The world is your oyster, but you are sick of shellfish.

What I am obliquely suggesting is what is known as the Paradox of Choice.

The paradox is when our choices become so expansive, we cannot be satisfied by the results of our selection. Inspired by a podcast that casually referenced this phenomenon, it occurred to me how this relates to the market many of us are facing.

The market I am talking about is the market for us, workers.

Yesterday I spoke with an acquaintance who is a recruiter for an industry outside of my own who told me he isn’t even reviewing half of the resumes he is receiving. As a recruiter, it is his job to find his clients the best options to fill a job role, yet he has too many choices to even get through.

Another friend was in the final interview for a position that had 1,800 applications. My friend is great, an asset to anyone that hires her, but she must beat 1,799 others to secure this job. One must believe more than a handful of those 1,799 were pretty good candidates, but they didn’t get a call. Thankfully my friend did.

And yet another friend, a former recruiter, mentioned he knew a manager hiring for a role that wanted to go it alone. This manager felt they could get all the options they needed on without a recruiting partner because the job market was in their favor. In one sense, he was absolutely right: in 24 hours the job had over 1,000 applicants. What the manager failed to realize was the value in the recruiter isn’t to bring in volume but to help wade through selections. The manager was overwhelmed.

All these hiring managers and recruiters were facing the paradox of choice.

Each had tons of options, and many of them likely fantastic candidates, but the volume was unmanageable. Choice became a burden versus a benefit.

Hiring managers can apply many of the same principle’s buyers use for overcoming the paradox of choice. While these are primarily intended for hiring managers, jobseekers should also take note.

Plan for volume.

Volume is manageable if you know what to expect.

Determine how many resumes you are willing to view, how many you need, and using the estimated number of resumes per day, find out how many days you need to keep your job post live.

As a jobseeker, you need to know listings will not be up long, so when you see it, apply immediately.

Model your preferences.

In marketing, we often develop personas that help us visual our target audiences. While standard demographics are part of this, we apply lifestyle and cultural notes to make stronger connections.

Hiring managers should do the same to fill their open roles. Model your ideal employee. What behaviors do they have? How do they react? What are their interests? And where have they worked previously that rounds them out as a great candidate?

For example, let’s say you work for Sephora.

Sephora has approximately 2,700 stores, operates in the beauty category but has many different products within that category. As part of your hiring model persona, you might look for similar category experience, but you may look for similar retail experience, or companies with a similar operational structure. If you look only for beauty, you could miss lots of qualified people.

As a jobseeker, you may need to help hiring managers understand why your experience is relevant.

Using the example above, my AT&T experience in marketing is applicable to Sephora given the number of retail stores (AT&T is about double Sephora). Additionally, AT&T might operationally be similar if both are matrixed organizations. Finally, the fact that AT&T has a focused category but partners with brands at retail, might be of interest to a Sephora hiring manager.

It becomes incumbent on you to show how you fit what they might not have even stated.

Weight your options.

In a buyer’s market, hiring managers may feel like they can get everything they want, but is that going to net you the best employee?

The natural temptation is to look at yourself or your last employee and develop your candidate persona based on this. What that gets you is someone with the skill set you already possess, or one that you’ve already worked with and allowed to leave. You should take this opportunity to bring in new and unduplicated skills.

For starters, determine the minimum level of experience you need to do the job. You won’t hire a stevedore as a CPA, unless that stevedore also has a finance degree and certification. But once the minimum is met, avoid the temptation to layer on every possible experience the candidate might have had. What you will get is someone that knows it all because they have done all, and they have a set way of doing it. How does one grow or innovate if that is the case?

Instead, weight the other criteria. Score it. Give yourself the opportunity to discover something new. Perhaps you’ll find a CPA that once worked in meatpacking and you have a product that, while different from meats, has similar storage and shipping needs. The skills may be transferrable and the insights could drive innovation.

As a jobseeker, remember to sell yourself without assuming the hiring manager is making the same connections you are.

A friend of mine once owned a customizable, portable camper van. In his view, its potential was unlimited. You could rent it for camping, for parties, as a “green room” for concerts, for a side-business. My friend assumed everyone had the same imagination he did. He assumed they could see its many potentialities. They couldn’t. Help managers connect the dots on why your experience is relevant, and moreover, what that might do to innovate within the business category you want to join.

Move faster.

In short, hire while you can and as quickly as you can. We all know hiring freezes come, and they often do so while you are torn between candidates. If you are approved to hire, prioritize that and do so immediately. Otherwise, you may miss the opportunity to get the help you need.

And don’t worry so much about making the right decisions.

Make your decisions right.

