Education Jobs and Teacher Jobs

The field of education—including elementary schools, high schools, colleges, and universities—is a very exciting place to look for a job because of the tremendous number of jobs available. I’m excited to show you how to approach this sector. I think it will open up some doors in terms of how you think about looking for a job. Jobs in education tend to be scattered across an incredible number of sources. Many of these sources are university and school system websites. Because of this, it’s much easier to track down and apply for jobs at these institutions. You also have a better chance of actually getting these positions compared to those that are more widely advertised. In order to explore this thoroughly, let’s start broad with the federal government and work our way down to state governments, universities, and finally, local school systems. Education jobs encompass not just teaching positions, but also those inside educational institutions. I’ll cover each below. Education Jobs with the Federal and State Government [Read more]

How Do I Find a Recruiter?

Recruiters or headhunters tend to have a lot of jobs. At the same time, working with a recruiter or headhunter can be a mine field. It can be dangerous from the perspective that if you do not know what you are doing when you are dealing with a recruiter, it can cause a lot of problems. Many, many people have made serious mistakes using the wrong recruiter or using a recruiter when they don’t have to. Nevertheless, people get jobs through recruiters every day and using a recruiter can be a great thing. The number of recruiters out there is astronomical. In terms of recruiters that list themselves in directories and that sort of thing, there are at least twelve thousand who are known in their industries. In talk about recruiting firms, there are a couple of things you need to understand, besides the fact that they are different than employment agencies. The first thing that is important to understand is that, generally, large recruiting firms will be a little bit better than their smaller counterparts. This is a general rule and there is a reason for this. Larger recruiting firms typically have resources to research jobs or contacts in the hiring community. What do I mean by that, specifically? Typically, when you look at a larger recruiting firm, they will be better because they have more resources to serve you. Usually, this is because they are in the contingency space. When you use a larger recruiting firm, most of the ones out there–or the ones that you will be using and almost everybody uses–are known as contingency-based recruiting firms. Essentially, a contingency-based recruiting firm is one that only makes money if you are hired. They advertise and call people and try to find people to take a certain job for which they are recruiting. They do this with numerous employers. The more jobs a recruiting firm has, the better off you will be because you will have more opportunities to work in different places. When a recruiting firm gets larger, it is typically a sign that they are doing something right, which means they are having success in terms of recruiting. Larger recruiting firms also usually work out of offices and this means the people there are working and putting more into their jobs. Larger recruiting firms typically have the resources to take phone calls, speak with employers throughout the day, and reinvest into the business. Smaller recruiting firms do not have the resources to investigate all the jobs, typically. You might also find they don’t put in as much time on your job search because they don’t have the staff. These firms are often run out of people’s homes and typically are a bit limited. At the same time, some of the smaller ones may have highly developed relationships with a few employers. It is not uncommon for a very small recruiting firm or even a solo recruiter to have one or two very strong relationships with employers and those employers will consistently turn to them for jobs they have available. For the most part, however, this is not the case. In addition, small recruiters do not do a lot of advertising. To some extent, this limits the number of employers they can serve. Larger recruiting firms will do a lot of advertising, which increases the number of employers they can serve. There are drawbacks and strengths to each and you want to encompass them both in your search. However, the more reinvesting that is going on and the more jobs the recruiter has, the better it is for you. As you look at ads and look at recruiters, it is very important that you understand what type of recruiter you are dealing with. The two types that you need to be concerned with are the contingency-based recruiters, mentioned earlier, and retained recruiters. In the following sections, we’ll take a look at both. Contingency-Based Recruiters This means that the recruiter is only compensated if you are hired. This is why it is on a contingency. They typically charge an employer anywhere from 15% to 40% of your annual salary; sometimes more, sometimes less. In order to get candidates, the contingency recruiter will do lots of things. They advertise and cold call for candidates. Any way they can get candidates, they will. It is important to understand that most jobs you see advertised and most cold calls you receive are from contingency [Read more]

