GUEST COMMENT: To Lehman refugees, a headhunter perspective
Firstly, I know it wasn't your fault personally, LB was a vast
organisation, and we've seen that size is not the same as strength.
Your CV is not poisoned by these events, and after you've allowed a
short pause to get your head back together, move forward, because if
you don't then you really will be lost.
I'm old enough to have been through bad times before, and the
recurrent pattern is that the real losers are the people who fail to work
their way back. Everyone has career breaks, this is yours. Wipeouts
leave spaces for determined people to move forward faster. Even if this
sounds like crap to you, it is necessary for you to think this way. I'm habitually contemptuous of psychobabble but it really is the case
that going passive is the worst thing you can do.
Look hard at what you've got to sell.
As a headhunter I have learned that a significant percentage of your market
value is the brands that have endorsed you. Lehman employees that I've
met are distinctly above average, and I know that is a common opinion.
To get hired by Lehman in the first place, you must have shown yourself
to be smart and able to deliver. As it happens, LB turned me down for a
job some years ago, so I know first-hand that the bar is set high....
I've written When it hits the fan, job hunting in a difficult
market, which is freely available to those who need it. The short
version is that you need to work on your network and really put the
effort into a total rebuild of your CV. Write down everything you can
do because the odds are that you will have to move diagonally, and yes,
that may have to be diagonally backwards. I do mean everything
you can do - to do this properly needs at least three passes, and there
is no reason why you can't meet up with people in the same situation to
share ideas on this.
I don't know how long or deep this downturn will be, I do know it will
end. The most common failing of people coming back after a break is
that they don't seem to have done anything with the time, which implies
they're not much of a self starter. To an extent, it doesn't really
matter what you did, as long as it was purposeful and can be spun as
not just watching daytime TV waiting for the phone to ring.
It's hard to call which of your skills will get you a new job, but you
need to embrace this downtime for maintenance and upgrade. Hit the
books, maybe take a course, and talk to other refugees about the
business, keep that part of your brain going. It never hurts to help
others where you can, I've got past some of my more stupid career
decisions by people remembering that I once helped them; others forget, but the mean return is still good.
Objectively, you still have value. Hold that thought in the days to
come.
Dominic Connor is a director of P&D Recruitment.
