If I could...

The lady who wrote to Amazon that “if I could, I would seriously make out with you right now” got a lot of attention for her blog, so I’m going to try it with the service providers that play a big role in my life:

THP Contractors, if I could, I would seriously rub your feet with warm oil while you luxuriate in rose-scented silk sheets as soothing music and soft lighting complete the ambiance right now.

Overhead Garage Door, if I could, I would seriously go down on one knee, beg you to complete me, and burst into whoops of jubilant laughter mixed with tears of joy when you say “yes” right now.

Vanguard Discount Brokerage, if I could, I would seriously gaze into your eyes for what seems like a lifetime together, then seize you around the waist and kiss you on the mouth, hard, so you feel my passion for ETF’s right now.

Southwest Airlines, if I could, I would seriously plant my seed in you and promise to give our half-Jewish, half-Airbus child all the opportunities we never had when we were small right now.

Earthlink customer support, if I could, I would seriously rip out your intestines, force you to eat them in front of your wife and family, and charge them a thousand gold coins to obtain the smallish portions of your corpse that haven’t yet been eaten by the crows for burial right now.

Constant Contact, if I could, I would seriously get us a couple of tickets to watch what's going to happen to Earthlink, then take you out to dinner in hopes of ending the evening with more than a peck on the cheek right now.

How I learned to stop worrying and love the boot

I told a hiring manager yesterday that I'm enjoying my job search so much, I don't want it to end. Steven, if you're reading this, IT WAS A JOKE. But the truth behind it is that sometime in the last two weeks a mental switch flipped and I went from considering networking a bore and a chore, to finding it pleasant and even exciting.

One reason for the change is stumbling across the single most useful (from a job seeker's perspective) feature of LinkedIn. I'm not sure whether it's a new feature or I simply never thought to try it before, because it is a little counter-intuitive: Select "Search People," not "Search Companies," but then enter the name of a company, not a person. What you get back is a list of your contacts and their contacts in order of closeness to the company you're interested in. Now I see why so many reporters are on LinkedIn: in one second you can save yourself half a day of calling around to see who knows whom. (Whether they're on LinkedIn to help them continue reporting or be able to stop is another question.)

Using this feature in combination with the human beings I've met at such events as Andrew Hudson's annual pre-Thanksgiving networking party and a breakfast meeting of the Colorado Healthcare Communicators, suddenly I'm landing the introductions to hiring managers that previously eluded me. My best connection is somebody I didn't even know two weeks ago. At Andrew's party I commented to another guest that the two of us were wearing identical jackets. It soon emerged Luke Clarke and I were living nearly identical lives: ex-journalists (me at the Post, he at the Rocky, which is why we didn't recognize each other) now interested in using our message-making skills to serve organizations. We exchanged cards and, the next day, LinkedIn invitations.

"Even though we're direct competitors, I like the way you're thinking about your career because it's validation of the way I'm thinking about mine," I told him.

Soon after I found a posting I liked, applied for it, then hopped on LinkedIn to see if I knew anybody at that company. I didn't, but there was Luke: one of his former reporters was the hiring manager. He introduced us; she and I yakked for 45 minutes about old times and why she's happy with her career change; I have a formal interview set for next week.

Imagine that: in this day and age it was a tweed, not a tweet, that led to a networking success. I told my Facebook friends that if ex-Rocky can help ex-Post land an interview, maybe every single Israeli and every single Palestinian should get on LinkedIn and offer to walk each others' resumes down to HR.

As I write I still don't have an offer in hand, but I have something more valuable: confidence in my and my contacts' willingness to help one another.

Goin' medieval on your brand

I've been talking to lots of communicators in postsecondary education lately and have discovered that a medieval oversight still bedevils modern branding and messaging efforts: what, exactly, is a university?

Even if they don't use these precise terms, all universities face the "branded house" vs. "house of brands" conundrum and many seem to be in a perpetual state of rebranding as a result. Far more than a semantic nicety, the distinction has serious implications for relationship-building -- and the budgets to support it.

At the University of Colorado I learned the hard way (by being told never to make this mistake again!) that while the Boulder campus may be referred to as CU, the Denver campus is UC. Come on, it says CU on the football helmets, and the football helmets are on TV!

But this is the point: the University of Colorado does not present itself as a single institution. UC does not have a football team; CU does. Google "University of Colorado" and three separate home pages appear, in this order: University of Colorado at Boulder; University of Colorado Denver ("at," inexplicably, is out); and UCCS/University of Colorado at Colorado Springs ("at" is in again). Each site has a different look and independent searching and navigation. They are distinct Web sites for distinct physical sites.

