The Job Market, Project Management, and Other Thoughts

I’ve written – and you’ve commented – about the state of project management, current hiring practices by employers, and the relevance of the PMP certification through the Project Management Institute (PMI) as it pertains to finding your next project management gig.

What I found eye-opening…maybe even eye-popping…was some findings I read about recently concerning job boards and their ability to help individuals find positions.

PMP Certification

First, let’s cover the PMP certification – briefly again – and what we’ve discussed already so far. It’s a given that more and more postings are requiring PMP certification for prospective project managers. Nearly all others state PMP certification as being highly preferred or that first consideration goes to PMP candidates. And even on some of those candidates have been told by recruiters that company ‘X’ won’t even talk to you if you’re not certified.

Good or bad, employers are eliminating the need to wade through thousands of good resumes of experienced individuals by having their HR departments do initial screenings – in many cases – on the existence or non-existence of PMP certification for the candidate. I’ll maintain again that this is a bad and lazy practice, in my opinion, but I’ve already beaten this one to death, so I won’t go into it any further.

Most of the rest of the information for this article comes from August Cohen’s very comprehensive article entitled “Need a Job? Then Don’t Waste Time on Job Boards.”  You can read his full article here.

Job Board Findings

Now on to the recent job board findings. CareerXroads recently conducted their 8^th Annual Source of Hire Study and the findings for external hires were astounding…downright disappointing, I guess. If you’re looking for a job right now, brace yourselves because this is very surprising information…but there’s light at the end of the tunnel in the form of job board advice so keep reading on.

According to the study, CareerBuilder is accountable for 3.95% of all external hires, Monster is accountable for 3.14%, and HotJobs is accountable for 1.35%. Granted, Craigslist isn’t mentioned – it’s a flaky job search site at best – but this means that the Big 3 right now account for only 8.44% of all external hires. I never would have guessed it.

What does this mean to job seekers? At the very least it means don’t rely only on those three job boards – be sure to incorporate other sources (yes, including Craigslist), but also utilize sources like Twitter and LinkedIn and network as much as possible. And when you are using the job boards, be sure to keep your information fresh because that gets the attention of hiring organizations. Be careful on this one if you are currently employed and just looking or keeping your information updated – it also gets the attention of your own HR department. I can attest to that as I did a CareerBuilder refresh one time at CareerBuilder’s request and had to have a discussion with the PMO Director and HR. Geez.

Ways to Aid Your Search

As I mentioned, keep your job board info fresh. Just as you look for recent postings, HR departments are looking for recent resumes and if you keep yours updated, it looks new.

Here are a few ways you can help your online search process:

• Make sure your resume is uploaded in the exact format requested, e.g., .doc or .txt. Note that .docx is not widely accepted.

• Refresh your resume every week or two so it looks like a new submission and doesn’t get stale. Just as you search by date of position posted, sourcers search by date of resume posted.

• Use job board aggregators like Indeed.com or SimplyHired.com. These sites are great time savers as they provide an easily searchable database for thousands of boards in one location.

• Take advantage of industry association and niche job sites. And, don’t forget LinkedIn’s exclusive job postings.

• Apply directly to the company career board if possible. LinkUp.com is a nice website that features jobs aggregated exclusively from more than 22,000 company job boards.

• Create a resume that is rich with keywords that are reflected in the position description. This means you have to modify your resume for each specific position, every time.

• Label your resume document as “lastnamefirstname,” or “lastnamefirstname_position” to make it easier for the recipient to identify and remember you.

• Don’t put a date on your resume file (“resume_05-08”), as you don’t want to accentuate how long you may have been looking.

One Case for Twitter – Comcast / Salesforce Case Study

I have now written two articles fully debunking Facebook of having any real project management or business related application. I’ve gone nearly as far with Twitter – only admitting that it’s good for networking and possibly for reaching out for hard-to-find answers when issues on your projects concerning technology or process may arise.

However, I just read the following situation InformationWeek where a Comcast rep was solving subscribers issues by reaching out to them on Twitter. From a pure project management perspective, possibly the best usage would be post-deployment support or possibly lessons learned information, but it’s an interesting read either way….read on…

Frank Eliason, a Comcast Customer-Service Rep, has more than 13,000 followers on Twitter. In the coming weeks, he’s going to help Salesforce.com figure out how to introduce corporate customer-service systems into the world of Twitter.

About a year ago, Eliason and his team of 10 reps, who primarily answered customer e-mails, began to seek out and help customers who were publicly blogging their criticisms and frustrations with Comcast. The team increasingly concentrated on Twitter and its millions of easily searchable microblogs. Eliason’s readiness to help solve Comcast customers’ problems, while calmly ignoring the occasional insults thrown his way, soon made him somewhat of a personality among Twitter regulars. He’s known as @comcastcares.

