How Email Address Typos Cost You Jobs and Business

At the beginning of my HR career back in the early '90s (which seems much more recent than 20 years ago), I had just received my WARN layoff notice from GE Aerospace (which no longer exists, sold off in pieces to its rivals General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin), giving me 60 days before my last day at GE Aerospace to find another job, inside or outside of GE.

There were two GE jobs available locally at my level and function, both at GE Plastics (which no longer exists either; sold off in pieces to SABIC and Momentive, respectively); one at the Selkirk location; and the other at the Waterford location. My site HR Manager and mentor, Tom, ensured that I was a candidate for both jobs.

I interviewed at Selkirk first. I liked the team and the work they were doing. When I returned to my office at GE Aerospace from the interview that day, I wanted to send each of them a thank-you note. Since I had introduced using PROFS email to distribute a now-crude electronic version of the weekly employee newsletter at my site (a precursor to Microsoft Outlook, which my dying business could not afford to purchase), I wanted to walk the talk of my innovation. So I sent each member of the interview team a thank-you note via PROFS, which was unheard of back then. Interview etiquette firmly dictated hand-written snail-mail thank-you notes.

The site Recruiter responded within the hour, informing me that they had hired an internal candidate and thanked me for interviewing for the position. I was annoyed. Clearly, they had already made their hiring decision before my interview, and I was interviewed to merely fulfill their EEO requirements. I shared my frustration with my immediate supervisor, Chuck. "Those who live by the sword, die by the sword," he grinned. "That's the risk you take with email communication." While I was eventually hired by the Waterford site - less then one week before the end of my WARN period - Chuck's observation always stuck with me, even to present day.

Now, I have performed my English-major rant in prior posts about typos in emails, which invariably cost job candidates and vendors both potential jobs and new customers. Recently, however, the typos have achieved a new level of failure through imprecision.

In the last month, I have received 3 emails with typos in the email address itself. So when I referred back to an email and clicked on the email signature to send a fresh email in response, the recipient never received my return email due to the typos in their email address and I received a mail delivery failure message from their email system. I helped the first one out because the guy fired great on all of the rest of his cylinders; he had transposed letters in his own name in his email address. I gave up on the other two email address typos: basically, it was too much work and too annoying to compensate for someone else's lack of attention to detail. If their prospecting emails caused this much work and aggravation: how would it be to work with them every day?

Wondering why you may not have heard back from that job application or that new customer prospect? Proof your email address, please. And everything else you send out in the email, while you're at it. It can only help support your success.

  

 

Giving Pays Large Dividends for All of Us at Work

If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time.

But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.

  

-Lilla Watson

I've spent most of the day putting the finishing touches on this year's property tax appeal; my brain cells are squeezed dry. I am, as always, looking forward to a lively discussion on Tuesday, while Noah and Joel watch me channel my inner amateur lawyer.

Earlier today, our Senior Youth conducted their annual Bridging Service to send their dear comrades off to college. One of them quoted Lilla Watson during their presentation to us. Another youth, a former Coming-of-Age mentee, shared her love and appreciation for her older sister, headed off to start her college career. "I know my life would not have been the same without her in it; I will miss her terribly," she said.

Yesterday, my good friend Avon asked me to present a Career Workshop to up-and-coming young women served by The Northeast Parent & Child Society. I'm no fashion diva by any means; and my challenge was to coach these young women on how to make a great first impression.

In preparation, I reached back to my own early career experience, with a equivalent college loan debt of about $40,000, making only $8,000 a year during my first of many rides to the Recession Rodeo. What meant the most to me as I began interviewing for career jobs? The first thing that came to mind was how to look professional on a shoestring budget. So I put together an interview outfit accordingly:

• Navy jacket:      $6
• Navy pants:       $3
• Peach blouse:   $3
• Matching scarf: $1
• Navy shoes:      $7

And made it part of my "show me, don't tell me" workshop presentation.

That day, I shared my experience, strength and hope with about 60 talented young women, as my mentors before me have so lovingly and generously done for me. I validated their great outfits, all decked out for the Career Fair. I recognized some of their talents on the spot, and told them. I gave advice on how to best manage and conceal tattoos. I gave them my daddy's advice: if you make 30 calls and you get one "yes," you're having a great day: for after all, you only need one job. My friend and co-presenter Barb Wisnom provided a new, more positive trope on that theme: try and collect 20 "no's" and make it a game. Can you? I'm going to try it out. Because one of the hardest lessons when you're marketing yourself to potential employers (customers) to learn is that it's business, not personal. "How can your feelings not get hurt," one of the students asked. "Practice, repetition and time," I replied, with full knowledge and serenity.

