer higher pay for less risk, the ability to shut off work when you are not there, the ability to leverage others’ assets as your own, the ability to be part of a social network and the ability to concentrate your efforts on one thing.

Working for other people has a tremendous number of rewards and these rewards are both psychological, financial and otherwise. When you are working for someone else you are in business for yourself but allowing your employer to take most of the risk. Another secret of working for other people is that you can take advantage of economies of scale and inefficiency. If you go to work for a large enough company, the company will hopefully be throwing off huge amounts of money with thousands of workers and you can claim your desired share of this as your compensation. For some strange reason, however, when I meet people at various public functions (and elsewhere) they all start telling me how they want to start their own businesses. Whether they are doctors, accountants or lawyers, everyone seemingly wants to start their own business. I do not understand this.

When you meet people who have little education and start hugely successful businesses and become fabulously wealthy, they rarely want their children to follow in their footsteps. They want them to go to school and become professionals and work for other people. There are a lot of reasons for this–the respect, the stress, predictability, the ability to be involved with large groups of people, the ability to be part of society and more. The point I am trying to make to you is that working for other people is something that the most successful people in the world want for others. It is good to work for other people.

Many Americans seem to have a belief that it is much better to work for themselves and stay fixated on this idea throughout their careers. The truth is when you are working for someone else you are actually already in business. Working for others is a very smart and shrewd choice for many people and if you were a business person it would be advisable in most instances to work for others rather than yourself. Someone who makes a $100,000 a year working for a company is no different than someone with a $1,000,000 a year at a company who is clearing a 10% profit margin. This is an impressive profit margin and something that not many people could accomplish, but being able to step into a job where you are guaranteed this profit margin is extremely smart. When you work for others there is often less risk; other people are risking capital and not you. And if you choose the company right, you may have a lot of security.

A few years ago I was meeting with a lawyer friend of mine who had a salary of $200,000 a year, who was (like many people I spend time with) telling me in detail how interested he was in starting a business. The more I thought about it, the more incredible I realized making a salary like this is. He was sitting there talking about how he wanted to start one business after another. One business he wanted to start was a winery. Another business was a dry cleaners. The list of businesses he was interested in went and on.

“What sort of profit margins are you interested in making?” I asked him.

“At least 10%” he said.

“Well, in order to make $200,000 a year you are going to have to bring in at least $2,000,000 a year. If a bottle of wine sells for $5 wholesale that means you are going to have to make and bottle over 400,000 wine bottles to generate the $2,000,000 needed to make your profit margin.”

He gave this idea some thought and is still practicing law today. There are many people who dream of starting businesses when they would be far better off not dealing with the idea of a business at all.

Running businesses is hard. Most businesses fail.

How hard is it running a business?

A couple of years ago I hired a now world famous executive consultant to come and look at my companies. At the time the companies I was running were generating several millions of dollars a month and had over 700 employees. The coach sat me down and for a full day (and $40,000) lectured me about everything that was wrong with the companies I was running.

“You would be a good CEO,” I said. “If you know so much about this why don’t you try going to work for a company,” I said.

There was a pause and then the guy said something I will never forget.

“I could never run a real business. I have never been able to fire people. I just cannot do it.”

It occurred to me that here I was paying someone thousands of dollars an hour and he did not even have the nuts to be able to fire people. Running a business involves all sorts of things like this. You must be willing to take the unpopular position for the benefit of the company and consistently do this regardless of the consequences to your psyche. And then there are budgets, payroll and all sorts of other things that most people do not even think about. The stress of running a business is incredible. There are a million small things like this that come up when you run a business as a business owner. When you limit your business exposure to your career and what you are doing on a day-to-day basis, you are much better off.

Just understand that when you are working for someone else you still need to run your career like a business. I would like you to consider the following business realities of your career.

First, that your career, like any business, needs to have a marketable product. This means that you need to be in a profession that is marketable in the geographic area you are in. There are countless professions that are marketable in some geographic areas and not others. For example, it would not be profitable to be a cowboy in New York City, but this would work in rural Wyoming. It would not be profitable to be a financial analyst in rural Wyoming, but it would be profitable to do this in New York City. Furthermore, the profession you are in can be under attack from various forces (including the economy) at various points in time. If you were a computer programmer 15 years ago you had a very bright future. In today’s economy, however, this is not necessarily the case. Many of these jobs have been outsourced to India, Romania and other locations where they can be done more cheaply. At all points in time you need to be asking yourself whether or not you have a marketable product.

Second, you need to understand the importance of your “brand” to marketing your product. Everything you do in your career will have an impact on your ultimate brand. The better your brand is, the more in demand your product will be. The best brands typically work in the most competitive markets. The worst brands typically work in the least competitive markets. For example, if you go to Harvard Business School you are going to have a better chance of getting a job with a top bank in New York City than you would if you went to University of Phoenix at night for an executive MBA. This is not to be insulting to this school, it is just to point out a reality that you need to consider when you market yourself.

Third, you need to know how to market your product for the maximum possible success. When you market yourself you need to put your brand before the largest possible market to make the most “sales”–i.e., to get the most interviews and job offers. You need to know how to position yourself and your resume. You need to understand what to say in order to impress the employer in the correct way.

A. Your Career, Like Any Business, Needs a Marketable Product

Every business needs to have a marketable product in order to succeed. While businesses can sell all sorts of things, your business is selling yourself and what you do. This is something that will need to be carefully managed throughout your career. It is important to realize that when we are in the workforce we are all like small business people. We are selling a product (which is ourselves) and need to follow certain rules in order to sell this product effectively.

The first thing you need to consider is that your product needs to be marketable. A lot of my family is from Toledo, Ohio. They are house painters and do other sorts of blue collar jobs. From the time I was around 10 until I was around 17 or 18 they kept telling me I should be a machinist. The told me about how they knew various machinists and how well they did as machinists. One machinist had his own boat, another machinist just redid his home. Being a machinist was a very good profession 20+ years ago in the Midwest. You could work for auto companies and other companies that were doing work that required the skills of a machinist. Today, it is almost impossible to find jobs as machinist in the Midwest. If I had chosen that career path I would be “out of business.”

What do most machinists do when they lose a job? They try and find another job as a machinist. If you are working in an area where auto companies are closing and there are no opportunities for machinists (like Toledo, Ohio) you might have to wait a very long time indeed before you get a job. The problem with finding a job is not you–it is that you do not have a marketable product. Lots of people do not have marketable products and yet continue to look for jobs when their product is not marketable.

When people lose a job the path they follow is often ass backward. They do not think about themselves as a product in need of a market. You can only sell what people are buying. You need to have something that is in demand. You can never cling to something that once was. I have seen so many careers ruined by this very idea.

I know someone who, 12 months ago, was in a field that was very much in demand. It no longer is. He was making upwards of $70,000 a year at this profession. Now the most he can make if he continues doing this for a living is $12 to $14 an hour. He goes into every interview and tells people he expects to make $70,000 a year. The market for what he is doing around his geographic area has gone away, and to the extent it has, he can no longer sell himself for that amount. This is just the way it is.

If I was a machinist in the Midwest I might try looking for a job in other areas around the country where the skills of machinists are in demand. I would get the hell out of Toledo, Ohio if I realized there were no opportunities. If there were not opportunities for machinists around the United States, I might consider another career. Or, I might consider how to package myself differently.

Since I am in the legal career industry, I have recently witnessed something quite remarkable that I think you can learn from. During the real estate boom in the United States, a ton of small real estate firms became overwhelmed with real estate work. Companies and others were purchasing an incredible amount of real estate and this generated a lot of work for these real estate firms. About 18 months ago this work started dramatically slowing down to the extent that most of these firms started aggressively letting go of real estate attorneys. Things got so bad I was under the impression that most of these real estate firms would start going out of business. The crisis they were facing was incredible and beyond anything that had happened in the past. I was not sure what was going to happen. Recently, something incredible has happened with many of these real estate law firms. They have started representing to their clients (real estate companies) that they have great skill in bankruptcy involving property. Now, many of these bankruptcy law firms are thriving again and doing well. They are actively hiring. This is a remarkable reversal of fortune and something I certainly did not expect to see. This is because these law firms have figured out how to have a marketable product.

As a business person and operator of a small business you are going to be faced with countless decisions as to how you operate your own business. You need to remember that every decision you make will determine your marketability.

Everyone has a myriad of choices about how they operate their businesses. They may brand themselves as a big company employee, small company employee, government employee, you name it. Whether you are working on your own or for a large firm, you are always in charge of your career.

There are aspects of your product that will never change. Wherever you are in your career right now, you simply cannot change the things you have done in the past. This includes your education to date, performance in school, the first company you worked at (or second, or third), your current skills and any variety of things that you have done in your career. However, if you look around, there are literally thousands of small businesses operating. The pedigree of these businesses does not matter so much as whether they are in business and how well they are operating.

You need to look at the field you are in like the business world as well. Whatever type of business you are running, it must have a marketable product. If you are a computer programmer who programs in PERL, you have a product. You will be able to sell your product in certain areas and with certain audiences better than others. For example, your programming skills will be more valuable in Silicon Valley, most likely, than rural Nebraska. The list goes on and on. Everything is about having a marketable product throughout your career in the area that you are working in.

The point of any business is to survive and, for many businesses, to grow. You need to consider the market for your skills and run your business accordingly. One of the most important aspects of running your business involves the type of work you do. If you are a sales person of premium automobiles, you help companies sell expensive cars. If you are an accountant, you will help people deal with tax issues. Whatever you do, it is important to understand that your product likely has more appeal (to the market) in some areas and points in time than others. Your objective is to get business and the decisions you make in this regard are important.

There are certain jobs that may be bad business to choose. For example, railroad law used to be a popular practice area for attorneys, but you would have a difficult time running a small business now that focused on such an antiquated type of law. Several years ago, corporate work was enormously in demand. Later, however, this market was doing horribly and corporate attorneys from top 10 law schools who performed well both in school and in high profile firms were, in some cases, looking for work for more than a year. Years later, corporate work was again available. For many small businesses/attorneys, corporate law would have been a bad choice for them to get into because there is no demand for that product. In this current economic climate, bankruptcy would be a more prudent venture for the business-minded attorney.

The list goes on an on. The point is that you need a marketable product.

Likewise, the geographic area you are in, the stability of your current employer and your opportunity for advancement at your current firm are all factors to keep in mind in operating your small business. These are all things that will have a bearing on whether or not your business will succeed.

Far too many people fail because they fail to adapt their business to the current economic climate. This is why most businesses out there end up failing. They simply fail to adapt.

B. The Importance of Your “Brand” to Marketing Your Product

When you are working in any profession, you need to have a good personal brand. The quality of your brand will determine a great deal about what happens to you. The quality of the work you do, your interpersonal relationships and a variety of other factors will determine the strength of your brand. The point is that all brands have certain attributes and over time you will develop a certain brand.

Companies spend an inordinate amount of money both protecting and developing their brands. There are certain things that come to mind when you think of any brand. For example, think of BMW or Chevy. Likewise, RC Cola creates a different thought than Coke. A brand is developed over time. The places you work, your practice area and all of the aforementioned factors will have a bearing on the quality of your brand.

Generally, better brands can charge more and have more interest directed towards them than poor brands. All of the rules of the business world apply to managing your own brand. You always need to be cognizant of how you want your brand to be viewed by the outside world and potential employers. Think through what type of brand you want carefully, and ensure that you manage that brand the best you can.

You are shaping your brand in so many ways, both by the things that you do and do not do. Your brand is shaped by the type of companies you have worked for, how long you have worked at these companies, the promotions or the demotions you have received, the awards you have received, the articles you have written and the general enthusiasm you have demonstrated for your job.

There are numerous things that shape your personal “brand,” which is the general perception employers have of you. You need to be conscious that everything you do is reflecting on this brand. Something I have seen a ton of in my career are employees who move around a lot–they move every one, two, or three years. Once you have done this enough times you and your brand will start getting a reputation as someone who cannot be trusted to work with the same employer for a long time. If you do the opposite, you will also get the reputation as someone who can be trusted and will remain with the same employer for a long length of time.

If you start out working for small, non-prestigious companies and gradually over the course of several years rise into more and more prominent positions and companies, you will get the impression as someone who is improving. Similarly, you will get the same reputation if you are consistently rising to higher and better positions with your employer over several years.

It is important to understand that everything you are doing has a major impact on your brand. You shape your brand by the choices you make. The reason your brand is so important is due to the fact that it will impact your ultimate marketability.

