"I'll send an SOS to the world

I'll send an SOS to the world

I hope that someone gets my

Message in a bottle."

The Police - “Message in a Bottle”

I think all recruiters have had this experience: we have a new position we need to fill, we’ve spoken with the hiring manager and their team to define the position and the attributes someone should possess to be successful in the role. Then, after hours of scouting social media profiles (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter,  etc.), we have a list of people to whom we want to reach out to. This is a critical moment. Strong outreach should lead to strong ROI on all that time. But if the outreach is bad, we have wasted the time of everyone who has been involved in the process.

Here’s the problem: more often than not recruiting outreach lacks creativity and personalization.

Below are 5 of 7 InMails I received:

Hope you are doing well, I wanted to reach out to you because I came across your profile and need your help.

I just wanted to reach out because your profile looks awesome.

I came across your background and your extensive recruiting background is a terrific match.

I came across your profile and wanted to speak with you about an exciting Technical Recruiter opportunity here

I LOVED reading through your page!

The repetition is almost robotic. It is like recruiters have moved from “post-and-pray” on job boards to, as The Police say, “Hope that someone gets my message in a bottle”.

We need to stop talking to people like they are “profiles” or “pages” and talk to them like they are people. Recruiting technology has evolved a lot in the last five years. The tools are excellent but they can also make us robotic. Outreach like this treats people like commodities. People are now “pages”, “profiles” and  “backgrounds”.

If you are trying to start a new relationship with someone, you cannot make them into a commodity and expect them to respond. Your message should give your reader the “why” in the very beginning.

Here are two lines from an InMail I wrote that had an 80% response rate:

Hypergrowth is NOT easy. At XXXXXXXX we have grown over 50% this year and we want to grow that much again next year and the year after.

To continue our growth XXXXX is looking for an…

Here is an excerpt from an InMail I sent (response rate: 50%):

The right software architecture paves the way for success. The wrong architecture keeps good products from becoming extraordinary.

Our software is at a crossroads. We want to move our software to the Cloud and build in Big Data and AI functionality. To do this we are creating a new architecture group and that group needs a leader.

I try to make the “why” of my outreach very clear. Why does this position exist? Why is it important to the business? The reason we should talk can be inferred, but it comes down to one word - opportunity. More simply put: the business has a need, which in turn creates opportunity. Let’s talk about opportunity This is much more effective than “being impressed” with someone’s “background” or “profile”.

At the end of “Message in a Bottle”, the singer does get a large response, but it takes over a year for those 100 billion bottles to come back. Obviously, there is some hyperbole in the number of responses, but taking a year to get any response would be disastrous for the organization. We have to stop sending out “SOS’s” and “hoping” that someone gets the message. Instead, we should reach out to people as people, give them the “why” upfront, and discuss an opportunity. This will make us successful and ensure that our time was spent wisely.

Greg Scherzo is the Senior Recruiter & Co-Founder of the Ellis Project. You can follow him on Twitter here: @GregScherzo.

Image courtesy of Raw Pixel.

It’s been said that you make your first impression in seven seconds. This is all too true for a candidate going in for a job interview, especially if you are a college graduate going in for your first job interview or gunning for your first internship that will help your career.

One thing interviewers will notice is how someone presents themselves, not just with personality, but how they dress. And, for many college graduates and students, they aren’t too sure how to dress the part especially if it’s their first time. Take, for example, Own The Boardroom Founder and CEO Erica Zahka’s previous role, where she managed entry-level employees at Brainshark.

“I was managing the customer support team, and the dress code was pretty casual,” Zahka said. “However, there were situations where individuals asked ‘What to wear?’ For example, maybe they were invited to visit a customer with the sales rep.”

She also began to realize that many college students are focusing on resumes and not so much on their attire for interviews.

“It’s not something they think about,” adds Zahka. “And not only is it a major influencer in how you're perceived, it also elevates how you feel, and therefore act, walking into the room.”

