EditorialsBy Matt Bud, Chairman, The FENG

As we all blast out of here for the long Labor Day weekend, let me give you a few suggestions to make your “time off’ most productive. I hope that all of you will be sharing some good times with family and old friends. (All my friends are old, but I digress.) If you are currently unemployed or for whatever reason actively looking for work, keep one thing in mind: Don’t tell any sad stories. In the movie Patton, George C. Scott explained why America was going to win the war. In brief, Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. As we do our best to achieve success in the job market, looking and acting like a [ Read more… ]

I had an interesting comment from one of our members of long standing several years ago to the effect that no one was calling him. Of course, the ultimate revenge would be to give all of you his phone number and ask you to call our very own “lonesome George,” but that would be mean. While it is certainly mathematically possible that no one in The FENG thought his background was of interest for networking purposes, I am more concerned with the idea that he is waiting around for the phone to ring so he can help others. As we all know, except for the very brave souls who make good use of our “Members in Need of Assistance” section, [ Read more… ]

The newsletters the past few weeks have been a little thin, so I thought I would take this opportunity to remind all of you of our mutual commitment to share job leads, even those in which we are an active participants. Yes, I know it is counter-intuitive to share leads in which you are an active participant, but it is one of our many PROVEN techniques for improving your very own “deal flow.” Inviting competition from your fellow members is one of our core values, only because it works. Even a job lead where you are one of the 20 candidates submitted by a search firm to his/her client, you only have a 1 in 20 shot. I can assure [ Read more… ]

I hope I will not sound like I am in a bad mood or anything, but I have to tell you that the bulk of the messages I get from members need a lot of work to make them appear as proper business correspondence. I wish I could believe this is only how you write when you are corresponding with your old and best friend Matt, but I fear that this is not the case. Unless you believe in the Tooth Fairy as strongly as I do, or unless you have a guardian angel, a significant number of the folks getting your messages aren’t getting back to you for reasons that are obvious to me and should be to you [ Read more… ]

Ah, if only there were such a thing when it came to job search. Alas, there isn’t. From time to time I get emails asking about the various “blood suckers,” who claim to provide variations on outplacement. They profess to be able to do either mass mailings, mass emailings or the ability to teach you how to leap over tall buildings in a single bound. (Yes, even at your age. But, I think they catapult you. You don’t actually leap.) Whatever happened to “If it’s too good to be true, it probably isn’t?” Have all of you hard nosed and hard headed finance types softened up a bit on me? Please leave your wallet at home if you decide to [ Read more… ]

One of our members wrote me once and asked me about how to keep a proper attitude when your job search stretches into what seems like an eternity. The reason he addressed this question to me is that he noted that I have mentioned on several occasions that beginning in March of 1991 I was unemployed for almost 2 years. (It was only 1 year and 9 months, but who’s counting?) This is not an easy question to answer from many perspectives. Time has dimmed my memory to a certain extent. (And, not only about my job search. Those senior moments happen more frequently lately, but I digress.) When I left my job in 1991 as Chief Financial Officer of [ Read more… ]

Have you ever had someone call you up to network and actually been able to help them in some way? I have to ask. How did it make you feel? My guess is that you felt pretty good inside. Perhaps you were only able to point out a typo on their resume, or perhaps you were only able to give them a kick in the you know what or a pat on the back. Still, it can’t help but make you feel good to know you helped in some way. Why is it then when the shoe is on the other foot that some members of the world’s best networking group (that’s The FENG), hesitate to call other members, let [ Read more… ]

I don’t know if you will agree, but I’m almost convinced that email is going to stick around for a while as a business tool. This being the case, I would like to make the bold suggestion to all of you who write emails (and hopefully that is everyone in The FENG) that you “get with the program.” When I write emails, I make every attempt to make them look like business correspondence. The simple reason is BECAUSE THEY ARE. If you have fallen into bad habits because you are writing to close friends all the time, understand that (as said in the Godfather movies) this is about business, it’s not personal. If you recall those halcyon days of written [ Read more… ]

Based on the resumes I see on a daily basis, I am not sure there is full appreciation for the amount of time any reviewer gives to your carefully crafted opus. The sad truth is that unless the information presented has a clarity greater than the other documents in that stack of 100-500, it can easily be passed over even though you MAY be the most qualified person in the pile. Think long and hard about any of the speed reading that you do starting with the morning newspaper. I sometimes feel sorry for the reporters who have slaved over the stories I skip because I have been unable to find even one word of interest to jump up and [ Read more… ]

As you know, each week I publish a list of our new members and I ask each member of our august body to call at least one person from the list. I sometimes spend close to a full day out of my personal schedule to review new member candidates. I only ask that each of you call one person — a rough time commitment of about 15 minutes. If you do it every other week or every third week, I can live with that too. Although the truth is we don’t have quite as many members calling new members as I would hope, it still happens a lot more than I ever thought it would when I first suggested it [ Read more… ]

There is nothing worse in the world of job search than to have an obvious issue in your background that is difficult to explain. I have often suggested to members that on some topics we discuss there is no right answer. When there is no good answer to something in your background, what do you do? While I am the official spinmeister of The FENG, there are some problems that people raise with me for which every answer is a loser in some ways. When you are faced with one of these kinds of issues, I would suggest that the best defense is not just to have the best possible answer ready, but also to be the one to bring [ Read more… ]

