Adjunct teaching positions occupy an interesting space in the higher ed job market. As such, the advice you might get about how to identify potential opportunities, and how to make a case for your candidacy is likely to be different than advice you might get when looking for tenure-track faculty posts or administrative roles.
Add in the reality that many administrators look toward adjunct roles to get teaching experience, that experienced faculty who are not in tenured positions are likely to be competing for the same jobs, and that persons with industry experience are sought after in some disciplines, and the adjunct search can be mysterious and confounding.
In this week’s episode, Higher Ed Career Coach Sean Cook will talk with Sharon Thomas DeLay, the founder and president of Adjunct Solutions, LLC. She has over 15 years professional experience as it relates to education, training and human resources.
Adjunct Solutions is a niche staffing agency focused on building a candidate pool of pre-qualified, experienced, and enthusiastic adjunct faculty and other higher education professionals.
We’ll discuss the nuances of the adjunct job search, and get perspectives from Sharon about how candidates can put their best foot forward in the job search, and how institutions can benefit from working with a staffing agency to fill open positions.
Until this week, Greg Meyer was the Customer Experience Manager at Gist. In part 3 of a 4-part interview with writer and career coach Sean Cook, Meyer talked about managing your reputation using Social CRM tools. Meyer began a new job at Assistly earlier this week.
I give career advice to college students, both in my private practice and with a small school here in Georgia, Wesleyan College, and talk to them about what they put out on social media, especially on Facebook. You know, college students think they are tricky. They’ll set up one for their mom and dad and for employers to look at, and then they’ll set up a second one, where they post their party photos and talk to their friends about drinking and whatever else.
What I think is interesting is that tools like Gist can confound that, because all of the relational data allows it to see the related e-mail addresses under which they registered and to kind of “mine” that data in some ways. And so I’ve shown job seekers kind of how to do a “social media audit” using Gist, where they can kind of see that what they think they aren’t putting out there, they still are. So I talk to people about using privacy filters wisely. The other thing is “Don’t think you can really get away with anything these days, because the network is almost becoming self-aware, because of tools like this.”
=I would say in response to that is that we honor the privacy controls set by the browser. So if you have locked things down on Facebook or other web service, we wouldn’t see that. And we’re not mining private data. We’re only mining public data. So your advice about having them understand that anything they put online could be seen by someone else is good.What I usually tell people who read newspapers is that if you don’t want to show up on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, or USA Today, then don’t post it. If they don’t read newspapers, and don’t want to read it on TechCrunch, then don’t post it. If you are owning your own brand and understanding that when people do a search on Google, or do a search on these other services, that they are going to find you, then that gives you additional power, because you can say, “this is what I want to present.” And if all my social media waypoints are saying the same thing, then it’s going to ring true, and people are going to have a consistent view of me. That’s probably the best defense you have against being seen in the wrong way.
And, as far as having your friends post pictures of you that you would rather not like them to post, I can’t help you with that.
Yeah, there are some people who couldn’t make their friends stop, no matter what. I think that’s a point I always like to drive home. Some people have said to me “This really feels ‘Big Brother,’ and my thought is “it’s in the public stream.”
Yeah, it is really all out there, already, and tools like Gist, tools like Google Reader, tools like Rapportive or Xobni, or any of these other tools are just revealing things that search engines have really known for a long time and you can now search them all in one place. It’s out there, and you may just not realize it’s out there.
I think that in today’s marketplace, and today’s career marketplace, the truth is that it’s harder to spin things, because reputation management is a two-way street. What I tell job-seekers is that you can put anything you want out on the internet, as long as you are willing to stand by it, as how you are, or what you meant to put out there, or explain what your rationale was, or what your thinking was, and maybe even admit your mistakes if people don’t perceive it correctly or if it just wasn’t a case of good judgement.
Sure. You are the best person able to tell the story of you. So the better the story you tell, and the more consistent it is, the more believable it is.
I think that’s probably one of the best things to make people aware of: it’s not a private place. The internet is “public, in overdrive.” If you wouldn’t be doing it on your front porch, you probably shouldn’t be doing it on the internet.
Greg Meyer is the Customer Experience Manager at Gist. In part 2 of a 4-part interview with writer and career coach Sean Cook, Meyer talks about knowing more about your network, and figuring out what’s important, using Social CRM tools.
Obviously, my niche is career coaching, but I am also a small businessman, so I see the utility of Gist in both roles. How do you think Gist could be used by job seekers or small businesses to really gather information about their employers, partners or even their competition?