Zahka’s startup Own The Boardroom (OTB) is providing an answer to this concern for college students and graduates about to go into what could be their first job interviews.

The founder compares the company to Rent the Runway, where women can rent designer clothes for weddings and other related events. OTB is an online store where consumers pick out an outfit and rent it for up to a week. Browsing the OTB page, there are collections of outfits that range in different styles and fit into any business meeting.

“We are working directly with manufacturers to create and sell the outfits,” Zahka said. “When we first started, we featured clothing from a handful of designer brands like Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein.”

While OTB is currently in an online marketplace, Zahka is looking into the idea of creating an OTB app for smartphones.

The website offers consumers much more than just clothing with OTB publishing content that focuses on all aspects of finding a job after college, including resume tips, building your own personal brand, and how to mentally prepare for an interview.

Currently, OTB is described as a “one-woman show” by Zahka, but she maintains a strong network of freelancers, who are also college students, to help out the content and website maintenance.

Zahka has been working with college career development centers in the Boston area. Some of them include Northeastern University and her alma mater Babson College.

“As an entrepreneur, I’ve had the chance to speak at a few of Babson’s entrepreneurial classes, offering my own advice and interview tips for upcoming graduates,” Zahka said. “It’s been a great experience to ‘share the wealth,’ so to speak, on job interviews with our audience directly.”

Aside from working with colleges and getting a chance to speak with students about to enter the workforce, OTB has made appearances at other Boston tech events. The company competed at HUBWeek’s Demo Day, and was part of Mass Innovation Nights #103, where she was part of a group entirely made up of women founders.

Anyone looking for a job should be hyper-focused on their resume and preparing for the interview. Worry about what you are going to wear shouldn’t be stressful and OTB takes the pressure off, allowing job seekers to hopefully nail the interview.

Colin Barry is a contributor to VentureFizz. Follow him on Twitter @ColinKrash.

In the seventh episode of our Career Inspiration podcast, I interviewed Carlie Smith - Director of Talent at Circle.

After two years of working at a local recruitment agency, Smith joined OpenView Venture Partners as part of the firm's talent team. She worked as an advisor for their portfolio companies on hiring strategies, team structure, and many other aspects related to the recruitment function. 

Last year, Smith joined Circle, a peer-to-peer payments technology company, to head up talent acquisition. Circle, which was founded by Jeremy Allaire and Sean Neville, has raised $136M in funding from investors including Jim Breyer, Goldman Sachs, IDG Capital, General Catalyst and Accel Partners.

​In this episode we discuss:

• Smith's background
• What it's like working as part of the talent team at a venture capital firm
• Working with multiple early stage founders on hiring
• Building Circle 's employment brand
• ...and lots more!

You can listen to the podcast in the player below. To make sure you receive future episodes, please subscribe to us on iTunes, Google Play, or Soundcloud. If you enjoyed our show, please consider writing a 5-star review - it will definitely help us get the word out there!

Keith Cline is the Founder of VentureFizz.  Follow him on Twitter: @kcline6.

Over the past few decades, I've been part of the incredible shift in the world of branding. What was once viewed as a bunch of fluff and over-spending with no hope of ROI, is now increasingly seen as fundamental to the customer experience and business value with incredible levels of commitment and measurement. Driving this shift is the massive move to digital that we experience every day; We move from our desktop to our phones to our tablets with the expectations that these experiences will be seamless. We expect the apps we use and the brands we interact with to have figured it out. The reality is that some have, most have not.

The other day, I went to pay for something using points from a travel rewards card. I was in the app on my phone trying to pay the balance with points to no avail. I eventually found that in order to pay with points, I had to log through the browser.

*Record scratch* What?

So, I'm in the experience, I want to complete the task and you want me to leave the experience and go someplace else? This frustrating experience is called friction and it will make or break your brand.

