Never Apply for a Job Again!: Break the Rules, Cut the Line, Beat the Rest (26 page)

I was a quiet engineer who had spent the previous 18 years in operations and engineering environments. I was reasonably comfortable within the company walls, but had never really done any of this networking thing. I knew exactly where I was and what my strong points were. I didn’t really need help, but a “stealth” approach sounded interesting.

So, I started the networking process somewhat tentatively. Now I am a total convert, having done more than 50 stealth meetings with an incredible variety of people, industries, and companies in my last campaign. The contacts and people I talked to were totally more than I could have ever dreamt of before learning this method. It really energized me!

During my campaign, I conducted one meeting at a restaurant (never the best environment) with a person whom I thought was a no-hoper. He referred me to a consultant, and, later, a half-hour discussion with this consultant changed my life. I suddenly realized that most of my requirements for truly passionate work were met by being a business consultant. “Ah-ha!” Maybe this is what I had always wanted to do, but never knew. And I still wouldn’t know, nor have had that realization, sitting in front of the computer looking for a job. It was being out talking to people that gave me the insight I needed.

As I continue to network in this stealth way as a standard part of life, the leads that come in are incredible. I just got an opportunity to look at a vice president of operations position in an exclusive startup with incredible potential. How? Well, I followed up monthly with all the people I met with, using my personalized “holiday letters,” letting them know where I was and what I was finding out. This kept me at the front of one particular person’s mind. When a recruiter called him asking for leads to professionals who might fit the role, he immediately thought of me and gave me a glowing reference.

It takes a bit of effort to keep following up, but it is really worth that effort. Even if I only get a few replies, consistent “information updating” really works because, as has happened so many times, one day there is a match.

This has been an incredible experience and one that is launching me off into Career 2.0. Now I decide where and what I do, not an employer.

Peter Thompson

Consultant

www.streamlinedstrategies.com

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After 12 years as a senior manager in the hardware technology industry, I made the decision to explore other career opportunities.

I had five criteria for the new opportunity I was seeking:

1. Software not hardware

2. Under 100 employees

3. Less than 5 years old

4. Web 2.0 driven

5. Leadership role

The problem was: I had a hardware background with a large company. Add to it that I had not actively looked for a job in 20 years. Then I happened upon the stealth method.

I have to admit I thought it was a little crazy, but Darrell’s confidence in the stealth method had me intrigued. As a salesperson, I knew that originality worked, but these are things that I would never have done before.

By diving into the process, I put together a detailed strategy of three formal meetings a week to gather information and ideas and specifically
not
to interview. I was amazed at how many business leaders were willing to spend time with me when I was not asking for a job. As a matter of fact, I had to really convince them at times that I really just wanted information. The education I gained during this process was priceless.

My face-to-face presentation skills were improving with each meeting. Usually only getting face to face during a typical job interview, there wasn’t much opportunity to practice…because those came along only so often. But now that I was the one setting up interviews, I became more relaxed in just being with people outside of the typical interview anxiety…and it spread to all areas of my relationships. No pressure, just questions and conversation.

I was also getting referrals and being referred by people. The stealth approach is effective because folks do not feel apprehensive because you are not directly looking for a job.

With this method, I was actually able to find the perfect opportunity that fit all of my criteria. Keep in mind, this was spring of 2009, and not the best time for most people in making a career transition. But, it turned out to be the perfect time for me.

Three years later, I lead the third fastest-growing company in Austin, Texas, with annual growth of 175 percent. We
were 663 on the Fortune 5000 Fastest-Growing E-commerce companies in the world. Starting with only five employees two years ago, we now have 40 with plans to expand to 200!

Folks ask me all the time how I got so lucky, how I was able to find the perfect opportunity and make such a huge industry shift in a down market. I tell them a good background, a good plan, and a good stealth approach!

Lee Sellers

Global Sales Manager

Interspire and Big Commerce

www.interspire.com

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While coming to the end of a consulting engagement with Southern California Edison, I was working with Darrell to apply his stealth search techniques to find a full-time opportunity.

At the time, I actually had a job offer on the table from Accenture, which came as a result of a relationship I built with them during my engagement at SCE. In addition, the company I had worked for previously (NCR) had reached out to me about rejoining them.

All of these would have put me back on a plane essentially full-time again, which I was not excited about. However, while I had talked to the friend who had brought me into SCE about opportunities within his organization, he really had not structured a job specifically for me, nor actually created a full-time position. To make things more challenging, I did not know the industry that well and figured, even though they had engaged me as a consultant to manage a specific
project, I really did not have the necessary knowledge to work in the industry.

However, as I worked on designing a career campaign, I began thinking about why I felt this way and why my skills could not apply at SCE
if
I was able to structure the right job. I began to ponder how to leverage the knowledge I was learning to open discussions with SCE. In effect, what I did was use the stealth method internally and started talking to people to understand how I might bring value to the company. It wasn’t about interviewing for a job—because there wasn’t one—but based on the stealth kind of meetings we were discussing at the time.