You Need to Stop Competing and Seeing Differences Between You and Others

If you are looking for a job, trying to improve in your current job, or simply wish to experience a better life, there is one thing you need to do: You need to be friends with everyone you meet in business, and stop competing and seeing differences.   This is a statement that falls on deaf ears for most people.  In fact, this is the exact opposite of the way most of us think.  Instead, we view others as competitors and the slices of pie as limited.  We view opportunities as few and limited, and feel the need to compete for what little there is. What are the rewards for looking and seeing commonalty between you and others?  They are incredible.  In the Year 2000 I started a legal recruiting firm.  I did not start the firm until around March of that year. I had no legal recruiting experience and knew absolutely nothing about the market.  Since I had been a practicing attorney for years, the fact that I was now recruiting seemed almost surreal to me in many respects.  I had decided to just enter a zone where I did not care what happened to me.  When you are in the recruiting business, what typically happens is that law firms will call you in a very formal way to tell you they have no interest in a candidate of yours.  The conversations will typically last no more than 30 to 45 seconds. “We are calling to let you know that we have no interest in John Smith,” they might say. “Thank you,” would be the standard response. After several weeks of this I began to feel that the entire situation was somewhat absurd.  This is what recruiters do all over the country. I decided that the best [Read more]

How Using the Power of Routine Can Make You a Top Performer

In the early 1990s, a very rigorous scientific study was done in Berlin on music.  The study’s objective was to understand why certain violinists were more talented than others were.  This study is related in a fascinating book by Geoff Colvin called Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World Class Performers from Everybody Else. In order to do the study, the researchers created three groups of violinists–best, above average and good.  Each of these three groups were spending the same amount of their time involved in music-related activities. One of the most interesting things going into the study was that the violinist all seemed to know what particular activity mattered most in order to make them better at the violin: Practicing alone.  In fact, all of the violinist seemed to know this but, of course, they all did not do it.  The researchers quickly discovered that the amount of time the various groups spent practicing alone varied dramatically. The study discovered that the advantages of consistent practice built-up over time.  All of the test subjects were asked to estimate how much they had practiced.  The results were significant

• Best Violinists-By the age of 18 these violinists has accumulated 7,410 hours of lifetime practice on average as a group.
• Above Average Violinists-By the age of 18 these violinists had accumulated 5,301 hours of lifetime practice on average.
• Good Violinists-By the age of 18 these violinists had accumulated on average of 3,420 hours of practice on average.

The study concluded that

The differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a lifetime period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain.

The reason this study is so significant is due to the fact that it flies in the face of the idea of innate talent.  While many people work hard, this study also shows that the people who work [Read more]

Carrot Peelers, Sales, Personality and Your Job Search

A couple of years ago, I started seeing a bunch of articles in Vanity Fair,the New York Times, The Village Voice and other publications about a guy named Joe Andes. Here is a portion of one profile of him from the May 2006 Vanity Fair:

In the early 90s a man named Joe Andes began showing up in the bar at the Pierre, Manhattan’s famously posh hotel on the corner of Fifth Avenue and East 61st Street. Joe liked the crowd at the Café Pierre, but the real draw for him was Kathleen Landis, the dimpled, piano-playing house chanteuse who still entertains there five nights a week. Joe was a five-nights-a-week man as well, always seated at the same round table with a front view of the baby grand and a back view of Landis. He drank only champagne, and never alone. His usual brand was Veuve Clicquot. On most nights he casually ordered a bottle, which always appeared with two champagne glasses—one for himself, the other for Landis. Even by the standards of café society, Joe cut a noticeably soigné figure in his classic, British-made Chester Barrie suits and bold shirts and ties from Turnbull & Asser. The clothes went well with his English accent and late-period Sean Connery salt-and-pepper beard. He looked so distinguished and was so free with the bubbly that the Café Pierre crowd, Landis included, at first had him pegged as one of the “owners”—the tycoons who actually live at the Pierre in stupendously high-end co-op apartments. The Café Pierre was way off about Joe, or so it decided after some probing. If no one was brave enough to ask him where he lived, quite a few people asked him what he did for a living. Holding his glass of champagne by the stem, Joe would say simply, “I sell potato peelers.” The probers had a good chuckle over that. “Right,” they all said. “Now pull the other one.” … Joe pushes his gear through the streets on a hand truck, which he in his English way calls a trolley. He and the trolley are often stopped by strangers ready with a heartfelt line: “Sir, you’re the greatest salesman in New York!”