Friction is caused by customer pain, like what I experienced with my travel rewards, and because of the frustration it causes, it makes customers question your brand. Pain creates doubt and doubt results in the customer thinking your brand doesn’t care, which is the reality much of the time. I can hear C-suite folks saying, "It's too much time and money to fix or improve that. What’s the customer  going to do, switch?"

Yes.

Last weekend, my Uber account was hacked. Someone had access to my account, including the credit cards and debit card I had stored there, and was riding around San Fran on my tab. Terrific. After searching the app, Googling and reading a bunch of customer reviews, which read more like hate mail, the reality set in that there was no one to call. Instead, I was instructed to instant message their team via Facebook. Seriously? Okay, seriously. Someone, likely a chatbot, responds right away asking for my email and they tell me to go to a page on their app that basically gives 3 reasons for unrecognized charges: #1 Check with your family and friends because they might have used your account, #2 You might have canceled your trip, and #3 An authorization hold was placed for a ride. Nope, nope and nope. Then I see number #4 I don't recognize the charges, which leads to a form – a long form that requires pictures, details and gobs of information for each individual charge. I canceled my credit cards and was left utterly frustrated. The next day, I tried to contact Uber again, this time calling Uber’s driver support number. I was told to follow the process on the app to file for reimbursement. We went around and around and he finally said, "I don't know what else to tell you to do." And I said, "You guys will lose in the end. Have a nice day." I deleted the app from my phone.

The lack of empathy for what happened to me was palpable. Uber didn't care that my credit card numbers are in someone else's hands or that someone hacked into my account. They didn't care to tell us when millions of accounts were compromised until a year later. They didn't care enough to create a service team and a phone number or "human" way for people to get problems resolved that are financially and personally impacting. They didn't care to be empathetic to anything or anyone. Their brand has failed to connect the dots and, instead, they gave their biggest rival, Lyft, a complete layup to slay Goliath.

The lesson in all of this madness is this:

Your brand has a friction tipping point.

Chances are, you don't know what it is, but when it happens, your customer will leave you. It might take months, like it did for me, but it will happen. It is like a leaky bucket. It's a slow drip, which without the right fix, means that, over time, your bucket will be empty. My approach to my work is all about deeply understanding the customer – their pain, their journeys, their goals – and turning those learnings and insights into human stories and experiences that fuel business growth. Because it's what I'm so passionate about, I have little to no tolerance for friction interacting with other businesses. I know too much about how to think differently and approach your brand and what it offers with care and emotion. It is not hard, torturous work. It simply requires a commitment to the customer that the entire company  – top to bottom  – must embrace, live and breathe. The brands that figure this out will win, the others will struggle with a never-ending leaky bucket.

I recently read a great article by Margaret Magnarelli, Senior Director of Marketing at Monster about customer-centered marketing. She inspired me to share my experience and advice for brands looking to make this shift:

Stop segmenting and start customizing

I work with lots of businesses and when we talk about their customers, they all have some sort of segmentation or categorization of customers. The problem with segmentation is that it looks at customers as a group. I'm a good example of segmentation gone bad. I often get lumped in with GenXers, which technically defines me from an age perspective, but I act more like a Millennial in terms of my buying behavior, tech and app usage, social media immersion, and preferences around interactions with brands. I also get lumped in with the "mom" crowd. I'm a mom but it doesn't define my entire life. If a brand really knew me they would know what makes me unique and, rather than sending me general, segmented marketing stuff, they would customize messaging to speak to me. You have data on what your customer buys, what they do in your app or on your website, how they interact with your service team and lots more. How can you use that data to create a personal, customized relationship? I see AI making this level of customization possible in a scalable way and urge all of you marketers and leaders to start asking and exploring different questions to understand your customers as a person, not a segment.