C. How to Market Your Product and Brand for Maximum Possible Success

As an attorney, consider hypothetically that your salary is $100,000 per year. Also consider that you are being billed out at approximately $200 per hour and expected to bill 2,000 hours a year in the law firm you are working in. This means that your small business is generating $400,000 per year and out of that amount you are “netting” $100,000. This is not bad from a business standpoint.

As a legal recruiter, I am not surprised that most attorneys want to go to the law firms that pay the most money and have the most prestige associated with them. These are all business decisions. If you are an attorney, over time you presumably would like the amount of money you make to increase. You would also like the percentage of the money you collect from your billings to increase. For example, if you generate $400,000 from your work, you would rather make $200,000 than $100,000, as in the prior example. You want to become a partner and earn more. The business game continues.

Everything that happens to your career is the result of selling your product on the marketplace. The amount of money you receive as your salary (i.e., the amount of money the market will pay) will be influenced by the type of brand you have. Hypothetically, you could have no education and start out as a clerk in a small firm. This is something thousands of people do each year. Then, several years later, you could be earning in excess of a million dollars per year leading the same company you started out in. To many people this may seem like an aberration. Nevertheless, this is not an aberration and it happens all the time. The reason this happens is because of how people ultimately (1) brand themselves and (2) market their brand.

Marketing is the single most important thing you can do for yourself and your career. Marketing is about how you package yourself, the things you say and the value the market perceives that you offer.

The point of this essay is not to act as a diatribe on marketing; however, a few comments on marketing should make a helpful point. When you market a product, you need to appeal to people on both an emotional and rational (cost) level. When marketing personal services-which your specific skills are-people tend to want to deal with people like themselves. It is for that reason that large companies typically prefer a certain type of employee, small law firms prefer a certain type of employee and certain types of clients (rich, poor and in between) prefer dealing with a certain type of employee. We have a tendency to want to deal with people like ourselves. Thus, your product is likely to be well accepted in some areas and not others.

I remember one thing when I was clerking for a federal judge and I had the opportunity to see different trial lawyers come into court and conduct trials. I also spent a year trying to write a book about personal injury attorneys several years ago and once again I made a similar observation. The one thing I noticed about the most effective personal injury attorneys was that they were nothing like big firm attorneys and almost never had big firm experience or top law school credentials. What they did know how to do was market themselves and their clients’ grievances to like-minded jurors. They also tended to be quite flamboyant in their marketing efforts, but that is another story.

In small towns all across America, there are very successful attorneys. In most cases, these attorneys grew up in the area and are similar to the people they do work for. What is most significant about the attorneys who are most successful in small towns, from those who are not, is their marketing ability. They fraternize in local clubs and bar associations. Stories circulate about their successes. All of this is marketing.

The same thing occurs in large law firms in big cities. Here, the marketing is confined to the law firm and getting clients to hire you as you advance in seniority. What is most significant, though, is that the marketing component and what the individual’s brand represents are always at the forefront.

The issue then is how you market yourself and advance your own career. While this may not be obvious, a large part of a recruiter’s job is helping people market themselves to employers. They know what the employers want to hear and how the attorney should say it. Virtually every week at our recruiting firms we get attorneys jobs at firms that I know they could not have gotten on their own. That is because we “packaged” the person to the employer in a certain way and told him/her what to say in order to portray the particular brand the firm is interested in.

What is so interesting about the work exceptional recruiters do is that none of what we do is dishonest. In fact, it is just knowing the market, the particular brand of the firm and what makes a person marketable to them. People need to be themselves, but also be aware of what the particular employer wants.

If you are looking for a position you need to keep the idea of marketing at the forefront of what you do and how you think about everything. You have a product to sell and in order to sell your product you must brand it and package it in the right way. In order to sell your product, and get the highest price for it, you also need to have the largest possible market. Everything I have done in my career is geared towards helping people market and package themselves. One service I recommend that anyone look at is Legal Authority (www.EmploymentAuthority.com), which can assist you in marketing yourself to the largest potential demographic of employers possible. It helps you professionally package yourself and get the highest price for your product. Two other companies I recommend are Hound.com and EmploymentCrossing.com, which can help you see the most openings.

You need to know what the market is for your product.

EmploymentCrossing is an exceptional way to learn about the market. Here, you can be aware of the market at all times and know exactly what is going on and who is hiring. EmploymentCrossing is your personal barometer of the market and shows you where you can market your product. The benefit of knowing this information at all times cannot be overemphasized. Think of your career like a product. You have invested a tremendous amount of time and expense creating your product. You may have spent upwards of $100,000 on your education to get to where you are today. (If you are not educated, you have likely spent years of your life learning a given skill.) If you had that much money in the stock market, my guess is that you would want to watch what is going on in the market at all times. Your career should not be any different. Do not lose your investment. Do not allow yourself to go out of business. Know where your product is marketable.

D. Conclusions

You are a product. Your career is a small business. Run it like a small business and realize the importance of your brand. Most importantly, realize you always need to have a market for your product. If you remember this, you will be well served throughout your career.

In Defense of Long-Term Employment With a Single Employer

If you go into any business that has been around more than twenty or thirty years, you will inevitably find a handful of people who have been there from the very beginning of their careers. These well adjusted souls will typically report to work each day at a similar time and have managed to be the only ones presumably left in the organization after generation upon generation of people coming and going.

Many people do last for decades in the same organization and there are characteristics which uniformly seem to characterize these sorts of people.While I am a recruiter, I do have a great deal of respect for people who in this day and age are able to “stay put” at the same organization for a long period of time and remain at single organizations throughout their careers. None of this is to say there are not really good and solid reasons for leaving an employer if the going gets impossible. I am the first to admit that there are employment environments that can be intolerable for many.  Nevertheless, you need to keep in mind that if an employer has been around for 30+ years, there is a chance the employer is doing something right. Before leaving it is often wise to take inventory of yourself.

There are certain characteristics that  people who stick with the same employer for long lengths of time tend to exhibit and also certain characteristics of this sort of employment situation.  These characteristics are as follows:

1.People Who Remain With the Same Firm for Long Lengths of Time Are Generally Very Committed to Their Jobs

Many people were raised with the idea (or have the idea) that fidelity to an employer is something that is simply expected.  The unwritten rule is that if you are not treated horribly, then there is really no reason you should leave a job.

One of the saddest (but also the most refreshing) things I have seen as a legal recruiter is when I interview and meet with attorneys who have been with the same firm for 20 years or more and whose firms are going under, who are in a position of being forced to look for other opportunities. When attorneys like this look for a new position, their rationale is most often that something profound has happened at the firm that is making their separation necessary.  These attorneys appear as if they are going through a divorce or have just had a death of someone they are very close to. For them, leaving a position is a traumatic experience.

This sort of fidelity between employers and employees reminds me often of people who have been married 50 years or more. There is a mutual respect that comes out of this and a thinking that both need one another. I believe that this sort of thinking is really missing in this day and age. While this may not seem related to careers, a statistic I once saw in a social science class showed that as divorce rates went up in society, so did rates of drug abuse, suicide and other associated societal ills.  The bond between an employer and an employee is a powerful force that in its best form is much like the bond between a husband and wife with a very committed relationship. Both sides respect and accept one another with certain conditions, but for the most part unconditionally.

2. People Who Remain With the Same Organization Are Not Interested in Office Gossip or Negativity

In every organization there are typically people who are not succeeding at their jobs.  These people generally are looking for ways to cut corners with their work and are not producing satisfactory results for their employer. Most organizations will generally call out this behavior and then speak with the employee. Some employees correct their behavior and others simply get mad at the organization. Some employees may be mad at their organizations for no particular reason at all—or may be angry with a previous organization and simply transfer their anger to their most recent organization. I remember a recruiter once telling me never to hire someone who had been fired from their last job. People who have been fired from their last job will typically take out their anger on their next organization, he told me.

There are always going to be people who have a lot of anger towards their employers.  These angry employees will start rumors, attempt to share their anger with others in the organization and often subtly (or not so subtly) forecast “gloom and doom” for their employer. This is how rumor mills get started and these sorts of rumor mills are prevalent in every decent sized organization.

People who remain with their employers generally do not participate in these rumor mills or even pay attention to them.  Every business goes through boom and bust periods, or faces various crises.  Loyal employees barely notice the difference because they’re too busy getting their job done day in and day out.

3.People Who Remain With the Same Organization for Long Periods of Time Generally Are Not Interested in Being Grandstanders—They Are There to Do Their Jobs and Do Them Well

I once heard someone say that the most successful people are often the most screwed up. I am not sure if this is true, but there is some wisdom in every saying like this. People who are able to remain with the same employer for long periods of time are generally not concerned with “getting ahead” to the same extent as many others are. Many people who are extremely concerned with getting ahead will often leave, saying they are looking for better opportunities because they are interested in immediate advancement. In other cases people will try and show up others in their workplace.

People who remain at their organization for long periods of times are generally most interested in just doing their jobs.  They have faith in their organizations and that things will work out for them.  They are not loud and do not go out of their way to attract attention to themselves.  Their main concern is to simply do the best job possible.

What ends up happening to people who remain focused on their work and not grandstanding is they end up getting ahead while others end up putting their foot in their mouth.  I remember when I first started practicing, there was an attorney who was first in his class from a major law school and the Editor in Chief of his school’s law review. Everyone thought this particular attorney was really on his toes and someone likely to have major success at the firm.  This attorney wrote articles in his spare time, and argued with firm partners about the finer points of law (and was right when he argued). While this attorney was very smart, he thought he was so good that he ended up sabotaging his career when he called a newspaper to discuss a case he was working on. He ended up being quoted on the front page of the Los Angeles Daily Journal.  The fallout from this incredible incident was that the attorney left the law firm a month or two later and never worked for a large law firm again.

These sort of incidents aside, it is important to keep a moderately low profile in order to have long-term success in any job. It is never wise to raise your swords and capture the limelight. While someone can win a sword match for some time, they will eventually lose—and in a sword match (which your career could be compared to)—the loss is usually permanent.

4.People Who Remain With Their Employer for Long Periods of Time Typically Do Good (But Not Necessarily “Brilliant” Work)

Someone who remains at their employer for long periods of time typically has learned to “pace themselves” and manages to do work on a day-to-day basis that is good but not necessarily extraordinary.  This does not matter. I believe that the majority of the battle of being an excellent employee is simply showing up. Sure, some people can do extraordinary work. However, the brightest flame is not always the longest burning flame. The ability to consistently show up and do the work is the most important aspect of being a long-term performer in most organizations.

The smartest people out there are often the ones who end up having the most problems. People who can consistently show up for work and do an excellent job send the message to colleagues, clients and others that they have the ability to get the job done.

5.An Understanding of ‘Insiders’ and ‘Outsiders’ Typically Develops Between People Who Remain At Their Jobs For Long Periods of Time

After someone has been with an employer for an extended period of time an understanding develops between that person and others who have been with the employer for a long period of time. An institutional understanding also develops.  This understanding seems to say something to the effect of “people may come and go, but we are the ones who are committed to this organization and we are the heart and soul of this place.” A similar sort of understanding that develops is that “we owe each other because we have each demonstrated a commitment.”

Bonds form between people who have been part of the same organization for long periods of time.  These bonds are often invisible—but they are real bonds.  These bonds are powerful and make the organization and forces within it come to the defense of those who are committed to the organization during times of change and reorganization.  These sorts of bonds are something that get stronger over time as an organization changes. After some time people who have been with the organization for decades are simply treated as part of the very fabric of that organization and are virtually unquestioned.

Conclusions

While it may seem odd for a recruiter to write a story in defense of people who remain with their employers for long periods of time, remaining with an organization for a long period of time is something that is meaningful in this day and age. There are many characteristics of people who remain at their jobs for long periods of time and these characteristics, in my experience, are usually found in stable people.

A final factor is that, in my experience, people who remain with an organization for long periods of time are often less tormented than the average person. By looking for reasons to like and respect their organization rather than find fault, they find themselves in organizations which ultimately welcome them.

Finally, it is always important to remember that if an organization has been around for 20 years or more the chances are it is doing some things very right.There will always be people who succeed in these organizations and, of course, always those who leave or fail.

Practice Makes Perfect

A year or so ago I was at a wedding, and a very successful doctor started talking to me. I was very impressed with this doctor and already knew of him through several people before our meeting. He was involved in some fascinating and cutting-edge research I found quite interesting.

