Think before you type when it comes to anything you do online...

Technology is great but sometimes it can get people into trouble if they misuse it or don’t take enough time and effort to use it properly.

I tend to notice little things when it comes to how people act and one of the things I tend to see more and more is how the use of email makes people lazy. I always open emails by saying “Hi Marc” or “Hey Joan” depending on who the person is and how well I know them. The nature of the correspondence also tends to dictate whether I’d start the email with “Dear Karen” if I was applying for a job for example.

Many people simply reply to an email without the opening salutation and simply start the email with their response which kind of annoys me.

How hard is it to say hi to the person you’re trading emails with?

Certainly if you’re trading a string of emails, the second and subsequent ones tend to less formal and that’s cool but for the opening one I just think it’s professional and good mannered to at least address the person you’re dealing with.

OK, perhaps that’s a small one…It just bothers me for some reason.

There are certainly much bigger issues when it comes to digital etiquette like whether or not you should be friends with your boss on Facebook for example. I guess it depends on the job you hold and how it’s perceived in that industry. If you work in a professional and old-school environment, perhaps it’s not such a great idea. But if you work in social media or in another Internet-related field, or perhaps in another funky field where technology is embraced, perhaps it’s not such a bad idea.

I guess a bigger question is how to react if you’re a manager who gets friended by a staffer or the reverse, where you’re an employee who gets friended by your boss. In these instances, I think the above-mentioned comment about the industry and job you have might help to play a part as does your actual interest in being friends with that person.

Yesterday I read a story about teachers who had been told by their school board not to become friends with students on Facebook. This one is probably a bit more obvious but I’m sure there are some teachers and other professionals who’ve gotten themselves into trouble by getting a bit too close to students or patients or other people who they should have maintained a more formal relationship with even if there was no bad intent.

These days it’s increasingly difficult to do anything that doesn’t get noticed by someone especially when whatever you’re doing is done online.

Just ask the high school secretary in Quebec who got fired from her job after it was found that she was moonlighting as an online porn star…

Whether it’s is fiddling with your iPhone or other device during meetings or your cellphone going off in a job interview, digital etiquette seems to be something that many people probably need to think a bit more about especially when they’re in an environment where people noticing how you’re acting can hurt you if it’s perceived that you’re being rude.

When it comes to social media, there’s the further realization too that much of what you do online – that is available for other people to read – is time-stamped so do you really want your boss and colleagues knowing that you’re spending your work hours playing around on non-work related social media sites?

Quality versus quantity

In my career I’ve found that it’s often a balancing act of quality versus quantity when it comes to so many aspects of my work life. You might find the same thing in yours.

Specifically, job searching is often a matter of quality versus quantity when it comes to applying for jobs. The throw-everything-against-a-wall-and-see-what-sticks approach is one where you fire off dozens (or more) resumes for jobs that you may or may not be qualified for or even interested in and then hope that someone calls you back for an interview. While you need some quantity you also want to focus on quality when it comes to job searching. Emailing off numerous resumes doesn’t always mean much since everyone else applying for the same jobs you are can do the same thing. Whether or not you’re accomplishing anything is the real question.

I’ve found that same thing in actual jobs I’ve had where working smarter yielded better results than working harder. In my first sales job, it was largely a phone sales role where I contacted businesses and consumers selling computer training courses and IT certifications. the nature of the job was that I’d initially speak with the contact on the phone and interested parties would then come into our office to attend the classes at which time we’d talk about further classes that might interest them.

When I started in this job, I was cold calling upwards of 80 people per day and sometimes might make as many as 100 phone calls per day. We had a call tracking tool so I could walk past the computer that showed the info and see how many calls I’d made that day and how many minutes I’d been on the phone too.

Over time as I built up my customer base and got repeat customers, I found that when I was at my most successful, I was perhaps making 30 calls per day and spent most of my time processing sales. So I went from basically doing sales prospecting about 80% of the time to perhaps 10% of the time as I got more and more repeat customers. More customers would call me to buy something rather than me having to call them.

