The idea of authenticity is very popular. As I read blogs, articles, etc, I am finding that it seems to be gaining traction in job search approaches and this is wonderful!

I’ve also been personally reflecting a lot on authenticity (as I’ve finished up writing the text of a new book, Authentic Networking and continue on Interviews as Authentic Conversations) and I think there is a lot to explore about the concept and practice of authenticity, so I’ve decided my theme for my next few posts will be authenticity.

A recent conversation in a LinkedIn group for career services professionals asked members
“How do you define authenticity?” and this got me thinking.

I’ve looked up definitions in dictionaries and they use words like “undisputed credibility” and “genuiness” but I find them lacking. They might be defining the concept, but they don’t capture the complexity and the power of the experience of authenticity.

To me, authenticity has two parts – one is the presence of something, the other the absence.

First, I feel authentic when there is the presence of feeling real. I wish I had better words to describe it, but I recognize it when I feel it. There is a rightness to it, a comfort, and sometimes a fragility.

Secondly I feel authentic when I feel the absence of a mask, or manufactured self. There is a freedom with this, and sometimes it also feels a bit exposed.

These two pieces speak to the core of my own definition and experience of authenticity.

How would you define and describe your experience of authenticity?

Authenticity, Integrity Authenticity, job search

Today’s post is a guest article from Angela Martin, a freelancer who writes about career topics. Angela’s article offers an interesting analysis of the human experience of “personal branding,” by looking at the experience of workers who were transitioning from life inside a socialist system, into a capitalist one. If you have any comments about Angela’s article , feel free to write to Angela, or post comments to this blog. Thank you Angela!

What We Talk About When We Talk About Personal Branding: The Polish Experience in Transitioning to a Market Economy

Here in America and the rest of the developed, Western world, personal branding as an individual marketing tool has become essentially commonplace. We don’t even question it anymore. We don’t think about its philosophical, psychological, or social ramifications, which is why I was pleasantly surprised to find this blog, one that actually offers an alternative method to successful job seeking.

So what happens when a society that does not even understand the concept of personal branding finds itself suddenly immersed in it? This, I think, is a fascinating question, and one that cultural anthropologist Elizabeth Dunn answers in her book “Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business, and the Remaking of Labor.” The book chronicles Dunn’s field research in a Gerber baby food plant that was established in Poland shortly after its transition to a market economy from a socialist state.

From her experiences with talking to executives, managers, factory workers, middle men, and workers’ family members, Dunn takes an incredible nosedive straight into the tensions that exist between a capitalist and socialist society. While political ideology is a matter to be left to the politicians, and something I don’t care to discuss,  I find it most interesting that Polish employees who wished to achieve management positions in the company had to completely remake who they saw themselves as people, in order to conform to neoliberal, marketing ideas. They had to find ways to sell themselves, to exhibit what hiring managers called “flexibility.”

In one part of the book, Dunn investigates interviews that American recruiters conducted with Polish job candidates for middle management positions. Dunn explains how the buzzword “flexibility” figured heavily in recruiters’ criteria for hiring. The perfect manager, the Americans surmised, would have little job experience (since experience under the old statist system was a liability), and would demonstrate intangible qualities like “self-confidence,” “sophistication,” and “initiative.”

These qualities all seem like part of the typical, business-speak lexicon to us, but to the newly initiated Polish workforce, these words were a revelation. As a result, during the interview process, these Polish, according to Dunn, “used changes in dress, personal possessions, and personal space to display their supposed transformations from a socialist being…to a capitalist being…By signaling this inner transformation, managers hoped to demonstrate that they had the ‘right attitude’ and were ready and willing to learn new Western management ideas.” (Dunn 71).

More tellingly, sometimes Polish managers misunderstood the image they were supposed to portray, to an extent that is in some way hilarious, but also sad. One Polish manager, in an attempt to impress the higher-ups, hired strippers for a company party, accidentally wore striped ties with checkered suits, and constantly made inappropriate jokes. Eventually he hired a personal stylist from New York City to help him overcome his many faux pas (73).

The rest of Dunn’s book is definitely worth the read, even if only to get a deeper insight into how Western management practices, as well as consumer marketing strategies, had such a surprisingly wide-ranging effect in all aspects of a post-socialist society.

But in terms of current management practices in the Western world, how do we, as people (we are, after all, people before we are anything else, whether we are employees, employers, or consumers) reconcile the rather depersonalizing effects—most dramatically demonstrated in Dunn’s book—of business techniques that we ourselves created? And not only that, but how do we combat these techniques when they are so deeply entrenched in the way things are run?