The reason so many magazines and publications were paying so much attention to Joe was because he is someone who was able to make a great living selling carrot peelers on the street. When Joe died a few years later, publications all around the world ran obituaries about him. [Read more]

Your Brain and Your Career

In our job searches and careers, there are a variety of forces that can hold us back. However, in almost every single case the thing that can hold us back more than anything is ourselves and our own minds.  In fact, your brain and what it is doing–how it thinks and the way it processes information–is the single greatest determinant of what will end up happening to you in your career and life. I would like to go a “little deep” with you today and discuss something with you that is pretty far out in terms of your career but which, at the same time, is the largest single thing determining what is happening with you and your career: Your brain.  This is a crucial determinant in your success or failure.  What is most interesting about your brain is that  maybe you are being benefited, or held back, on either an organic or a psychological level by your brain. Natasha Richardson, a well-known English-born actress, died after a skiing accident in Canada.  She apparently fell down and lightly hit her head.  After the injury, she declared she was fine and refused any medical care and went back to her hotel room.  However, around an hour later, she started complaining of a really bad headache.  She was then taken to a hospital in Montreal and then a short time later, flown back to New York City, where she ended up dying.  According to Scientific American:

“…The tragic story, if confirmed, is a reminder that even minor blows to the head can lead to devastating bleeding that can cause strokes or otherwise damage brain tissue. One possibility, sometimes called “talk and die” syndrome, is that the actress had delayed bleeding between her skull and her brain stem, which sits at the top of the spinal cord and regulates consciousness, breathing, and the heart and connects the brain to many of the body’s sensory and motor nerves. Another possibility is that there was a tear in the inner lining of her arteries, causing blood clots. To find out more about Richardson’s potential injury, we spoke with neurosurgeon   Keith Black, chairman of the Department of Neurosurgery at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles….”

How fragile life is and how quickly things can change for people at the blink of an eye!  Richardson apparently [Read more]

Flow, Your Ego and Your Career

Aristotle believed that more than anything, we seek to be happy.  There are some individuals who do their work and continually find happiness in this work, and for whom work takes on a meaning that transcends what most of us experience in work.  These people feel completely involved in the work they are doing and are completely focused.  They do not experience emotional turmoil when they are doing their work. In Mihhaly Czikszentmihalyi’s book “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience” (1990), he described a state of “flow” where people involved in an activity “forget themselves, the time, their problems.” Flow [Read more]

The Use of Testimonials and Endorsements in Your Job Search

When I was in my final year of high school, I remember that in English class one day the teacher handed me back a paper I had written and it had a B+ on it.  While there were a lot of classes that I would have been incredibly happy if I received this grade in, English was not one of them.  In fact, with the exception of a horrible play I had written for one English class, I had not received a grade of less than an A- in any English class for years.  I decided that I needed to meet with the English teacher and go over this.  After all, I figured that something must be seriously wrong. The teacher asked me to meet him for lunch, and so a few days later, I was sitting there with the teacher having lunch.  We spoke for some time before the grade came up and when it did I said, “Listen, I have not received a grade this bad on any paper I have ever written in any English class.  There has to be some mistake.” I then proceeded to list [Read more]