Dig deep into the customer journey

Your brand must be human. This sounds obvious, but, as I experienced with Uber, it is not. It's easy to get caught up in the product roadmap or whatever else is on the priority list. One way to shift your brand to become more human is to journey map your customers' experiences and understand what your customers want to do. I do this with every client before we start any customer-facing work. It takes a few people in a room with a giant sticky pad and some markers. Begin by ensuring that everyone at the table knows the customer in a detailed, personal way. Once you’re in the customer headspace, begin listing out the customer pain points or problems. What is the customer trying to solve? Why does your product help them solve it? I worked with one of my clients to do this for a new insurtech brand. We had pages of user flows and an incredible amount of detail about what the customer would expect to do at each part of the flow. It was a complicated journey - both online and offline. The best part of journey mapping is that it helps you anticipate what the customer will want to do next and helps you meet their expectations. Your journey maps become detailed blueprints for all of the customer interactions that need to be designed within and outside of the stream. Some people see journey mapping as just a product or UX exercise, but it is a super-insightful brand exercise. Once you understand the customer's journey, you are on your way to being human. Being human is emotional and building an emotional connection with your customers is the holy grail of any brand. Go on, dig deep.

Listen to the bad and ugly

I mean really listen. When a customer complains about your brand, you have a choice to make about how you handle it and how you absorb the feedback. I write lots of reviews for restaurants, hotels and products. I would say that less than 10% of my reviews are bad, but there are times when I just have to share a crappy experience. I worked with a client that would only read the positive reviews. Who wouldn’t want someone telling you how great you are all day long? But, how does that make you better? Answer: it doesn’t. And, it’s not based in reality. It’s a proven fact that negative reviews carry more weight. In Uber's case, the customer complaints are more of an uprising and Uber has made the conscious decision to do nothing to ease the pain. The bad reviews and negativity can sometimes be noisy and, sure, there are people who just like to complain. But, when you see a trend, you need to pay attention. Imagine the impact of going back to customers to tell them you heard them and you improved something based on their feedback. Imagine if Uber had listened to their customers and created a path to connect with a human to resolve these complicated issues, or imagine if they had just done it before customers started to complain? Maybe I wouldn’t have clicked “delete.”

Turn pain into empathy

Humans have the ability to be empathetic. The people around us that lift us up and give us advice when we need it and help us thru difficult times are the people we always turn to. Why? They are empathetic. The listen and understand us. Empathy creates trust. Trust is the foundation of relationships. Brands have the opportunity to be empathetic, but often don't see themselves in the relationship business. Whether you deliver pizzas, cybersecurity software or consulting services, you are in the business of forming emotional connections with people. When you understand these people - your customers - at a personal level, you can turn their pain into empathy, giving you a powerful a new way to communicate and connect. I think about the Uber situation and how empathy could change the reality for their brand. I know so many people that have switched to Lyft and, after listening to Lyft Co-Founder, John Zimmer, talk about founding the company and how their mission is centered around people and making the world a better place, I'm sold.

The bottom line is this – don't think for one second that you have a customer for life. Loyalty is dead. We continue to watch brands turn to dust because they thought they had all the power. The reality is the power has shifted to your customer. And, with one tap, your app is deleted. With one call, an account is closed. With one click, your customer can tell the world something amazing about your brand or something horrible. And, as Whitney Wolfe, the founder of Bumble says when asked about her competition, “We really aren’t worried about competitors for one reason: I really believe anyone can copy a product or piece of technology, anyone. I could go find a bunch of talented engineers and build any software product right now. However, you cannot just copy someone else’s brand and become them. There has to be authenticity and true purpose, a mission and a story. No one can replicate that.” Find your empathy and be human. It’s an untouchable advantage.

Michelle Heath is Founder & CEO at Growth Street Marketing. Follow Michelle on Twitter: @michelleheath.

Photo by Michal Parzuchowski on Unsplash.

I had the good fortune to attend the Mass Women’s Conference last week.  Hosted in four major U.S. cities, it is the largest conference for women in the country. It’s an event that attracts women from high school age through those more mature in their careers, and its intention over one night and one full day is to inspire, motivate, and develop women on a wide variety of topics. This year, not surprisingly given the current climate, the topic centered on “having a voice.”

