I'm about half way through LINCHPIN by Seth Godin, and though I don't agree necessarily with a lot of the book's message, he has hit on some points that have made me question myself. More specifically, he's made me question the way in which I've approached situations. As an analyst at Accenture, whenever I finish a project it is my responsibility to try to find that next role that will help both advance my career and be in a position where I can rely on my skill set that I've developed on my previous projects. Though its not exactly like finding a new job, it is not too dissimilar. Just as you should find a new job, I must rely on the network that I should have created while with the company, I should have an updated and accurate resume spelling out my past project experience, developed skills and aptitudes, and if I find a project that interests me that I do not have a network contact to leverage, contact that project proactively to at least get myself out there. 


What I learned though on one of my previous projects where I was assisting with the onboarding process, is that with so many candidates coming through, and with limited time and resources to do screenings, each candidate was boiled down to their key words, years of experience, and bill rate. 

With the proliferation of massive candidate repositories which are driven off of key words, years of experience, and other metadata factors (think radius from work location, date of last resume update), how can one hope to become more than their metadata? How can one express their individualism, the unique talents that can’t be expressed by a data point? The people and companies that are scouring these databases are just like you and I; they are busy, strapped for resources, and a lot of the time just looking for somebody to fill a seat and contribute at least enough to keep the project afloat. One answer is to leverage your social network to find the roles that aren’t just looking to fill a seat, but to get a key player positioned to knock the ball out of the park. But what if you don’t have a social network to use? I personally have been on projects that have had very little in common with my work stream, or I have been fully client facing, getting little opportunity to network with my Accenture peers. To me, the question now becomes how do you make yourself ‘too big’ to miss? I don’t mean to hype yourself up to anyone you talk to, or to send out emails to everyone saying “look at me!”, because both of those avenues put you right alongside everyone else in our age group. This is a question that I’m dealing with right now. My solution is to try to learn from others out there who’ve walked my same path, and hopefully to gain insight. I ask anyone reading this to share theirs with me as I plan to share mine with you. I guess the first thing that I see for setting ourselves apart from the metadata monster is to re-humanize ourselves (which it turns out is networking). Hopefully as the days and months go by, I’ll be able to share some insight with somebody it makes a difference for, or find somebody that has the insight that finally changes the way I see something and opens a new world of possibility for me.