I love meeting people who are passionate about their careers because they give off so much energy. People who achieve amazing and significant success in any profession always have a lot of passion for what they do. If you allow them to, these people will talk your head off about what they are doing. They will show you their collection of books about the subject, debate various philosophies about what they are doing, and more. People who commit to something are the most exciting people in the world. They provide me with an incredible education. I wish everyone was committed to what they do.

In speaking to this doctor, however, I realized despite his incredible knowledge of what he was doing, he was not satisfied. “What I really want to do is start a business,” he told me. “That is what being successful is to me. I have a friend who is doing very well in the manufacturing industry now that steel prices are up.”

The manufacturing industry? Steel? Why would someone spend years going to medical school and becoming a successful researcher only to go into steel manufacturing? I am not saying this is the wrong thing to do. But when you are an expert in something, it is not always in your best interest to switch jobs completely.

I spent many hours of my career going to various law firms and meeting with successful attorneys. I would say in at least 25% of these meetings, the attorneys I met did the same thing as this doctor–they started talking about how they wanted to pursue careers in completely different professions. One memorable meeting was with a famous attorney in Los Angeles who told me about opening a chain of ice cream parlors on the other side of the country only to see them fail miserably. Of course they failed miserably! The man running them was a famous attorney involved in all sorts of high profile cases. How on earth could he be expected to also run a chain of ice cream parlors?

At this particular point in history, I know many people who’ve lost all their money and life savings by investing in real estate. They bought homes in Arizona, condominiums in Florida, and other properties for little or no money down. They jumped face first into the real estate game because they believed they would get rich. Most of these people taught high school, sold cars, or were accountants, for example. Of course they lost money in real estate! This was not their expertise and they knew nothing about it. I saw the same thing back in 2000 with the Internet stock crash. Back then, all sorts of people aggressively invested in these stocks and lost their shirts. These people did things like sell insurance, or own auto repair shops. Of course they lost their shirts! None of them had expertise in the stock market.

The point I am trying to make is you can never be in two places at the same time. You need to choose who you want to be and what you want to do. You can never become an expert in multiple things. You need to concentrate on doing one thing.

An excellent book I recently read is called “Outliers” by Malcom Gladwell. Gladwell examines the people who are able to achieve incredible and massive success in various callings. He looks at people like Bill Gates, the best lawyers in the United States, chess grandmasters, Mozart, Steve Jobs, the Beatles, professional hockey players, and others. Gladwell cites study after study describing the fact that people do not get really good at anything, at a world class level, until they have been doing it at least 10,000 hours. According to Gladwell:

“The idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.”

“The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert–in anything,” writes neurologist David Levitin. “In study after study, of composers, of basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again. Of course, this doesn’t address why some people get more out of their practice sessions than others do. But no one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.”

I get very concerned when I think about people vacillating back and forth between various skill paths. Instead of choosing to do one thing, so many people spend their careers floating from job to job – each one different than the one before and requiring a completely different set of skills. There is nothing wrong with changing careers, of course, but the most important thing anyone can do is ensure they choose something and then focus on it completely. If you continue to change your mind, you will never develop true mastery.

One of the most amazing things I have seen in my life is people who become incredibly happy, successful, and rich by seeking out and doing simple jobs to which they have committed. The universe rewards commitment. Warren Buffet has become incredibly rich committing to one form of investing. Some people make their fortunes doing simple things you would not expect.

When I was an asphalt contractor, I knew a man who’d built a giant company putting hot tar in the cracks in roads all over Michigan. I know of another man who became very wealthy building pallets for the automotive industry. In college admissions, people with stand-out interests always do the best. I remember a high school teacher who talked about his students who’d gone to schools like Yale and Harvard, and how those students all had incredibly focused interests. Some were interested in bug collecting, another liked translating Japanese poetry, etc. The world rewards people with specialized interests who nurture that interest and continue to get better at those interests year after year.

One of the most unusual things I’ve witnessed is that most people are flirting with life and their careers. Instead of committing to a career and something, these people continue to dissipate their energies in many different directions. As a consequence, they never achieve anything near what they are capable of achieving. What are your capabilities? How much do you think you can achieve? The sky is the limit if you focus and continue to improve at something.

Why do I call focus “a law of the universe”? In the family unit, marriages, children and so forth typically only occur when two people decide to commit to one another and get married. People choose to focus on one another. This is a rule in virtually every culture in the world. It is almost as if the rule is saying life cannot begin until two people choose to focus. In your life, your career will never really begin until you choose to focus.

As a legal recruiter, I very quickly get a sense after looking at an attorney’s resume of how long it is likely to take for the person to get a job, and where. The most important factor determining an attorney’s future employability is his or her focus, beyond where they went to law school, their previous employer, or specialty. If the person has had several jobs in a short period of time, then employers will stay away (they know the person is unlikely to commit). If the person has flirted with other jobs in addition to practicing law, a smart employer will stay away. Employers are looking for commitment, and they want to make sure people accepting jobs with them are going to be committed to their company. Employers want their employees to use their commitment to help the company grow. The level of commitment legal employers look for is the same as in other professions. People want to hire people who are likely to do a job long-term.

Your life and career will change when you learn to commit to something over the long term.

If You Want to Earn More, You Need to Be Worth More

Your financial requirements and what you would like to earn have nothing to do with what you are worth in the market. In running my various organizations, I have hired superstars from the very best universities with the very best work histories who ended up contributing next to nothing to the organization. I have also hired people who started out making close to minimum wage, and whose contributions were so great their salaries doubled, and in some cases even quadrupled. Several years ago, the contribution of one of our departments, which was then around 10 people, was so great I literally doubled each and every member’s salary in one short 15 minute meeting.

Are you someone who contributes so much to your organization your salary merits doubling? Or do you merely have a sense of entitlement and feel you are worth more than you are paid?

I cannot tell you how many times I have heard statements like the following:

“I made this much four years ago; therefore I should be making more right now.”

“My wife told me that I need to get a raise.”

“I think it is really important that I get this car because it will show some outward sign of success.”

“I know of someone who makes even more money than this in [some other city] and, therefore, I need to make that much as well.”

“This is an expensive city, and I need to be paid that much to live well.”

“I would like to have some extra spending money for travel and other things, after paying the mortgage on my house.”

“I need to make enough money to afford to send my kids to a private school.”

These are actual statements I have heard from people over the years. The sense of entitlement that drives people to make these sorts of demands needs to have a basis in reality.

Again, your financial requirements have nothing to do with how much you are worth in the market. Unless you are truly indispensable, your employer simply does not care what those requirements are. You are paid a certain amount based on your ability to generate value for your employer, and, with very few exceptions, that value generally must be far greater than what you are paid. Your contribution to any organization must generally be at least three times greater than the reward you are seeking.

Far too many people fail to realize what they are paid is based on the company’s profitability. Organizations have overhead, such as rent, advertising, and the cost of manufacturing the products or services they provide. Organizations need to have reserves in order to pay you when money is not coming in. Organizations need money for research and development. Organizations need money to pay for your health benefits and social security taxes, to print brochures, pay for office machine maintenance and more.

Since I am a legal recruiter, I would like to share with you some information about how partners are traditionally compensated in law firms. There are numerous compensation systems. However, the one I am about to share with you is the most prevalent.

When many young attorneys graduate from elite law schools, they tell themselves when they join equally elite law firms they will one day make astronomical amounts of money. About 10 years ago, I remember the number young attorneys my age were throwing around was $1 million. How does an attorney make $1 million a year?

Remember: any amount of money you are paid will have to add much more than that to the firm’s bottom line. Typically, the rule is that for every $1 a partner makes they have contributed at least $3 to the firm. That means that the partner is lucky to receive only 33 percent of what he or she brings in as business to the firm.

How does a partner contribute a total of $3 million to the pot for a firm? The partner brings in loads of business, works extremely hard, and then collects the money that has been billed. The partner also has associates doing work, he ensures their work is getting done and that all invoices are getting paid.

If partners in the world’s largest law firms are lucky to receive only a 33 percent return on the contribution they are making, you should understand you will need to make a giant contribution to any organization you are part of in order to justify the amount you would like to be paid. In order to justify a high salary, it is important you begin concentrating on what you can do to make your contribution even greater than it is now.

You need to make yourself indispensable to your employer by virtue of your hard work and contribution. There are certain people within any organization who are indispensable, and others who are not. These employees usually don’t last very long in organizations.

I want to tell you a quick story about one of the worst hiring mistakes I ever made. It involved hiring a manager to lead a small company I was starting at the time. In order to try out for the job and show me what he could do, I asked the man to put together some financial figures that took into account the potential performance of the company and what he believed he should be paid if each milestone was met. Since it would take several hours to go over these figures, I agreed to meet the man at my home on a Sunday afternoon to go over them until we could reach an agreement.

After three to four hours of reviewing these figures with him, I realized there was absolutely no way the company could make any money and that, no matter how well or how poorly the company did, the man would end up making plenty of money from the business. It really didn’t make a lot of sense, and I saw immediately this man was not interested in making a contribution to the company. He was only interested in taking money from the company as quickly as possible.

There were many warning signs I should have noticed early on. The man was extremely flashy in the way he dressed. He bragged about always getting stuff for free. His car had been modified, and was very over-the-top. Basically, the man made me feel uncomfortable.

By 10 p.m. that Sunday, I realized I could not reach any sort of agreement with this man. Instead of offering him the job to lead the company, I offered him a commissioned sales-type job in another company. The man had stellar qualifications and had formerly been the leader of a large division of a national company.

The man responded by telling me how he had a home in Beverly Hills with an expensive mortgage payment, a nanny he needed to pay, a private school he sent his daughter to, and that his wife really liked to shop for expensive shoes. Therefore, he told me, he needed to bring home a certain amount of money every two weeks to pay all these extravagant expenses. I told him I understood and I agreed to loan him a massive amount of money against his future commissions over the next several months, as he started his job.

This man ended up being the worst performing salesman in the company’s history. He failed like no other and disappeared with all of the money he was lent. To this day, I still do not know where he is.

The primary mistake I made here was not paying attention to the various signs this man would make an extremely bad hire. Mainly, he was entirely focused on what he believed he deserved, and not at all focused on what he could contribute. The most revealing thing was his business plan, which basically did not permit the company to make money and survive.

In order to thrive in your job, you need to be the sort of person who over delivers and provides incredible value to your employer and organization. You need to focus on over delivering in order to be worth more than the other people who are doing similar jobs.

I am from Detroit and an interesting subject to me is the decline of the American automobile industry. I remember in 1984, when I was 14, my mother purchased a Honda Accord. Before she purchased the car, we went and looked at numerous other, American cars. Even then, I realized that the quality of the Honda far surpassed any American car in the same price range. You could tell by the way the car started, the way the doors closed, the way the lights clicked when you turned them on, the way the radio fit into the dashboard, the hue of the paint, the tightness of the ride, and more. As a young teenager, I thought someone would have to be an absolute idiot to purchase an American car in the same price range.

At the time I did not even know about things like resale value, how long the car would last, and overall brand reliability. Purchasing the Accord would actually be even more valuable to someone in the long run, once reliability and resale were factored into the equation. In this respect, it made even less sense to purchase an American car. Ten years later, I sold that Accord to a classmate of mine for around $4,000. If it had been an American car (assuming it were still running), the sale price would have probably been around $400.

My main point is the Honda provided far more value than its competitors at the time. It was worth far more than its American counterparts, even though it was priced less. It is no wonder, then, the market share of Japanese manufactured cars has grown rapidly in the United States, while the market for American cars has declined. It is an issue of providing more value for the money.

Since your labor is a commodity to your employer, you should aim to become a higher-priced commodity that is worth far more than your competition. In order to merit raises and other employment related benefits, you need to shine and really stand out as someone who provides tremendous value. Do not expect to be paid a certain amount simply because it is what you want. Get paid more because you are worth more and because you deserve more.

Can You Be Trusted?

Can you be trusted?

This is more important than any other single question. Regardless of how motivated you are, regardless of where you went to school, regardless of your work history, if you slip up in this area, you might as well forget about a good career in any profession.

Certainly, there are many people who rise quickly by playing fast and loose with the rules. I’ve seen this more times than I can count during my career. Nevertheless, when all is said and done, no matter how far an individual gets, they almost always come crashing down if they are not trustworthy. When this happens, it’s major. Careers end.

I used to teach professional responsibility at a law school. In this class, like in most professional responsibility classes, we spent a lot of time going over the rules and debating various ethical questions. Personally, when I took this class in law school, I believed it was somewhat of a blow-off, just like most of my fellow students. However, this article is about the consequences of dishonesty, not a blow-off discussion of professional responsibility.