Then the media came calling, and in recent months, several newspapers, magazines, and television networks have profiled Eliason. His technique is to tentatively approach Twitterers critical of Comcast, rather than offer up advice that wasn’t asked for. “I never thought I’d become famous on three words: Can I help?” Eliason said.

Now Salesforce wants Eliason’s help. It recently announced an add-on for Salesforce CRM that lets companies track and aggregate customer complaints on Twitter. Eliason and his team will be testing the offering, which is scheduled for general availability in the summer. It’s a perfect fit, since Comcast is already a customer of Salesforce CRM’s Internet (a.k.a. “cloud”)-based software services.

CRM for Twitter will include a dashboard for tracking and monitoring topics on Twitter, the replies to those topics, and whether customer issues were resolved, and it will alert customer-service reps to volume spikes on certain topics. The app will be integrated with Salesforce’s Knowledge Base, which reps use to look up answers to customers’ questions and problems.

Pricing will start at $995 a month for five agents and support for 250 customers. This isn’t Salesforce’s first social networking attempt: In January, it announced an app service that companies can set up to have customers come to them on Facebook (the searchable Twitter approach wouldn’t work with Facebook, since users’ “walls,” where they would post comments, operate on an invitation-only basis). Still, using a team of salaried employees to seek out disgruntled customers on the Web may seem counterintuitive to the typical big-business approach to customers service; that is, stock a phone bank with as many low-cost workers as possible that follow scripts in a database.

But Salesforce executives said during a recent InformationWeek briefing that maybe that’s not the best approach. Perhaps, they suggested, companies need to move beyond the call-center mentality and start reaching people at the place they’re increasingly going to complain about things and get help from others: the Internet.

Twitter, of course, is used by just a small fraction of Comcast’s customers, and Eliason’s team is a tiny speck in a pool of 30,000 customer reps at the company. Still, Eliason said his team has helped solved about 21,000 customer issues on Twitter, Facebook, forums, blogs, and other social networking sites since starting the work a year ago, and he envisions a day when perhaps thousands of Comcast reps can use the CRM for Twitter application.

“This allows us to be much more efficient because it’s going to tie into Knowledge Base,” Eliason said. “My team is the guinea pigs.”

There’s also a big-brother quality to a software service that helps companies find what their customers are saying about them and then intervene. Eliason said it’s all in the approach.

“My advice to companies considering this is that you don’t try to interfere with a conversation,” Eliason said. “If someone is commenting about Comcast, we may not give the answer right off the bat. We don’t force ourselves into a conversation. Instead, we throw the ball in their court, with, ‘Can I help?’ ”

Twitter has also proven to be an “early warning system,” Eliason said; customers will tweet about a Comcast problem before calling customer service.

In some situations, Eliason’s team has known about issues before a Comcast call center. Last year, Comcast reps working on the East Coast at 7 a.m. saw a few late-night tweets about a network problem in San Francisco (4 a.m.). The call centers serving San Francisco didn’t start getting calls about the issue until three hours later, when most Comcast customers in the area were waking up and trying to sign on.

Based on his experience with Twitter, Eliason believes that public social networks will prove to be far more important to businesses than they may are expecting. “Engaging with customers is what works, not PR or marketing or customer-relationship ‘management,’ ” he said. “People respect a company when it’s not about the message, it’s about the personal relationship.”

This article was written by Mary Hayes Weier for InformationWeek. It did not appear in their print publication but was available to subscribers online through an alert download at www.informationweek.com/alert/socialnetworks.

More Discussion on Twitter and Facebook as Collaborative Tools

I already touched on this in my earlier article entitled “Twitter and Facebook as Project Management Tools?” In that article, I came to the conclusion that there is no real viable use in PM for either Twitter or Facebook. I explained that I see Facebook as a good connector for family and friends with no real business application at all. And Twitter is, at best, a networking or promotion tool, but isn’t of any real value to the world of a Project Manager.

Facebook Still a No-Go

The original article garnered quite a few comments. I expected this given the high usage of each site. Nearly everyone agreed that there really isn’t a good application in the PM world for Facebook. If one were to setup a group just for a specific project, then possibly I could see some value. On going comments could be seen by all team members subscribed to the group and files could be shared.