For starters, Cathy Keates’ blog and book are promising forays into the different ways job seekers can overcome a system that is slightly absurd, while still working within the system. I, for one, believe that sincerity really will get you far, even though there is an expectation that job seekers must proffer some sort of quasi-phony sales pitch.

 And you know why? Hiring managers and recruiters are people, too, and even though they may have set criteria to look for when hiring, communicating your real self will be refreshing. It will establish a connection with a potential employer that no “technique” can. It is my most sincere hope that the future of job search is headed in this direction, if only to extract and expand what little humanity is left in the world of business.

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This guest post is contributed by Angela Martin, who writes on the topics of Career Salaries.  She welcomes your comments at her email Id:  angela.martin77@gmail.com. 

Branding, Criticisms/questions, Job search as sales & marketing Branding, job search

If you are looking for guidance about how to use social networking for your career, you’re sure to find lots of advice about branding yourself. For instance, Brand You, an article in jobpostings, a job search magazine for students and new graduates, is a good example.

While in the past I’ve referred to the pain of branding ourselves in our job searches (branding is for cows isn’t it? And honestly I hate to think of cows being branded! Ouch!),  I just saw a fantastic  new article called Brand You? (see pages 16-17) specifically about branding and social networking.

Interestingly, this recent article was published in the same magazine as the previous Brand You article, but note the new punctuation.

That question mark in the title is important. Brand You? isn’t more promotion for the branding approach, but instead it asks whether, regardless of all the hype about branding,  it is actually useful and healthy to be a brand.

The article points out many interesting concerns about branding – the whiff of manipulation, the trace of insincerity and lack of honesty, and the hint of self-interest over interest in others.

Consider this thought from a digital literacy consultant who is quoted in the article “I think employers are less interested in your personal ‘brand’ … than what kinds of contributions you are making to your field, to others, to the world. What do you bring to an organization besides your carefully constructed self?”

What indeed. It is not our constructed brands that connect us with people and opportunities, it is ourselves – our interests, our questions, our curiosity, our real characters. The “constructed self” can actually get in the way of making a connection with an employer. If they can’t get to the real you behind the brand and access who you really are, it will be difficult for the two of you to form a real connection.

With the constant chatter about personal branding, it can be hard to not jump on the bandwagon and get branded. But some caution may be useful here. Will branding yourself help you to connect with people, or will it get in the way?

I love to see more dialogue and criticism of these sales and branding approaches starting to happen and spread. Brand me? No thanks.

Branding, Criticisms/questions, Job search as sales & marketing, Networking, social networking Branding, job search, social networking

Happy New Year everyone!

I’d like to start the new year in the spirit of resolutions, with some goals. But not so much goals about what to accomplish in 2010 (get fit, learn to play the piano, etc), but more goals about how to approach the year.

Goals for activities and accomplishments can be great – they give us tangible things to do. But they aren’t the only kinds of goals that can help us make positive changes in our lives and careers.

We can also think about goals for our attitude and approach. How do you want to approach 2010?

In my book, I talk about these attitudes as “anchors” – beliefs and approaches that anchor us and keep us on track.  So here is a brief look at 3 possible anchors for how we approach our careers and job searches (for more discussion on anchors see pages 81-94 of Not for Sale!)

Outlook: Optimism versus pessimism

Your outlook for the future has a significant impact on your job search. There are two basic options for outlook, and they couldn’t be more different from each other. You can look to the future with hope and optimism, or you can look forward with despair and pessimism. When presented with these two choices, I can’t imagine anyone saying “I choose despair and pessimism.” However, when listening to discussions about job search, there’s a whole lot of pessimism around. And while these may be outlooks for the future, they have a strong impact on your feelings and behaviours in the present as you job search.

Opportunity: Abundance versus scarcity

Your beliefs about opportunity – how many opportunities are available, what those opportunities are, and where and how those opportunities are found – are very influential in your job search. If you listen to a lot of people talking about the world of work, you’ll hear it described as a place without enough for everyone. This “scarcity of opportunity” belief is quite popular – and can be quite depressing. The world of work is described as if it is a place with a finite number of job options – and if you can’t grab one of those, then you are out of luck, and that’s all there is. An alternative view of opportunity is that it can never be finite - there is an abundance of opportunity. New work and opportunities are being created all the time.