We heard from a variety of truly exceptional women who have found their voices, and are taking advantage of sharing them. Actress Viola Davis shared a backstory so raw and moving, there was not a dry eye during her keynote. Gloria Steinem, the woman who has paved the way for so many women to thrive, is still sharing her brilliant wisdom at age 83. Designer Diane von Furstenberg showed us what it’s like to still be creative and irreverent at age 70.  Very different women, with one very common theme: they have a voice, and they use it.  

I will be quite candid in saying one of my frustrations with conferences in general - even with incredible speakers as this one had -  is this. Attendees invest money and are thrilled to see powerful talks. Maybe they also take copious notes and walk away sharing information with peers about the incredible day they’ve had. All good; but the frustrating part for me is that often times people go right back to work the next day, and proceed as normal. That time away might have been inspirational in the moment, but many people fail to apply the learnings to make a significant difference in their everyday.  I walked away from the most recent conference pondering of the 11,000 women in attendance learning about how to find their voice, how many would be inspired to do just that and then truly use it.

And if they do find that voice and use it for the greater good, will anyone actually pay attention?

Let me zoom out and address this idea with a bigger picture example. Time Magazine recently selected “The Silence Breakers” as their Person of the Year. These brave women (and a man!) represent a selection of those who have had enough and were no longer willing to stand aside and let themselves be marginalized. To what end though? Sure, it’s fulfilling to see those who have treated others with such flagrant disregard removed from their positions of power. And yet, will these people who were brave enough to use their voices really make a difference?

Essentially, even if women - or candidly anyone who is being treated badly -  find their voice and summon the courage to use it, can they drive change to occur? I honestly believe over time it will, but we sure do have a lot of obstacles to overcome before wide sweeping behavior evolves.  For every politician who steps down in shame, we seem to elect a new one with just as many accusations. For men who hold positions of power and are finally removed in disgrace (think Harvey Weinstein and Matt Lauer), there are likely a significant number of people who turned their heads for years before the scrutiny became so significant there was no other option but to terminate them. So the question becomes, will change really occur proactively, or will we continue down a path of senior leaders accepting this behavior until something so egregious blows up in their own backyard, they are forced to tackle it head on?

It’s not unlike the cybersecurity field I’ve worked in for the last seventeen years. For so long, security experts preached the importance of understanding vulnerabilities and how to best protect their companies. Often, it fell on deaf ears. “Too expensive an investment,” or “That could never happen to us.” And then the Sony and Target breaches happened, along with so many others. At that point, even my mom understood how serious an issue this was becoming. As a result, sometimes people have to be hit where it hurts - massive decrease in market cap, termination of senior leaders, etc. to shake a company into change. Cybersecurity is now a discussion topic in every boardroom and a key focus area for CEOs. It took years, but the voices - combined with the severe ramifications of not paying attention - ultimately have begun to pay off. The same is likely going to be true with the way we treat one another in the workplace.

My challenge to us all is to not sit passively by and hope that the person sitting next to us will be bold enough to use her voice. Each of us - men and women - need to say “enough!”...and then put a stake in the ground as to what they will no longer accept. Companies need to not just say, “that’s horrible,” and then look the other way because they haven’t suffered the same fate as Uber. Instead, leaders need to take a stand, proactively define what they will do to make changes to ensure they are creating a workplace that is safe for all, and then be transparent about how they are measuring against those goals.

Voices are incredibly important, and we all must use them to drive change; not just rely on a handful of powerful people to represent us all. Equally important, however, is action. We are better than the situation we are in right now as a business community. Let’s not just talk about fixing it. Let’s actually do it.

Christina Luconi is Chief People Officer for Rapid7. Follow her on Twitter: @peopleinnovator.