However, this just seems to be a case of introducing something “just to use it” when tried and true communications still work and do not need replaced. The frustrating thing about using a new method like this when it’s not needed is that you end up using both, taking twice as much time to do what you were already doing and then never being certain who’s using which tool so there’s always a question mark. As the PM, I never want to be uncertain whether my team received the information I sent over. But if I have to post send it 2 ways (email and Facebook) to accommodate both types of users, then I’ve doubled the chance (not halved it) that information could be missed.

Twitter – Minor Pluses

After receiving comments and rethinking, I will now admit that I can see some minor good that can come from Twitter usage in the business world beyond just networking and self-promotion. One individual commented that a Twitter message sent out to the general community got a critical question answered and rescued a project.

I can see that happening very easily because with Twitter, you’re sending it out to the world. Anyone can find it even though they may not be following you – you just have to make sure you put relevant search words in the message. The 140-character limit is frustrating, but you can link to something longer, if necessary. Since getting that feedback comment, I’ve used it to reach out to others on information I needed for software and issue resolution.

However, I still contend that Twitter is really not a useful tool for collaboration and project management. It may get you an answer you need – not very quickly though…the best you can probably hope for is 24 hours. But someone will eventually reach out to you most likely. But in terms of disseminating critical information on a project to team members and customers… I still don’t see it as having any viable application in the PM world. It still remains to me, just a tool for networking with other like-minded individuals, a means of promoting your thoughts or work or whatever it is you’re doing, or possibly a way to get some questions answered. For true collaboration as a team, stick with email, phone and other devices to share knowledge like sharepoints and wikis.

Twitter and Facebook as Project Management Tools?

My wife introduced me to Facebook a few months ago and I’ve enjoyed using it to reconnect with friends I haven’t communicated with in nearly 25 years. How cool is that?! I can share pictures, videos and thoughts with all 108 of my friends 24/7. My office is upstairs and my wife’s office is downstairs. I can quickly chat with her (she doesn’t like to use IM) through the chat feature at any time during the day, though instead I usually hear “Braaaaaad!” and have to go down and see what she or one of the kids needs. Ok, I still think it’s kind of lame, but that doesn’t stop me from using it. To me, it’s a “family and friends” tool, nothing more.

As for Twitter – I joined it about a month or so ago. I find it somewhat addictive to go out and check the latest updates from the 96 people and organizations I’m following for their latest thoughts and interests as well as to let the 93 followers that I have know what I’m doing or what article I’ve recently posted. For me Twitter is far more of a business tool than Facebook. It’s Facebook without the pictures and friend connections – it’s just blurb thoughts. But I really only use it for business purposes. I announce articles, conferences, etc. on it. I network with like-minded professionals on it. I realize that some people use it to tell the world what they’re doing every 5 minutes, but that’s certainly not for me.

Now that you know my basis for using Facebook and Twitter, let’s discuss whether either can be a valuable tool for Project Managers and team members on implementations.

The Usual Information Sharing Techniques for PMs

To me, the effective parts of project communication, as I’ve always said, are:

• Weekly formal status reports
• Up-to-date project plans/schedules
• Weekly formal delivery team/customer status meetings or conference calls
• Weekly delivery team calls to prepare for customer communications and ensure everyone is on the same page
• Adhoc calls with the customer on issues or progress
• Adhoc calls with the delivery team members on issues or progress
• Frequent information sharing, status check, and issue alert emails with delivery team members and the customer.

I have honestly racked my brain to figure out a way to make either Facebook or Twitter a useful tool for Project Managers and project team members. I can’t figure it out though.

My Thoughts on Facebook & Twitter

Facebook, to me, is a complete no-go. I can’t find any useful business application for Facebook other than to kill time in long meetings or on long webex’s and conference calls. Nada…nothing.

As for Twitter, because I use it almost exclusively for business networking I’m trying to find some good PM use for it. I share info on my articles when they’re published. I connect with other PM, business and IT professionals that provide information I can use or have deemed my information useful. But as for sharing info with on-going team members…I just don’t see it. Oh, it can be done, but email and phone calls are better. A quick Twitter message could get overlooked. And email stays in your inbox and marked as unread until it is read.

Summary

Again…I’ve tried. I know there are those of you out there claiming that at least Twitter can be a viable way to share information across teams within an organization. If you’ve been successful with it, I’d like to hear your story. Comment here and let me know how you’re using it because information sharing is ALWAYS going to be a roadblock to some degree. Anything that aids information sharing without just providing another grey area path to communication is a welcomed addition. So tell me how you’re successfully using it. Likewise, if you’ve tried and failed, I’d like to hear that as well. Until someone convinces me otherwise, I can’t visualize a way to use either Facebook or Twitter as a viable Project Management communication tool.