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[From
his platform as a senior house writer for the top executives at
IBM, HP, MasterCard, Arthur D. Little, Symphony Services and
other companies, an American author has compiled a remarkable
and often amusing series of universal insights into what works
and what doesn’t work in the art of doing business in the
global economy. The title comes from the proverb about a frog
and his need to see more of the world than just the narrow
confines of the well in which he live.]
Following is the full content of chapter eleven of the
book aimed at helping students find a good job in the IT
world—particularly for students who are not lucky enough to be
a graduate from an IIT university--as was my experience growing
up in the United States. – Author (Bio of Chuck Boyer in the
foot of page)
Chapter
Eleven “Get Your Frog Out of the Well”
The
top IITians are a sought-after group, but there are some things
the rest of us can do to improve our chances.
How
do you use all this stuff to get a job?
Hint:
Start with the net roots and keep going
My short answer to the question, “How do I use this book to
get a good job with an American company in India?” is very
short indeed. I haven’t got a clue. My assumption is, after
researching this book for the last 18 months and interviewing
dozens of people, mostly Indians, that you would get a job with
an American company in India the same way you would get a job
with an Indian company in India or an Indian company in America.
This assumption isn’t exactly a wild guess. Most of the major
U.S. companies in India, e.g., IBM, HP, Microsoft, are managed
and run by Indians.
However, we both know that the job scene in India, wonderful
as it is right now, has its own special challenges. Job openings
at major companies, particularly in the IT and IT-related
industries, can quickly turn into mob scenes. A Web site posting
for a handful of openings at a desirable company will often
generate a deluge of responses. According to Fortune
Magazine’s Sheridan Prasso, Google India receives
“thousands and thousands of job applications a month.”
Google, as of this writing, has about 900 engineers at its
Bangalore center.
So even though there is a shortage of talent, competition for
the best jobs is daunting. Equally challenging is the turnover
rate at some companies in the IT sector. While Google claims to
have virtually zero turnover, other companies are experiencing
employees jumping ship at the rate of 10 to 20 percent a year.
That’s borderline chaos.
That said, job opportunities at American companies in India
do abound. In fact it’s probably easier to get a job in the IT
and related industries in India right now than it would be to
get a full-time job in the publishing industry. Websites at IBM
India, HP India, and Cisco India—to name a few—have got the
welcome mat out for bright graduates. They are so eager for you
to join their companies they are almost willing to let you
establish your own rules.
Do
you like to sleep late and come to work after lunch? No problem.
Is there a favorite food you like? We’ll have it for you when
you get here. Need some guaranteed time off for the Strawberry
Fields concert in Bangalore? We can do that. You just name it.
I may be exaggerating, but not by much. Vineet Nayar, the CEO
of HCL Technologies, India’s fifth largest outsourcing
company, wants managers to “suck up to employees.” Welcome
to the age of the employee. Trouble is, these are the benefits
and perks flowing to the top 20 percent or so. IBM’s Extreme
Blue internship program takes 20 or 30 high-potential graduates
and gives them an intense 90 days to learn the company and try
out innovative ideas at its India Software Labs. Other companies
have somewhat similar programs for “incubating talent,
technology, and innovation,” as IBM Software Labs likes to
say. But these are top students from premier schools.
The question is, how do the rest of us bright, hardworking
people land jobs with these great companies?
Part of the answer lies in turning the “issue and
expectation” concept on its head and re-thinking what it means
to get a job from the employer’s point of view.
Almost all of us, 99.9 percent, believe that getting a job in
a competitive market means we have to have a great resume—good
grades, good school, good recommendations, and some good
experience. And we also have to be able to fill in the blanks on
those little psychological dramas that the Human Resources
people are constantly dreaming up.
For instance, a question such as “Have you ever lied?”
could really be an intelligence test to see if you are smart
enough to put down the right answer. Then of course you’ll
have to suffer through the usual gauntlet of “How would
you describe your personality?”, “What would you say
your weaknesses are?”, “What do you know about our
company?”, and “What did you like least about your former
employer?” The trick to these tiresome questions
is to always answer with a positive—especially the ones that
seem to be looking for a negative answer. For example,
“What’s the worst thing people say about me?” Your answer:
“People sometimes say I’m impatient to get things done. I
don’t like working slowly.” And what about that
“Have you ever lied” question? The answer is always: “I
was raised in a family that just didn’t tolerate lying.
However, I did once lie to a police officer about my age when I
was stopped while driving my grandmother to Delhi for medical
treatment.” And, of course, do your homework about the company
you’ve applied to.
The real questions run the gamut from trivial to complex.
They range from “Describe your ideal job and tell us when you
first became interested in computer science?” to “Given a simple program designed
to take inputs of integers from 1-1000 and to output the
factorial value of that number, how would you test this
program?”
But what if you don’t even get so far
as to be invited in for an interview? What do you do then? This
is where the Issue and Expectation thinking can help. Normally,
seeking a job coming out of college or moving from one employer
to another presents the issue: I need a job. The expectation is:
There is a lot of competition for this job; it’s not going to
be easy. You are going to turn the issue and the expectation
upside down. You are going to create the issue that “they need
you,” and the expectation that “you will be a great
long-term investment for the company.”