In the sixth episode of our Career Inspiration podcast, I interviewed Michael Brown - VP, Talent at SHYFT Analytics.

Brown graduated from Ithaca College with a degree in Applied Psychology. His career has focused on building out the talent acquisition function for high growth companies. When he joined Acquia in 2012, he was the sole technical recruiter and ended up running a global talent acquisition function as a Director. Today, he leads a team at SHYFT Analytics in Waltham which is a fast growing cloud data management and mobile analytics for the global life sciences industry.  

​In this episode we discuss:

• Brown's background
• Building a successful employee referral program
• The challenges of hiring UX professionals
• Recruiting talent in the suburbs
• The importance of having a side hustle
• ...and lots more!

You can listen to the podcast in the player below. To make sure you receive future episodes, please subscribe to us on iTunes, Google Play, or Soundcloud. If you enjoyed our show, please consider writing a 5-star review - it will definitely help us get the word out there!

Keith Cline is the Founder of VentureFizz.  Follow him on Twitter: @kcline6.

Work and play were once treated as separate domains, but the state of the current workplace environment fully integrates both. The concept of “gamification” has been embraced by a multitude of industries; we see credit card companies incentivizing spending by offering mileage rewards programs, restaurants and cafes rewarding visits through stars or points, and even personal financial planning apps making saving fun through virtual awards and milestones.

This concept can easily be replicated to increase employee engagement internally at your company as well. Gamification can involve the incorporation of incentives to motivate your team and support a goal and value-driven culture. There are a variety of platforms you can use or programs you can build to reward your employees and facilitate an environment of creativity and collaboration.

Employee Recognition

While there may be mixed feelings towards the approach of offering virtual rewards in the workplace, it has certainly been shown that incentivizing employees generally increases productivity and willingness to complete tasks. Gamification as a use case for employee recognition can look a lot like the platforms developed by WooBoard, Tap My Back, and IActionable. In these applications, participants can receive feedback and gain recognition from both peers and supervisors. These recognitions are scored as points that can ultimately be redeemed for gift cards, trips, or other rewards.

These types of platforms can be great for incentivizing employees to interact with those outside of their primary functional group and instill a sense of community within the company. It’s also a great way to allow employees to chose their own rewards rather than be awarded something arbitrary like a plaque on the wall.

Philanthropy

Many organizations aim to enable and empower their employees to inspire greater social change. Platforms like Causecast and Wespire provide companies the opportunity to create impact through supporting the values that they are built on themselves. Companies can define their corporate identity, and translate that identity to events and outreach opportunities that employees can choose to partake in and earn points for.

There are also practices that can be initiated within the office to promote environmental sustainability such as donating leftover food, recycling, and minimizing your carbon footprint. These types of programs align corporate missions to tangible initiatives in the greater community, and incentivizes employees to make true and meaningful commitments to these causes.

Wellness

With the workday becoming longer, more stressful, and more sedentary, many companies are starting add wellness and work-life balance to their list of values. Outside of adding a gym, offering fitness perks, or hosting fitness classes in your office space, how can you show that you truly support your employee’s health?

Hotseat is an employee engagement platform that adds customized two-minute exercises to your calendar, which collectively can make a large difference at the end of the day. Employees rack up points for participating and can cash them out for health prizes. Programs like Wellable allow employees to sync fitness tracking devices like Apple Watches and Fitbits to coordinate office-wide competitions like step challenges. Even further personalized is a product called Virgin Pulse which integrates an employee’s individual interests and personal goals and generates a unique program encompassing activity, nutrition, sleep, stress, focus, cognition, financial health, personal relationship, philanthropy, and other aspects that drives their happiness. The platform also provides a number of resources for employees to understand their personal health, and engage with their colleagues on a global level.

The foundational idea is that supporting an employee’s health and well-being will not only lead to a happier workforce, but also a more productive business. Showing your employees that you reward time spent on physical health is ultimately what will prove that it is a true value.