And I became more successful too even though I was spending less time actually “selling” and more time processing sales. The thing is that if not for the grunt work at the beginning making all those cold calls, I’d not have achieved that success later on.

To a certain extent, job searching can be the same thing. When you fire off dozens of resumes for potential jobs, you might find that you accomplish virtually nothing. But if you attend several job fairs or networking events and maybe call several contacts on the phone rather than emailing them, you might yield better results. So you get better results by doing less actual work. You’re working smarter not harder.

If you are about to email someone, ask yourself why you’re not picking up the phone and calling them instead especially if you’re looking for a response of some sort. Email is a great communication tool but it’s also a great way for the person receiving the email to ignore you and not respond, which is clearly not what you want. You can work smarter not harder with your job search too and part of it knowing how best to deal with people who can positively influence your job searches and ultimately your career.

Email makes you strong

Email can also cost you during job searches when you don’t pay enough attention to what you write and make grammatical or spelling mistakes that the reader takes as meaning that you are either aren’t a good speller or are lazy and don’t double check your work.

I’ve seen cases where candidates who I was working with wanted to send a thank you email following an interview and sent a draft of the email to me first so I could check it over. In some cases, the email probably would have hurt them more than it would have helped them because it had spelling mistakes and grammatical errors that didn’t make them look too good. At this point, some hiring managers look for a reason not to hire someone and certainly sending a poorly written email might be a good start to lose out on a job.

I’ve also seen people turned down for resumes because their resume or cover letter was poorly written so this sort of thing can hurt you as well.

While people often use email to hide behind rather than picking up the phone to call someone, email can sometimes help you get in touch with a person who might prefer it as a contact method. I recall contacting people and leaving them several messages and not hearing back from them but when I emailed them, I heard back from them within minutes receiving a response from their Blackberry or iPhone.

It goes to show you that sometimes when contacting someone, a combination of methods – phone and email – often yields the best results.

When possible it doesn’t hurt to ask someone what their preferred method(s) of contact is just so you know in advance.
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Last week I saw a job posting that had some really interesting advice that I don’t remember seeing before, at least not in a job posting. It said:

For your privacy and protection, when applying to a job online: Never provide credit card or bank account information, or perform any sort of monetary transaction.

What great advice.

It would probably help solve the issue that I’ve been seeing recently, namely the numerous emails I get from people regarding a certain (fake) oil company that emails people expressing interest in the person even though the recipient of the email never applied to the job or company in the first place. It’s obviously a scam but people keep emailing me asking if it’s a real job and real company and what they should do.

Notwithstanding the fact that this email has all the hallmarks of a fake, phony company and a scam i.e. spelling and grammatical errors in the email, a free email address is used (like an oil company can’t afford a real email address with their company name in it?!), and the fact that in the email they tend to ask for a job visa processing charge or something like that.

Also notwithstanding the fact that the people who have received the email never applied to the company in the first place! Like legitimate companies just happen to come across your email address and offer you a job sight unseen with no interview! Yet people fall for this scam and I see lots of people emailing me honestly wondering if it’s a real company.

Bottom line: when you see anyone asking you online for money or any sort of fee during a job interview process, be very careful. Legitimate companies don’t do this in my experience.

Hiding behind email is something that is fairly easy to do and is something I have to watch out myself as I’m prone to doing it from time to time.

Sending an email rather than picking up the phone and calling someone or seeing them in person is an easy way to get a message out…but whether or not the person receiving the email – assuming the email got delivered to their In box and not their Deleted folder – is another question.

As a recruiter, I know it’s easy to send an email rather than picking up the phone and calling someone but again, it’s so easy to send an email and just as easy to ignore it. Plus you’re basically putting your fate in their hands as you wait for them (to hopefully) respond quickly.

Just as we spoke about yesterday regarding how working for someone puts your fate in the hands of others, so does hiding behind email when you know in your heart and head that picking up the phone or seeing someone in person will possibly get you closer to what you’re looking for.

This past week, I received several spam emails offering me free items that I knew were fake so I simply deleted the emails. You’ve probably received the same.

