December 15, 2011

Fight through the flakiness

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Flakiness is a wonderful quality in a pie crust -- but as we all know, it's an incredibly annoying trait when it comes to human beings.

If you're a job hunter, it's inevitable that you'll encounter flaky behavior as part of your employment search. Hiring managers and recruiters will frequently fail to get back to you within promised deadlines. You'll likely even have good friends, at times, fail to deliver on promised favors or commitments they've made.

Can we blame these folks for their unprofessional behavior? Certainly. But getting frustrated doesn't usually accomplish much. Instead of taking flaky behavior personally, I recommend that job hunters adopt more effective strategies for pushing their agenda forward, past roadblocks, and for getting people to take action. Here are four tips:

Don't use negative emotions for leverage. As tempting as it might be, never attempt to coerce your contacts using guilt, shame or other negative emotional manipulation. Not only does this approach rarely work, but you might end up permanently damaging the relationship and receiving no help down the road.

Give people the benefit of the doubt. While your employment situation may be your highest priority, other folks will have many other competing priorities to contend with, each day, that might interfere with their ability to follow through on commitments they've made. In some cases, they might have had an unexpected emergency come up that prevented them from getting back to you.

Help them do you favors. When following up with your connections about their promised actions, try suggesting ways in which you might be able to take the load off and help push the favor forward. You might offer, for example, to draft an introductory email on their behalf or to contact the desired referral party directly, saving them time and hassle.

Thank them into taking action. At the end of the day, most people do favors for others because it makes them feel good about themselves and reinforces their self-image as a helpful, generous, well-intentioned human being. So throughout the networking process, make sure to thank people profusely for their assistance, multiple times, even before they've taken the action in question. This positive, proactive reinforcement may be all it takes to tip them over the edge and spur them to action. Gratitude is the drug that inspires people to be helpful.

In a perfect world, of course, everybody would keep their word and maintain a flawless say/do ratio -- always doing exactly what they say they will. But that's not how things always play out. Following the four strategies above will help you maximize your success rate on the job-search and networking circuit.

Matt Youngquist is the president and founder of Career Horizons, a career counseling and corporate outplacement firm. Email him at myoungquist@nwjobs.com.

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communication, job search, networking, relationships

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