As a legal recruiter I have seen far too many careers stall out or end due to credibility lapses. This is more common than you might think. In fact, I would estimate at least five to ten percent of all careers in the legal sector experience long term, negative results because an attorney has done something dishonest, or not credible. When you probe the reasons why top attorneys from exceptional backgrounds do not get interviews or hired, it is most often because when their references are checked others believe they cannot be trusted. While some credibility lapses are obvious – for example, stealing client money or lying in court – most often the issues are far subtler. If an attorney shades the truth with superiors or does not make important information known to a client, the results can be disastrous to his or her career.

In the organizations in which I’ve been involved or run, the most persistent cause of failure is someone losing credibility. Once this happens, a person’s career within an organization usually ends, and their lack of credibility ends up following them to their next job, and the next one after that, because people remember and people talk. I do not care if you screw up in a law firm in Chicago and then move to New York or Florida, wherever you go, the chances are very good that your past will follow you.

Can you be trusted? Once there is any doubt, you have lost a great deal.

Fortunes can be lost and rebuilt. Being fired for wrongdoings wherein your credibility was not an issue can eventually be forgotten. If you lose your credibility however, you may never regain it.

Credibility encompasses far more than you may realize. Paradoxically, it is almost always the most accomplished, aggressive, and talented people who seem to lose their credibility. Years of achievement can be ruined by one moment of poor judgment.

Credibility can be defined in many ways, but at its simplest, it means the following: (1) never being dishonest or lying, (2) never failing to make someone aware of the truth behind circumstances when you should, and (3) not cutting corners, and doing what you say you are going to do, and when you say you are going to do it.

You must never be dishonest or lie. If you lie then you are toast. This is the most direct cause of loss of credibility. Most liars are exposed, and people stop trusting them. People do not want to give liars work or do business with them.

Lying is all too common. When it occurs, careers quite often end. You simply cannot be good at any job and lie to others. It does not work.

Never fail to make someone aware of the truth. This area can be particularly problematic, because not disclosing the full truth is something many people do not consider as being dishonest. Why, I don’t know.

A common example of this is the prosecutor who does not turn over exculpatory evidence, simply because he is not asked for it. These sorts of prosecutors can become pariahs in the legal community. More importantly, when you are an attorney working for someone else, you are expected to make your superiors aware of information they should be aware of. If you have failed to do something, or have done something, you need to make others aware of it.

Others will trust you if you make them aware of information they should know about. Keeping silent is often tantamount to lying. There are numerous examples I could get into here, but basically, if you do this you are hurting yourself and putting yourself in a situation wherein you might not be trusted in the future.

Do what you say you are going to do. This is probably the most common lapse of credibility out there. In fact, I would say this is the single largest credibility failure for an attorney.

First, if you say you are going to do something, then you should do it. No questions asked. If you cannot be trusted to get something done, then you are sending all sorts of negative messages to your employer. There are always excuses for not completing work or not doing this or that. However, there are always people who manage to get things done, and then there are people who always make excuses. You need to be trusted as someone who will get things done if you say you are going to do them.

Second, you should never cut corners when you work. This also is a credibility issue. If you are going to do something, you should do it in a professional and serious manner. This sort of performance will win you a great deal of credibility. In addition, people who carry out assignments this way are the ones who are most likely to get future work from clients and superiors. There are far too many people who do things half way, and do not complete work the way it should be done.

When I was about 20 years old, I met a man who ran a giant steel factory. He was an uneducated German immigrant who was competing in my hometown of Detroit against some of the world’s major steel factories. One day I met the president of a major automotive company, to which this man supplied a lot of steel. I told the president I could not understand how this man was so successful, because he appeared to lack business sense, and certainly could not hobnob with other important executives. The president told me one thing I will never forget: “He does what he says he is going to do, and does it well. That’s all he does. It’s very rare.”

Far too many people out there are out for a fast buck or a quick transaction. My career advice is to become someone of integrity, and you will be trusted and thrive.

It is important to be credible for a number of reasons: (1) it makes you human and therefore more likable and appreciated, (2) if you are not credible, people will fear that dealings with you will lead to negative repercussions for them, and (3) if you are dishonest you will constantly be reminded of your lack of credibility, no matter where you turn.

Everyone has probably seen a comedian perform at some point. Typically, the comedian will talk frankly about topics that most of us can relate to, but would never speak of publicly – sex, bathroom habits, or strange things they do. Most people laugh at comedians and enjoy them. I believe this is true is because comedians let us see who they are. We like people when we can really see who they are.

The work environment is extremely competitive. Many people spend a great deal of time trying to cover up their weaknesses. They do this by avoiding talking about what they cannot do. They don’t tell clients they have never worked on a certain type of project; they do not speak about negative performance reviews to peers; they try not to let superiors know an assignment did not get done in a timely manner because they were out having fun over the weekend.

The most successful individuals I’ve known do not approach others with a tremendous degree of arrogance or confidence. Instead, they are always careful to point out what they know, what they can do, what their limitations are, and what they need in order to do whatever is being asked of them. This is an explicitly honest approach. It is also an approach that makes the person preferable to deal with.

If you think about it, the reasons you probably like people who act this way are not much different from the reasons you like comedians. When you like someone more, you are not only more forgiving, you trust they will ask the correct questions when carrying out assignments and doing work. You also identify with them because you know you too have limitations. When you identify with someone, it creates a bond of sorts, which makes your relationship stronger. In addition, when you let people know your limitations, they are more likely to award a “job well done”.

I am not suggesting you should not be self-confident. You need to be. The issue is how you let people know your limitations and how honest you are with those around you. When you are honest with those around you, they will also be likely to open up to you more. You will learn more from the world around you and grow more.

If you are not credible, people will avoid dealing with you. Twice in the past two years I have come across attorneys who were terminated from their law firms for reasons related to a single credibility issue. What happened in each of these cases was so remarkable in its simplicity and stupidity it’s hard to believe. The attorneys were asked by a partner if they had completed an assignment and although the attorneys said yes, they hadn’t, and were fired as a result. In one case, the attorney was terminated only a couple of weeks before he was going to be formally installed as a partner in an AmLaw 100 law firm. In each case, I do not think the attorney found a new job for a long time, if at all. Certainly, no good recruiter would continue to represent someone who was dishonest like this.

The reason this simplistic bit of dishonesty, like most dishonesty, resulted in such a drastic outcome is because it has the capacity to hurt other people. If people tell their employer they did something when they did not, this will affect the employer’s dealings with the client. The result is the employer could lose a client, which is bad for everyone involved.

Time after time, attorneys engage in one stupid episode of dishonesty after another. In the above example, the rationale may have been to appear competent for a moment or two in the partner’s eyes. Who knows? Regardless, these sorts of lies ultimately harm people, and are seldom worth any perceived short term gain.

Everyone is certainly familiar with the trials of Martha Stewart, Dennis Kowalski and others regarding various sorts of fraud and insider trading charges. Each of these episodes looks harmless enough on the surface. Nevertheless, these people ultimately hurt investors and others who relied upon the dishonest representations of the individuals in question.

When you are dishonest with others, you put them in the position of not knowing if up is up or down is down when they are dealing with you. People will actually fear doing business with you.

This is something I have noticed over and over again in the attorney placement business. When a recruiting firm decides to cut corners and be dishonest in one respect or another, law firms and others in the legal community quickly learn of the dishonesty. As a consequence, they do not know if what the recruiter is saying is right or wrong. They do not trust the recruiter and opt to cease doing business with them completely. Because it is a small industry, other law firms and employers quickly learn about the recruiter’s dishonest ways. Very shortly, the recruiter may be out of business.

A lot of times people who do something dishonest are under the impression they can do one dishonest thing, get away with it, and then come out ahead. This is rarely the case. When you lack credibility, you will be constantly reminded of it. This is the case whether you do one, or many things wrong.

One of the most common forms of dishonesty is the lie. There are different categories of lies. It can be something as benign as calling in sick when one is not really sick. On another level, there are things like lying about whether an assignment was completed, or lying about what a law means, so that you can do something you want to do. The issue with these sorts of lies is that you may often have to tell many additional lies to cover up for your original one. The more lies you tell, the more you have to keep telling. Pretty soon, lying becomes a near full-time occupation, and the lies just continue to build upon themselves. This is almost always disastrous.

In addition, a lot of people think if they are dishonest with someone, they can confine their dishonesty to that one person and be okay. This, too, is rarely true. If you upset one person through your dishonesty, chances are you will see them again and again and again. How you deal with the guilt of upsetting them is up to you. You need to understand, however, you will likely carry that guilt for a long time.

Your credibility is one of the most important aspects of your career. For many, credibility comes naturally. Others are always looking for a way to cut corners, or are simply dishonest. Those who cut corners and lack credibility never come out on top. In fact, their failure and mediocrity are all but assured.

Job seekers often don’t understand their reputations are fragile. The most important thing you can do for your reputation is to approach your work with credibility in mind. Always err on the side of credibility.

Job Opportunities Are Everywhere

What You Will Learn Getting a job has a lot to do with how you think and the way you put your mind to use. A strong positive mindset can help you succeed in the job market. You have to think and believe that opportunity exists everywhere. You need to be persistent and strongly believe in the end result ahead of time. You also need to believe and exhibit that you will add value to your potential employer. This mindset will impress employers and increase your value.

The job market is tough, isn’t it? During times of economic uncertainty businesses lay people off, or undergo hiring freezes. People are losing their homes, the housing market is down, and people are scared. It seems like the world is getting tougher and tougher, and many of us wonder what the future will hold for our kids.

If you are looking for a job or you were planning to start a business, it may now seem as though there are no opportunities out there at all. However, that is only one way to look at the current situation. What you need most in order to succeed in the job market is a strong, positive mindset. You need to understand that getting a job – any job – has a lot to do with how you think and the way you put your mind to use. A positive mindset can create a great deal of opportunity for you. But first you have to think and believe that opportunity is everywhere.

After September 11, 2001, the market for corporate attorneys in Silicon Valley – my main location for legal recruiting at the time – was at an absolute standstill. Law firms were glutted with corporate attorneys, and most were letting them go as quickly as possible. I remember getting calls from hundreds of laid-off attorneys looking for jobs. One day, I got a call from an attorney and proceeded to tell him the same story I’d shared thousands of times before:

The market is horrible.

There are no jobs.

Firms are laying people off as quickly as they can.

This is the biggest crisis in the history of Silicon Valley.

No one has ever seen a market this bad.

I basically told him everything I had told countless others before. There was nothing particularly impressive one way or another about this man’s experience or education. He was pretty much just an average out-of-work corporate attorney in Silicon Valley. I saw his job prospects as rather grim.

“I am going to a retreat for a week this Friday,” he said, “and I plan on starting work in the next week or two after that. If you’d like I’d be happy to meet with you in your offices tomorrow.”

He was calling me from Mountain View, several hundred miles from where I was sitting in Los Angeles. I agreed to meet with him. He took a flight down a few days later.

Morrison & Foerster had an opening for an attorney at his level in a very small corporate group. I got him the interview and, somehow, he landed the job. Granted, he made a good impression in person, and I did do my best to get him the job; nevertheless, I believe it was his desire and his energy which really got him the job. I cannot imagine how else this occurred; there were many other candidates who were more qualified for the position. As it turned out, this man was the only corporate attorney I knew who secured employment in California in the first six months after September 11.

As a recruiter and as someone who now runs various employment companies, I have seen countless examples like this over the years. Some people just know they have “it” and they refuse to take no for an answer. A similar story appears in the book Think and Grow Rich about the power of persistence and knowing your end result right when you start:

Shortly after Mr. Darby received his degree from the “University of Hard Knocks,” and had decided to profit by his experience in the gold mining business, he had the good fortune to be present on an occasion that proved to him that “No” does not necessarily mean no.

One afternoon he was helping his uncle grind wheat in an old-fashioned mill. The uncle operated a large farm on which a number of colored sharecrop farmers lived. Quietly, the door was opened, and a small colored child, the daughter of a tenant, walked in and took her place near the door.

The uncle looked up, saw the child, and barked at her roughly, “What do you want?” Meekly, the child replied, “My mammy say send her fifty cents.” “I’ll not do it,” the uncle retorted, “Now you run on home.” “Yas sah,” the child replied. But she did not move. The uncle went ahead with his work, so busily engaged that he did not pay enough attention to the child to observe that she did not leave. When he looked up and saw her still standing there, he yelled at her, “I told you to go on home! Now go, or I’ll take a switch to you.” The little girl said “yas sah,” but she did not budge an inch. The uncle dropped a sack of grain he was about to pour into the mill hopper, picked up a barrel stave, and started toward the child with an expression on his face that indicated trouble.

