Career Advice, Part 3 – LinkedIn and breaking the Algorithm

If you’re involved in a job search in any way, you are dealing with a cold, heartless, unrepentantly automatic tool.  I’m talking about an algorithm.  The algorithm helps recruiters sort through candidates – both with the thousands of CV’s that applicants upload to various organizations sites, and with recruiters looking for viable candidates.  You want to be ready to make sure you work with the algorithms to make sure they’re working for you.  You may be the best candidate in the world but you’re not getting any recruiter attention.

So you’ve looked around and you have an idea of the kind of job you want to have.  Look at the job postings; after a while you’ll hopefully get an idea of the skills and past experience required to get you from points A to B.  It would follow that if you have any of those skills or experience, that you should try to match what you write in your CV and cover letter to what your target organizations have posted.

LinkedIn has become the go-to resource for recruiters, it’s where they go to look for passive candidates.  As I mentioned in previous blog posts, international development recruiters live on LinkedIn.  They check in every day, and most of them have a special recruiter account that gives them access to pretty much everyone – they can cold-email anyone and see anyone’s complete profile.The main thing about LinkedIn is that you want to make sure you’re hitting all the various keywords a recruiter would use – make the algorithm work for you.  You need to make sure how you present your positions and expertise is generally aligned with how recruiters post and describe the jobs they’re recruiting for.  Make yourself easy to find.

The other thing about LinkedIn is to make sure you’re using the name of the organization as LinkedIn prompts you to enter it.  So, when you enter an org name, as you start to type it, the system will give you some options, they’ll start to show up in a drop-down menu, and you pick the correct option.  That way you’re automatically associated with organization alumni or current staff.  This is useful as it strengthens your profile, linking you to more people through common organizational associations.

Once you feel confident that your LinkedIn profile is looking good and is ready for prime time – I recommend going on a connection spree.  Try to find someone you know reasonably well who’s connected to a ton of people you probably know, and start inviting people to connect.  Start with people you really do know that are likely to connect with you.  When you connect with people, go through their connections to see who you might want to connect with.  Also, the “People you may know” function is well developed and is disconcertingly accurate, I’ve found.

Then, as you’ve built up your LinkedIn connections to reflect your true connections, your people start helping you connect to new people and new opportunities, much like in the old days, but more automated (a sad but true fact of modern online life).  So, for instance, you find a new job with CARE that you like – you then go through your personal connections and LinkedIn connections who work for CARE, and they help you connect directly to a CARE recruiter who you want to see your CV.

Once you’ve built up your first-degree network, I also highly recommend connecting with as many recruiters in your target organizations as possible.  When you’re searching for people, do the “Advanced Search” and look for people by position, use the word “Recruiter”, and, assuming that you’re connected to lots of people in a similar industry, many recruiters in your industry will be within 2 degrees of you.  These recruiters will, at a minimum, take the time to look at your name and profile, which will then be a useful little neural pathway in their brain, waiting for the right time to connect you to a new opportunity, should one arise.  If they do actually connect (and they probably will if you’ve got a serious profile and at least a couple hundred connections) then, as you connect to new people and update your profile, they see your name often in the various regular updates that LinkedIn shows them, in their news feeds.

Modern online life can be a blessing and a curse.  LinkedIn is the current professional social network of choice, for most industries (at least in my international development world and my Bay Area dot-com friends).  You might as well jump in and swim with the school on this one.  There are lots of tools to make your profile awesome and have it reflect whatever you want – but you also want to be found.  Make the algorithms work for you.

What do people do all day?

An intern asked me about what I do all day, what my job is like.  So here’s what I told her.

At my last job, Program Development (writing new proposals and devising new programs) and Program Operations (general day to day management) were both done by the Program Officers.  Here at my new job, it’s more of the latter.

