A SMALL BUSINESS HELPS SMALL BUSINESSES IN A DOWN ECONOMY

[Print and On-Line Media Reports in various East Coast Publications]

Southbury, Connecticut based IT Services Company "DBA Web Technologies" was launched in March 2007 with an objective to provide a wide range of Information Technology Services to small and medium size business with reasonably good success. Towards the end of 2008, it started watching a large number of small and medium businesses collapsing, one after another. Each one of these small and medium company that went bankrupt, started with one common sequence of laying-off some employees, and then some more, and then a larger chunk of lay-offs in an attempt to survive the down economy and save the company from total collapse. But the vicious circle never stopped, forcing many of these companies to eventually close their doors.

To read the full article, printed in various East Coast Publications, please click the following link:

A Small Business Helps Small Businesses in a Down Economy

CMP TECHNOLOGY MAGAZINE INTERVIEWS VARESH SACHDEV

CMP TECHNOLOGY MAGAZINE INTERVIEWS VARESH SACHDEV

[CMP Technology Magazine, a leading global provider of news distribution and specialist information services for the professional markets interviewed Varesh Sachdev, President and CIO of DBA Web Technologies.]

Links to this TWO-PART Interview are given below:

INTERVIEW PART 1:

Career Profile: Varesh Sachdev, President and CIO, DBA Web Technologies by CMP Technology Magazine

INTERVIEW PART 2:

CMP Technology Magazine interviews Varesh Sachdev, President and CIO, DBA Web Technologies on hiring projections and guidance to job seekers. This interview includes some suggestions from Varesh on what to do and also what not to do while looking for a job in this dwindling economy.

Audio Interview - Varesh Sachdev interviewed by Belray Asset Management

AUDIO INTERVIEW

[Greg Skidmore of Belray Asset Management Interviews Varesh Sachdev, President and CIO of DBA Web Technologies]

Listen to the audio interview by Greg Skidmore where Varesh Sachdev, President and CIO of DBA Web Technologies talks about how he is saving many companies from total collapse; and at the same time saving the jobs of many employees who are about to be laid-off with his unique On-Demand IT Support Model

What Is Wrong With Your Resume?

You lost your job many months back. Since then you have been aggressively looking for a job. You are responding to hundreds of opens jobs every week and sending out your resumes to every possible company, recruiter, and even to your personal contacts but nothing seems to be working. You are more concerned because you are not even getting interview calls. Yes, job market is tuff. Very few jobs are opening up and so, you have to compete with hundreds of candidates for very open position you are applying for. But still, in spite of this dwindling economy, “one person” is getting every specific job that you too applied for.

• Why not you?
• Why resume is not among the top few who are called for interview?
• Why your resume is always discarded by the hiring manager?
• Why no one takes a second look at your resume?

After all you are well qualified with many years of experience and expertise in certain domains. Still no job is coming your way, why? Don’t blame anyone else for your woes. It is your resume and your presentation style that is killing your job prospects. A very large number of candidates while applying for jobs do not even realize the countless obstacles they create for themselves during the process of applying for jobs.

These are some of the most common pitfalls.

When you force hiring managers to toss out your own resume

I cannot even imagine that some well educated and highly experienced professionals can commit this common mistake across the board. I see this happening in more than half of the resumes I receive in response to all our open positions on a daily basis. Most of the prospective candidates name their resumes as “resume.doc” while sending resumes as attachments. Look at the problem we hiring managers have to face now:

Very first thing we do is right-click your attachment and click “Save”, to save your resume, so that we can read it later. If you named your resume as “resume.doc”, that is what appears as file name when we click “Save”. So, now your resume is saved as “resume.doc” in our records. An hour later, we open another candidate’s resume which is also named as “resume.doc”. Now see what happens. When we click Save, we see this message flashed on screen: The file resume.doc already exists. Do you want to replace the existing file? Now, look what have you done to your resume? If we click Yes, then resume of the first candidate (imagine if you were this first candidate) has gone forever. If we click No, then we have to provide a name for your resume. Ideally, we would like to save your resume as your_name.doc for future references but at this point, we do not even know your name.

To find out your name, we now have to open your resume, copy your name, close your resume, then right-click your attachment and click Save As, paste your name which we copied in above step as file name and then click save.

Are you realizing that you just wasted about one minute of hiring manager’s time? Now imagine how irritating it is for us when we receive hundreds of resumes every day and majority of these all named as “resume.doc”. For us, the only way to not allow people like you waste our time is that we just skip all such emails with resumes named as “resume.doc” because most hiring managers, who are at the CIO, CTO, HR Director level cannot afford to waste one minute for every single resume to just save the file for future reference.