I ended up using the relationship-building skills to speak with a broad range of people at all levels within SCE: some junior, some peers, and some much more senior than I had been working with. Through these conversations, I was able to gain enough knowledge to both realize and articulate how my experience could actually be valuable in the right position, and then described that position in such a way that it would fit into the framework of SCE. In the vernacular of the company, it would be called a strategic planning manager.

So, even though I had other offers, which would have been a path of less resistance to take, I used the stealth method to actually design, create, and propose a new position within SCE. The entire process of this internal stealth campaign took six months. In the end, the company created a senior position specifically for me. The outcome was a job offer for a position I had crafted myself, including the level and compensation.

It still amazes me that I was able to accomplish this when SCE was in a completely different industry from the industry in which I had almost 30 years of career experience.

David Bartholomew

Strategic Planning Manager

Southern California Edison

Author of
The Diamond Principle

www.thediamondprinciple.com

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A few years ago, I had a position as a program director within a non-profit organization matching volunteers with isolated seniors. My daughters were quite young at the time, and the hours and flexibility of this job worked well with my girls’ schedule.

Eventually, as a proud-yet-stretched-thin member of the sandwich generation, I had to take a hiatus to coordinate care for my mother. After a while, another time-limited project came and went. My girls were getting older, and I needed a full-time gig.

I had remained very close with my supervisor from the first job, and shared with her my vision of my ideal job. I had learned, through my adopting of a stealth method of career transition, that it was the channel of people that would lead me to my next right opportunity. So I made a point to share what I was really passionate about so she could be an educated antenna for me.

I was stealth networking with whomever I could think of, but I sensed that due to this former supervisor’s position, intuitiveness, and acute listening skills, there was a good chance she would hear of something that would fit my ideal.

Sure enough, she called me one day not long after that and announced that there was a position about to be posted by the non-profit agency, and I needed to pounce. She simply stated “It’s your job, Dawn!” I faxed my resume and cover letter, and immediately got a call.

Before I knew it, I was interviewed and in the role! The result was an extremely rewarding adventure directing an educational program for older adults on a college campus. It actually was “my job.” But I was coming back to a non-profit agency I already had familiarity/connections with. So, I suppose a stealth approach works for retreading former work environments as well!

After a few years, I transitioned to another non-profit. Fast-forward another few years, and I am stealth networking yet again, but this time into the for-profit senior service world.

Knowing a few people at the networking meetings I attend, I asked them to introduce me to whomever they thought I should meet. Any doubt I had regarding making the leap from the non-profit to the for-profit world rapidly dissipated because of what I saw about how the stealth method works.

A woman who was an instructor for me in the senior educational program introduced me to someone immediately who arranged to interview me the next day. That job wasn’t right for me, but a few weeks later, I interviewed for
one that was. The same career tribe member had made this connection for me as well. In just a few weeks, I will be celebrating my one year anniversary working for that company.

Think positive, and never underestimate the power of your lifetime network. You can do it!

Dawn Muroff

Life Enrichment Director

Emeritus of Chatsworth

www.emeritus.com

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USINESS OPPORTUNITY

I’ve spent 28 years in the banking business. In my last position, I was the marketing director for a payments software company. I left that last employer in late 2008 in a force reduction action that trimmed the staff of our payments software company by about 20 percent. This happened because our market was major banks that, at the time, were struggling with their own huge financial problems at the beginning of the recession. They were spending no money whatsoever on software.

In that economic climate, I decided to rethink my approach to searching for a job. As a result, I sought a career coach and landed on the stealth method. Fairly quickly, I was having stealth interviews in various fields that I had considered moving into. It was empowering to have a tool that allowed me to connect and get information on a wide variety of interests.

The area I was most drawn to was the application of business intelligence techniques to banking and financial services. I had always managed my staff using key measures of performance. The advantage of using key measures is that they clearly communicate what is important so the staff can be creative in deciding how to achieve our business goals. This simplifies the management process and creates a much better work environment. It demonstrates the core process of business intelligence: to identify the key performance indicators (KPIs in industry jargon) and create a way to reliably measure and report this information.

One of my stealth research projects was to explore the potential need for business intelligence techniques in banking, and one particular meeting was with a retired bank president. I asked a broad question in the beginning of the interview that centered on my interest: “What is the most important management information you were lacking as a bank president?” The answer was totally unexpected. He said he never knew the cash flow of his customers on a timely basis, which is what a bank relies on for loan payment. He went on to explain to me that the information he and every banker gets is weeks or even months old because it is taken from the financial statements provided by the customer which, of course, are historical documents.

Having just left a payments software company, I knew there was a way to provide this information on a daily basis through automation. The stealth approach had shown me a new business opportunity.