013 Abby Grant on Connecting People to Work

Career Tips & Trends with Tom McDonough & Deborah Burkholder

Welcome to Career Tips & Trends.
Internet radio for savvy professionals –
doing work you love, work that matters.

Our guest today is Abby Grant, Director of Employer Relations at Boston University’s Center for Digital Imaging Arts. She has close to 20 years working in the communications field including publishing, advertising and public relations.

Previously Abby was with the circulation Group at the Boston Business Journal – Boston’s premier business publication. Prior to that, she was with Hollister, a Boston-based recruiting and staffing firm, conducting business development for the creative and marketing group. She has held business development and account management roles for several Boston-based public relations and advertising agencies. Abby holds a B.A. from the University of New Hampshire and a M.A. from Emerson College.

As you’ll hear in today’s episode, Abby is passionate about networking, career and work force development. She loves connecting people to work.

We’d love to hear from you in terms of your actionable takeaways from this episode.

Leave a comment or send us an email.

Here are some exurps from todays interview…

From the show

My original career was in advertising and public relations. I have an undergraduate degree and a master’s degree in communication. I worked in that field for many years doing a lot of different things. At some point I decided it was time to make a change. How did I make the change? I sat in my back yard and did a lot of thinking about what was I good at? What was I bad at? What did I love? What did I hate? I kept coming up with this career called recruiting. So I got my head all around this particular career and started to talk to people about it and it just really psyched me up and gave me a lot of energy.

What I discovered was if you’re looking for a job and you think like a salesperson and you make connections and work connections, you will show up differently and you will be a different type of candidate.

That’s how you can set yourself apart. I started going around to a lot of these groups and I discovered that what I really loved doing was connecting people to work. So once again I put on my thinking cap and thought ok, where am I going to do this. I’m going to make a change again; out in the back yard again. I did all the soul searching and I came up with something called Career Services. I started to talk to anyone that I met that was in Career Services; anyone that I met that worked at a college or university or school and the classic networking scenario where someone that met me introduced me to someone who told someone about me who told someone about me who got my LinkedIn. That’s how I got my current job. I’m the director employer outreach at a school called The Center for Digital Imaging Arts. What I do is connect people to work. So I did it again. I changed again.

…how do you set yourself apart? If you make the decision to go do something different and you haven’t done it for 20 years like a lot of the other people that you might be competing with, you need to have a real passion for it. Passion really energizes people and excites people and if you’re a candidate that walks in and you’re so passionate and so convinced that this is what you want to do, it really does work. You might have to do a little bit … to educate yourself towards where you want to go but the passion is key when you’re making a change.

When you’re embarking on either a job search or a career change, the thing that you are going to need to start with is your tools. What do I mean by tools? Your resume. Your LinkedIn profile. Your business cards. These things, if you’re changing, you’re going to have to set them up towards where you want to go. You’re going to need to get a lot of words on that resume to reflect where you want to go. When I decided I wanted to get into career services and I did all this networking with people that were in career services, what they told me was I needed a lot of the words that career services people had on their resume. So I crafted my tools towards that end. …we’re going to talk about networking a little bit.

I’m actually more of a fan of LinkedIn than a resume. I think a resume is necessary, but with LinkedIn, there’s so much more that you can do and it’s richer. You have your references and your connections. When people would look at my LinkedIn page, some of the comments I got were you need words like mentoring, counseling. I had all the networking and outreach portion but I had to focus and strengthen myself on where I wanted to go and the job I wanted to do and what my weakness were and think well, do I have experience that speaks to these areas. In fact, I did but I just didn’t have them on my LinkedIn profile.

So then we get our tools and we have the words to where we’re going. We have our business cards so when we go out and network, people remember us. Networking … is all about who you are not necessarily what you’ve done. What’s happening in current searches right now with people who are going to the job boards, those are about words but we want to get away from being just words on a page. We want to be a passionate person that connects with people and people remember us and we go to networking events and that’s how that works… What we want to do with these tools is we want to have the tools so when we make connections with people, then we’re going to work those connections and that’s how we’re going to set ourselves apart.

I typically go to 10-15 networking events a month.

If you’re the person that’s looking for the job, it’s your responsibility to do the follow up…The other point I want to make is you go out and network and you meet all these people, you do your follow up; this is one of the key things – you don’t ask for a job.

Networking, as I touched on earlier, is about who you are and not necessarily your resume and what you’ve done. One of the things that’s happened in this economy is all of these networking groups have emerged. People understand that getting out and meeting people is really how we’re all going to make stuff move forward and get things going. So I like to go to networking events where there are people like me. That would be industry events. They tend to be content driven. You learn things. Then you can connect with people in your field. I like to go to networking events where there’s no one like me. That would be maybe a Chamber of Commerce event.

I think the most effective process or steps to take is you get your tools and you’re ready to go. You go out and research network events. You can find networking events on LinkedIn. You can find them on eventbrite.com. All of the American City Business Journals with events. You find a few events and you go to an event.

What I like to say when I go to an event is I turn to someone that looks interesting and I shake their hand and say “I’m Abby Grant, what brings you here?”

…It’s the same type of relationship a good recruiter has may however open their personal network for you and also make connections, etc. etc. but, that’s really key cause recruiters are looking for candidates that are a really good match for a job that they have open. It’s not about what you can do with a recruiter it’s about what you’ve done. And so 80 percent match, link that experience, pretty recent within a year, two years maybe even three years, tops, so not hey I could do this, I’m gonna send it to the recruiter and see if they have an opening they’re not going to send you to their client. If you’ve done it, if you’re a good match, if it’s current that’s how you work with recruiters. If you see a job opening that you have all those criteria that are met, send you resume to the recruiter, maybe do a follow up phone call, and if you’re a match for the job, the recruiter will call you.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

We’d love to hear from you in terms of your actionable takeaways from this episode. Leave a comment or send us an email.

More About Abby

You can find Abby on LinkedIn and on Twitter.

RESOURCES

Networking

Finding Networking Events: Eventbrite, find a local Business Journal.

Business Cards: MOO Business Cards and ZAZZLE Business Cards

Managing Your Google Results

Vizibility allows you to create custom QR codes that can be used on business cards and resumes that links to your profile information and a curated google search.

Make a Killer First Impression. Vizibility helps you control, organize and share your online identity in one click, from your curated Google results to your hand-picked online profiles, mobile business card and more. Your personal SearchMe button, link and QR code instantly direct people to your true online identity.

You will be googled, vizibility makes it easy for you to direct people to the real you. Check it out at Vizibility.com

What do you want?

80% of finding work you love, work that fits you is knowing what you want. If you don’t know or aren’t quite sure – just start with what you think you might want. Take small smart steps and follow your gut. Talk to people who are already doing the work you’re interested in. Connect with them on LinkedIn. Speaking of just starting, Just Start is a great new book we love. See link below.

Coaching

Tom & Deborah can help you turn your dream job into a reality.

Contact: Deborah Burkholder – Tom McDonough

The Entrepreneur’s Source: If you’re thinks of starting your own business, you might want to connect with Suzanne Gray. We interviewed her in episode five (005 Career Tips and Trends: Me, Inc.).

Continued Learning

We’ve found these books very helpful and recommend them to our coaching clients.

*You can support the show by using our Amazon affiliate links above. Thanks.