You’ve probably also received emails or seen offers for legitimate free things related to your career and wondered about the value.

Free resume critiques

Free job boards

Free answers to interview questions.

How much are these things worth? It certainly depends on who is providing the free things of course and they certainly might have some value (although in these cases the person offering the freebies is probably doing so to sell you something down the line.)

I also received another email this week which was rather bizarre. It came from a legitimate email address -or at least it looked like it came from one – and was a full letter signed by an HR rep (or at least he was claiming to be one) offering me a sales job and offering to pay me a number of things in exchange for working as a contractor.

The interesting thing about this email was that it didn’t really take the typical Nigerian scam email tone where it just looks fake from a mile away. This one looked quite legit…or course the “To” field of the email was blank meaning that this email had been fired off to perhaps hundreds or thousands of other people, but I digress.

The reason that I mention it is that several days earlier, I received an email from a fellow in India who said he’d been sent an email from a company in the UK wanting to interview him…even though he’d never applied for a job with the company.

Just like I hadn’t applied to the company I received the email from either.

He was pretty excited for the interview…he was just trying to figure out why he was getting the offer since he hadn’t even applied to the company in question.

Moral of the story: As usual, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

The rule of the day relates to how sarcasm should have its own font just so it’s perfectly clear that the person writing the sarcasm is actually being sarcastic.

Have you ever read an email (or a newspaper article, Internet article, magazine article, etc) and wondered if the person writing it was being serious or sarcastic?

I’ve read plenty of emails from people who I don’t yet know very well who try for some reason to make a joke and sometimes I can’t tell whether or not they’re actually joking or serious. Sarcasm only works when it’s obvious and when it’s applicable to the situation.

Sometimes it’s difficult to convey sarcasm unless you put an annoying smiley face after every incident just to make it patently obvious to readers that sarcasm was intended.

Moral of the story: Watch what you write and how you write it whether in a work setting or when applying for jobs. Sometimes people try to get a bit too cute and make a joke and might not realize that the person at the other end actually reading it might not get the joke.

Or worse, they take the comment the wrong way and you pay for it as a result.

As we’ve already discussed, many people these days consider a “job search” to be a matter of firing off dozens of resumes in response to jobs that they’ve seen online on various job boards. The issue of course is that it’s just as easy for everyone else to do the same thing so ultimately, the hiring manager receiving these emails might simply choose to ignore the (possibly) hundreds of submissions they get and look for a more effective way to hire someone.

In other words, if you email your resume to someone, does someone actually read it?

With spam filters these days, they might not even receive it.

In the old days – that would be up to the early to late 1990s – it wasn’t uncommon to mail or fax your resume to a hiring manager and then receive a letter in the mail several weeks later in response to acknowledge that they’d received your application!

You’d actually get a written response and not an automatic form email as is common these days. It felt like you were actually dealing with a human being at the other end.

It didn’t mean you were getting the job or even an interview but it did somehow feel you had made some progress. Now of course, it takes far less time and effort to email a resume than it did to print out, address, stamp and then mail a resume to the same person.

Of course, this also means that you may not have to worry about all the stuff we used to worry about when mailing a resume:

• Should I use colored or white paper?
• Should I use heavy stock paper or can I use the cheaper stuff?
• Should I hand write or type the address on the envelope?
• Should I include a cover letter?

These days, things tend to be spelled out a bit more than before. Jobs that you view online often tell you exactly what you need to apply for the job and many companies utilize online systems that enable them to decide what they want from you ie. Resume? Cover letter? Written answers to certain questions?

In that regard, when applying for jobs, the best thing to do is to follow the instructions you are given and give them what they’re asking for. Even if they don’t specifically ask for a cover letter, you can include one to not only give them a sample of your writing but more importantly to illustrate things not evident in your resume that show the reader why you are someone they need to interview. As a recruiter, I often speed read cover letters just to see what’s in there and to check the spelling, grammar, etc which can give me an idea as to the type of person I’m dealing with.