Darby held his breath. He was certain he was about to witness a murder. He knew his uncle had a fierce temper. He knew that colored children were not supposed to defy white people in that part of the country.

When the uncle reached the spot where the child was standing, she quickly stepped forward one step, looked up into his eyes, and screamed at the top of her shrill voice, “MY MAMMY’S GOTTA HAVE THAT FIFTY CENTS!”

The uncle stopped, looked at her for a minute, then slowly laid the barrel stave on the floor, put his hand in his pocket, took out half a dollar, and gave it to her. The child took the money and slowly backed toward the door, never taking her eyes off the man whom she had just conquered.

After she had gone, the uncle sat down on a box and looked out the window into space for more than ten minutes. He was pondering, with awe, over the whipping he had just taken. Mr. Darby, too, was doing some thinking. That was the first time in all his experience that he had seen a colored child deliberately master an adult white person. How did she do it? What happened to his uncle that caused him to lose his fierceness and become as docile as a lamb? What strange power did this child use that made her master over her superior? These and other similar questions flashed into Darby’s mind, but he did not find the answer until years later, when he told me the story.

Persistence can get you a job. Knowing your end result ahead of time is a good way to bring results. When I think about the people I have seen conquer the odds and secure good jobs, even in a bad economy, I am reminded of the power of a positive mindset.

According to Michael Basch, one of the founders of Federal Express, it takes three things to succeed. I believe people who succeed in business or in the job search market typically accomplish these three items very well:

1. They change their mindset from “I am owed this” to “how can I add value?” Projecting this mindset to potential employers or colleagues shows you are an asset. For example, a corporate attorney out of work in a tough market may talk about how he can create work, how he can grow the department, etc. This is what truly successful people do to add value to their workplaces and communities. People who do this continue to succeed, even in challenging financial times.

2. They give direction to that value in order to ensure they’re producing results for the organization. In the same regard, people who give the most value also direct it toward that which helps the organization the most, and they do so in the most efficient manner possible. Time is money, and utilizing time effectively shows employers your value in a clear way.

3. They have a system to apply their energy so their results get better and better. When you are with any organization, you need to show improvement, and willingness to improve. Well-directed energy becomes even more efficient and effective over time if you constantly fine-tune your processes. This is what employers want to see: a salesperson who regularly takes self-improvement courses to increase his sales; a litigation attorney who spends his weekends at camps, brushing up on his trial advocacy skills. These things impress employers and increase your value as an employee. Being committed to the study of what you do and having a system for improving is what makes all the difference. Looking back on the people I have seen hired against the odds, this is exactly what they did. They kept learning and growing even when the state of the market and economy looked dismal.

The only secret to finding a job is to believe you will, and then to show your potential employer you’re highly valuable. Understand that in order to succeed, even in the worst of markets, you have to believe there are opportunities available. Tune out what seems wrong with the market, and put your heart into your job search. If you do this, nothing can hold you back.

To Succeed in Any Job You Need to Create Work

What You Will Learn Work is not something to be detested; instead, it is a path to mental and economic stability and happiness. The most important of all of your career skills is the ability to create productive work. When you create work you always have something to do and you are always adding value. You need to be working for companies and people who are proactive in creating work. Work is healthy and it gives you a purpose in life – cherish the work you do.

To be denied the right to work is to be denied the right to participate in the society in which we live. It is for this reason that having the opportunity to work is probably the most important part of your existence. Work is not something to be detested; instead, it is a path to mental and economic stability, happiness, and purpose in our lives. To be around people who think otherwise is never in your best interest. To associate work with something negative is also never in your best interest. The most important of all of your career skills is the ability to create productive work. The ability to create productive work is something that will change your career for the better, and it can also take you further than you might have ever believed in your chosen path.

Perhaps you know how to create work in your chosen profession and are doing it already. Perhaps you are not creating work in your chosen profession, or you detest work. Regardless of your current attitude towards work, you need to understand how to create work. The people who create work in our society are the ones who are the happiest, the ones who rarely lose their jobs, the ones who make the most money, and the ones who are the most stable in all respects throughout their lives. You need to know how to create work. Creating work is essential to your existence.

As a manager and also as someone who works very hard at my job, one of the most distressing things that I see is people who fail to create work in their jobs, or who look for ways to avoid work. I am a firm believer in the importance of work, not just from the standpoint that work provides us money with which to live, but also because the act of work is how we participate in society.

One of my jobs is managing a legal recruiting firm called BCG Attorney Search. As part of this job, I have had the opportunity to work with numerous recruiters throughout the years. Some of these recruiters have been absolutely exceptional, and others have been quite marginal. It is very easy for me to tell an outstanding legal recruiter from an average one. My conclusions are based on the recruiter’s ability to create work. Regardless of your profession, understanding the key behind this observation and what it means will be of great assistance to you.

A legal recruiter’s job typically involves (1) working with candidates who approach the legal recruiting firm seeking placement and (2) finding new candidates to work with. I have always sat in an office with legal recruiters and have had the pleasure of watching them very closely. Several years ago I remember having a recruiter who would come in at 8 a.m. every day and would generally leave by around 12 to 1 p.m. most days. When I would ask him why he was leaving so early he would generally say something to the effect of “there are no new candidates today.” What he was saying was that he had done all of the work that had been presented to him–no more and no less. My obvious question for him was along the lines of, “Why not go out and look for new candidates?”

There is always plenty of work for anyone in sales to do beyond the tasks that are immediately presented to them. They can call old leads. They can send letters to old clients, trying to reactivate some old accounts. They can call old sales and see how the product is working out. They can look for new sources of sales. They can socialize to meet new potential clients. The list of work you can do to find more work and be good at your job is almost endless.

In my career, I have run across all sorts of people. I have met countless people who I know have jobs making $500,000 a year or more. By simply examining their work ethics, I always know if they will last at this income level over the long-term. The ones who fail my observational test are never on top for long. The only thing I am looking for is whether this person knows how to create work in his or her job. When you create work you always have something to do and you are always adding value.

Work is most often not something that jumps right into our line of sight. In any job you have it is important to realize that someone created the job you are doing. It is up to you to maintain this job, ensuring that this job continues to create value for your employer. You should also take the initiative to add tasks to this job that continue to make it as effective and profitable for your employer as possible.

For example, a secretary’s main job may be to answer the phone. While waiting for the phone to ring, there should also be other jobs that the secretary is working on, to be more productive. The ability to create work will give the secretary more value to her employer, and will gain the secretary more appreciation. Few sane employers would ever let someone like her go.

In my job I have managed hundreds of employees. I have had the opportunity to work with some truly exceptional people. I would estimate that, in terms of people who are truly exceptional and indispensable in good times and in bad, the proportion of exceptional performers to average performers is around one in 10. That is, only one in 10 people are really, truly exceptional performers. The exceptional performers are the people whom employers rely upon and try to hang on to in all economic climates. The poor to average performers are not as important to the organization. In fact, unless a job is extremely well defined and measured, the poor to average performers will in many cases drag the company down to some degree. What I have noticed from all truly stellar performers is that they have the ability to consistently create work that the company values.

These workers tend to appear to have the happiest personal lives and make the most money in their jobs. I have seen this pattern enough times in my career that I really believe there is something to it. These same individuals also typically have the most employment stability. When they come to work at our company they may have been with their previous employer 10 years or more. They always have good references. They are the sorts of people companies and groups want to keep around.

One of the most infuriating things for me as a manager is when I walk around the office and see people screwing around, not really doing any work. As our organization grew several years ago I wanted to ensure that our employees were always working on productive tasks, so I started giving managers weekly tasks to do. I would write these tasks up on a Sunday night and then speak with our managers in a one-on-one meeting each week to gauge the tasks. The meetings tended to follow two sorts of tracks (and generally still do to this day):

One type of manager would come into the meeting, his team having accomplished most of the tasks, and he would be very familiar with the status of each of the tasks. He would be excited to report on his progress, and would be aware of the exact amount of work required to complete each task, and would provide me with an estimated date of completion. This manager might also suggest new tasks in addition to the existing tasks that needed to be done, for the organization’s benefit. In addition, ongoing tasks that were started would always be brought to completion, and never stopped once they were underway. Before ever requesting additional staff, this type of manager would always ensure that their people were fully utilized and were doing their work as efficiently as possible.

The other type of manager would come into the meeting and would have accomplished few of the tasks. He might even be slightly annoyed at having to report on the status of the tasks. He would state that certain tasks had not been completed or started, for reasons that were very trivial–and only served to help him avoid starting the tasks. This manager would go on to complain about his workload, and would request more staff. In subsequent meetings, I would find that tasks that the manager had started had, for some reason, suddenly been abandoned. The manager would never suggest new work that could be done.

While I hate to make the distinction between managers in such a black and white manner, this is something I have seen over and over and over again. It goes without saying that the people I want on my team are the managers who are proactive. You do not need to be a manager to be proactive, however. Everyone needs to be proactive in his or her job in order to create work.

You need to be working for companies and people who are proactive in creating work. Young companies are generally hungrier and know how to create work better than older ones. Companies that are expanding and not contracting generally know how to create work. You need to be creating work inside your organization. I believe that entrepreneurs are the engines of our society, because they are constantly trying to create work and, in the process, they create new jobs.

In the movie About Schmidt, Jack Nicholson plays an actuary in Omaha who retires from his job after a long career. In the movie we see Nicholson go back to the office weeks after retirement in an effort to give the organization some sort of information he had been working on prior to his retirement. He speaks to his replacement in the job he once held, and is politely told that he is no longer needed. Nicholson is crushed and the audience realizes that the fact that he is no longer needed by the company, to him, almost means he is no longer part of society.

People who cannot work in society are the most unhappy and troubled. To work is to be part of society, an active participant. To be prohibited from working is to be cast out by society. There is nothing more crushing to people than being prohibited from working.

After taking vacations most of us are happy to get back to work. Work defines our psyche and our sense of purpose. People with no sense of purpose often go mad.

You need to create work in your job, and to continue to create work. You should also stay away from people in your job who are critical of the act of work. While I believe unions have their place, they can be very dangerous in many respects because their goal is often to protect you from doing too much work. Work is healthy for you and it gives you purpose. If anything, you should have more work rather than less. People who try to give you distaste for work are extremely dangerous because your identity and life, for the most part, revolve around work.

You have a more wonderful and productive life and existence the closer you are to work. The more productive work you create, the better you will do in your job. Cherishing your work and creating more work will change your career and life.

The Importance of Fitting In

What You Will Learn Develop the ability to fit in – it is one of the single largest contributors, in both getting and keeping a job. Employers want to hire people who will embrace, on philosophical and moral levels, their approach towards business and the world. Your happiness and the success of your career depend on the ability to recognize when you fit in and when you do not.

One of the most persistent mistakes people make is not fitting in with their work environments. Fitting in enables you to both get and keep a job. In terms of what it takes to succeed in the long term, fitting in may actually be more important than your skill level. This little-known observation is lost on many people, and overlooking this can result in unhappy and unfulfilled careers. Conversely, being aware of this often results in very happy and fulfilling careers. The problem is that it is often the very best people and those with the best academics and technical skills that end up not fitting in.

Having been raised to believe that the true success is measured purely by how well people perform academically, many people enter the working world like shooting stars. They arrive at the very best organizations and soon leave one organization for the next, and then the next. If they are smart, though, they learn the importance of fitting in; otherwise their careers quickly end, and they are left blaming a self-imposed set of circumstances and people for their career problems.

I have been a legal recruiter for several years, and I am constantly speaking with firms that are hiring, laying off, and firing attorneys, paralegals, and legal secretaries. I am constantly seeing both good and bad things happen to people searching for jobs. The interesting thing about my work is that I often get firsthand accounts regarding why people are getting hired and why people are losing their jobs. If there is one thing that stands out to me, it is that the people that get hired and keep their jobs are generally those who fit in with their surroundings at work. The people that are losing their jobs and are having the most problems landing employment, are those who are not able to fit in.

A. The Importance of Academics and Technical Skills to Your Job Search

In order to get an interview with certain organizations, you do need (for the most part) to have certain qualifications. For example, if a company is seeking someone with three years of prior experience, you are going to need to at least come close to this. If a company hires people out of the top third of their classes–from only top-notch universities, you are also going to need to come close to meeting these qualifications. With very, very rare exceptions though, once you get beyond these types of hiring criteria, you are going to be competing with a large group of people. Who do you think is going to get the job?