You can see how this little carelessness is costing you a job at the prospective company even though you could have been the ideal fit for the position you applied for.

When you make it difficult for hiring managers to contact you

This is another very common example of the problem I face a lot when I try to reach a candidate. You apply for a job and email your resume. We find your skills and experience a reasonably good match for the position. In your contact information is your cell phone number and I decide to call you and plan to leave a voice mail with my phone number so that you can contact me later. But on many occasions, instead of an option to leave a voice mail, I hear a recorded message, saying, “This Voice mail box is full. You cannot leave voice mail at this time”. What do you think, I should do now. Call you every few hours hoping that either you will pick up the phone or you might have deleted some old voice mails and I will be able to leave a voice mail for you next time I call. No, I will not do that. I will just move on to the next candidate. In couple of cases, I actually sent an email to the candidates, with the flash news “Your voice mail box is full. Please delete your old voice mails, so that I can leave a message for you and schedule a possible interview for the job you applied in our company”. Do you think we will do that for every candidate who has his "voice mail box full"? No, we won't.

If you are in the job market, please make it a point to regularly delete your old voice mails and make it easy for hiring managers to contact you.

Realistically, you should be doing this anyway even if you are not looking for a job. What if your family is in a medical emergency and someone is trying to reach you but is getting the recorded message “Voice mail box is full. You cannot leave voice mail at this time”. That can be tragic in some situations.

When you ask hiring managers to do what should be your responsibility

This is not too common a mistake but still happens many times. We understand that you apply for many open positions and it is not possible to remember the position description of every job you applied for. But when we call you OR send an email to you in response to your resume you sent to us while applying for our advertised job, it is inappropriate to ask us by return email to send you the job description.

It will help you to be a bit more organized and save a copy of the job description in a company specific folder on your computer. That way, even if hiring manager contacts you one or two months after you applied, you can always go to that specific company folder and look at the position description instead of asking your possible future employer to send you the job description. Such a request will create a negative impression long before you are called for the interview. And let me add that most hiring managers will put your resume on the side a minute after you make such a request.

In my next blog, I will talk about how we can help you in writing a professional and sophisticated resume that can put you ahead of your competition in the job market.

For any career help during your job search, please feel to Talk to us directly.

Job Search or Self Employment: What is right for you?

Job Search or Self Employment: What is right for you?

by

Varesh Sachdev

Have you been a victim of corporate downsizing?

With half-million people losing jobs every month in United States, an unusually large percentage of people and families have become victims due to this downward spiral of economy not witnessed by our generation ever before. Each one of us knows at least one person among our close families and friends who has been directly impacted by this. While, most of us have been through some recessions where people lost jobs but were able to find new jobs in a short span of time; this is the first time when a large number of people have not been able to find a new job after losing their previous job even after many months of extensive job search. This is the first time when we know with certainty that a large percentage of jobs being wiped out by Corporate America are not coming back for different reasons.

I experience this every day because for every new open position that we advertise on Dice, I receive over one hundred resumes from well qualified candidates but I can offer the job only to one person. You are competing with hundreds (sometimes even over 200) of equally qualified candidates for every open position you apply for. This is the reason you do not even get interview calls even though you are applying for so many jobs every day.

But for how long you can let that happen to you? You have to feed your families and you have to find a way to do something about it. No one will bail you out.

So, what should you do? You will have to change your strategy! Do not let the corporate world shape your destiny and your professional future. Take control in your own hands.

If job search is taking you nowhere, ask yourself if being self employed is an option for you?

HOLD ON!

Some of you just thought that it is not for you and are about to close this article. Don’t just close this article without reading even if you think being self-employed is not an option for you due to your specific circumstances. Because it certainly is an option for you and I know that for sure!

• Whether you have just couple of years experience or you are a former CTO or CIO or had a similar management level position in the corporate world and were downsized;
• Whether you are a very strong technical specialist with mastery in certain domain(s) or you are more of a functional expert than technical expert;
• Whether you cannot afford to invest even one hundred dollars or you have a million dollars to invest;
• Or maybe you have spent all your professional life working in other companies and even the thought of being self-employed seems too unrealistic or too risky;

Whatever may be the case, if the pain of job search has become unbearable, Talk to us because we understand that when you are without a job for many months, investing just one hundred dollars may seem an uphill task.

If you are fighting for your survival as a Professional:

If you are fighting for your survival as a professional, start as a one-person consulting company. When job market is not in your favor, you have to change your approach to make it work for you. Being self-employed does not mean you have to make major investments to setup your company but still you have to market yourself.

Finding a new full time job with all benefits has become extremely difficult and will continue to get from bad to worse for at least the next couple of years. Most companies – small, medium, as well as big corporations are thinking of ways to cut down their expenses. So, the preference for hiring consultants for short term periods for specific critical assignments will be the norm instead of hiring fulltime staff with all benefits; at least for the near future.