Saturday was a day of vocational giving, and I received nothing in return except an unexpected and delicious sandwich from Ambition. And from my experience, the dividends that always come thereafter are: priceless.

Focus the Strengths of Your Own Team of Avengers at Work

Warning Before Reading: Spoiler Alert for the movie The Avengers.

Joel, Noah and I saw The Avengers this weekend. It was a great movie on a number of levels, the best movie we've seen as a family in a long time. Of course, what delighted me personally were the plot elements that addressed The Avengers often-exciting and frankly chaotic team-building process - it was more of a series of brawls than a process. Their storming phase included but was not limited to the triggering of weapons of mass destruction and destroying large swaths of New York City. No time or patience for an HR geek to facilitate the Avengers through the universal development phases that all teams experience. Movie or reality: chaos is definitely the more common state.  

When I attended and subsequently taught facilitation training at GE, one of the optional overnight homework assignments was to ask the class to watch 12 Angry Men: not only a great flick with a wonderful ensemble cast, but also a great "show me, don't tell me" way of absorbing the challenges and rewards of developing and working with high-performing teams.  

The Avengers is more complex and nuanced than 12 Angry Men, however. The plot thread of the marginalization and eventual integration of Dr. Bruce Banner / The Hulk as one of the Avengers is a team effectiveness nugget to note.

As we're re-introduced to Bruce Banner, he's banished himself from his life's work and from any stress triggers to keep The Hulk from making an appearance. He can't even off himself to escape his volatile burden: he and his alter-ego the Hulk are both indestructible. Bruce is self-deprecating and at times ashamed: the last time he was in New York City, he sheepishly admits that he "broke Harlem" and was not quite welcome back there.

Some of the Avengers keep their distance: Nastasha Romanov (The Black Widow) and Tony Stark (Iron Man) however immediately engage him as a respected colleague who they admire and want to get to know better.

Of course, The Hulk subsequently returns and wreaks havoc and destruction in his usual psychopathic way. The rest of The Avengers are similarly challenged, by both external and internal demons, not unlike what the Hulk experiences.

However, when the going got tough, the Avengers regrouped as a tough team and got going. Captain America marshaled The Avengers, doling out assignments; for example, Tony Stark was charged with repair and engineering work while fighting off alien enemies swarming like killer bees. When he got to Hulk's assignment, Cap directed him to "Hulk: Smash!" Hulk grinned and there was a sea change: Cap not only acknowledged Hulk as a team member and "saw him;" Cap also asked Hulk to take his strength and use it for the good mission of the team.

Hulk subsequently teamed with Thor and saved Tony Stark, and got his confidence back in the process: while the punch he gave Thor after they defeated their group of bad guys was not appropriate behavior for the workplace, for The Avengers' comic-book work environment and norms, it signaled that Bruce / Hulk had come in from the margins and regained his confidence in his abilities and his contribution. The team saw it and he saw it. When there work was done and one team member asked him how he kept his anger (and the Hulk) at bay, Bruce grinned confidently and declared that "he was always angry;" e.g., that the Hulk was always there, a part of him, and clearly he embraced that as a strength and a contribution.

Which made the last scene after the credits all the more delightful: The Avengers, sitting together in a destroyed NYC deli, have a quiet sandwich together.

You know you've made it as a team when you can share a quiet meal together without the need to chat.

How will you marshal the strengths of your own team of Avengers - inviting them in from the margins, self-imposed or otherwise - to support your mutual success at work and in your business?

Share the Success of Your Discretionary Power on LinkedIn

The 8th and 9th-graders conducted their Coming-of-Age Service today. They did a wonderful job sharing their musical, artistic, and writing talents with the rest of us in the congregation, including their credos - the culmination of a year of study and self-reflection. One of the Coming-of-Age youth, in sharing her credo with us, shared also her belief that if we all did our small parts in small ways to help others, then together we could actually make things better overall.

At the end of the service, their adult mentors (one of whom was my husband Joel) stood behind the Coming-of-Age youth and shared with the congregation one to three words about what was special about their respective mentees. The positive use of the discretionary power of our adult community's network in support of our young mentees was evident (and heart-warming) indeed.

