Use Your Head to Get Your Foot in the Door by Harvey Mackay Page B

After E-mail. More and more people don’t want unexpected or extended calls unless there is a very good reason for them.
    E-mailing or phoning, your agenda is obvious: What do you know that I don’t that might provide me some work? It never hurts if you can carry your own weight and provide the people you’re calling with some information that may be of value to them. You might mention a hot sale they may not know about or some even hotter business gossip you may have picked up during your job hunt, like a major executive shuffle.
    5. Do your homework. Stay on top of new developments in your field, and that’s saying a mouthful these days. There may be an art director somewhere who doesn’t use or know how to manage computer aided design, but the market for hieroglyphics is slim! An increasing number of art directors have degrees in multimedia design or computer graphics. Creativity is important, but so are precision and ease. Now is the time to take those courses you never had time for, anywhere and especially online. And be sure you find a way to mention how you are clicking on to new skills during your interviews.
    6. Know the company you keep. Before you interview, check with anyone you know who knows about the company: employees, customers, bankers, vendors. But most of all, learn the art of good Googling! Before, you needed to chase down facts like a Mickey Spillane gumshoe. Today, you swim in oceans of detail, and the new skill is how to prioritize what to look for and how to piece it together.
    Point #1: You want clues to the company’s reputation. Is it a leader in its industry? An also-ran? How does it compete? Does the company emphasize price? Quality? Service? Innovation?
    Do you have any special strengths in any of these areas that you can bring to the table? If you do, don’t forget to mention them during your interview.
    Don’t forget the flip side. If the company is in the technological dark ages, emphasize what you can do to help stage a cost-effective, low-pain, fast-acting renaissance. If the business is a service laggard, and you were once the assistant czar of service who helped redeem another company’s customer relations, it may be high time to play that card.
    Point #2: You want clues to the company’s values and style. Be aware of the huge trend toward niche marketing, which is the concept of dividing the marketplace into even smaller segments in order to concentrate on a clearly defined target audience. Because of niche marketing, there are a lot of companies with highly idiosyncratic corporate styles, developed as a result of their adapting to the styles of the niche markets in which they sell their products or services.
    Niche hiring has been a predictable outcome of niche marketing. You’re going to find the best chance of getting a job—and of being a success—in a company where you fit in.
    In 2007, Elinor Mills did an interview for CNET News with Stacy Savides Sullivan, the chief culture officer for Google, perhaps the most coveted employer in the world. Tune in to some of her comments:
    • On the culture: “One that is team-oriented, very collaborative and encouraging people to think nontraditionally.”
    • On the kind of question a job candidate might be asked: “This is just hypothetical, but it could be ‘How many bread boxes could you fit in an airplane?’ or something like that. That’s certainly not going to show if somebody is adaptable or flexible, but it’s certainly going to show someone’s thought process and reasoning, the way they can rationalize a true answer to something. Obviously, there’s no right answer.”
    • On the kind of social behaviors that are popular in the company: “We’ve done Google-wide ski trips since 1999. Different groups go up and we spend the night and there’s a lot of team-building and bonding.”
    Those three items have nothing to do with the degrees you have, the schools you went to, the years of experience you’ve stacked