Also, if you have noticed that having extensive experience in your field of specialization (which also means age factor) is becoming an obstacle for you in your job search for fulltime permanent positions, it is important to know the “having extensive experience in your field of specialization” becomes a big plus in the consulting word. When a company hires you for a specific project as a consultant, they actually want someone who has mastery in his or her field. So, your experience and even age becomes a huge plus for you when you enter the consulting world.

Due to frustration, one big mistake people make is that they apply for every consulting job that is advertised anywhere and most of the time these consulting jobs are advertised by consulting companies for their clients. And if you notice carefully, every single consulting position is advertised by multiple consulting companies because all these consulting companies are talking with “same client for the same consulting position”. If multiple copies of your resume reach same client through multiple consulting companies, it results in your resume being discarded by the client before any one even looks at your profile only because of multiple submissions even though you may be an ideal candidate.

The right approach in the consulting world is to get associated with just one or two consulting companies because if you are a one-person company, you cannot market yourself aggressively which becomes more difficult when economy is collapsing and no company wants to hire anyone unless it is necessary for their survival and that too for mission critical projects for their clients.

So, the strategic solution is to get associated with just one or two consulting companies and let these companies do the marketing for you. Pick the companies that you can trust. And pick the one that gives you personal attention. Never associate yourself with a consulting company if you get a feeling that you are being treated just “as one of thousands looking for a consulting job”.

DBA Web Technologies can help you in more than one way.Talk to us about your situation. Not only, we will help you get your first project, we will also push your candidacy for other incoming projects with other clients before your current projects ends.

If you are a one-person company with plans to expand but facing obstacles:

If you already have been successful as a small-time one-person consulting company, you face a different problem. You can only take one project at a time because you do everything yourself. At times, while you are still working on a project, you come across multiple projects within your domain expertise but you are forced to refuse the new projects because you don’t have time to work on more than one project; mainly because your current project needs your 100% commitment. Don’t you wish sometimes that if you had one more consultant in your small-consulting-company, you could have accepted “that new project”? While the second consultant would have worked on the new project, you could have enhanced the reputation of your small company and at the same time could have made some financial gain. And then maybe few months later, you may be in a position to add additional consultants in your small consulting company and in few years grow from one-person company to a small scale business depending on how much you want to expand in the future.

Only thing that stops you from adding a second consultant is that you do not have any infrastructure in place to manage the additional consultant that you would like to hire. When you are a one-person company, just one laptop is enough for you to successfully accomplish and deliver the ongoing projects and meet all client commitments. But with one more person on your small company payroll, now you need to worry about some additional commitments and responsibilities. Investing in setting up a new infrastructure for your very small company may seem unrealistic because you never know how things will turn out six months later. You cannot afford to invest thousands of dollars in setting up initial minimum IT infrastructure due to so many uncertainties.

You cannot afford but you still need a minimum set-up if you choose to add some additional consultants in your small company. To begin with, you definitely need a website to be effective and stay ahead of your competition in the business world, no matter which industry you are in even if you are a one-person company and now adding your first consultant on your staff. To market yourself effectively, you need a place to showcase your credentials and what your small team of consultants can do and accomplish. Every new prospect would like to know more about you, your consultants, your skill-sets, your previous as well as current clients, some evidence of the quality of your work and the depth of your knowledge & capabilities. And let’s face it; your resume is no longer enough to market yourself and your small company with two or three consultants. Every new prospect in the consulting world wants to see your online portfolio. You also need a small server so that you can manage your small staff. Also, keep in mind, now that you are slowly expanding, you want to avoid having your small staff to use their personal gmail or yahoo email addresses while communicating with your clients. You want to provide them with a corporate email addresses because you want to start building a brand-name for yourself and enhance your small company’s reputation as you look forward to what you can accomplish within the next one to two years.

This is where; we lend a helping hand to small and medium businesses with our On-Demand IT Support Model.
DBA Web Technologies offers the following IT Services:

* Website designing, Logo designing, and Website Hosting and maintenance Services for small and medium companies.
* Support to small and medium companies on our Infrastructure without you having invest in setting up IT Infrastructure.
* Cost effective alternatives to set up, host, maintain and support IT infrastructures.
* IT Consultants on hourly basis for short-term and long projects in all IT domains in every state across United States.

If job search is leading you nowhere and last few months of unemployment are resulting in frustration and desperation, don’t give up. Start thinking like an entrepreneur and DBA Web Technologies will help you with initial support to move forward. Accept the realities of the new job market and take control of your professional future in your own hands. Talk to us because we understand and know what you are going through. Listen how we can help.