I think that, for a job seeker, it can really help you to see what is going on out in the marketplace, about either the individual you are dealing with in a hiring process, or to just get a better scope of what goes on in that business, how that brand communicates, and to be more knowledgeable, so you can start acting as if you work at that company already. If you can show them how you can contribute from day one, it is much more likely that they could easily imagine you in that job.
And as far as a small business owner, if you are keeping track of trends in an industry, and you want to tag all the relevant contacts you have in that industry, your competitors, suppliers and your customers, that Gist can definitely help you either to reach out or to them by amplifying them privately, or by amplifying them publicly by sending them out via Facebook and Twitter.
On the flip side of that, social media has done so much to deliver information to us quickly and affordably, but there are definitely days when I feel like I have so much information, it’s like I’m drinking from a fire hose. How do you think users can use Gist to keep from suffering from that information overload?
Well, I think the first thing they can do is go to Gist.Com and sign up for our e-mail digest. And that would allow them to get information about the people they care about once a day or once a week. We talk about sitting down for your morning coffee, that you might take 5 or 10 minutes every morning or maybe a couple of times a week, to go down a tag list or a list of all the people in your network, and try to find one or two or three that you’d like to reach out to personally. It can definitely help you do that.
I encourage my clients (both career clients and small business clients) to use social media for monitoring their presence and their reputation online. How do you see Gist or other Social CRM tools helping someone to do that?
Well, you know when people sign up for a new tool, they want to see “what does that tool know about me,” because I know most about what information is right about myself. So you can go in and actually the first contact that is built in Gist is your personal contact. You can find that at gist.com/people/me and you can go ahead and edit that contact if it is not quite right. It should mostly be right, but if it’s not quite right, you can edit that contact. You can learn more about how to edit the contacts of your friends, and understanding so far what’s out there, it’s really good at being able to scan the horizon and understand that there are mentions they are likely to see of you, and there are mentions they are not likely to see of you.
With the growing popularity of social media, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to monitor your connections and stay up-to-date with conversations. This need has ushered in a wave of tools that take Client Relationship Management to the next level, by integrating information from social media into the mix.
Gist is one such tool that can help you find out more about the people you know, and develop a more intelligent view of your network. Bought by Research In Motion in February, Gist seems to be a key part of the Blackberry maker’s efforts to include cloud-based services into new phones and tablets.
Greg Meyer is the Customer Experience Manager at Gist. In that role, he interacts with users, takes feedback and gets suggestions for new features, as well as acting as a social media ambassador for the company.
I interviewed him by phone May 25th, and he shared his thoughts on how tools like Gist can be used to find information about people, companies and industries in your network, to monitor your online presence, and to develop a better understanding of how you may be viewed by others, based on the types of information you are making available about yourself through social media.
Part 1: An Introduction to Greg Meyer, Social CRM, and Gist
So can you tell me more about yourself? Who is Greg Meyer, and how did your education, skills and experience lead to where, you are now?
Sure. Absolutely. At this point, I think I am a little bit over-educated. I started out doing undergrad in Fine Arts and History, I thought I wanted to be a a history professor. And then I went to graduate school and found out that the process to become a professor was a lot different from what I wanted to do, which was to read books and organize information.
Then I found myself in the computer field, and then went into a number of small companies. I was with a company called Allaire, which is now part of Adobe, and I was part of some big companies as well.And then I went to graduate school I worked for T-Mobile and Expedia, and as part of that, I discovered that I wasn’t as good at the technology part of the business as I was about seeing systems, and connecting people and information, so I went back to school again and got an MBA from the University of Washington. I actually used those skills to make my current job, because my job is a combination of three things. I’m a customer experience manager, and I do high-touch customer support. I also do some product planning and recommendations for products from the user base, and then I also do some technology work as well as some traditional marketing evangelism and social media.
Could you give the uninitiated a kind of “thumbnail sketch” overview of what Gist is an how it works?
Sure. Gist is a web service that helps you to take all your contacts and keep them in one place. Whether your contacts live in a web email like Gmail or whether you use Microsoft Outlook or whether you’d like to take those contacts and incorporate the contacts on your phone, say your iPhone, Android or Blackberry device, or whether you are interested in connecting to the people you know on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, what Gist does is take into account all of those contacts and we go ahead and look out over 50,000 news sources and 20 million blogs and build the complete social business profile for that person. What that means is that you would see news about them or their company, and you’d also see a history of your interactions, and we do that, and make it all available to you on all those different platforms.