A friend (apparently I have a few, at least for this article) once used a line he got from his dad, ‘don’t worry about making the right decisions, focus on making the decisions right’. Phrasing it this way highlights your involvement as a decision-maker, or hiring manager, does not end with selection. Selection is only the beginning. You have an on-going commitment to make this candidate into the ideal employee. Put your energy and effort into doing that rather than just making an offer.

Reevaluate your process.

In marketing, optimization is all the rage, and it should be (as long as you are honest about your performance.) Apply the same principle to your hiring process, what worked? What didn’t work?

How can you tell what worked and what didn’t? Ask the last person you hired. Find out what they would say about the process. Find out what concerned them, drew them, or turned them off. Then go optimize your hiring process.

If the job title isn’t working, go change the title or do a better job of explaining where the role fits in the organization. If the duties are ambiguous, find out why and update.

As a jobseeker, when you transition to employee, volunteer this information to your new employer. Phrase it constructively and with respect but share what you thought and felt during the process. This information ensures that when you are in a hiring manager role, you’ll be highly engaged, but it also ensures the peers that are hired around you, are people that like their jobs and want to be the kinds of peers you can lean on.

The world is MY oyster

While I opened with the expression “the world is your oyster” in the context of hiring managers, I am fortunate that the choice is also mine. My vast experience in marketing, and the good fortune to have a choice in my next career make the world my oyster too. Consider bringing me in to help drive your marketing. And for reference… I like shellfish.

Managing people is more about managing yourself.

In case anyone I’ve managed reads this and thinks I am suggesting I’m the best ever, I will say up front, I have the mug as proof. But seriously, I know that I’m not, though I try. 

Management is a practice never perfected. The people you manage change, grow, and move on. At every point in the life of a manager, you also evolve and adapt.

There isn’t much about management that hasn’t been written. Even Michael Scott wrote “Somehow, I manage.” But I believe each of us has something to offer that may unlock something, particularly for new(er) people managers.

Here are a few things I’ve learned while managing people.

What if they are right?

When you first get promoted to a management role, it is easy to think it is because you mastered the business. That elevation in status feels like you’ve been given authority to impose your will on those around you like Leo Messi and MLS defenses. Melodramatic? Perhaps, but I challenge anyone that has moved up in their career to tell me truthfully there isn’t a small feeling that you are the expert.

As a subject matter expert, it can be hard to allow opinions to run counter to your own. And as a managing subject matter expert, you may feel your team should endorse, and work toward, your opinion. It isn’t necessarily a conscious thought, but it can tank your ability to rally the troops.

What I have learned is to ask myself, what if they are right? They, being your direct reports.

If you pause to ask yourself, “what if they are right?” you should be able to avoid knee-jerk reactions that create the fear of reproach in your team. The phrase also opens your mind to alternate possibilities and forces you to make the idea make sense in your own head.

Use the opportunity this reactive pause creates to ask questions, probe. While you may never come to agree fully with your team, you should at least learn what inspired the idea and what they were trying to solve by presenting it. That exploration may lead you to a more cohesive solution for all.

As you are exploring, you will be asking questions.

Ask questions, but don’t question.

Over the years, this bit of knowledge has been hard-fought and won. Even now, I have to work at it. Unfortunately it isn't like sticking your finger in a light socket. One good shock doesn't cure you of the desire to poke.

The difference between asking questions and questioning is the presence of doubt. Questioning ensures a defensive posture from your direct reports because it is clear you disagree with or doubt their assertion. Fear is stoked. Teams become less likely to speak up, which limits your potential because all you output now are only your ideas. And despite being the subject matter expert, you aren’t that great, (at least not on your own without other views to build on).

Ask questions phrased to illicit thought, not simply explanations.

Consider:

What were you thinking?

Vs. 

Tell me what you want me to take away from this.

When put side by side, there is a clear difference. What were you thinking is still a legitimate question, comes loaded with doubt.

Ironically, sometimes the best way to ask a question that doesn’t question someone, is to use an imperative statement and abandon the question mark altogether.

“Tell me more about…”

“Help me understand…” 

These are imperative statements that take ownership for your role in transactional communications. It is like saying “I didn’t quite understand this” vs. “You didn’t explain this well enough.”

This simple approach empowers your team to continue to build and refine how they communicate.

Let them win.

New managers are prone to believing their direct reports will adapt to their way of working. It is natural to assume this because most feel their own manager made them adapt. But managing people can really only be affective if you determine what works for each direct report, not what works for you. 

You will bang your head against the wall. You will be disappointed every single time they don’t “get it” because you once “got it” and it is so simple. 

This isn’t about you. It isn’t about how good your way was when you got promoted. 

