Careers

Advice from a Recruiter: The Letter’s the Thing

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Careers, Marketing Musings

Unless you know someone at Projectline (46 percent of our new hires in 2011 were from employee referrals), having a well-built cover letter is an essential step to having a strong job application. On average, we receive more than 150 resumes each week for positions in a variety of areas ranging from business intelligence to customer evidence. Cover letters aren’t just a reiteration of a resume or a copy and paste of key bullet points. Here are three tips to making your cover letter work for you, not against you, when applying for a position at Projectline.

Get to know us.
We hire people who share the same values as Projectline. Our hiring decisions boil down to not only the skills a candidate can bring to a role, but also how they will fit in with our company culture and foster an environment of trust and growth. Having a solid understanding of our mission and core values is essential to writing a cover letter. Include information how our values align with your lifestyle, and how you identify with them in the position you are applying to. Give concrete examples. If you learn about our values and can’t get on board 100%, then don’t apply.

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My Journey from Seattle to San Francisco

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Careers, Company, Marketing Musings

Have you ever felt like you needed a new challenge at work? What did you do to make sure you felt like you were growing in your career and continually improving? For me, challenging myself and taking my career to the next level is one of the most important things.

Projectline works with customers like Microsoft, Dell, Intel, and SAP. These companies have large customer bases and need a savvy marketing agency to help tell their customer stories and bring in more sales. If you were to brainstorm the best place to build your business in the technology and software industry, where would you go? That’s right: San Francisco and the Silicon Valley. That’s why I moved to San Francisco from Seattle several weeks ago.

My goal in the Bay Area is to increase the visibility of Projectline’s services and connect more with our current clients in the area. It’s so important to have face time with your clients, to develop a relationship and really understand their business. Even with all of the conference-calling technology, in-person, human interaction cannot be replaced. So, I took this on as my new challenge: move to San Francisco and build a strong business in the area while deepening Projectline’s relationships with current clients in the area.

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How to Improve Work Performance in Just 18 Minutes a Day

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Careers, Marketing Musings

TIME, sweet, precious, glorious time. I would argue that time is the highest sought commodity on Earth. We are each given 24 hours a day regardless of our age, race, or profession. Between Facebook, the latest TV show, and catching up with friends, we all wish we could have more of it.

A couple of months ago, while browsing the airport bookstore, I came across Peter Bregman’s book 18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done. Like most people, I often yearn for more hours in the day, so the title alone immediately pulled me to select it for my long flight. By leveraging his engaging and thought-provoking talent for storytelling (as exhibited regularly in his HBR blog posts), Bregman provides a variety of tools, tips, and techniques intended to help us enhance our productivity and maximize our potential.

Reading this book is like having a personal and professional life coach standing right beside you—providing success tips, keeping you focused, and cheering you on along the way. Here are four of my favorite tips from his book that address how we can achieve our goals and use our time more efficiently:

To accomplish the right things, choosing what to ignore is as important as choosing where to focus. There is an endless supply of information at the touch of our smartphones and computers. The world is moving very fast and will only continue to move faster. How do you keep up with the pace of the action around us? If you are like most of us, you stay awake until 4:00am responding to the 400 email messages in your inbox. “Trying to catch it all is counterproductive. The faster the waves come, the more deliberately we need to navigate,” Bregman describes. Arguably, there hasn’t been a time when it has been more important to choose how to spend your time wisely. For instance, consider declining a meeting if it isn’t aligned with your goals and focus. The other tip Bregman suggests is to create an ignore list. We have to-do lists, but how many of us take the time to decide what should be ignored?

Limit your focus to five areas that will make the most difference in your life. Bregman describes his usual experience with buffets: “A few hours later, I was completely stuffed and couldn’t possibly have fit another thing in me.” Since there are so many choices in life, the secret to surviving is to be strategic about how to spend your time. In his instructions, he directs readers to “focus your year on the five areas that will make the most difference in your life. One way to medicate is to decrease your scope and focus on five areas that you deem the most vital.” What are your five?

Plan ahead so that you can fly through your days, successfully maneuvering and moving toward your intended destination. There are times when we have huge obstacles in our way. They may seem daunting, even insurmountable. Bregman describes a time when he was mountain biking and was attempting to ride over a large rock. His approach to riding over this large obstacle was to focus on the hill itself. After many attempts, he kept hitting the launch and falling off his bike. Then finally, “I decided to focus ahead of me—10 feet in front of where I was at any point of time,” Bregman says. He was able to make it over the rock by planning ahead. What could you accomplish if you were to determine your goals, plan the route, and then follow through?