I don’t know if all of you have noticed, but our new member announcement has a field called “Greeting to use.” It is there because I think it is important in establishing networking connections to be able to call people by the name they find most “comfortable.” As I have often said, you can call me anything you like as long as it isn’t late for lunch. Most people who have names that can be abbreviated in various ways will tell you that they don’t really care if you call them William or Bill or even Will for that matter. That said, when you call them on the phone and they say “Bill here,” you now know their preference. If [ Read more… ]

I don’t know if any of you feel as I do, but when I have a cold or the flu, it is at once annoying and thoughtful that those who care about us are constantly checking up on us. Thank goodness I’m not sick very often, but when I am I prefer to be left alone during “the cure.” Human beings vary, of course. Some of us are hypochondriacs, and some of us are foolish to the point of going out when we are sick. The human experience, as in most things, runs the gamut. So, like I said, if those who care about you “discover” that you are a little under the weather, the constant phone calls or the [ Read more… ]

For those of you with allergies, you know only too well that once you have a reaction to something, for some period of time even small amounts of that substance will set you off. As I understand it, what happens is that an allergic reaction triggers elevated histamine levels in your body. If you stay away from whatever it is you are allergic to, gradually your histamine levels decline and although you are still allergic, it takes more of it to set you off. (Now I know I shouldn’t stray too far from my usual sailing analogies, but I couldn’t think of one that was appropriate to this topic.) We have all heard of the straw that broke the camel’s [ Read more… ]

Most of us CFO/Controller types find talking on the telephone one of the more difficult things we do. I believe one of the reasons is that most of our work is accomplished in written form. When we do present our work to the boss or to our peers, it is usually done face to face and to a very large degree, we set the agenda. In other words, we know the topics and the typical questions that are going to be asked and we are prepared for them. It is for this reason that telephone interviews can be difficult for us. (Actually, they are probably difficult for everyone!) If you think about the communications aspects of a telephone interview there [ Read more… ]

Although the job market appears to be getting better, it is still a sad fact of life these days that most of our members face the prospect of a salary lower than they previously enjoyed. From our perspective as financial folks we struggle with the burden of our hard won escalations in salary over our careers, as if somehow these increases were our birthright. Alas, they aren’t. Unlike those who change jobs more frequently and who, in turn, have a better sense of the market and their value in it, we often do not enjoy such a “sixth sense.” Therefore, when faced with providing our “salary requirements” in responding to a job posting, we are often at a loss as [ Read more… ]

I’m not sure why people go their own way, but the standard resume framework is very much the “gold” standard. If you accept the idea that most resumes only get 10 seconds, I think you can begin to appreciate why straying from the traditional structure can get you into trouble. Of course your contact information needs to be at the top. This includes a home address, telephone numbers where you can be reached and your email address. If you are going to worry about being called at the office, I would only suggest that you should be so lucky. When someone wants to reach you, you want to be reachable. I believe the old saw is that opportunity only knocks [ Read more… ]

There is nothing worse in this world than to finally get an interview and to blow the opportunity because someone asked you a question you weren’t prepared to answer. I don’t know why some very obvious questions can take a seasoned financial professional by surprise, but they do. Perhaps we are unprepared because we are not used to others treating us with disrespect. When you control the checkbook, people tend to be nice to you. However, such things as “Why did you leave your last job?,” “How much did you earn in your last job?,” and “Why do you like the color blue?,” are all things that can come up without warning. (Okay, the last one has never come up [ Read more… ]

Over the years I have been asked many times how large The FENG could get before “law and order” breaks down. By law and order breaking down I am talking about a point in time when we can no longer count on our members to treat each other with respect. Respect comes in many forms. We all take a leap of faith when we post job opportunities. Are members really going to follow “qualified members only?” Will I be embarrassed when I next speak to the recruiter I have coaxed to post with our network? Just as important, will we reach a point in time when networking phone calls no longer get returned? Or worse yet, when calls offering assistance [ Read more… ]

If I had to put my finger on the one issue that confuses senior financial professionals it is the subject above. Who is the customer for your services, and what is your product? When I have chatted with or had email exchanges with members who were going through outplacement, the bad advice they have gotten has included only showing their most recent 10-15 years on their resume, to dumbing down their titles, and, of course, leaving off their graduation dates. Please know I am very much opposed to any of these approaches. The assumption with only showing your most recent 10-15 years is that you can somehow fool a resume reviewer into interviewing you. May I suggest that just as [ Read more… ]

Despite all the financial scandals that we have seen in the past few years, most of us financial types by our nature have a hard time lying. For the most part, it just isn’t part of our DNA. While we may be burdened with many secrets of the organization such as payroll, we get around the questions of others on these topics with silence or a cold glare. (They should know better than to ask us about such matters.) When it comes to job search, we get asked a lot of questions that we would prefer not to answer. The problem is if you don’t answer you won’t be considered for a golden (or perhaps silver or brass) opportunity. Such [ Read more… ]

If there is one thing that is certain about us financial types, it is that we always know the answer. Ask us a question and it isn’t long before we are well into the “primarily due to’s and partially offset by’s.” Yet, this major strength of ours and important skill set is an impediment to success at job search. Our perception of the world, much like other human beings, is colored by our experiences, and in our world job change typically hasn’t happened as frequently as it has for many other categories of workers. When I was in my mid 40’s, an art director friend of mine told me that he had already worked at 25 different advertising agencies, some [ Read more… ]