First, put yourself in the shoes of the
employer. This is what you are thinking: I need good people with
certain skills to fill some immediate job slots. But I also want
people who will grow and continue to contribute as the work
changes and evolves. I need smart people with great skills, but
also ones who show a budding sense of maturity who may turn out
to be terrific long-term, loyal employees. My expectation is
that I’m going to get a lot of resumes that look nearly
identical, and I will have to interview extensively to find out
what the person behind the resume is really like. I need to know
who this person is and what their real ambitions are. Will they
be a good match for our culture?
That’s what the department head who
needs you at IBM, HP, Cisco, and Microsoft is thinking. The HR
people, who will do the initial interviews to determine if you
get to see the department head — well, no one knows what
they’re thinking,. They probably don’t know themselves what
they’re thinking. (Have you ever noticed that HR people attend
a LOT of conferences? That’s where they dream up all those
fuzzball questions.)
That’s why our strategy will be to go
“around” the HR people—pleasant and polite as they
are—and go straight to the hearts and minds of department
heads who really can use you.
First thing we do is the netroots work. Netroots is a
relatively new word, a portmanteau of Internet and Grassroots.
Invented to describe the Internet’s impact on politics and
elections in the U.S., netroots can also describe the process of
data mining the net to find out what’s happening in the world.
In this case, we want to learn everything we can about the
company where we want to work.
You already know how to find all the Web resources pertaining
to a company’s hiring information. That is easy. Right now
companies have the red carpet out pleading with you to come and
work for them. IBM India has great Web sites for job seekers,
and HP India actually lists all the specific jobs and locations
open right now, today, for new employees.
This is good, but it has the obvious drawback that everyone
else in the country is reading the same list.
That’s why you are going to take a slightly different path.
Go to the company’s Web site and select “About HP” or
“About IBM” or whatever. When you get to those pages find
the IR (Investor Relations) site. On this site, or nearby you
will find their Press Release site. When you get to the press
releases read ALL of them for the last year to eighteen months,
even two years back.
The press releases are a treasure trove of vital information.
First, they’ll tell you detailed information about every major
product and program release the company has made. Not only that,
they’ll provide the names of who was in charge, and even some
of the key players. You want these names.
Second, the press releases will also tell you all about every
merger and acquisition the company has made in the last two
years or more. Large companies buy up promising small companies,
usually software- and services-oriented companies, as though
they were eating PaniPuri. Every major company you might want to
work for has made dozens, if not dozens of dozens, of
acquisitions in the last few years.
Often, these acquired smaller companies move right into the
parent company more or less intact. They just change the name on
the front door and on their Web site, fire a couple of innocent
bystanders just to let everyone know there’s a new boss in
town, and continue working business as usual.
One of these dozens and dozens of small companies is doing
the exact same work you did your thesis on at Manipal or Pune
Institute of Advanced Technology. For example, you’re
something of an expert on Ruby On Rails. Not only that, you
think you’ve figured out a way to radically speed up
Oracle-based SAP installations on HP systems. Bingo. You find
the name of a recently acquired small company doing this or
related work, and you get every name you can find from the Press
Releases, and any other Web search.
Now comes the hard part. Remember paper and envelopes? If you
don’t, find someone over 30 years old and they will explain.
Now you have to sit down and write letters to all the names in
that company or department. Just explain who you are and what
you can do, and that you would like to come in and talk to them.
You can also ferret out their email and send a very short note
to them. One of three things will happen:
1.
They will ignore you.
2.
They will refer you to the HR people.
3.
Or, they will establish an email dialog, and then invite you to
come in and chat with them.
I can’t tell you for sure that they will admire that you
contacted them directly, but they will certainly respect the
fact that you searched them out, knew what they were doing, and
showed an interest in helping them. This can be a huge step in
landing a job when your chances of being “discovered” in the
resume blizzard are not as good as you could hope for.
You can use this same process to try to land a job with a
company that contracts with the big company you really want to
work for eventually. Working at the contractor company will
provide a lot of opportunities to develop relationships with
people at the target company. And it will give you an
opportunity to show them what you can do and who you are.
Before I joined the IBM Company, where I worked for 16 years
before going freelance, I had been working as the managing
editor of an engineering magazine. During my four years at the
engineering magazine, the phone rang exactly four times. I had
the feeling this wasn’t going to be a long-term growth job.
And anyhow I wanted more of a challenge. I had just gotten
married, and was already working two other part-time jobs after
work to make ends meet. I taught statistics and industrial
finance at a night school for a local engineering college, and
on weekends, I sat all night in the driveway of this rich
guy’s mansion and guarded his estate while the family slept.
I was fired from the security job. One night the supervisor
came around and asked to see my gun. He discovered that I’d
taken the bullets out of the .38 revolver and had put them in my
sock. Asked “Why?” I told him I wasn’t in a mood to shoot
anybody, and therefore I didn’t need a loaded gun. This left
my weekends open to find another job. IBM had advertised that
they were looking for a writer to interview their customers and
put together magazine articles explaining all the good things
IBM had done for them. I immediately jumped at the opportunity.