FOMO. Even if you aren’t familiar with the acronym, you’ve likely encountered it.

“Fear of Missing Out” is that sinking feeling you get when you feel like you are being left behind. Like when you are scoping out your friends’ Instagram shots during a fun Saturday night, while you are stuck on your couch in your flannel PJs, taking down a pint of Halo Top, and binge-watching Sons of Anarchy.  Regardless of how FOMO might hit you, it’s becoming ever more commonplace in today’s hyper-connected, share-everything-with-everyone society.

While FOMO can sting in our personal lives, it’s potentially even more dramatic when it creeps into our professional lives. Think about it. There’s a huge world out there, and there is always something to get involved with or people to connect with if you are motivated to make it happen; you are in control of how involved you want to be in your own life. However, at work, you typically don’t get to choose your team or the people you partner with on a daily basis. Assuming all of these co-workers share your same aspirational desire to continue to learn, grow and develop, it can be really painful if you feel stuck on the sidelines while you watch them get called in for exciting projects and opportunities.

Rather than wallow in self-pity, here are four simple approaches about how to get off the bench and get in the game.

TAKE A LOOK IN THE MIRROR.

It’s shocking that even some of the most skilled people have glaringly limited self-awareness.  People often think they are crushing it at work, but don’t understand their blind spots or have an accurate read on how others view them.  For example, you might think you are so valuable, you should be included in every meeting that touches your world. Is this realistic though? Take a beat to evaluate your role, and what value you add to your team and organization.  Do you truly need to be in those meetings, or do you just want to be? Most companies try to limit who’s involved not to be dismissive; it’s because at some point it just becomes inefficient to have too many people involved. That said, if you really are being left out of things that you should be involved in, it’s up to you to do that self-evaluation. Are you behaving in some way that would cause others to feel like they are better off without your input? Maybe people are reading you as overwhelmed, so they don’t want to throw more on your plate. Or maybe they view you as someone who talks over everyone else’s ideas, and jams your own point of view. Not sure why it’s happening? Instead of suffering from FOMO, ask your manager or trusted colleague for feedback. It might be a little scary, but you just might get some much needed insight that allows you to thrive going forward.

MAKE CONNECTIONS.

Once you’ve developed a little more clarity on why you actually may be left out of things, get friendly. That means, get out of your own head, and start connecting with your co-workers. This doesn’t mean you need to become insanely extroverted, but it does suggest that the more time you spend developing relationships (think sharing a cup of coffee, eating lunch with the team, offering to pitch in to help someone wrap up at night) the more likely people will include you going forward. Anytime someone raises their hand and says, “I’ll help...what can I do to pitch in?” I’m inclined to find a role for them. If they deliver with a great attitude, I remember and proactively reach out to them the next time. I won’t play into people’s FOMO, but I’ll sure reward those with opportunity if they earn it.

UNDERSTAND YOUR VALUE CONTRIBUTION.

People should be included in projects because they will add high impact, not because of their title or years of experience. To be included, you need to add value. A few years ago, we identified two up-and-comers as having unique skill sets to aid us in orchestrating our town hall meetings. So talented are both, they now partner with our CEO each month to plan and execute these meetings. Their unique value contributions allow them direct access and have netted them additional new opportunities. Find your value, offer it to others, and deliver impact. Do this, and you won’t be sitting on the sidelines for long.

NEVER, EVER GIVE UP.

This isn’t a “I gave it a shot but I’m still benched” kind of scenario. If you continue to be passed over, you need to have a heart-to-heart with your manager. While it would be outstanding if they would be direct and clear on why this is occurring, you might need to ask some direct questions to get to the root cause. Then really listen to the feedback.  Maybe there are some legitimate reasons.  Maybe you have a great attitude, but your work quality isn’t as great as you think it is. Maybe you are making this all about what you want as opposed to what’s in the best interest of the team. Apply the feedback; act on it. And don’t give up.  If you are following the above steps, it will happen for you.