It is about coaching your team to find its own way of doing things. The ends will matter more than the means. Let them win.

Practice letting go of things that don’t matter. 

Style is often one of those. Allow your team to have a different style than you, as long as the work is correct. This doesn’t mean you can’t show them a different way, just don’t force that different way. 

Early in my career, I was the subject of a number of aggressive red pens. I fear the red pen analogy is lost on the current generation of workers with less on paper and more done electronically, but the principle is the same.  Your work is being marked up.

I hated this. “I’m a great writer,” I would say to myself. “This made total sense.” And it usually did, but looking back, it wasn’t right for the audience.

My managers understood that I wasn’t going to see where I was missing on my own. So they marked up my communications.

I tried the red pen method when I got promoted, because it had worked on me. Maybe I needed that kind of prodding, and in the end, I learned from it. But I didn’t like it.

Eventually, what I developed as a manager goes back to asking questions.

“How might you say this more economically?” The need to correct is implied, the instruction to rewrite is there, but it lacks sting. It feels more like you are giving the reason something needs to change in the same breath as you are saying something needs changing.

You as a manager have to give the team time to solve it their own way. It takes time to get there but they get there feeling better about themselves.

Let them win on that.

And while you are at it, let them make decisions too.

When I disagreed with a member of my team on something subjective, I would push them to find allies. If they were able to convince others – often peers – to agree with their approach, I would allow them to decide. After all, we were in a subjective business and influence over your peers counted for something. I still could chafe at the ultimate direction but that’s on me to handle. 

If you can manage your own tendencies, you’ll be able to manage others more effectively.

If you are looking for someone to build a strong working team, consider bringing me in. I’ve managed to manage myself and have proven that with managing others. Did you manage to catch all that?

Unpopular Opinion: don't hate the word, hate the buzz.

If you have the bandwidth, you should socialize this edutainment post across your ecosystem.

Buzzwords in business aren’t inherently bad.

They are sometimes comically overused, but the words themselves serve a purpose. For example, in my intro above I used quite a few and you understood what I meant. While there may be better words, the meaning is more important than the size of your vocabulary.

Even “unpopular opinion” is a buzz phrase businesses and people use to get you to click on something because we all like to get riled up over stupid stuff and spout our opinions on the internet. The irony, right?

On an Indeed list of 30 common buzzwords in business, almost all had a valid use. Yet we constantly joke about people using these words. The person who says they will “circle back” on several issues in a meeting, will have IM’s floating between other meeting participants poking fun at the speaker’s expense.

But I think buzzwords have a valuable place in business.

Language is always changing

If you use a word incorrectly long enough, it becomes correct.

That’s a unique thing about language, it evolves and shifts. The dictionary isn’t a fixed document to list the only words you should use. The dictionary is to formalize and share the meaning of words that are already being used to communicate.

Consider slang words making their way into the dictionary. It happens often. Cool is a description of temperature. It is also slang that has lasted generations and the definition of cool as ‘something stylish’ is in the dictionary. Now things may get a little confusing because cool = hot. We still have to apply context. Something can be both cool and hot, particularly if it’s a conversation between a Gen X’er (“that’s cool”) and a Millennial (“that’s hot.”) The word ‘literally’ is going this way where its opposite will also be as valid as its original meaning. I digress, but buzzwords are like slang, they impart meaning and become institutional.

Language changes because the world changes. We need new terms to better express ourselves.

One of the words I came across in my reading was “phygital.” My first thought was will I need to have my phygital removed as I get older, but as a marketer, I do like this. Physical + Digital. I love a good portmanteau, and this was a great new one. I can see the need for it. The physical location of selling or experiencing a brand was historically different from experiencing a brand in the digital space. Marketers have pushed to make these more similar as the consistency from one touchpoint to the next makes the brand stronger, and potentially the assets more efficient to produce.

Prior to the 2000’s we really didn’t need a word that blended these two realms because one really didn’t even exist.

Marketing changes. Language changes to keep up.

Meaning is shared.

The “buzz” part of buzzword sounds impermanent and dismissive. Maybe it wasn’t intended but that’s the feeling that seems to persist whenever I hear the term. I argue that buzz is a key part of the phrase.

Language is nothing if it is not shared. It absolutely must be common to be correctly understood. You may have heard about twin language, which I feel is more of a Hollywood invention (Nell, I’m looking at you here) than a regular occurrence, but even with twin language, you must have two people share it to be understood.

Buzz suggests the word is spreading. It is catching on. It is making its way into common vernacular. And we need this to happen so understanding is solidified.