So this is really taking that whole traditional idea of Client Relationship Management or Contact Relationship Management really to that next level, because of the way you aggregate that information from the public stream along with all your back and forth about a client. This may be a really stupid question, but what do you think the value is of that additional functionality to the CRM process?
Well, Sean, for starters, I don’t think there are any stupid questions. But I think that the value in understanding what makes somebody tick and how you can have a better interaction with that person is really, really key. Because if you find out on Twitter that somebody is talking about going on their vacation, that might be a signal that you might not want to talk to that person that day, because maybe they’re out of town, or if you find they are interested in a particular personal interest, like maybe they like baseball, maybe the next time you see them, you’ll want to invite them the a game, and you can use that information to make that interaction better. Now that doesn’t mean that you should use all the information you learn in every interaction, it means that it gives you better tools to make that interaction better.
Cover letters come in all different styles, and it’s not always easy to figure out the best way to outline your arguments for a job and keep the reader interested. So it’s not surprising to know that many job-seekers obsess over their cover letters. Others spend more time on the résumé, and barely any time at all on the cover letter. Others skip writing cover letters altogether.
The advice you’ll get on cover letters is likely to be mixed, too. You’re likely to hear any or all of the following:
Write a new letter for each position and try to show your potential match for a company’s current needs;
Write a generic letter for each type of position, but worry more about the résumé; and
Forget about the cover letter–nobody reads them anyway, so you’ll be wasting your time.
Given the different approaches candidates take, and the dubious assertion that you always need to write a cover letter, should you bother to write one? And if you do, what approach should you take?
It’s true that some recruiters are avid cover letter readers, others barely skim them, and some skip them until reviewing the resume. But none of these truths justify leaving a cover letter out of your application materials.
Here are 6 reasons why you should write one anyway:
You are not a mind reader.* As such, you can’t be sure about the preferences of the person(s) screening the applications. (*apologies if you are indeed, a mind reader!)
If a committee is handling the screening, people on the committee might have different thoughts on the value of a cover letter. Better to cover your bases.
The recruiter(s) are not mind readers, either. Cover letters provide context about your education, experience, motivation, and possible fit. Your résumé should include plenty of information about education and experience, but the cover letter lets you tie all the pieces together into a coherent whole. Essentially, the job of the cover letter is to make the screener’s job easier, by helping the reader see how your motivation rounds out your education and experience, and molds you into someone who will fit their needs.
Not sending in a cover letter will make you look lazy. Basically, it sends the message that the recruiter needs to do the work to figure out why you are interested in a job, and then to sell you on the value of working for their organization. And the recruiter probably has enough work to deal with already.
The recruiter may interpret the lack of a cover letter as an indication that you are desperately applying for anything and everything, and that you haven’t really taken the time to determine why you are interested in the specific position.
Some recruiters will consider your application incomplete and remove you from further consideration.
What do you think about cover letters? Do you write them for any of the jobs you apply for? Why or why not? Please share your thoughts in the comments.
LinkedIn is growing in importance as a tool for professional and small business networking. Here are a few things worth knowing about the world’s second most popular social network.
According to Howes, making money, expanding their businesses, networking, and finding a job are probably the most important reasons the average consumer creates a profile and connects with others through LinkedIn.
He also notes that, compared to the way businesses have networked and promoted their services in the past, LinkedIn is more efficient and less expensive.
A while back, I enrolled in LinkedInfluence, an online training course by Howes’s and his business partner Sean Malarkey. I have personally gotten a lot out of this course, and I think you will, too. Sean and Lewis are two really well-respected experts on Twitter and LinkedIn. I connected with them on the Third Tribe Marketing group a while back, and had an opportunity not long ago to interview Lewis for a Technorati article on LinkedIn’s recent IPO.
LinkedInfluence will help you really understand how to use LinkedIn to expand your professional network and gain career and business leads. I personally joined this program and have seen the benefits. I’ve gained new followers, expanded my network, and been offered new business opportunities based on what I learned. At this point, I can easily say that I have experienced at least a ten-fold return on my investment.
More importantly, I finally understand the power of this great tool, and can share my knowledge with others. I’ve already shared tips and tricks with my clients that have helped them with business and job leads.
But there is more…Sean and Lewis have figured out some incredible new techniques for increasing your Twitter following and you’ll get those as a bonus for purchasing this course. I haven’t tried many of these techniques, but will soon.
Click the link below for a sneak peek at LinkedInfluence.
Work with Sean. I help higher ed professionals take control of their careers with tailored services including resume and CV development, LinkedIn profile optimization and networking strategy, interview coaching, and one-on-one career guidance.