A fourth Web site, which appears lower in the same Google search, largely explains what's going on:

Founded in Boulder in 1876, the University of Colorado has evolved into a network of four unique campuses, each set against the dramatic backdrop of the Rocky Mountains: the University of Colorado at Boulder, the University of Colorado Denver, the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.

This site leans most heavily upon the Boulder campus's branding, including the CU logo and the textual use of "CU" to refer to the entire system, suggesting Boulder's predominance within the system. (The relationship of the two Denver campuses requires further explanation.)

The Denver campus's former Associate Vice Chancellor for Integrated University Communications provided his views on how the system's identity ought to be reflected in its Web presence. I participated in a similar branding tango at my two most recent jobs, so I can imagine the nature (if not quite the scale) of the challenge. The mere creation of such a job title says a lot about how universities perceive themselves.

When I first heard the terms "branded house" and "house of brands" I immediately gravitated toward the former, reflecting my desire to bring order to a chaotic universe and my on-the-job experiences. But if a student's or alum's loyalty lies with a residential college, a center, an eating house, a major or a team, surely that loyalty should be encouraged.

The answers are out there, but they'll never be easy to find, nor should they. Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard have been dealing with these questions for centuries; let's keep dealing with them, knowing that whether we win or lose on specific details of brand identity, we're all on the same side: education.

Single-subject misrule

Colorado and many other states have a "single-subject rule" stating that a bill or ballot proposal can only deal with one subject. It's a good effort to focus the mind, even if it does make it hard to write a law that attempts to prescribe both a cause and an effect (e.g., when a new tax is proposed to fund a specific expenditure).

Lately I've detected the existence of a new, unwritten single-subject rule: An e-mail may only deal with one subject. This has probably always been a good idea in a business setting; a rambling memo gives the recipient too many opportunities to shirk the areas s/he doesn't wish to deal with.

Even in personal messages, however, there now seems to be an increasing unwillingness or inability to follow along as the writer moves from one topic to another. For example, if you send somebody an e-mail asking, "How are you? Want to have lunch?" you will find out how the person is but not whether s/he wants to have lunch. If you were to write "Want to have lunch? How are you?" the reply will be about lunch and only lunch.

It's ironic that in an environment that practically mandates multitasking, taking two sentences (or, heaven forbid, two paragraphs) to express two thoughts is a vanishing skill.

Relationship management

Much like expectations or bosses, relationships, it seems, must be managed. That's the implication I see of using so-called relationship management software when dealing with large numbers of donors. When a relationship consists principally of hitting "send" every now and then, however, is it really a relationship?

Our household is facing a similar issue with Infinite Campus (IC), the Web site that serves as an electronic grade book for teachers -- and allows parents to peek in 24/7. Report cards as a feedback mechanism were always imperfect because they reported on the past; by the time you got them it was too late to intervene and correct any problems. IC is a huge leap forward in that parents and teachers can be literally on the same page, watching day by day as assignments get turned in (or not) and how grades are stacking up.

But in an apparent effort to keep teachers as well as students honest, IC can be quite unforgiving as an accountability mechanism. Once a due date is input, it is set in metaphorical stone. If a teacher is late inputting grades, everyone fails until the grade appears. As parents, what do we make of that F? Is it truly an F, or a clerical error? Those are very different problems, with very different solutions, but IC leaves us clueless as to which is which.

Which brings us to the relationship part. If IC is working (and being worked) correctly, it can enhance the parent-teacher relationship by allowing us to keep the heck away and let the teachers do their work. When IC sows confusion, on the other hand, we need to call or e-mail the teacher. We all know teachers are overworked, but think of it this way: Having 150 students is like having 150 direct reports. Add in parents, and you're talking about 450-ish direct reports (a few less if you've got lots of single parents, a few more if you've got lots of step-families). Can you imagine being an effective manager with 450 direct reports? Can you imagine filling in their semiannual evaluations, let alone maintaining truly healthy relationships with them? No way.

Yet that's what we force teachers to do. It's no wonder, then, that, like development officers, they'd love to outsource part of the hard work of maintaining relationships to technology.

Human frailty plus technological rigidity makes for a bad combo, alas. Precisely because relationship management software makes it possible to create separate messages for, say, major donors and lapsed donors, it's more-or-less inevitable that eventually someone's going to make a whoops and the major donors get an e-mail intended for the lapsed donors while the lapsed donors get one intended for the major donors. Similarly IC, which is supposed to provide clarity, does the opposite when the humans can't be as efficient as the software demands. In an instant, mistrust takes over, and relationship repair must begin.

