Job Search 2.0.11

If you haven’t looked for a job in a while, I’ve got news for you: The process has changed.

Gone are the days of calling your dad’s best friend, the CEO, and asking for a job, any job, and having one the next morning.

Gone are the days of mailing in your resume, then following up with a phone call and actually reaching someone of consequence.

Gone are the days of sitting with a potential employer and walking through your job history, explaining the gaps and emphasizing the good stuff, asking what they want and saying, “I can do THAT!”

Gone are the days of simple job titles and clearly defined roles and responsibilities. Gone, just gone.

I took a sabbatical from a solid career as a strategic communicator at Hewlett-Packard in 2006. I left at a time when my star was high, but relentlessly re-orged and laid-off bodies were dropping all around me. After several years of stepping over them (or, as Jeanne Robertson would say, making 7-Up pound cakes for the wakes), one had to expect to be on a list somewhere. So I designed my own 18-month long exit strategy.

I began by getting my real estate license, then practicing with a partner at nights and on weekends. By mid-2006, I was doing well enough to execute my transformation, and became a full-time REALTOR in Galveston, Texas. A year later, I was asked to take on a failing franchise, and by March 2008, I was leading a team of around thirty agents.

In September that year, just as we were getting our sea legs, so to speak, a 100-year hurricane called Ike, which nobody much remembers anymore outside Galveston, washed away the business, all our assets, and all of our agents’ livelihoods. The Lehman Bros. collapse, which happened that same week, and the recession that followed, didn’t help this little second-home market much either.

I kept our doors open as long as I could, then conceded victory to the gods of change and took down my shingle. I moved to Atlanta a couple of months ago, and have spent most of that time thinking about what I want to do when I grow up.

What I’ve found is that my goals haven’t changed at all: I want to change people’s lives—help them discover their bliss, make their existence better. I could clearly see that in real estate everytime I helped someone find their dream home or sell a property that would free them to take off on their next great adventure. And I could especially see it when I had all those storm-surviving agents on my team.

That’s also what my career in strategic communications was all about, though: Helping people understand what is happening around them and grasp how it affects them and what they can do to succeed, personally or professionally or both. For instance, my last gig before the sabbatical was leading the communications for HP’s four billion dollar IT and business process outsourcing account with Procter & Gamble. Two thousand employees came over with that contract, and it was my job, in part, to help them be happy about it. I absolutely loved that.

So it has become clear to me that my real estate foray was one of those forks in the road that connect you back to the freeway after a loopdiloop side trip through the forest, where if you’re paying attention, you can pick some wildflowers or learn to fish, sometimes by watching a bear do it.

Today, though, I’m back on my original path. And that brings me to reality and a call to action for you.

It’s Job Search 2.0.11, folks, where social media is king and pay-per-view job sites stand sentry. Here your connections are defined by X degrees of separation through LinkedIn. Here you complete online application after online application, and never know who, if anyone, is seeing it or if it’s being scanned and discarded by an algorithm in the cloud. Here the job descriptions are written in language so obtuse and deliberately corporatized that you have to wonder if the HR interns writing them understand what they’re looking for.

It’s my job to navigate all those process and semantic changes, but I’m hoping you can help me with the old fashioned stuff. Would you be willing to share this essay, or even just my resume, with anyone you might know who might know someone who might know someone who might need someone with my skills?

Here’s my elevator blurb (note: a blurb is shorter than a pitch):

Alice Melott is an award-winning strategic communicator specializing in internal & executive communications around management of change. She has worked with top tier executives to design creative messaging and direct integrated communications programs that affect such corporate events as the transition and transformation of workforces impacted by M&A or reorganization, critical global process and tool implementations, and product and technology launches to both internal and external audiences.”

More:

• Who the heck is Alice Melott?
• Alice Melott’s resume
• Real Estate Executive Magazine article

That should cover it.

Thanks for your help. When you’re in Atlanta, call me. We’ll do lunch… on me, if I have a job by then.

Smiles,