亲爱的Shannon：如何降落谷歌梦想工作

我每天都与职业变化机一起工作，影响专业人员希望利用他们的技能和过去的经验来瞄准和土地梦想的角色。

I advise all my clients that you can make a career change — but you can’t change everything all at once. Together, work through interim steps, building the experience, skills, clout and relationships and that will ultimately put their career on the path to that dream role.

My client, Vijay Padmanabhan, is a great example. Our work together focused on making his extensive experience in government and academia relevant to private sector employers. After just six months of actively searching for jobs, Vijay broke into the tech sector by landing a role as Policy Advisor at Google.

我最近有幸在旧金山和他一起巡回谷歌的总部，并坐下来讨论谷歌如何雇用，他如何定居在这个角色，以及他的下一个动作可能是什么。这就是他所说的话：

香农胡德: Tell me a little bit about what you are doing now.

Vijay Padmanabhan：我正在致力于信托与安全团队，这是一个拥有大约600-700名员工的全球团队。在此之内，我在小政策小组中，我认为整个团队是25人。这是一个非常有趣的立场，因为我们的组织致力于尊重和保护用户。

We write the rules to protect users and our loyalty is ultimately to them. The team is very diverse in terms of backgrounds and skill sets. You need a lot of different skills because job is not just about writing rules but also implementing them so having a lot of different mindsets is crucial. People come from everywhere – engineering, public policy, academia, you name it.

降落梦想工作

Houde：What do you think was the key to your success from our coaching program?

Padmanabhan：我们确定了我真的擅长做什么，我喜欢做什么，然后看着找到一个我实际上可以做那些事情的角色。例如，我不知道“利益相关者参与”。

I wasn’t thinking about myself in terms of skills. It’s all about identifying what you like to do at work and finding the right language to present that as relevant for your audience. That’s the key. Ask yourself, what are the skills you really want to develop? In my role now, I get to do what I love and what I am good at but I am also always looking to continue growing and developing new skills and relationships.

Houde：你需要多长时间才能进行过渡？

Padmanabhan：I think we worked together for 6 months before I got this job, which is pretty fast, considering I didn’t really put myself out there until about 3 months in when we had been prepping for a while.

Houde：How did you find the job?

Padmanabhan：我基本上跟随您的建议，您不应该只是在盲目应用中发送。相反，找到公司中的人，你可以先谈谈。当我正在寻找工作时，我发现了我对我感兴趣的东西，我会先踩着LinkedIn并找到一个人，或者一个认识某人的人，谁会和我谈谈，或者将我介绍给我能够谈论的人。我主要通过电子邮件做了这一外面。

我不知道“利益相关者参与”。

谷歌邮寄了所有工作，所以我在网上找到了它，但后来我也能够在本公司中找到一个人的申请。我们在LinkedIn上连接了，我伸出援手。你可以找到列表，但如果陀螺让你前进，你将有更好的机会。就像你说的那样，如果您可以在本组织找到内部联系人，则会在董事会中提高70％的机会。

Houde：That’s right. Things are so competitive now that you do have to do everything you can to get that extra leg up. Use your first and second connections on LinkedIn to get in front of a real person. I am still a stickler for phone calls, too, if you can get a phone number.

Just yesterday I had a client, a Yale graduate, who was applying to Clif Bar. She got on LinkedIn, had a second connection to the hiring manager, who also went to Yale. She used Rapportive, a Chrome extension, to guess her email address. And we then crafted a very short three-line message directly to the hiring manager. She is interviewing there this week so stay tuned.

在您自己的技能方面，您觉得您最常用的是什么？

Padmanabhan：The role is very heavy on stakeholder engagement– internal more than external. To succeed you have to build and develop the right relationships with different internal organizations, for example, with the Product team.

因此，我联系了那些组织的不同成员，解释了我的政策团队所做的事情，了解他们的优先事项是什么，然后在我的团队帮助用户提供也影响产品决策的区域的区域上发现。

Houde：What is the key to issue spotting?

Padmanabhan：这真的是弄清楚其他人正在努力实现的目标，他们的目标是什么，然后试图说服他们为什么你正在做的是对他们有帮助。很多时候我正在开发问题发现的过程，这是一个非常创造的角色。

If you are the type of person that just wants to be given a project, that is not really what this work is about. To be successful on this team, it’s more about, ‘let me go out and find a project or make a project’.

Houde：你搬进科技的令人惊讶的是什么？

Padmanabhan：Mainly, the diversity of backgrounds of people in here. Almost no one on my team comes from tech. Most of the profiles are of people that have done a lot of different things.

Houde：So then what do you think is the common factor for hiring to this team?

Padmanabhan：Google is looking for people who have the skills to succeed in this particular environment – problem solving, stakeholder engagement, communications. It’s hard to find the whole package of people who are effective and aggressive at delivering on these.

Houde：That’s interesting because I see a lot of people selling themselves to have these skills, so I am wondering what’s the next layer at Google to really find the right people. Do you think this is one reason the interviews are hypothetical as opposed to competency-based?

Padmanabhan：Yes, they are looking to see how you think. You have to be entrepreneurial no matter what your job function. This environment can be a very critical environment since it’s driven by engineering and testing. You have to find a way to frame your contribution in a way that engineers appreciate.

这是通用语言。如果你来自不同的背景，所做的决定也可能似乎是外国人。在这里，事情是非常数据驱动的，自然界批评，您必须证明您的价值，您的价值不断增加。