I met a seasoned professional at a large networking function last week who's been out of work several months due to the elimination of their department at their last company. We chatted for a while and I offered my Recession Rodeo experience, strength and hope as well as a few tips and advice on how to reach out to potential decision-makers in their field. I also encouraged Seasoned Professional to connect with me on LinkedIn, which would expand their LinkedIn network view further for potential local companies to pursue. After I accepted Seasoned Professional's invitation, I reviewed their profile. They had no fewer than 13 recommendations from their last company, from direct supervisors, managers and customers alike.

So I used a bit of my own discretionary power, and forwarded Seasoned Professional's LinkedIn profile to one of my contacts on LinkedIn, with this note:

 [Dear Contact]! I hope this finds you and yours well. 
  
I met [Seasoned Professional] at a networking event this week; I can't personally vouch for them as a reference, however they seem like a good egg in case you're looking for a [seasoned professional] - they have 13 references on their LinkedIn profile including from their immediate managers; their department was eliminated earlier this year. 

Would love to catch up with for lunch; please let me know what your schedule looks like.  

Have a great weekend,  

Deb. 

Debra J. M. Best, SPHR

How will you leverage your discretionary LinkedIn power and support the mutual success of you and your network this week; and every week? Let us know how it turned it out for all of you, and I will, too.

Your LinkedIn Headline is Your Calling Card for Success

I spent last Wednesday night with a great group of women from the Schenectady BPW, sharing my LinkedIn experience, strength and hope in support of our mutual success.

One of the first tips I shared was the importance of your LinkedIn headline: if your LinkedIn profile is your website (which I firmly believe), then the headline on your profile is your calling card, announcing that you're open to whatever opportunities you seek or hope to share. "I'm involved in several endeavors that speak to me vocationally and creatively," I shared with the group. "So I include them in my headline:

Change / Project Manager | HR / Recruiting Leader | Career Coach | Writer |

Small-Business Social Media Marketing SME."

"You include everything in your LinkedIn headline?" one of the workshop attendees asked. "Yes," I responded. "I subscribe wholeheartedly to Dr. Wayne Dyer's assertion that I will not die with the music still inside of me. So I include all of my 'music' in my LinkedIn headline and profile. When we say who we are and what we do, opportunities open up on LinkedIn and elsewhere." The attendee, a wonderful women full of "music" herself, decided to update her headline.

I received a LinkedIn message from her two days later:

Thanks, Deb! After working on my LinkedIn account [and headline] last night, I was invited to [a key business organization] event as a guest next week to network about [my project]. Who knew????

I did.

To our shared success on LinkedIn (and everywhere else)!

Your Leadership Presentation for Every Audience at Work

Dress shabbily, they notice the dress. Dress impeccably, they notice the woman.
 

-Coco Chanel

First, a disclaimer: I'm not a professional stylist, or, by a long shot, the best-dressed professional I know. Nor would I compare myself to Coco Chanel. I learned the quote from one of my all-time favorite movies, Working Girl. I'm just another blue-collar girl from Queens who acts on her dreams using her smarts. Like most of us, I learned from experience to dress professionally enough for each situation to the extent where the focus was on my smarts and not on what I was wearing.

Which is why I loved working at the GE plant where the main manufacturing ingredient was a diluted acid running in pipes overhead. In that environment, the only practical uniform for men and women alike was safety glasses, metal-toed safety shoes, dirt-streaked jeans, polo shirts and hard hats with our last names on the front. I felt right at home; and my Granddaddy Nat, a skilled electrician who passed away before I graduated from college, would have been proud of me.

The Vice President of Human Resources for my GE business, not so much. I had been invited to attend a meeting for promotable women managers at Headquarters facilitated by the VP of HR. I did have enough sense at that point in my career to wear clean clothes (dress pants, no jeans), regular shoes and glasses sans my beloved hardhat. We were told that the dress code for the meeting was business casual. However, the Headquarters version of business casual was clearly a step up from our plant-level definition of business casual. They all wore blazers. I wore a sweater.