So, day to day, I’m basically providing oversight and guidance to the field program managers (through the CD’s) to make sure the program deliverables are being met, on time, and on budget.  There’s no incentive in this business to come in “under budget” because we are a non-profit, we don’t and can’t profit from being efficient.  Monthly fund requests come my way from the country finance managers, and I make recommendations.  Yesterday one FM requested about $85,000 for May, which I thought was too low, it should be closer to 120,000 or more, as it’s for a $2.5 million project for 12 months.  You can’t just divide it by 12, because about 25% of the budget will be charged at HQ as indirect/overhead and salary/fringe benefits charges (part of my salary, a finance person, and any others that can).

 

Also, I review all the donor-reporting for the technical programs (i.e., not the financial reports).  For the USG programs I am the main POC for my counterpart at USAID, OFDA, or BPRM.  So I submit the reports to the donor.  After I finally visit the field I’ll have more context and be able to contribute a little more to the reports, to make them more useful.  They become public record, it’s US taxpayer money funding USG projects, so in the end someone somewhere (like a reporter or an auditor) could make a FOIA request and read these reports.

 

 

Also, there are procurement requests where I have to provide approval.  Recently  one of my programs requested to purchase approximately $40,000 of “hygiene kits” and I had to coordinate about 6-7 signatures from staff spread out all over the world (finance people in Baku and LA, operations people in San Francisco).

 

 

Working on proposals can be fun, I got to work on an assessment in Niger and Burkina Faso earlier this year for my last job.  You come up with a ton of questions, gather the quantitative and qualitative data, and work as a team to come up with a solution design.  The writing can be fun because you feel like you’re fighting for people who need help.  It can also be exhausting because it’s like writing a thesis, USAID likes these proposals to be rigorous.

 

 

So, in general here at my new position, this is a line-them-up and knock-them-down type job for now.  You have to be able to keep organized and to prioritize.  It gets a lot cooler when you get to visit the field and get a little more connected to the beneficiaries.  In general, other than being a Peace Corps volunteer or maybe a doctor for MSF/Doctors without Borders, most Americans that work in international development are removed a few steps from the beneficiaries.  But hopefully we’re doing more good than harm.

Career Advice, Part 2 – basics

I wrote a bit about interns and breaking into international development to a young student completing her undergraduate degree. Keep in mind I mostly deal with people developing their careers in America, and I don’t have a of experience with DFID or EU oriented types.  Go check our RedR for that, I guess…

I just started my new position with Relief International, I just finished my 3rd week, so I’m trying to learn as much as I can about how this place works.

One thing I’ve noticed here at RI is the number of interns we seem to have. It’s way more than at my last employer. So that’s a good way to break into things, these interns seem to have a lot of real things to do and opportunities to really learn about development.

Generally speaking, to break into the international development world, there are a couple of tracks – through UN-oriented organizations, or for USAID implementing partners.

UN oriented would be actual UN orgs, like WFP, UNHCR, FAO, UNICEF, etc. They do very interesting work with super vulnerable people in tough environments, and you can feel good about what you’re doing. UN jobs pay pretty well too. Check out the UN Foundation, they’re an interesting American org (funded by Ted Turner when he made that $1 Billion donation) that might be good for an entree.

USAID Implementing partners are the more familiar NGO’s like Mercy Corps, Save the Children, CARE, IRD, Relief International, etc. Most of these orgs also work with the UN, but as a compliment to their USAID funded programming. For these kinds of jobs, you need to be familiar with USAID programming and administrative stuff, like contracts management.

A good place to start to look into this world is DevEx – all American NGO’s have their jobs posted there and DevEx has developed a nice central website where you can really dig into various aspects of this industry – jobs, jobsearching, donor solicitations, etc. All American NGO’s post almost all their jobs there. Another good place to look is InterAction, they’re the umbrella group of American non-profit NGO’s. Lots of good information there and links to all the orgs.

A third option is the for-profit USAID contractors like DAI, Chemonics, and Creative Associates, among others. There are some good opportunities with them, but they are very selective. They’re also very successful. IRD is a nonprofit but in my time there they competed against and modeled themselves after the for-profits. It was an uneasy balance.