The Y Factor

Today was my last day at work for Super Book Deals. I sat down with my boss today, and he said, “You’ve done so much to help us to accomplish our goals over the past three weeks, now I want to help you accomplish yours.” My ultimate goal out of the whole scholarship experience is to end up with a job, so he had me print out my resume. I came back later in the day and we had a nice long talk about what a resume should look like.

Lesson #7, SO WHAT?

As John read through my resume, through every single bullet point he replied with “So What? Meticulously Organized and excellent Multitasker. So What? 3.5 GPA. So What? Why should I care that you have any of these things?”

After the initial heart dropping that comes with all constructive criticism, I asked, “because they mean that I am qualified?”

“No. None of these bullet points tell me that you are qualified. They tell me that you have done tasks. They do not tell me what you have learned from them, if you even learned from them, or how they will help you do the job you are applying for. You need to explain. You have all of the greatest bullet points that you could have on a resume, you have this scholarship, you run your own business, but it doesn’t tell me why that applies to me or the job you are applying for.”

“Consistently met high sales goals at a high end furniture company. SO WHAT?! Why do I care? You need to tell me that you met these goals by using your sales training to close sales! Work Experience at 3 companies for scholarship. SO WHAT?!?! This is a huge point, you got HANDS ON work experience doing Marketing, the job you are applying for, and actually helped the company achieve goals. THIS is what I want to hear when I am looking at a resume. Don’t assume I’m going to connect the dots. Make it loud and clear how YOUR skills will benefit ME.”

So to all of you job applicants out there, and there are many of you, remember that you need to look at your resume as if you are the interviewer. Why do I care? Tell them loud and clear what they want to know and why YOU are the one they should hire.

The Art of Delegation

At work this morning, while searching for inspiration for my next post, I had a sit down with my current employer. After this discussion I decided that it might be beneficial to have a lesson not only targeted at my fellow workers and other interns, but a lesson targeted at employers.

The discussion this morning was about an employer's standpoint of an intern and what exactly they should do with an intern. It's not only hard from our side because we're being adapted into a new environment and have to learn new things and new processes, but it's hard from their side as well. Employers have a path, a track to a goal in mind, and when you insert an intern, the question becomes what tasks can I give to this intern that will help me achieve my goals. The problem then than becomes that no one wants to give up their work for the intern to do because it's easier for the employees to do it themselves. This leads me to...

Lesson #6, Delegation is key to obtaining your goals.

Delegation is sort of an art. When the company delegates tasks to me, they have to be tasks that achieve the company's goal, but are still independent from the works of others. The employees at Super Book Deals can take me aside and assign some of their normal tasks to me, but that would be a waste. This is because it would take me time to learn these tasks, and I would only be able to do them for three weeks until I leave and the responsibility falls back on them again, not to mention they could have been doing it better in the first place. This is where the art of delegation needs to be played correctly.

The employers here were smart enough to assign me tasks that were independent of everything else, but still helped to achieve the common goal. They had me handle a giant pile of contracts that had been laying around for months waiting to be scanned and filed. When I got to the filing cabinet, it was a mess and completely unorganized. By scanning the contracts and organizing the file cabinet, I helped the common cause, and now the process of finding files doesn't rest in the mind of a sole person. It is a numerical method that is efficient and anyone can find anything. I was also assigned the task of updating the facebook page and creating a blog. These tasks still helped the company to achieve the common goal, but it didn't require me to explain my process to someone else to hand it over to them.

So the lesson in short is that delegating tasks is important to the success of a business. Determine the person's skills, and assign them tasks that are productive but at the same time independent from your process. Give them work that they can do by themselves without the detailed explanation of the secret steps that solely reside in the mind of one individual. Have them step outside of these processes and tweak them so that they can be preformed independently of one's prior knowledge. Create a system that works no matter who is performing preforming the task.