My beloved boss and mentor Bill coached me the very next day, displaying minimally the discomfort of a male-to-female dress-code coaching discussion. "The VP of HR liked you," Bill began. "Great!" I said, starting to leave. Bill waved me back into the chair. "However, he didn't know how smart you were until you opened your mouth." I was puzzled. "What do you mean?" I asked. Bill paused. "He liked you a lot, which is why he asked me to speak to you about your executive presentation, in the spirit of supporting your career path and ongoing success." I was still confused. "So he liked the way I talked but he has an issue with my executive presentation? I don't understand." Bill got to the point. "He had an issue with the way you looked." Great, here I am back in high school. I started to pick up my planner to leave. "Bill, if this is going to be a discussion about my weight or the fact that I'm no great beauty, let's please not go there." Bill was a bit taken aback. He down-shifted into Queens, my native vernacular. "Stop being a pain in the ass and sit down," he directed. I sat, subdued. He leaned over the desk. "When is the last time you wore a blazer to work?" he queried. Oh, I wasn't wearing the right uniform for that group - that was the issue. "When I interviewed for my job here," I replied sheepishly. Bill smiled. "Point taken," I continued. "I will take care of it immediately." Bill leaned back in his chair, relieved and proud. "Thank you, I knew you would." I hightailed it to the store right after work that day and bought four new suits. A bit much, but I needed to make up for lost leadership presentation / credibility.

How you dress at work demonstrates your vocational choice as well as your situational leadership: whether you dress so you'll be noticed for your talents or skills; or whether you dress like the executives because you aspire to be an executive; or whether you proudly wear your hardhat so the guys in the plant won't think you're a stuck-up elitist. Or Madonna.

Good Boundaries Make Good Hires

And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

                                                 -An excerpt from Robert Frost's poem Mending Wall


Nothing is more frustrating when you need to hire 100 seasonal warehouse employees in 3 weeks than to have the post-offer, pre-employment drug test come back positive. Cost-per-hire time and money down the toilet (no pun intended), including but not limited to the wasted cost of the drug test, which could run about $35 - $50 a pop.

Now, you may not agree with the concept of drug-testing in the workplace at all: let's agree to disagree. In my experience in manufacturing and warehouse environments rife with automated conveyors, heavy forklift and cherry-picker lift-truck traffic, you want everyone to be clean, sober and constantly on the alert. A 5-story fall from a cherry-picker at the top of your typical warehouse to its cement floor is certain death. A human / forklift collision is at minimum a loss of physical capability and at maximum, life-changing paralysis or even death as well. You get what side of the fence I'm on.

Early in my warehouse hiring career, we had about 10 drug-test failures in one week. A $500 bite in one week out of my already thin Recruiting budget. The Operations, Loss Prevention (LP) and Human Resources teams got together and brainstormed. Here are some of the solutions we developed and implemented:

• We inserted messages into our employment application and ads that we were a Drug-Free employer;
• We posted signs with the same messaging in our interview areas;
• We developed a fact sheet for applicants to read during the offer process that not only spelled out we were a Drug-Free Employer, but also that we also required a post-offer, pre-employment drug test.

These hiring boundaries had an immediate impact, and we saw a drop in our pre-employment drug test failures. But we still had one or two each week, which continued to be a frustrating waste of time and money. I reached out to our testing vendor and asked what drug was the most common reason for failing our pre-employment drug test. It was marijuana, hands-down. We gathered the teams together again. "It's easy to grow and readily available, that's why it's an issue," one LP team member observed. "True," I responded. "It's not considered a 'hard' drug," a member of the HR team added. "So maybe applicants don't think we're testing for it." Great point. "Okay," I summarized. "Let's add that we test for marijuana to the fact sheet and see what happens."

I hit the jackpot later that week. Two well-dressed and professional young women attending college locally came in during the 2nd shift open-interviews; they were friends and I interviewed them together. As I prepared their offer letters and pre-employment drug testing paperwork, I gave them the revised fact sheet to read that spelled out marijuana as an illegal drug included in the drug test. "Ma'am?" one of them queried politely. I looked up. Disappointed, they handed back all of the new hire paperwork to me. "We can't work here," the young woman continued. Her friend nodded. "We smoke weed every day," she added. "We don't want to waste your time. Thank you for the opportunity." I nodded my understanding. "Thank you for letting me know," I said, genuinely grateful. "I wish you both the best of luck." I appreciated their candor, but wondered how many opportunities they had to pass up because of that personal choice.

Are you clearly and constructively communicating your workplace cultural and compliance boundaries as part of the hiring process? If not, consider the opportunity to lower your overhead costs -- your cost-per-hire / cost-of-turnover -- by proactively and positively sharing your workplace running rules with your lead candidates.

Good boundaries make good hires.