Here's something you don’t see everyday

It looks like one of the best college newspapers in the country forgot to renew its internet domain name. Hence, at this very moment, the Cavalier Daily is no longer available over the internets. This applies to all URLs hosted on the web page including old articles.

I am guessing that when the Cavalier Daily first appeared online, which was approximately ten years ago, it must have signed a ten year contract with its provider and the ten years have expired. A similar thing happened to the Washington Post in 2004 when it failed to renew the washpost.com domain it uses for its corporate email.

This is not only an example of something that internet businesses have to protect against but also of an opportunity for opportunistic operators. If I had know that the CavalierDaily.com URL was going to expire and the newspaper people had no clue what was about to hit them, I could have tried to register for the web site and ask the host service to reserve that site the moment it became available. I can then use it as the new site for my blog and the thousands of people who go to the site expecting to read the Cavalier Daily will instead get to read the saucy little things I write about my life.

“Pulled all the stops” for the “biggest season yet”

The trailer for Season 7 of 24 is now available. It comes with an on-screen announcement from Keifer Sutherland promising us the “biggest season yet.” Some of you may not want to watch the trailer because it reveals a surprise about the identity of the new bad guy.

Needless to say, I am going to block off two hours on my Outlook Calendar for Sunday, January 13, 2008.

From the most unlikely sources

One of the things that I noticed lately is that I have been getting leads about companies through some unconventional means. Almost a month ago, I interviewed at the internet division of a newspaper company. Before the interview, I was in the reception area waiting for the interviewer when a young woman walked in with another interview candidate. From the two minutes of small talk that ensued, I found out she’s a recruiter for a technical staffing firm and learned her first name and the name of her firm. I called her the following Monday, reminded her of our quick meeting the previous Friday, and offered to send her my resume. Last week she called to tell me about a product manager position at a local company that provides internet security products for large enterprises. I interviewed there on Wednesday.

 

Another lead that I got came from a student who was a year ahead of me in the MBA program (Class of 2006). We have never met but he emailed me out of the blue last week to tell me he has followed my blog with some regularity and to tell me about a local start up company that he has some connections with. I am going to spend some time next week looking over its website to see if this is something I’d be interested in.

 

Job leads are not the only things have resulted from unlikely sources. I was at a Chinese buffet restaurant on West Franklin Street for lunch today and the “fortune” in my fortune cookie read:

 

“You will besingled out for a promotion.”

Taking the search to Old Town, Alexandria

I arrived at the Embassy Suite hotel in Alexandria, Virginia this morning and attended the Executive Diversity Career Fair. The event was a bit disappointing. I decided to attend mainly because a management consulting firm with a large technology practice was listed in the list of companies that attended last year (the site did not list the companies that had committed to attend until almost the last minute). That company, however, was not at the event this year. I tried to spend most of the three hours there talking to as many companies as I could and the results were mostly disappointing. Many of the recruiters told me that the departments I wanted to work in were outside what the subset that they were recruiting for and referred me to the company web page. At one point I was talking to a very small consulting firm located in Arlington, Virginia (one whose name I am certain you have never heard of) and the recruiter said “I have been recruiting for more than 20 years and with your MBA, you really should look elsewhere such as (the firm that was a no show) or (another well known consulting firm).”

I did make two interesting connections. One is with a product manager who works in Raleigh for a telecom equipment company. He was at the event looking for a job. The other was with someone who graduated this May from another MBA program. We swapped stories about wanting a position that has exactly what we want and our experiences with not having a job five months after our business school graduations. He said “I am really glad I ran into you, I don’t feel so alone.”

Because I am a cheapskate and did not want to pay the eighteen dollar flat fee to park at the hotel, I found a metered spot three minutes away that cost one dollar per hour, with two hour limits. At the two hour mark, I went to feed the meter and on the way back to the hotel I saw what I immediately recognized from reading other blogs as one of the many cars that Google is using to record the streets of major cities for its Street View functionality. When I asked the driver of the California plated vehicle whether the car was equipped with a hard drive to store the information, his response was “I am sorry sir, I cannot tell you that.”