Spend a few minutes at the end of each day thinking about what you learned and with whom you should connect. These minutes are key to making tomorrow even better than today. The “18 Minutes” in the title refers to Bregman’s suggestion of planning out your day, analyzing throughout, and wrapping up with a review of that day’s events. We often are so entrenched in our world and what we need to get done that we don’t always pay attention to our own development—what are we learning, what is working for us. Bregman suggests taking a few minutes for self-analysis before you leave the office. How valuable could it be to pull out your calendar and compare what you set out to accomplish with what was actually produced?

Ask yourself:
1. How did the day go? What success did I experience? What challenges did I endure?
2. What did I learn today? About myself? About others? What do I plan to do differently or the same tomorrow?
3. With whom did I interact? Anyone I need to update? Thank? Ask a question of? Share feedback with?

By tweaking a few of our actions, routines, and focus points, we can accomplish more than we ever imagined. The author Ted W. Engstrom said it well: “Anything that is wasted effort represents wasted time. The best management of our time thus becomes linked inseparably with the best utilization of our efforts.”

I’ve just begun implementing some of Bregman’s techniques, such as focusing on five areas that will make the biggest difference in my life, and I’ve already seen positive results! So, after reading Bregman’s excellent tips, how will you define your focus, remove distractions, and conquer your goals?

Being a Visionary, Extending Your Time Orientation – You Can DO It!

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Careers, Marketing Musings

A new year has just begun, and with it came the many predictions for the future that we’ve come to expect – everything from Brian Johnson’s insightful bit on social media to The Daily Beast’s 2012 News Quiz: Before It Happens.

Every time I see these predictions, I think to myself: how do they do it? I tend to think ahead to my next meal or roller derby practice, and that’s about it. But the work I’ve been doing recently in a leadership program at Projectline has shown me that my short-term thinking tendency needs to change.

We don’t all have to be Steve Jobs – but we do all need to think ahead to some degree.
Who do you think of when you hear the word “visionary”? Probably someone like Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, or the creative genius Steve Jobs? Or, if you’re lucky enough to work at a place you love with leadership you admire, you might think of someone at your company’s C-level (holla, Anika Lehde!). That’s who I think of, anyway—creative geniuses who are paving the way and striving to change the world. In other words, not me. But, as it turns out, even I need to be visionary to some degree. Kouzes and Posner say that there is “no hard and fast rule as to how far into the future a leader should look, for those on the front lines of supervision, the future might be a year from now. For those in middle levels it might be three to five years. At the more senior levels it should be at least ten, and executive leaders responsible for entire organizations in the national and international arenas have to look out twenty years and beyond”. In other words, different time orientations are appropriate for different roles, and it’s up to us to figure out what time orientation best suits our work.

As a marketing consultant, much of my work is task-oriented and driven by monthly or quarterly deadlines. It can be pretty easy to just put my head down and focus on what’s at hand. But if I’m not thinking beyond the bounds of my current contract, or the end of my client’s fiscal year, how valuable am I really? How much can my work evolve? I have so much more to offer than high-quality delivery on assigned tasks—I can be insightful and help my clients and my company get a jump on opportunities.

Altering your time orientation just takes exercise—or so I hope.
Extending my time orientation will take practice, practice, practice. Here is what Kouzes and Posner suggest in “The Leadership Challenge”:

First, reflect on the past. Dr. Omar El Sawy’s “Janus Effect” demonstrates that looking into the past first is proven to elongate our view into the future.

Next, make time to pay attention to what’s going on around your work, and make connections. For me, this means reserving the time of day at which I’m most creative for reading industry news and internal newsletters, and reflecting on my projects. It also means actively seeking information from my clients about their overarching goals.

Think big. Jim Collins and Jerry Porras introduced us to the Big Hairy Audacious Goal in Built to Last—you need to keep a few of these in front of you. Nothing like “big and hairy ” to get the inspiration going.

Feel your passion. You have to tune in to the things that excite you most, not only in general but also in the work you’re doing—and then let that passion drive you!

See? It’s possible. All I have to do is try…and maybe this time next year I’ll be the one looking into the crystal ball and telling you what’s next.

What’s waiting around the corner for you?

Purposeful Passion

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Careers, Marketing Musings

Recently, I started my day in a fairly typical way in my technology-driven household—watching a podcast on our television. This time, though, I was really struck by the topic and decided it was worth documenting in a blog post. The podcast featured Kevin Rose, creator of the news site Digg, interviewing Leah Busque, founder of TaskRabbit.

I was captivated by the story of the founding of TaskRabbit, which Busque created in 2008. It turns out that the inspiration for the company was amazingly straightforward. She’d run out of dog food one evening and wasn’t able to head out to the store right away to pick some up. She thought: what if there was a service that let you pay people to handle your errands for you? And from that simple question, the idea for TaskRabbit began to take shape.