Employers Want to Hire You

One of the most important things for you to realize when you are looking for a job and see a position advertised is this: The employer wants to hire you. If the position is advertised, the employer is actually desperate to hire you. When I say ”desperate,” I mean that the employer wants you yesterday and not today. The employer is losing money, or has a need that is really “calling out” when they start advertising jobs. A few years ago I was running a company that was growing like absolute madness. We could not hire or bring people on fast enough. I remember, at the time, that I hired a person and paid him $85,000 and his assistant another $50,000 just to bring people in to hire. I advertised our jobs on our own website and also made sure that those same jobs were advertised on numerous job boards. In one month I took out contracts for over $120,000 worth of job postings. Twice a week I would meet with this manager and the conversations would generally go something like this: ”I have over 40 job openings right now! Each of these jobs that is not being done is costing me a tremendous amount of money. You are probably costing this company like $500,000 a week by not getting these openings filled and filled fast!!” Each day I would watch this person go home with a stack of hundreds of resumes to review. He used to fall asleep every single night reviewing resumes. Our need for people was absolutely out of control. We needed bodies and did not know what to do. In other parts of the country I remember we needed people so badly that people would walk in, start interviewing, and if they looked like they were respectable they were hired on the spot. During this characteristically busy time, I heard a story from one of our managers about when a girl walked in for an interview to our office, which was bustling and out of control. He looked at her and said: ”You look fine. I do not have time to interview you. Sit down and start answering the phone!” This is what it is like when companies are growing and need people. They want to hire you. Sometimes if you get really lucky, they do not even ask many (if any questions). I remember walking out of my office one day and seeing a man with scores of tattoos down his arm sitting directly outside of my office. I had no idea how he had been hired. The man had a shaved head and was wearing jeans and a starchy clean tee shirt. He had a belt on that appeared to be a chain of some sort and was also wearing boots. The man had some of the most intimidating and scary looking muscles I have ever seen on a human being. He looked like a larger skinhead version of Mr. T, with a shaved head and a bad attitude towards humanity. Just to be clear, this is not the sort of office atmosphere I have traditionally fostered where I have worked. This was quite a scene for me and a lot to take in. I did not care, however. It is best to allow people to be themselves. ”Nice tattoos!” I told him as I exited my office. I noticed that his biceps were probably larger than my calves. I probably should not have said this. The tattoo on his arm appeared to be some sort of important scene. It looked like a woman with a snake wrapped around her body screaming. Whatever it represented, the tattoo was positively intimidating. I will never forget what happened next. The man looked up at me and growled, then went back to whatever he was working on. I was afraid he was going to kill me. I met with several people over the next few days and no one could figure out how he got hired. We had been so busy with everything he had been hired by mistake. He had showed up for work and people were so afraid of the guy they did not want to tell him that hiring him had been a mistake. Then, incredibly, he was allowed to start work. At the time we had around 120 people working in the particular office he was in. About 30 people who were sitting within 20 feet of this guy were stone cold silent during the day. It had formerly been a fun and playful work atmosphere, but they were all absolutely terrified. Men and women. ”We need to fire this guy and get him out of here,” I told a group of our managers behind a closed door meeting one day. ”I am afraid he is going to kill someone.” It certainly looked that way. The guy skulked through the office, bumping into people and staring them down in response when they did not react. Everyone (including myself) was absolutely terrified of this man. ”I’m not going to fire him. He will kill me if I do!”’ one manager said. One after another, the managers came back with the same thing. There was no way any one of them was going to fire this guy because they were terrified of them. Every single manager refused to fire the guy. They were afraid of physical violence directed towards them. We ended the meeting with none of us knowing what to do. A few days later a guy in the mail room declared that he was not afraid of the guy and would fire him. This completed the process and everything went pretty smoothly from there, as far as I know. When companies are in ”hiring mode,” they need people so badly that even assassins can make it through the door (as evidenced by this case). Back at this particular point in time our company was so desperate to hire people, it was amazing. These are the sorts of employers you need to find. A company that is growing and needs people. In a bad economy, places like debt settlement firms, collection agencies and others are growing and bursting at the seams. In a good economy it may be mortgage companies. The point is there are always tons of employers out there who are growing and want to hire you. I read a story the other day about a debt settlement company that is growing so fast, it is unbelievable. You need to find companies like this. When you go into interview with any company, they are desperate to hire you or someone else. Think about it. When an employer takes the time to line people up to interview you and bring you in to speak with them, they must be pretty eager to hire someone. Most employers that are interviewing people are very eager to hire. Exceptionally eager. Here is what happens, however. Most people go into interviews and throw off all of the wrong signals and end up not getting the job. It happens to everyone. You do not get the job because you throw off the wrong signals and the employer thinks you do not want the job, do not have the confidence or charisma [Read more]

Go Beneath the Surface to Find a Job

One of the most interesting theories about life on earth is the fact that it exists and can be found in conditions that conventional wisdom would believe it cannot exist in. Carl Wirson of the Wood’s Hole Oceanographic Institution wrote in a 1991 paper:

In 1991, scientists aboard the submersible Alvin were in the right spot at the right time to witness something extraordinary. They had sailed into the aftermath of a very recent volcanic eruption on the seafloor and found themselves in a virtual blizzard. They were densely surrounded by flocs of white debris, composed of sulfur and microbes, which [Read more]

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