I’ll tell you exactly who is going to get the job: the person who meshes best with the hiring committee.

Most professionals presume that the most important thing that employers are looking for in an interview is whether or not they have the skill set to do the job. Whatever the qualifications of the job may be, the fact of the matter is that employers would not even be interviewing you if they did not think you could do the work. Whether you are applying for a blue-collar opening or a c-level position, virtually every employer out there is smart enough to know that you can be trained to do the work for which they are interviewing you, even if your skills are not immediately on target. Employers may use your skill set as an excuse NOT to hire you after the interview. More often than not, though, the person who gets hired is the person that employers feel would fit into their organization best.

B. What Is Fitting In?

The remarkable fact is that it the concept of fitting in will vary depending upon the organization you join. Fitting in will mean something different if you want to work for the government or military from what it will mean if you want to work for a private company or a public interest organization. Fitting in simply means that you will be comfortable around your coworkers and they will be comfortable with you. Fitting in can also be akin to being part of a family: Everyone may not be the same; however, everyone shares a certain set of beliefs and philosophies about the world.

Your employers do not want to have to feel uncomfortable around you, nor do they want to feel as though you are going to be critical of them. Your employers want you to embrace, on philosophical and moral levels, their approach towards business and the world. Your employers want you to get along with everyone in the office, and not to be a source of tension. Your employers want you to identify with them and be sympathetic towards them. To your employers, you should seem like a kindred spirit, someone towards whom they can take a maternalistic or paternalistic approach.

The more easily you are able to meet these needs of your employers, the more likely you are to get hired and remain hired once you are with a particular organization.

While the analogy is far from perfect, an employer, in many respects, can be viewed as akin to an immediate family member. In any family, there are likely to be a variety of different personality types. Nevertheless, most families share a lot. They tend to share the same religion; they tend to share certain values among their members; they tend to have similar beliefs about the importance of education; and they may enjoy doing certain things together. They are also likely to come from a similar economic background and to know a lot of the same people. These commonalities bind family members together on multiple levels, despite all of their differences. These commonalities are what make the family cohesive.

In order to fit in with an employer, you need to be seen as a member of the family. In order to be a member of the family, you need to be bound to the employer by a set of commonalities. On its basest level, going to a good school or getting good grades may be enough to break the ice. This is not something that enables you to fit in over the long term, though. In fact, having a shared experience and outlook towards the world is the one thing that is likely to help you the most. This is the essence of fitting in. The most successful people are those who are able to fit in with their employers’ environments.

At the risk of not being PC, I will simply note a few things. If you examine most organizations closely, you will almost always notice some very strong similarities in terms of the types of people that are most often hired. The people are never the same; however, their tolerance (or lack of tolerance), for certain types of behavior, is usually quite similar. In addition, many organizations are comprised of people with a very similar set of life experiences. Many organizations may be male-dominated bastions, made up of groups of men with an affinity for football. Other organizations may be comprised of a great deal of former military men. Other organizations may be dominated by people of a certain race, religion, or even sexual orientation. Whether or not any of this is “correct” is not for me to say. What I will say, though, is that none of this is the least bit surprising. People want to be around others with whom they feel comfortable, and share a similar set of experiences.

And this brings me to another significant point that few professionals ever take the time to realize. You cannot fit in with every group of people. Certainly there are companies and employers in every city of the United States that are considered the most prestigious. You may have the academic and other qualifications to go work at these places. The question that is important, though, is not whether you have these credentials, but whether you fit in. You are likely to experience the most success and longevity in your profession if you find an organization where you fit in. If you do not find an organization where you fit in, you may be in for a rough ride.

The drive to succeed for certain people dictates that they only go to the hiring organizations that are the most universally recognized as the best. Job seekers often ignore the concept of fitting in in these cases, when it is really the most important aspect to consider, in my opinion.

C. Fitting In at Different Stages of Your Career

I would like to walk you through a typical career from (1) being hired out of school to (2) being hired laterally after working for some time to (3) being a senior person in a company.

1. The Importance of Fitting In When You Are Interviewing with Employers During School

In school, certain employers will generally only interview you if you (1) are coming from a certain level of school and (2) have a certain grade point average. Once you get the interview, though, it is all up to you. The most important factor determining whether or not you get a position will be your ability to fit in.

Many of the best minds in every profession are not able to get positions in prestigious companies precisely because they cannot fit in. There are, of course, companies out there that will hire people because of their sheer academic prowess. Indeed, the better your school and the better your academic performance, the more likely it is that employers will look the other way if you do not fit in perfectly. Nevertheless, at least on some level, you are going to need to fit in. As you move down the food chain in terms of your school and academic qualifications, the importance of fitting in increases.

If you are currently working at a Fortune 500 company, take a few minutes to consider the following. The people with the worst academic qualifications are often the people that fit in the best. They act as people from the company are expected to act. They have the right level of professionalism. They get along the best with others. These same people are often the ones who do best in the long term in their chosen profession. The ability to fit in will only continue to increase throughout their careers.

I want to give you a couple of illustrations from my own law school experience.

In my second year of law school, I was in an interview with the hiring partner of a law firm that, quite frankly, was at such a rarefied level that I did not think I deserved to be interviewing there. This high-powered law firm came to my law school (a top-10 law school) and only interviewed five people for a half hour each before jetting back to New York. Most other high-powered law firms came to our school and interviewed candidates all day long. Some even interviewed for a couple of days straight. Suffice it to say that this particular law firm is often considered the very best New York law firm, and its interview schedule simply reflected the fact that it did not believe more than five people in the entire second and third year classes of nearly 800 students merited interviews. While I am sure that not everyone in my class tried to get an interview with this firm, I am confident that at least around 100 students did. I had no idea why I had been selected to interview with this law firm. The other four people that the firm was interviewing were widely known to be at the very top of their classes. While I was a good student, compared to those people, I was not all that special.

I entered the interview cognizant that I did not belong there based on my grades, and I was surprised to see that the partner was very welcoming. During the interview he asked me when I could travel to New York. At the end of the interview, I rose to shake the man’s hand, and when he held his hand out, he gave me my fraternity handshake! I realized right then and there that this was the entire reason I had been interviewed. While I did not ultimately get this job (after a callback), I was the only student in my school that received an invite to visit this firm’s office, despite the fact that I did not believe I deserved the initial interview.

If you think about what was going on in this situation, I am sure that something similar to this has probably happened to you in your own career or job search at some point. If I did not have the academic qualifications to be interviewing with this law firm, why did I get the interview? The reason was because the partner had also been involved in the fraternity I was in, a small national fraternity with not too many chapters throughout the United States. He knew that I had endured some of the same hazing experiences he had endured when he was younger. He also knew that we had sung the same songs and been indoctrinated into many of the same philosophies. He probably took a liking to me because he saw me as being somewhat like himself.

Many people that do not have a good understanding of the political nature of work environments often presume that the purpose of an interview is for the employer to gauge a candidate’s skills and technical acumen. This is wrong. People who succeed in interviews are people who the organization perceives will fit in the best. Every single job I have ever gotten, I have gotten because of this factor.

The people that do not fit in with the group are always easy to recognize. They tend to be more critical of the group. They tend to create problems.

Most interns realize that success within an organization is all about fitting in. This is one of the main reasons that stories circulate each year about interns that do not fit in during the summers, at companies all over the country. Companies typically hire students to work there for the summer to see if they will fit in. Below is one of the most unusual intern stories I have ever heard. This particular story is told by Tucker Max, an individual who was a summer associate at Fenwick & West in Palo Alto, California, in the summer of 2000:

—–Original Message—–
From: [Suppressed]
Sent: Monday, June 05, 2000 2:51 PM
To: [Suppressed]
Subject: The Now Infamous [] Charity Auction Debacle…

Here is the story of what happened to me this weekend at my firm’s retreat. That’s the last time I ever drink before an auction:

Aaron and I decide to leave for the Silverado Ranch by car instead of taking the bus at 2 pm. You have not lived until you’ve ridden through three hours of Bay Area traffic with Aaron at the wheel. By the time we got to Silverado, he was madder than fire.

The first reception starts at like 6 pm. There are finger foods, etc., and lots and lots of wine and beer. Not really liking any of the food, I start drinking. Heavily. By the time I know what’s going on, I’m talking to the name partner, Bill Fenwick, in a redneck accent. Of course, he is from Kentucky, so we talked about basketball for an hour. It was great.

About 9 pm the charity auction began. There were lots of “Fenwick” type items, like a dinner cooked by the managing partner, etc. One of the items was an entire night chauffeured by the hiring partner, [John]. In my inebriated stupor, I thought that if I won this, then they would have no choice but to give me an offer. The bidding starts at $50. People are bidding here and there, but I get tired of all the slow bidding, so I stand on my chair, and hold up my bidding card. Without getting down. So the auctioneer takes this as a cue to just start yelling price increases, without even identifying other bidders.

When the price hits about $800, [John] says that he will pay half if a summer associate wins. The bidding automatically doubles (John is a litigator). As the price gets to $2,000, I think I have the thing won. I get the “going once” call, and then this other summer, Aparna, goaded on by some partners, decides that she has to beat me. So the bidding hits $2,600, and before I know it, I’m on stage, taking the mike from the auctioneer, and yelling at Aparna to stop bidding. My exact quote, “Aparna, seriously, stop. I have to win, this is the only way I’m getting an offer.”

So that just inspires more partners/attorneys/recruiting staff to contribute to Aparna’s pool. When the bidding hits $3,400, I start yelling, on the mike, about how this isn’t fair, because she has partners bankrolling her, but I only have a “few scrubby summers in my corner.” I keep trying to bid only like $5 more than her, but the auctioneer gets all mad at me, and is making me bid in hundred dollar increments. When her bid hits $3,800, I get back on stage. After some banter, the auctioneer asks me if I want to bid $3,900.

I ponder this for a second, and in front of the whole firm and spouses/significant others, with the mike in my face, say, “Fuck it–go ahead.”

I won the auction.

This particular email was rapidly circulated among most summer associates in large law firms around the United States after it was written. From a social standpoint, the reason this email was so widely circulated is because it shows the antithesis of fitting in and highlights the importance of doing so.

Regardless of where you work, chances are that you will be working in close proximity to a relatively small group of people. Because you spend so much time at work, these people are going to become quite aware of your style of work, your personality, and like it or not, a lot of details about your personal life. In all of this, these people are going to want to feel comfortable around you. In addition, these people are going to want to feel that they can develop a relationship with you over time.

2. The Importance of Fitting In When Being Hired as a Lateral

After you have been working for a few years and want to transition into a new employment environment, the importance of fitting in will arguably be further amplified.

Shared experiences take on a different form when someone is trying to move laterally to a company. As a legal recruiter, my job is made easier by knowing the sorts of shared experiences that are likely to get people in the door in different sorts of law firms. For example, if someone is in Los Angeles and has worked for the Los Angeles office of a major New York law firm, I know that other New York-based law firms in Los Angeles are more likely to be interested in that attorney than Los Angeles-based law firms of a similar prestige level. The perception is that these attorneys will share a certain “New York outlook.” The same can hold true if one is moving in Palo Alto from one major law firm to another. He or she is more likely to be hired by another major Palo Alto firm than, say, somebody who has been working in another area of California.

All of these similarities are based on shared experiences and the perception that these people will fit in. Certain organizations will simply not hire from certain other organizations (even those that are generally considered better than they are) because they believe that people from these companies will not fit in. Most often, these organizations will say things like, “These professionals are all too arrogant,” or something of the sort.

When professionals are in the job market, an exceptional recruiter will instinctively know which candidates are likely to get interviews with certain organizations and which ones are not. This calculation is based first on externalities such as the school and company the person is coming from; however, it is ultimately based on other important factors in the professional’s background that are often less evident.

Recently, I have seen professionals ultimately hired over many other applicants for what I believe were the following reasons:

• I believe one executive was hired for a $200,000-a-year job over more qualified candidates because he, like the CEO that hired him, enjoyed surfing;
• I believe one manager was hired because she attended the same religious group as the hiring manager;
• I believe one executive was hired because she had formerly followed the Grateful Dead, like a director in the company did;
• I believe one professional was hired because of his military background; and,
• I believe one executive was hired because of her ongoing participation in a controversial protest organization.

I could continue this list indefinitely and give you countless examples. People always say things like, “You have to know someone there to get a job,” and so forth. Indeed, it does help if you know someone. The reason is that you have already proven that you can get along with someone who fits in with that company, which means you too will be more likely to fit in there.