Carry me back to old Virginny

Greetings from Fairfax, Virginia. I arrived here on Saturday to attend a friend’s wedding and to attend a job fair tomorrow. This past weekend was filled with multiple reminders of both my life prior to business school and also my life at UVA.

 

On Saturday night, I drove to the Ballston section of Arlington to go to my favorite bar. After failing to find street side parking, I parked at the garage at Ballston Commons two blocks away. While heading toward the shopping mall exit, I passed by a bar with an orange sign announcing that the local UVA Alumni club was meeting to watch the football game against Maryland and decided to watch the remainder of the game. At the bar, I ran into three UVA alums I know – each I have known from a different part of my life, one from school, one from work, and one from somewhere else. The game ended in a photo finish. Words cannot describe the excitement in the room when Virginia’s #5 Mikell Simpson scored a touch town in the last 20 seconds, winning the game for Virginia (by one point) and breaking the record for the longest winning streak in the history of the UVA football program. I left the bar as a group of younger, more rowdy alums had just finished joining hands to sing the Good Old Song.

 

The wedding yesterday was beautiful. I got to spend some quality time with many people from UVA whom I have not seen in a long while. One good friend of mine and I swapped stories about our mutual friends and experiences from college. Many of  our sentences began with “whatever happened to” or  “did I ever tell you about that time when.” There was one girl whom I had not since graduation nine years ago. She looks so different that it wasn’t until she told me she is the correspondent fora major news organization that I recognized who I was talking to.

 

This weekend is making me begin to look forward to the 2008 Reunion Weekend.

Climbing back onto the saddle

I did not blog last week was because I was in a foul mood. Much of it had to do with the feedback from my interview. This was the product manager job at the internet division of a newspaper company where the manager said I was “too eager” and was not a good cultural fit with the team. It knocked me off my horse because it reinforced a general feeling I have about my job search – that this particular job (or any other jobs that I am interested in) does not call for anything that I cannot do. Yet because of subjective standards such as “personality” or “cultural” fit, I spend my weekdays looking for a job while 96% of my classmates are actually working at one.

 

While I am on the topic of my classmates, I have done quite a deal of soul searching as to just what it is that separates them from me that they have been more successful at finding a job. They certainly are not any smarter than I am. I was reassured of this last week when I was putting together a cover letter for a non product management position at a computer hardware company. I started thinking about a classmate who works there. One day in our Data, Tools, and Decision class the professor said that while X percentage of women voted for Bill Clinton, only Y percentage of the votes Clinton received came from women. This classmate proceeded to raise his hand and ask “I don’t understand why there is a difference. Shouldn’t the two numbers be the same?”

 

This is both reassuring and upsetting. It’s good to know that my employed classmates are not any smarter than I am. Yet it’s disturbing that this classmate has a job and I don’t. If it’s not a matter of intelligence, then what is it then? I think a lot of it has to do with the relevancy of my experience. A plurality, if not majority, of my classmates have worked in either consulting, finance, or marketing. A classmate once called this the “MBA median” because this is the mainstream which MBA recruiters consider most relevant and most transferable to the positions they are hiring for. And because I worked as a software engineer and my duties was not related to either consulting, finance, or marketing, I need to significantly spin my experience to make them relevant to recruiters.

 

And spinning is where the rest of my problem resides. Selling myself is something that I am hesitant to do and on many interviews, I find myself psychologically scaling a wall that I cannot get over. After I started working at AOL, I began noticing that I regularly found myself in situations where someone would ask the obligatory “where do you work” question and when I gave the name of my employer, the person’s facial expression would change. It’s almost as though I became more valuable because I worked at AOL. This made me uncomfortable and eventually I began telling people that I worked “at a software company.” I compare this to other MBAs who always manage to talk about themselves in most glowing way possible. And sometimes they do not allow the truth to stand in their way. A 2003 Kenan-Flagler alum once told me about the bad job market during his second year. His classmates tried to sell themselves to recruiters by lying that they had received other job offers. In contrast I have a problem hearing people say that they live in “DC” when their homes are in Arlington, Virginia.