Leah Busque grew up fascinated with technology and went on to earn a degree in Computer Science from Sweet Briar College, an all-women’s college in Virginia. She then took a job at IBM as a software engineer. In her interview with Kevin Rose, she talked at length about the vision she had for her company, which she has now turned into a multimillion-dollar venture. She also discussed how the company was always about much more than monetary success. It was about empowering people. TaskRabbit launched just when the global economy took a nosedive. She noted how, to this day, many of the “runners”—the people who provide services through TaskRabbit—are unemployed professionals who are trying to do all they can to provide for their families or pay their bills. She’s creating jobs for hundreds of people who want to use their talents and make the best of a bad situation.

I’m intrigued by this question: what drives the flash of inspiration that Busque experienced? What’s behind our instinct to invent and create value? There are so many ingenious personalities that continue to move our technology-driven world forward. And their stories often seem to have a common thread. All successful entrepreneurs seem to possess a single-minded focus on achieving their goals and are prepared to sacrifice to transform their vision into reality. For example, Busque would sit in her bedroom at home and program for hours on end to hone her skill. Founders of successful start-ups also seem to have a keen sense of where they need to improve. Busque, who enjoyed the problem-solving aspect of programming, knew that she needed to deepen her understanding of how to run a business.

But the integral ingredient, the catalyst for all creative endeavors, is a genuine passion for ideas. I’m lucky that, as part of my job every day, I get to document and share success stories from organizations in every industry. And at the heart all of these stories, there inevitably are individuals who have used their passion to turn simple concepts into notable achievements. By working with clients to help capture their customers’ stories, I have a chance each day to tap into the current of creative passion that runs through companies like TaskRabbit. Seeing the energy and drive that Busque and others bring to their pursuits inspires me to bring that same level of passion to my work each day!

Picture of the Week: 11/11/11 At 11:11

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Careers, Company, Job Openings, Marketing Musings, Pic of the Week

Here at Projectline, we’ve recently started a project to capture all the places we work and bring together our team around the world. Every weekday morning at 10:42 am, our team is invited to send in a picture of where they are, what they’re doing, or who they’re with. Each Monday, we’ll choose our favorite picture of the previous week and share its story here.

10:42 Nov 11, 2011 - Zach Waud, PL Bellevue (11:11 11/11/11)

OK, so it isn’t 10:42, but some folks in our Bellevue office might have seen the 11:11 11/11/11 ghost. They all look a little freaked out. Maybe they noticed that we need to hire 15 people in the next week. If you know anyone really smart and funny, please tell them to apply here.

Revive Passion By Building a Functional Team

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Careers, Marketing Musings

During my undergraduate education, I began to dread business school group projects. Whether it was accounting or marketing, each course came to the same inescapable point where the class would disband into small teams to work on a project, applying the principles and concepts we were learning. I understood the purpose: the real-world functions around teamwork. However, each team seemed to be dysfunctional in some way or another. There was Tim, who never shared his ideas; Carmen, who never left Facebook; and James, who never showed up on time. I was an army of one, struggling to unite my uninterested peers. I decided it was because we were in a simulation, and when I would graduate and join a real team that would be invested in the company’s success, things would be different.

In reality, I was already on a real team. We had the same real potential and the same real dysfunctions that were challenging the companies I desperately wanted to work for. We were simply stuck in our dysfunction. A lack of trust in one another from the get-go kicked off a series of even more problems, and we never fought against it. Ultimately, we thought the goal of our project was to use our ideas to create something new, yet the true purpose was to teach us to work together.

Patrick Lencioni, author of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, breaks down team dysfunction into five clear and relatable symptoms: (1) Absence of Trust, (2) Fear of Conflict, (3) Lack of Commitment, (4) Avoidance of Accountability, and (5) Inattention to Results. He cleverly explains these dysfunctions through the eyes of a brand-new CEO, challenged with bringing together a team of incompatible executives. Through his business fable, Lencioni describes the difficult yet capable path to team rehabilitation as the CEO works with the team, facing harsh realities each step of the way.

We discussed the book and the dysfunctions present in the story at last month’s Projectline Book Club. There, we shared stories of our own experiences in broken teams and we felt refreshed by Lencioni’s view that most teams (if not all) experience dysfunction. What we learned from Lencioni is the reality of team dysfunction, and although its existence can be difficult to deal with, the process of becoming functional is necessary to preserve the vitality of any organization. I recommend this book to anyone who is looking to build a strong team from the bottom up or to ignite passion in an existing team!