Category: Dress Code

Promoting the Business of You

I call the tactic of selling yourself to an employer promoting The Business of You. This is commonly referred to as Brand You.

Narrowing your job leads to the companies that fit with your work ethic can make all the difference.

Having to act against your nature to attempt to succeed on a job will only set you up to fail.

As evidenced by my ill-fated first career in the buttoned-up insurance field.

You’ll have an easier time of it when you’re interviewing for jobs that are the perfect fit.

Sometimes you won’t realize you’ve made a mistake until you’ve already tried on one career for size.

And the reverse can be true: having to keep your disability under wraps as you try to succeed in a traditional workplace can doom you to fail too.

Everyone blindly goes on Indeed.com to search for jobs. What if there was a better way? A way to find a job where your disability is an asset. Not the thing that employers use to rule you out.

Job search websites exist for individuals with disabilities.

An Accenture study proves that companies that hire people with disabilities obtain a higher shareholder return.

Not only this:

As per the Accenture study: “The GDP could get a boost up to $25 billion if just 1 percent more of persons with disabilities joined the U.S. labor force.”

Up next a list of job search websites geared to people like us.

Will You Fit into the Company Culture?

Here’s where it pays to take a rigorous accounting of your prior job environments.

At one ill-fated interview I went on in the 1990s the woman asked me what I liked best about my last job.

“I loved the interaction among coworkers,” doomed me as soon as I told her.

Apparently, for that woman at that job this wasn’t the right answer. Luckily, I wasn’t hired.

This is because the building would’ve been a 10-minute walk from the subway.  In that time, it took me at least two hours on the subway to get into Manhattan. Factor in a 10-minute walk in addition to the subway ride.

Having an isolated job at a desk away from coworkers would’ve sealed the deal that it wasn’t worth it to walk 10 minutes to get to an isolated building.

Today it’s imperative to research the business environment.

There’s been the opposite trend of “open offices” where everyone is working in one big room without dividers like in the traditional cubicle format.

Would you thrive in this workplace where you’re on display while going about your business?

As you can see, fitting into the company culture is imperative.

In my career handbook Working Assets I talk about qualifying your job leads like a salesperson qualifies their prospective clients to pitch a product or service to.

More on this in the next blog entry.

Dress Code Diversity

An innovative tactic for promoting Brand You is through how you dress. As I wrote in a blog entry innovative thinking should be prized as a tool to generate solutions that achieve profits for businesses. Visionaries are in the vanguard in how we dress as well. Restricting the type of clothes, a person wears on their job can backfire.

A more relaxed dress code can promote gender equality. A lot of women prefer to wear pants not skirts or dresses. Allowing staff to dress in their own style within the bounds of what’s appropriate can boost morale. Forty-five percent of firms that instituted a casual dress code saw increased productivity.

Adhering to a strict dress code rules out hiring a diverse talent pool. Individuals who don’t dress in a traditional style are shut out of the workplace at classic companies.

For those of us loathe to wear a suit on the job I recommend getting a job in a public library or other non-corporate environment. I can remember all those suits I wore in the 1990s to my insurance office jobs. Good riddance to the 1990s—and to dressing in boring, bland outfits with no pizzazz.

In the coming blog entry, I’ll talk about a real issue in the workplace for people who don’t conform. Though it begs the question as to whether there can be a “norm” from which others deviate.

I say: hold on. Not so fast with the norms.