In developing new processes, I have long contended that taxonomy is the first and most critical step. If we are not aligned on exactly what words mean, we have no hope of sorting through the sequencing of actions.

It would be easy to assume that I think people are stupid or they lack vocabularies but language, in particular business language, is highly contextual. Consider this: your colleagues could span 30 years in age and experience. During that time, the internet came about. eCommerce became a thing. 800 numbers and catalogs essentially died off. What was “media” to someone 30 years ago is quite different now.

People went to different schools, in different parts of the country, and were taught by different professors with their own different books and backgrounds. The context in which a word was first learned has changed. However, we can guess the meaning of a word through a shared context. Buzzwords are an attempt to bridge the gaps in context.

As a result, I believe a taxonomy first is a critical component of marketing operations. The organization doesn’t have to define all the terms, only the terms they plan to use.

One manager may think a “key benefit” is a product feature, while another may believe a “key benefit” must be expressed in terms of how the customer views the brand. As briefs are drafted and information shared, these terms cannot continue to have these variations in meaning. The beauty of having an internal taxonomy is that no one is wrong, we simply define how we as a collective are going to use certain words moving forward.

If at Company A, we all agree that down means up and up means down, then when someone says this is going down, we all know to look up. It would be ideal if these terms were better defined across business in general, but agreeing on them within your organization will improve communications. When a new manager joins Company A, they are trained with the new taxonomy. They are told that in the world, up means up, but here at Company, we ask you to only use up to mean down.

Buzz helps the words we use begin to emerge as the ones that will make the final cut in our taxonomy. Buzz is the start to shared meaning.

The “better” words are loaded or too long.

At a former company known for long names, we had a culture of abbreviating everything. We even abbreviated the abbreviation with the term TLA (which stood for Three Letter Acronym). I am not a fan of the acronym because I generally think things should be better or more simply named. However, in marketing, with legal considerations, and a need for differentiation, we can’t always find the best, simple name. In those cases, the TLA makes sense.

Let’s say we name a product the Premium Widget Service.

Now I have to communicate across my organization in depth talking about the Premium Widget Service. I’m going to refer to the Premium Widget Service frequently. I need to tell my Premium Widget Service partners what we are doing with the Premium Widget Service. I am going to tire of typing Premium Widget Service so often, so I’m just going to save us time with PWS.

Often, the abbreviation will become an internal buzzword. Some will hate it. The brand naming team will tell us we need to use the full word. But it will catch on and PWS will be used by many. It is simply a matter of convenience. The buzzword is easier than the name.

In addition to those we create for expediency, there are other words we adopt from general business because the actual terms may be loaded.

Consider a Point-of-View Document (or POV). The definition is a specific set of beliefs about your brand/product shared with a specific audience. If I called this what it really is, I would likely call it a Counter Point. In my experience, a POV is needed when you suspect others do not share the view that you have about a specific topic. This feels combative, even if its intent is to just tell someone why you think the way you do. The buzzword is less confrontational.

Two words/phrases that made the popular list from Indeed were “Core Competency” and “Bandwidth.” These are buzzy words with the scent of MBA vellum on them, but they may still be strong alternatives to more direct words.

Core Competency is a way of positively stating what you do well. You could just say “competency” but by adding “core” you focus your organization away from things that are not as relevant to the customer. A product manager might say, “we have a really good insurance plan” but our company sells high-end watches. The product manager may be totally correct that the insurance plan is great and worthy of talk, but when I say “it isn’t our core competency,” I am essentially telling that manager we’ve agreed to talk about the watch quality, our core competency, not the insurance add-on. The buzzword is a positive way to focus vs. telling someone to stop pushing your product, we have limited dollars for promotion.

Bandwidth is a way of saying stop making me do other people’s jobs, I don’t have time. Bandwidth makes it sound technical and that you are purposeful with all of your time. The reality is more loaded: you don’t have time to add one more project to your workload without getting paid overtime or having the quality of the work suffer.

It’s just nicer to use the buzzwords where everyone knows what you mean but you don’t have to come off feeling combative or resistant.

I started out saying don’t hate the word, hate the buzz, but I really don’t even hate that. Buzz has a purpose. What I do want to circle back on is the user that can only use buzzwords to express themselves.

Despite having a place in business, buzzwords can be overused and make the speaker seem to lack substance. Choose your buzzwords carefully.

Do I really think I’m going move the needle on my own ROI by helping stakeholders unpack personalized key takeaways from my thought leadership?

Doubtful. But I’ll bet you understood that sentence which proves my point.

I can help your organization communicate more effectively and efficiently both internally and externally. My experience with processes will help your business simplify and refocus on delivering compelling messages to consumers.