 

The small bit of good news (in a secular sense) is that hitting the bottom often gives me the chance to bounce back. I scheduled a meeting with someone at Kenan-Flagler later this week who provides career counseling for MBA alums and made arrangements to go to a job fair in DC … oh wait - it’s actually in Alexandria, Virginia - next week. Two weeks ago someone commented that she was surprised I didn’t have a job. She said I should have no trouble getting a job because I am outgoing and have a great personality. So in some ways I am hoping that this “personality” thing is not so subjectiveafter all.

Receiving more honest feedback

When I was writing my blog posting at this time on Monday, I originally wanted to write about something that happened that morning that really upset me. But other things intervened and I ended up writing about something else instead.

 

About three weeks ago I got a call from a headhunter about a position that sounded almost too good to be true. A Raleigh newspaper has an interactive division that manages the internet tools used by the more than 30 newspapers owned by its parent company. The product manager position is local and involves working with newspaper editors and others in the newsroom. I had the interview on Friday where I met with the manager, a director, and another product manager. I thought the interview went really well. The research I had done on product management really paid off. I asked questions to show that I had done thinking into some of the duties and challenges that this particular position entails.  At the end of the interview, the manager gave me her office number, which is always a good sign, and asked me to call with any questions.

 

I got the call on Monday. The headhunter said the manager felt I am not a good personality fit because I came across as “too eager.” He went on to say that my “energy level may rub some people the wrong way.” The rest of the phone call consisted with him telling me of ways I can utilize that information to make me a better interviewer. He suggested that I should speak to every interviewer in his own “language” by first assessing the individual’s personality and speaking to him at his own level. He said I don’t want to come across as “too aggressive” or “hard to manage.”

 

When the phone call ended, I was so shocked you could have knocked me over with a feather. As the next couple of minutes rolled by, the shock was replaced by anger. I did absolutely everything I have been told that I should do on interviews and at this company it was held against me. The job description asks for someone to “act as a leader within the company” and I tried to give the interviewers exactly what they wanted. The ultimate irony is that my former co-workers and classmates have never accused me of being “too aggressive” before. I guess maybe I was so excited about the position that I came across as intense and the interviewer had this image of  hiring the equivalent to a “bull with an MBA degree running around in a China shop.”

 

The only consolation I have is that God still remains faithful and if He didn’t want me to work at that newspaper company, there’s got to be another place He wants to work at right? Right?

Beginning to stink and becoming stale

Today’s the first day of October and more than one third of a calendar year has gone by since my graduation from business school. I am beginning to feel a bit frustrated that I still don’t have a job. On Wednesday I was having dinner at Chipotle’s and saw a second year (Class of 2008) MBA student. I called out his name and he came over. We talked about his second year and when we got to the part of the conversation where I said I still did not have a job yet, his entire demeanor changed. While I don’t want to go so far as to say that he was judging me for not having a job, I certainly felt that at the very least it made him uncomfortable. When the conversation ended I said something that I often say to people whom I run into, “hey if there is anything I can ever do for you, let me know.” He responded with hesitancy - as though he couldn’t believe that an unemployed alum could possibly help him with anything.

 

The encounter underscored something that I suspect is true about my job search - that it comes with an undefined expiration date, after which I begin to “stink” and become stale. Just two days prior to my encounter at Chipotle’s, a friend brought this to my attention when he suggested that at some point I will no longer be considered a “recent MBA graduate” and will have to explain to a recruiter what I have been doing in the time since graduation. I don’t know when that imaginary deadline is. More interestingly, I don’t know how to answer if a recruiter were to ask about my activities since graduation. I can tell the truth and say that I have been looking for jobs but have not received any offers or I can lie and talk about fictional trips to foreign destinations. One of these choices is more in accordance to my moral beliefs while the other is more likely to result in a job offer.

 

Such are the games that we play as MBA job seekers and the choices they present to us.