I know of dozens of instances at various major organizations throughout the United States where laterally hired employees with, frankly, horrible academic qualifications are working alongside people with first-rate academic qualifications. Why do you think this is so? In many cases, these people with horrible academic qualifications may have some unusual and highly valued skill. Still, more often than not, I have discovered that these people knew someone.

This is how things work in the world. If you fit in, you are more likely to get a job and succeed in an organization. I can also tell you that there are organizations out there that are somewhat racist, and hire people that are likely to fit that mold. My purpose here is not to be judgmental. There are certainly other factors that organizations consider when making hiring decisions, too. Nevertheless, when all is said and done, many hiring decisions are the products of people’s ability to fit in.

3. The Importance of Fitting In as Your Career Progresses

In order to survive in a company, you will need people higher up than you in your corner. You can get people in your corner by working hard. Nevertheless, there will always be people working hard in large companies. The people that most often get higher-ups in their corner are the ones who are able to establish bonds. These bonds will make people go to bat for the employee. These bonds will also humanize the employee to their employer and make it much more difficult for an employer to fire an employee.

D. Conclusions

Most of the conclusions from this article can be derived on your own. You need to understand, however, that fitting in is probably the most neglected topic when it comes to discussions about success. Fitting in can be accomplished on several levels, and oftentimes you might not even be able to articulate why you do or do not fit in with a particular group. Fitting in is also something you cannot fake. You can often get a job without fitting in, but you will have a very difficult time keeping it and advancing if you do not fit in.

When you were in elementary school, junior high school, high school, and then college, there was probably a group or groups you naturally fit into. Think back about the reasons why you fit in with those groups. Certainly, you have changed over time and will continue to change. The most important aspect of why you have fit in with various groups in the past, though, was based on how comfortable you felt with that particular group of people, and how comfortable they felt with you. Your happiness and success in your career depend on the ability to recognize when you fit in and when you do not.

The Dangers of Getting Jobs Through Friends and Family

Men are more ready to repay an injury than a benefit, because gratitude is a burden and revenge a pleasure.

-Tacitus (c. 55-120 A.D.)

What You Will Learn Watch out about taking up a job with the help of family and friends. Nepotism is usually considered a negative term and can serve to create resentment in all employment environments. Your friend or family member’s act of kindness could ultimately result in a strained and imbalanced relationship. You are safer getting a job without the help of family and friends.

“Oh, I already have a friend there. I’ll just contact them.” In the legal recruiting realm, this is one of the more common things we hear after informing an attorney that a certain law firm has a job opening. There is a lot you need to consider before you decide to apply to a job through a friend or relative or take a job working for a friend or relative. First, it is exceedingly rare that a friend or family member will ever be able to get you a position. The reason for this is simple: despite what you think, the involvement of friends or family members in your job search may actually hurt you because they may not want to help you get a job. Moreover, all employers know the severe problems that can arise when friends or relatives work together. Due to this, simply going through a close contact is often something that is counterproductive to your job search. Second, even if you are one of the few people who are able to get a position through a friend or family member, you could run into a great deal of trouble and harm your relationship with that person in the process.

When you are seeking a job through a friend, you may be surprised to find that he or she will not help you get a job with his or her organization. Moreover, the organization may actually look upon you negatively and not hire you if you try to use a friend or family member to get a job.

One of the most common things that people think is that friends are their best allies in a job search. After all, the job market is a harsh place. Who better to help you with your job search than a friend employed inside a firm for which you would like to work? A friend certainly recognizes all of your strengths and appreciates you for the person you are. In addition, the thought of depending upon a stranger when you have a friend or family member close by does not make a lot of sense. Certainly you can always trust a friend over a stranger, right?

I have been a legal recruiter for several years. I have represented more candidates than I can count. In all of my time as a legal recruiter, I have never once had a candidate get a job through a friend. Incredibly, I have actually gotten several candidates jobs with firms where they thought that they had friends inside who were helping them with their job searches-”insiders” who never managed to get their friends interviews. Moreover, when I think back on my own life, I do not think that I have ever gotten any job by having a friend or relative help me.

The issue with using friends to try to help you with your job search is that you never know your friends as well as you think. Almost instinctively, many friends are competitive with one another. When you are dealing with people close to you, you will often agree with them just to avoid argument. In fact, if you spend more than a couple of hours with your family or a group of your friends, you will find this sort of thing occurring probably every few minutes throughout each conversation. Friends and family also often do their best to laugh extra hard at each other’s jokes and cover up their unpleasant qualities. Your friends and family will most often say they love your taste in music, your choice of clothing, your house or apartment, your writing, and most everything you take seriously. It is possible your friends and family mean this. It is also possible they do not.

The thought of asking a friend to help you with a job search is, in effect, an attempt to shield yourself from the harshness of the world. The same enthusiasm your friends and family have for you in the personal realm, you may imagine, will directly translate to an eagerness to help you find work with their organization. I would offer at the outset that this is a possibility, and you may not be wrong in thinking this. Notwithstanding, this is often not the case.

One of the more common things that happens when people ask a friend or family member for help is nothing. The friend or family member gets your resume and thinks about it and then (for whatever reason) decides he or she does not want to forward it to the powers that be. You cannot imagine how common this is. If you have forwarded a resume to a friend inside a company recently, call the company about it. In more than 50 percent of cases, your “friend” will not have even forwarded the information. He will pleasantly tell you that he will, but he doesn’t. Your friend will often lie and tell you he forwarded the information when he did not. Again, I have seen this more times than I can count. The number is more than 50 percent (with the possible exception of firms which pay “bounties” for employees who bring candidates to their company).

Your guess as to why this occurs is as good as mine. Perhaps your friend or family member simply does not want the two of you working in the same office. Perhaps your friend does not want to take responsibility for what you might do if you were hired. Perhaps (just perhaps) your friend honestly does not think as highly of your capabilities as you do. While your friend may not tell you that he resents you because you once had, did, or said such and such, you can believe this can come out if you come to him seeking assistance with getting a job. Again, you will not even know this has come out-it just will. The firm may never see your resume.

Assuming your friend or family member does forward your resume, be prepared for all sorts of brutally honest assessments of your character and talents of which you personally may never have been aware. Most friends speak about one another with other groups of friends when the other is not around. Not all of this conversation is pleasant. Do you have any idea what your friends are saying about you? I can almost guarantee you that some of it is negative. You probably do not know even 10 percent of the negative things your friends and family say about you when you are not around. I have a question for you: do you want any of this negative information to be communicated to your potential employer?

There are reasons why organizations do not like to hire friends and family members of their employees. Nepotism has traditionally been considered a negative term. The word originates from the Latin word nephos, which means nephew, and was created to describe Pope Calixtus III’s hiring of nephews as cardinals. The first anti-nepotism policies probably originated in the Roman Catholic Church during the Middle Ages or Renaissance, when resentment began to build against incompetent people being appointed to high clerical offices. To this day, nepotism is something which can serve to create resentment in all employment environments. In this instance, I define “nepotism” as the hiring of friends as well as relatives.

Reducing corruption and increasing efficiency are the primary reasons many organizations have anti-nepotism policies. Corruption has always been a concern in this realm. If individuals who are friends or relatives work together, organizations fear that these individuals may collaborate to advance their own interests rather than the interests of the organization. Nepotism can also lower the morale of those who supervise relatives or friends of high-level members of the organization, those who work with them, and those who feel that rewards or promotions have been bestowed in an unfair manner. One or two friends or relatives may react negatively (and contrary to the interests of the organization) when another is criticized or disciplined. Finally, perception is a serious problem. Other employees will often perceive unequal treatment of a friend or relative regardless of whether or not this is the case.

While a great deal could be written about nepotism, suffice it to say that it is something many employers are concerned about. Using a perceived “in” with a firm to try to get a job may actually hurt you because of the firm’s own feelings about nepotism.

It is important to note that not all firms will be against nepotism. For example, in smaller, family-owned firms, nepotism is often common because it provides an efficient way to identify dedicated people. Nepotism may also foster a dedicated, family-like environment that boosts the morale of everyone-relatives and friends alike. A good example is the Central Intelligence Agency, which actually encourages the hiring of married couples. Having both spouses free to discuss classified information actually can reduce the strain of a high-stress career.

While nepotism may have its place, it is important to note that more often than not it is something that can scare away employers. It is, therefore, better off avoided in the job search.

I review a lot of the resumes that we receive from throughout the United States each day at our recruiting firm, BCG Attorney Search. There are two things that I frequently see: (1) associates (i.e., younger attorneys) who obviously do not have the qualifications to work inside a certain law firm, and (2) associates working for small law firms that are owned by their father or mother (with their own last name in the masthead) who are secretly looking for jobs. Each and every time I speak with these associates, I find that they are in positions because of family members and are extremely resentful of those family members for whatever reason. They have lots of negative things to say about them and desperately want a new job with the same salary and level of responsibility. Not once in my career have I seen someone from this class of associates who was qualified for a job even remotely as good as the one he or she was in at the time. Nevertheless, these associates always resent and, in most instances, hate the family member who got them the job they were unqualified for to begin with. Moreover, these associates refuse to go to a less-prestigious firm or job. Most often, in fact, they believe they should be working for an even better organization.

If you accept a job through a friend or family member, watch out. More importantly, watch yourself. In the end, you will likely be your own downfall. It is your friend or family member’s act of kindness that will ultimately unbalance your relationship.

The typical pattern that happens when someone is hired by a friend or family member is as follows. First, the people hired are grateful for being hired, but generally want to feel as if they deserve their good fortune. Accordingly, the friends or family members hired will look for all sorts of justifications to show the world and demonstrate to themselves that they deserve their good fortune.

One response from the people hired may be to believe that their being hired is a “payback” of sorts for everything that they have ever done to be kind to their friend or family member. They begin a process of justifying their hiring by everything they have ever said or done for the friend or family member.

Another response may be for the people hired to begin comparing themselves to others in the firm and believing that they are more intelligent than all of those other people. Therefore, the hired friends or family members justify their positions by often unjustly attacking their fellow employees.

The most common reaction, though, is that the hired friend or family member will become resentful against the person who helped him or her get the job to begin with. The receipt of a favor can come to mean, in the hired friend or family member’s eyes, that he or she was hired due to this and not based on merit. There is what I would term “hidden condescension” in the act of hiring a friend or family member that grinds at the new employee all the time.

Whomever you are working for likely cares more about (1) getting the job done and (2) doing the job as well as it can be done than about having friendly feelings flowing between the two of you. Your status as a friend or relative of someone does not mean that you are automatically the one who can best do the job. If you cannot do the job in the best manner, more resentment is going to arise when your friend or family member asks another person to help with a given task.

One of the more brilliant statesmen of the 19th Century, Napoleon’s foreign minister Talleyrand, decided that his boss was leading France to ruin. Talleyrand therefore decided that he needed to take Napoleon down. Obviously, the task of overthrowing Napoleon would not be a small one. In order to carry it out, Talleyrand desperately needed to enlist the assistance of someone he could trust. Instead of turning to a friend for help, Talleyrand turned to his worst enemy, Fouché, the head of the secret police.

Fouché had even previously tried to have Talleyrand assassinated. The brilliance of Talleyrand’s choice was that it provided Fouché with the opportunity to reconcile with Talleyrand on an emotional level. In addition, there was nothing Fouché would expect from Talleyrand, and, quite the contrary, Fouché would work hard to prove that he was worthy of Talleyrand picking him for the task. When people have something to prove, they will work harder than those who do not. Compare this to what could have occurred if Talleyrand simply went to a friend for help.

Talleyrand chose Fouché because he knew that their relationship would be based entirely on their mutual self-interest in removing Napoleon and not be poisoned by personal feelings. While their effort to topple Napoleon ultimately failed, they were able to generate much interest in the cause and have a good relationship going forward.

Like Talleyrand, it is important to realize that getting a job and working in a job on equal ground and in an atmosphere of mutual self-interest is crucial. Personal feelings obscure the fact that there is work that needs to be done in an efficient manner. In a work environment where everyone is evaluated and judged on merit, more productivity and honesty on all sides can only ensure good business.