Dear Lorem, I write to ipsum dolor sit amet

A networking event sponsored last night by Andrew Hudson's Jobs List was fascinating for the contrasts and contradictions it exposed. The mere sight of hundreds of people with sky-high socioeconomic status but without work was jarring enough. We were further shaken by much of what the corporate recruiters on the panel had to say.

My outplacement firm, Right Management -- and many other guests said they'd received the same advice from their career counselors -- has job-seekers remove the "personal interests" section from their résumés, and has everybody reformat their résumé using Times New Roman and an extremely strict template, so that from a distance, all résumés coming out of Right Management are identical. The recruiters, on the other hand, expected to see personal sections and attractive, creative résumés.

Mary Kate Houk of Crocs tried heroically to convince the audience that, when rejection happens, "It's not about you." She even had us repeat it aloud, in unison, in the first person, like a prayer meeting. Much of the panelists' time was dedicated to expounding upon another aphorism: "It's not what you know, it's who you know." Personal connections, we were told again and again, will get us looked at; skills and experience won't.

While it's impossible to argue with the importance of connections, if "it" isn't about me and "it" isn't about what I know, then it's hard to imagine how recruiters know "it" when they see "it."

For a roomful of communicators, the most shocking news was that many recruiters will not read cover letters under any circumstances -- not before, not while, not after filling a position. Career counselors are adamant that a well-crafted cover letter is our best, first, and in most cases last opportunity to impress a recruiter with our thoughtfulness and suitability to the position. Many online application systems require them. If they're not being read, one might as well submit a screenful of Lorem ipsum, which I think I might try just to see if anybody notices.

The importance of having a robust online presence was also established -- but not a revealing one. All must link in, all must tweet, all must blog -- but merely to prove that they can. I thought of an entrepreneur I met early in my job hunt who started blogging to prove to potential clients that he's a "thought leader" in his field.

Poor fellow. Doesn't he know that it's not what he knows?

Will I get this job? No. Do I feel better? A little, actually, yeah.

Human Resources

Department of Veterans Affairs

Friends,

I wanted to point out that the following sentence appears repeatedly in job announcement PG-10-DGo-298155 (Editor):

I have supervised performance of this task or is normally the person who is consulted by other workers to assist them in doing this task because of my expertise.

This should be corrected to:

I have supervised performance of this task or am normally the person who is consulted by other workers to assist them in doing this task because of my expertise.

Sincerely,

Eric Hübler

Denver, CO

How murderous are we really?

Just after our two most recent mass shootings, I've read this New Yorker article exploring the history of murder in America. The article reviews various authors' differences of opinion on why America is more dangerous than other, roughly comparable places, but never questions the hypothesis that America is more dangerous. Weirdly, despite myself having twice been threatened with guns in America, the article made me think America may actually be safer than Europe for this reason: we have been more successful than Europe in recent decades in avoiding full-blown civil wars and politically organized massacres.

Because the law distinguishes between killings during war and killings during peacetime, so does the article. This made me wonder: what were the murder rates in, say, Germany during the 30s and 40s, Northern Ireland in the 70s and Yugoslavia in the 90s? Perhaps quite low, but this didn't make them great places to raise a family. If killings inspired or mandated by political movements were added to the deaths officially classified as homicides, creating an intentional killings rate instead of a murder rate, how would we compare then?

I remain, at best, dubious that widespread private ownership of guns is a net positive for public safety. All the evidence I've ever seen is that it's a net negative. But I do think we should ask whether the interpersonal violence that leads to a high murder rate might also somehow be protective against (or at least negatively correlated with) civil unrest.

More ballot initiatives I'd like to see

All deli containers shall henceforth use interoperable lids.

Professional broadcasters delivering weather forecasts on public radio stations whose call signs begin with K and end with R and also have a C and an F in there somewhere shall henceforth be prohibited from saying "uh" or "um" or otherwise stammering, repeating or forgetting themselves more than once per sentence, because they're professional broadcasters for cripe's sake and there are plenty of talented people out there who would love to have a job like that.

Headline writers shall henceforth be prohibited from modifying the noun "ride" with the adjective "wild" or the adjectival phrase "roller coaster" in describing stock-market volatility. Likewise shall they be prohibited from using the phrase "a yen for" when describing anything that is popular in Japan. These provisions shall apply in all media, print or electronic, known or as yet uninvented, in this or any other universe.

Apostrophe catastrophe

Dear Mr. Walker,

Ours is a difficult language, but it's your obligation to learn its rules before publishing ads like this in magazines like The New Yorker.

Sincerely,

The English-Speaking World