Job search culture: Cooperation versus competition

Often the culture of job searching is seen as one of fierce competition. Disadvantages of see job search as competitive can include stress from feeling constantly in competition with others and concerns about “not measuring up;” missed opportunities for collaboration because other job seekers are seen as rivals; and the all-too-common experience of feeling isolated and alone in your job search. Instead of maintaining this competitive job search culture, we can choose a different culture – one that focuses on the potential of cooperation. The advantages of focusing on cooperation, such as support, shared resources, and community, are many.

I’m choosing to approach 2010 with optimism, abundance, and cooperation.

What attitudes and outlooks are you using to anchor your career in 2010?

Attitude and Approach, Choice abundance, approach, attitude, job search, Optimism

“With competition for good jobs at an all-time high, candidates who conduct their job search as a sales campaign consistently win out over those who don’t.”

So starts an article called “Win Your Next Job With Three Essential Interview Skills.”

Now, if you’ve been reading my blog or book, you can guess my reaction. I don’t agree at all. There is nothing noteworthy about that -  all over the internet there are thousands of articles with similar arguments and content that I disagree with. What makes this one worth notice is this fascinating opening line.

“[C]andidates who conduct their job search as a sales campaign consistently win out over those who don’t” is quite a claim. Bold, assertive – very sales-like?

The biggest problem with this is that this is opinion presented as fact. There is NO evidence that this claim is true. There is no evidence for this provided in the article, and as far I can tell from my research, there is no evidence anywhere. Perhaps anecdotally many people feel that this has been their experience. And certainly there are legions of people who believe this to be true. But to present this as fact should require far more than anecdotal stories and beliefs.

Too often job search “experts” tell us the right way to do things. But a lot of this (if not basically all) is  based on opinion. There is nothing wrong with opinion - we should just be up front about it being opinion and not fact.

I’ll use the same analogy as used in the article in question. When you go to buy a new car, you listen critically to the salesperson’s pitch (and you know it is a pitch, you know they are using “closing techniques” and looking for your “hot buttons”). You try to step back and evaluate if the offer is really as good as it is presented as being. You know the job of the salesperson is to get the sale – which may or may not be in your own best interest. So you question all claims.

Let’s do the same thing when being sold on the “correct” way to job search. Question all claims. Beware of opinion masquerading as fact. 

Thank you to Christine Fader for sending me the link to this article – you were right  Christine– I did enjoy reading it!

Choice, Criticisms/questions, Interviews, Job search as sales & marketing job interviews, job search, job search as sales and marketing, sales

My last posting looked at two kinds of inauthentic networking moves: insincere flattery and insincere questions. These are moves that most of us have been on the receiving end of, souring our networking experiences.

What about when it is not the inauthenticity of other networkers that is souring the experience for us, but our own feelings of inauthenticity?

A lot of people report feeling “fake” and “phony” when they try to network. If you are trying to create new relationships with interesting people, and trying to deepen existing friendships, feeling fake is certainly not going to help. For many people it evens stops them from going out and networking at all.

Where do these feelings of inauthenticity come from?

Trying to Be The “Perfect” Networker

I think a lot of networking advice (perhaps very well-meaning networking advice) has presented a particular picture of what a “perfect” networker is. If you read too much about networking, it is easy to start believing that there is one right way to be as a networker.

Who is this “perfect” networker?

They

·         work the room – effortlessly flitting from person to person

·         are gregarious and outgoing

·         mingle relentlessly and with no hesitation strike up conversations with people who they don’t know

·         promote themselves with their elevator pitches and proffer business cards with finesse

Sound familiar?

This image of an ideal networker is everywhere. So, in an effort to be good at networking, job seekers try to emulate this ideal. And this is where the inauthenticity insinuates itself.

Some people may feel like they have exactly what it takes to be this “perfect” networker. They head out and network in this way and feel good about it. Far more of us do not naturally operate this way. But, in a misguided belief that you HAVE to be this way in order to be successful at networking, you grit your teeth, take a deep breath, and do it.

You “work the room.” You give your elevator pitch. You force yourself to mingle. And you feel phony and inauthentic. You don’t want to give that pitch – you did it because you thought you were supposed to. You don’t want to end one conversation and “work the room” – you were perfectly happy talking with the person you were with but started to feel guilty you were spending too much time with them.

The bad news – legions of discouraged job seekers who’ve been trying to live up to this perceived ideal

The good news – this “ideal” networker may not be the ideal after all

Next: Shattering the image of the “ideal” networker

Authenticity, Networking Authenticity, inauthenticity, job search, Networking