Christina Luconi is Chief People Officer for Rapid7. Follow her on Twitter: @peopleinnovator.

“Intellectual property has become – in many instances – the most valuable asset on a company’s balance sheet,” Anaqua CEO Bob Romeo said.

Intellectual property (IP) protects the ideas that your company owns. It’s your patents, your trademarks, your copyrights, and in some cases, much more than that. For a company like IBM, it might not be enough to just hire someone – or even a team of people – to manage this. For context, IBM broke the U.S. patent record in 2016, with over 8,000 patents granted in a single year.

And so, for a company to manage so much IP, an analytics-driven platform like Anaqua’s can prove necessary. And in fact, it was necessary.

Anaqua was established in 2004 in response to an “important gap within enterprise software solutions,” according to Anaqua’s official website. Simply put, there was no unified IP management system.

In response to this problem, Anaqua worked with IP leaders from The Coca-Cola Company, Ford Motor Company, and British American Tobacco to develop specifications for a “new web-based, unified system for intellectual property – a comprehensive software platform capable of managing and automating the full IP lifecycle of patents, trademarks, designs, trade secrets and contracts.”

Now on the recently-released ANAQUA 9, the platform “unifies the critical tools, best practice workflows, data, documents and services into one efficient, intelligent environment so our clients operate more efficiently and make better decisions faster,” according to the company.

Between Anaqua, its merger with Lecorpio, and its acquisitions, the company has roughly 1,000 IP clients worldwide, including IBM, HP, and Honda. Collectively, Anaqua’s platform is used to manage up to 25% of the world’s IP.

Although different companies have different needs when it comes to IP software, Romeo explained that the core software is the same for every client, with different pricing depending on how many patents and trademarks a given client has. That said, because companies can have different needs, the platform can be customized with various add-on modules.

When it comes to Anaqua, the name of the game here is “growth,” especially in the years since Romeo joined in 2015 from Reed Elsevier. Under his leadership, the company has announced four major acquisitions, including ideaPoint in September 2015, AcclaimIP and Free Patents Online in April 2016, and Patent River in June 2016.

He was also there for Anaqua’s merger with Lecorpio in July of this year.

“Our roots were very, very similar. We’re both based in innovation, both very young companies, and we both really believed that bringing both companies together would give us an opportunity to take advantage of our strengths, and create something that is even better than what we had individually,” Romeo explained.

Anaqua’s growth is occurring at every level. In 2015, the company maintained roughly 150 employees and 375 clients. Today, Anaqua has about 320 worldwide employees (with 120 in Boston), and has nearly tripled its client count.

In its success, Anaqua has been recognized for two awards in the past year. This spring, Hyperion MarketView recognized Anaqua as “Law Firm Software Leader,” while, last winter, the company was recognized as a “Market Leader” in Hyperion’s 2016 report for IP management systems.

Anaqua is headquartered in Downtown Boston, but maintains a total of 10 offices between Massachusetts, California, Utah, Japan, Germany, UK, France, Italy, and India.

This global physical presence is a must, due to the company’s expansion plans, as well as the fact that F500 companies like HP and Honda require global support. IP needs to be filed separately for every part of the world it maintains a presence in.

This gives Anaqua an advantage over other IP management companies in Europe and especially Asia, who might not be able to support large companies with international needs.

“We have global customers all over the world. When you’re in Japan, you need to be there. You need to be where your customers are.”

To cap off the interview, I asked the CEO about his proudest moment since joining Anaqua.

“I don’t think I can think of just one, so I’ll tell you what I told the board. I think we have great momentum. The merger with Lecorpio is going very well. We’ve got the two businesses working very well together. We have a very, very strong pipeline, and we’re running after it very, very hard. It just feels really good right now.”

Alexander Culafi is a Staff Writer for VentureFizz. You can follow him on Twitter @culafia. ​

Images provided by Anaqua.