At the time, my resume from Penn State University, where
I’d studied aeronautical and industrial engineering, didn’t
indicate that I was IBM-level material. During college, I was
more interested in becoming a military officer than an engineer,
and my grades reflected it. Had I sent an application and a
resume to IBM, I would not have been invited in for an
interview.
But working for IBM as a freelance gave me an opportunity,
and I took it. I would get assignments from IBM during the week,
and then fly out Friday nights to the customer’s city. The
assignments were all over the U.S. I would interview the
customer on Saturday, fly home Saturday night, write the
magazine articles on Sunday, and turn the stories into IBM on
Monday morning on my way to my regular job.
This worked out well. IBM liked the stories, and I liked the
money and the work. A few months later, IBM called to say they
were sending over a Mr. Big to take me out to lunch, to see if
he thought I was worthy of joining the company. I said,
“Great.” At the very least it would be a free lunch. I
met Mr. Big at a very nice restaurant. He was wearing an
expensive suit and the look of a harried, gruff executive. I
immediately got the impression that he had more important things
to do that day than take this freelance writer out to lunch.
There was a long queue at the restaurant, and we were standing
in line trying to make small talk, shifting our weight back and
forth the way people do when they are uncomfortable. It was a
truly awkward moment.
I finally said, “You know, we’re both pretty busy. Why
don’t we go across the street to MacDonald’s and speed this
up.” Most interviewers are just as uncomfortable as the person
being interviewed, and that broke the ice for us. We just
started chatting away. Pretty soon I was interviewing him.
“What does an executive at your level do all day? What are you
priorities? When do you get time to concentrate on the big
picture? What do you like to do best at IBM?” I didn’t
go so far as to ask him if he’d ever told a lie. But he really
enjoyed talking about himself. And at the end of a pleasant two
hours, during which I listened much more than I talked, he hired
me. Making the transition to IBM and to his department was easy,
as I’d learned a lot about it during my interview.
I hope it works the same, or better, for you.
Chuck
Boyer Bio
Chuck Boyer has been writing for business since 1973. He
spent 16 years at IBM, where he was manager of Corporate
Publications and writer and editor for the company’s Think
Magazine. For the last 14 years he has written speeches and
white papers for major corporations, including HP, Compaq,
Digital, Symphony Services, MasterCard, and Arthur D. Little
Consulting. He has a BS in Industrial Engineering from Penn
State University, and studied drama at Hunter College in
Manhattan. Chuck and his wife, Katharyn, a book indexer, live in
Phillips, a small village in the mountains of Western Maine. Contact:
chuckboyer@x3communication.com
Other
Chapter Headings of Get
Your Frog Out of the Well
Chapter One
How the best communicate: How
to communicate across the table, across an entire corporation,
or across a culture.
Chapter Two
Why worry about Americans?: Pushing
buttons on a digital device is not the same as pushing buttons
in real life.
Chapter Three
From “Problem and Solution” to “Issue and
Expectation”:
Making the leap….
Chapter Four
Three good things and three bad things you should understand
about American business culture: Cultural differences? Guess again. But know the basics.
Chapter Five
Three types of Americans—and how to push their buttons:
How do I know this works? I’ve used it for years.
Chapter Six
Words of wisdom from young Indian managers and professionals:
“Let me tell you something about Americans….”
Chapter Seven
Subroto Bagchi, Ajay Kela, Dr. Sridhar Mitta, Bikramjit
Maitra, Gordon Brooks, and Dilip Phadke explain why the “soft
skills” mean everything today: Words
of wisdom from six senior executives.
Chapter Eight
How to do everything “write”: Four
subtle secrets of communicating.
Chapter Nine
Presenting yourself: A few tips to keep you going until the great anti-PowerPoint
revolution sweeps across the world and sets you free to be
yourself again so you can enjoy talking about your work.
Chapter Ten
A couple of words about that plan of yours:
“How do you make God laugh? Make a plan!”
Chapter Eleven
How do you use all this stuff to get a job? Hint: Start with
the netroots and keep going: IIT graduates are a sought-after group, but there are some
things we non-IITians can do to improve our chances.
Acknowledgements
One
of the odd realities of human life is that writers—who take
absurd pride in working independently—are, for the most part,
incapable of doing anything alone. This book owes everything to
Jim Colosi “The Architect,” Ed Grimm “The Chief,” Holly
Ripley-Boyd “The Champion,” and Kate Dunham, “The Critic,
Proofreader, and Indexer.”
Cover
design by: Spotlight Creative, LLC, Cypress, Texas http://www.spotlightcreative.com/
“Get
Your Frog Out of the Well” Wiley India, May 2008
Please contact: Paras Bansal, Assoc. Publisher pbansal@wileyindia.com or
Pratima Rao Marketing Manager prao@wileyIndia.com, or Shreshta Srivastava,
Media Contact, at ssrivast@wileyIndia.com
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