One of the more disturbing phone calls I have received over the years was from the Dean of Career Services at a second-tier law school. The dean had read an article I wrote which advised attorneys on how to get a job in a tough legal market. The dean told me that the first place everyone should always look to get a job was with his or her family. The dean then told me that people should go to events and “make friends” with other attorneys and then ask them for a job (a.k.a. “networking”). As I listened to the dean speak, it became abundantly clear to me that she did not like any manner of getting a job that did not come through friends or family. In her view, getting a job through a friend or family member was far better than getting a job through a “stranger.” It is natural when looking for a job to contact the people you know to see if they can help you with your job search. In fact, I would guess that most attorneys early in their careers contact a family member, a personal friend, or an acquaintance when seeking a new job. Most people I have worked with as a recruiter (who have contacted me for assistance) have been clear with me that before contacting a recruiter they contacted a friend, an acquaintance, or another person they were connected with in some social manner to see if they could help with a job search. Moreover, most attorneys who have been practicing for a year or more have at some point in time told a friend that they would try to assist him or her with getting a job at their law firm.
While it may sound hard to believe-and contrary to the advice of the dean-you actually may be safer getting a job without the help of family or friends and working in an environment without family or friends. You do both at your own risk. Most of the time, I believe the risks far outweigh the potential long-term and short-term rewards.

Concentrate on the Process, Not the Results

What You Will Learn Pay attention to the small, almost invisible things that collectively make a difference. Think of yourself as an instrument, like a fine piano – it is the attention to everything that will go into making you ultimately produce the best notes. You need to make sure that you continually improve every single data point that is involved in the process of your seeking a job, or growing your career.

Some time ago, I was listening to a seminar about a company that was in the furniture business. This company decided that because it was doing so well, it should expand into the piano business, and also sell pianos. They went out and purchased a Steinway and took the piano apart to study all of the pieces. Then they made the same pieces themselves and built a piano. When they finally had built their own piano and tried to play it, nothing but thuds came out of the instrument. Discouraged, not knowing what they possibly could have done wrong, they decided that they would no longer go into the piano business.

They reassembled the Steinway Piano so they could return it as well. When they reassembled the piano, however, the same thing happened: only a thud came out when they tried to play it.

This is how it is with many people and businesses. We only look at the results, and not the process that goes into creating a particular result. In order to build a piano, you need to have studied instrument- making for some time, and to really understand a lot about the process. You also need to understand and study musical theory. It could take generations for a family to become proficient in making a great piano. There is just so much that goes into it.

This is how it is with everything. You cannot just call yourself a piano company and start making pianos. You cannot just decide that you want to do something and expect immediate success just by trying to copy an outcome. You need to understand the complete process that goes into what you are trying to do.

My first year as a legal recruiter, I generated over $1,000,000 in fees. This means, essentially, that for the work I did personally, I sent out over $1,000,000 in bills to law firms for my services. Since the average bill for recruiting back then was probably around $30,000 or so, this means that I made a tremendous number of placements. When you are doing well, it tends to attract more business to you.

Within a few months, I had hired various people to help me with recruiting, and pretty soon the word had gotten around that our team was really good. Soon after that, various local attorneys around Los Angeles started calling me. Several people I know of copied me and went into the business only to fail pretty quickly.

I loved recruiting and I am sure I had some natural skills for it. However, by the time I started recruiting in an office, I had already essentially been doing the job in one capacity or another for almost 15 years. Since a young age, I had run an asphalt business that had required me to sell door-to-door to people, businesses and others. Sales skills were really important in that business. While asphalt and recruiting are very different in many respects, in actuality they have a tremendous number of similarities. Here is the biggest similarity:

If you emphasize the process over the results in the recruiting and asphalt business, you will succeed.

One of the biggest mistakes many people make in business is emphasizing results over process, or style over substance. The more people concentrate on the process and substance of their work, the better they do:

• The more people concentrate on their intended results, the worse they do in the long run.
• The most successful job seekers are the ones who have the ability to excel in their work process.
• The most successful companies are the ones who have the ability to excel in their work process.
• The most successful workers and employees are the ones who have the ability to excel in their work process.
• The most successful asphalt contractors are the ones who concentrate on their work process.
• The most successful legal recruiters are the ones who concentrate on their work process.

I am not saying that results do not matter; they do. But what ultimately matters most, and what makes people successful is focusing on the process and how things are done.

A lot of the problems in the American economy have been caused by a massive emphasis on results rather than process. For example, the Wall Street practice of emphasizing quarter-by-quarter profits and gains has been extremely dangerous to our company in numerous respects.

I believe that in business, in your job search, and in everything else–process is the most important thing. It is how you do things that matters, and not just the result you hope to attain.

Process in the Asphalt Sealing Business. In the asphalt sealing business there is essentially one thing you are doing: You are putting black stuff on people’s asphalt and then leaving.

This is the result of what happens when you do the work. This is what most contractors and others concentrate on, and it is why most of them fail or eek out poor livings at best.

In the asphalt sealing business, there are a lot of tricks that contractors can do. When you are putting asphalt sealer on a driveway or parking lot, essentially what you are working with is a black coating that fills in cracks and pores and makes the surface look good. More importantly, the coating serves to protect the surface from oil spills and other things. This material is typically purchased from a factory in a raw state, when it is very heavy and thick like molasses. The contractor has to water down the material in order to make it the proper consistency to be used on asphalt.

From the consumer’s point of view, it does not matter how much water you put into this concoction, within limits. After the material dries on someone’s asphalt, it is generally going to look quite similar, regardless as to how much water was used in the mix. Contractors can save a tremendous amount of money by watering the material down more heavily. This is something that many contractors do. The difference is that a few months later, the material that has been applied ends up looking very bad, which does not do the customer much good.

There are other tricks of the trade as well. One of the most outrageous scenarios involves people traveling from city to city purchasing used motor oil (which used to be practically free) and then putting this on peoples’ driveways and parking lots. They would get paid for the work, and the customer would have a piece of pavement that looked decent when the “contractors” left, but the asphalt would never dry and the job would end up having been a complete waste of money and time.

Here are some other tricks of the trade:

• There are chemical thickeners you can buy to bulk up watered down sealer, for example.
• Using a squeegee will apply much more sealer than a brush, but it costs more.
• You can fill cracks with sand instead of tar (which is more expensive).
• It is better to put the material on when the asphalt is cool because it can cure longer (but this means you cannot work when the asphalt is hot, unless you have cooled it).

I could create a long list of the various things that contractors do to cut corners when they are doing this work. However, it is really never a good idea to cut corners. This is what most people and contractors do, however.

Asphalt contractors who emphasize the process of the work they are doing always do much better in the long run. They come back and work for people year after year. There is a certain confidence they exude in their work. They are craftsmen, not salesmen. They take pride in their work. They build careers, and meaningful careers at that. You can do very well financially (and in many other ways) as an asphalt contractor. However, very few people truly do well in the asphalt business. In fact, not only do most asphalt contractors fail, the contractors who do not fail end up making mediocre livings at best.

Every year tens of thousands of people go to law school. They all graduate and compete for the same jobs. How many people choose to become asphalt contractors? Hardly any. You could learn most of what you need to know about this job in less than a week. There are some complex areas of the job that require engineers to work on roads and stuff, but basically anyone can do the work or run a business doing this. When a state or city needs to build a road out of asphalt, they will get bids from a contractor. Most times there are only a few people bidding on many of these jobs because there are just not a ton of people in the business with credibility. The reason is that most people get a single job and simply try and make as much money as they can as quickly as they can. They cut corners. The people who do not cut corners get good reputations and end up doing better in the long run.

Process in the Legal Recruiting Business. In the legal recruiting business, there is essentially one thing you are doing: Finding an attorney and making an introduction between the attorney and a law firm or a legal employer.

This is the result that occurs when you do the work. This is what most legal recruiters in the business concentrate on, and it is why most of them fail to even moderately reach their full potential.

When I got into the legal recruiting business, I quickly noticed people cutting corners, just like people do in the asphalt business. If you were looking at the profession from a distance, without any form of understanding, you too would likely think that all that recruiters do is find people and make introductions. I remember one of the most upsetting interviews I ever had was interviewing someone for the job of being a recruiter, who told me that the job sounded great. He told me that he thought he could spend time out on the golf course doing the work, forwarding résumés around on his Blackberry between strokes. This person simply thought that all the job involved was forwarding résumés from one person to another.

Incredibly, the more I learned about the business, the more I saw that most recruiters seemed to feel this way. In fact, this sort of idea was indeed how most recruiters seemed to approach the entire business. They would put a little advertisement on a job site, or in a legal newspaper, and then forward someone’s résumé to an interested employer. Others would simply cold call attorneys. The idea was that they were simply going out and plucking people from one firm, and sending them over to other firms.

This simplistic understanding of the job characterizes the way many people approach it. Without going into too much detail, however, there is a much more in-depth way of looking at the work:

• The best recruiters are constantly writing and lecturing about recruiting-related issues and their industry.
• The best recruiters put together very compelling and in-depth presentations about their candidates.
• The best recruiters meet with employers on a weekly basis.
• The best recruiters know about the industry and the most important things happening in it.
• The best recruiters are constantly networking at industry events.
• The best recruiters have highly developed research skills to find jobs.
• The best recruiters have highly developed research skills to find candidates.
• The best recruiters never compromise their integrity.
• The best recruiter help people, even when it does not mean a short-term reward.
• The best recruiters are committed to working hard throughout their careers.

There are actually thousands of little things like this that the best recruiters are constantly doing in order to excel at their jobs, and all of these details are what make them incredibly good at their job. Most of these things are not, however, related to simply emailing résumés. They are related to the deeper process of recruiting.

When you speak with recruiters who are process rather than results oriented, you can always tell. They are not focused so much on getting résumés out the door or making money. They are doing a good job at all “touch points”.

The importance of process in recruiting also has a huge impact on the bottom line. The best recruiters do well in all economic climates due to their emphasis on process and not results.

Process and Your Career and Job Search. Just as a successful piano maker, contractor or recruiter needs to concentrate on the process in order to be successful at their trade, so too do you in both your career and job search. Good results only come about when you concentrate on the entire process of what you are doing, refine each step of the process, and ensure you are getting better and more skilled each step of the way.

A job search ideally should not start, for example, when you are looking for a job. There are thousands of data points that go into finding a job and ensuring that you get a good job when you are looking for one. For example, you need to consistently be building relationships, and building every single relationship you can over time. The more relationships you build both inside and outside of work, the more people you are going to have to call upon when you are interested in getting a new job.

The harder you work in your existing job, the more people are going to be interested in helping you when you are looking for a job. People will come to your defense and do everything they can to help you when they believe that you are someone who will work hard. When you do the right thing and always make a good effort, this will come back to help you.

This is the opposite of what many people do, however. Many people are only out for short-term rewards and “quick fixes” at every turn. They do not think in terms of building long-term relationships with those around them. In your career, you need to be consistent, to give results and perform over time–not just in the short term.

When you are looking for a job, the quality and the depth of work you put into your résumé matters. The quality of the letters that accompany your résumé matters. Whether or not you apply to enough employers, to increase your odds of getting a job, matters. Your interviewing skills matter. The entire process that you follow matters and the better that you do at each step, the more likely you are to get the results you want.

Think about the manufacturing a world-class piano. A lot of thought goes into each little component of the piano. Whether it is the wood used, the thickness of the wood, the polish of the wood, where the wood comes from, how the wood is sanded, how the wood is fitted into the piano, the glue that is used in the piano, the dexterity of the person working with the wood, the machine that the wood is compressed on (if it is compressed) and more–the thought that goes into each part of the process matters. Every data point is refined and studied and probably has been refined and studied for a long period of time.

You need to make sure that you continually improve every single data point that is involved in the process of your seeking a job, or growing your career.

Several years ago, in the late-1980s, I was taking a test drive of a Corvette with the President of a German car company. He thought the American Corvette was a piece of junk, and did not like the car at all. He told me a story about how his company operates, contrasted with how a typical American automobile company operates.

He said that American car companies build a car model, and then completely change up the model the next year. They may throw a different transmission in the car, a different engine, radically change the styling and so forth–the idea being that they are trying to show progress and innovation, although, in reality not much is really changing. In contrast, he told me that when his company builds a car, over the next decade or so they keep refining it and making it better and better. They figure out a way to make the transmission better and to make small “almost invisible” changes that continually improve the car. They are concentrating on the process of improvement in building a car, and the result is that when you get in one of their automobiles, it feels very different. The cars also last longer. They run better. There are a myriad of powerful things that make these cars superior, and they are all the result of concentrating on the process.

You need to be focused on the process in your job and job search. Pay attention to the small, almost invisible things that collectively make a difference. Think of yourself as an instrument, like a fine piano. It is the attention to everything that goes into you that will ultimately produce the best notes.

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