Can Corporate America Lift The Economy?

Can Corporate America Lift The Economy?

Every business, from very small companies with just one employee to top multinationals with several thousand employees, is suffering. We all are faced with difficult choices and deteriorating economy is forcing us to make every possible decision that can cut down our expenses to some extent. We are doing all this to save our companies from total collapse.

And the most painful decision most of us are making is reducing the workforce. As I wrote in my previous article in our June 2009 Newsletter, the reason most companies do so is that it has been ingrained in our minds that the only way to reduce expenses is to lay off some employees.

Let us look at it from another angle. Every time we, as a business, layoff one employee; we are actually bringing the already dwindling economy, one more notch down. Why? Because now the family of this employee will have to drastically cut down their expenses which means this family will not be buying anything except bare essentials necessary for its survival. We all know the negative impact when consumer spending goes down as gradually it starts impacting every other sector of the economy. And our own businesses will not be immune to this no matter what industry our business is in. This is when I am talking about one employee. You can visualize the multiplier effect of this as nearly half-million people are losing jobs every month across United States.

Can Corporate America lift the economy?
In my opinion, the answer is YES!

The only way to stop the free fall of the economy is to stop the bleeding. If at the national level, we can reduce the number of people losing jobs every month along with some getting re-hired, Corporate America will succeed in lifting the economy.

And only multinationals cannot achieve this by themselves. Small and medium business sector is the backbone of every economy. Collectively, we all can lift the economy. But now the problem is if we decide not to lay-off employees or lay-off fewer than is necessary to survive, how do we cut down our expenses.

Let me illustrate a very small but real-life corporate example. Many years back, I was working with an established company. Gradually company started losing business and executive management of the company started thinking of new ways to reduce expenses. Company Management made an announcement that every employee of the company will have the responsibility to turn off all the lights of his or her office when leaving for the day. And most people did. Every evening, I noticed President of the company walking in every corridor of the building before leaving for the day and turned off lights if someone forgot to do so. Nearly 1000 tube lights and bulbs that used to be ON 24x7 were now turned off for at least 12 hours a day. I later heard that monthly electricity bill for the company was reduced considerably. Very small thing but it did make some difference.

We all can think of certain unnecessary expenses in our companies and try to cut down to some extent; leaving the decision of workforce reduction as the last resort.

If you lay-off one less employee or can hire just one new employee, even if it on a part-time basis, you will be contributing towards the lifting of the economy and will be doing a service to the country. With millions of small and medium businesses, multiplier impact will be tremendous and that will be a much needed boost for the sagging economy. It will certainly result in rise in consumer confidence and consumer spending which means every business including yours will gain; no matter what industry you are in.

Can we do it? Yes, we can. May be as our social and corporate responsibility; May be as our social obligations towards the society as well as towards the country. We in the business world can make an effort to do so. No matter, whether we are a capitalistic economy or social economy; When consumer confidence goes up, consumer spending is bound to go up; And when that happens, every economy thrives.

We at “DBA Web Technologies” are certainly doing it. We did not layoff even a single employee till this day in spite of financial strains. In 2007, we told CMP Technology Magazine, in an interview that we want to establish DBA Web Technologies “as a unique company in this country where no employee will ever be laid off”. In spite of being hit-hard by the deteriorating economy, we have kept our word till this day.

In most cases, we lay off some employees because we believe we do not need them for 40 hours a week and we do not have the financial resources to pay salaries to our staff. Talk to us before you decide to lay them off. We will hire your IT staff and then reassign them to work with you at your site. You will maintain the continuity of work and your employees will not lose their jobs. If you need them only for limited number of hours per week, they will be directed to do so. You do not have to pay full salaries to them if you need them for fewer hours per week.

We will help you save your business from total collapse and we will help your employees save their jobs. Not sure? Talk to us and listen how we can help.

What if the Economy does not recover for a long time?

What if the Economy does not recover for a long time?

Do you have a Plan B? Just in case the Economy does not recover for a long time.

I am not worried about large corporations like IBM, Microsoft, or GE. Whenever they experience financial pressure, they will simply lay off a few hundred employees to get back in the comfort zone. I am talking about small and medium businesses, whose survival depends on new business that comes from Tier-1 and Tier-2 companies. When larger corporations start scaling back their expenses and putting new projects on hold, smaller businesses are really the ones that feel the hit; after all, their very survival often depends on those new projects which larger corporations are so eagerly dropping.

There certainly is a very real chance that the economy might not recover for a long time. We are all watching the constant oscillation of the stock market every week. While the real estate market seems to be moving in a more positive direction, and unemployment figures seem to be declining (albeit at a slow pace), we still regularly hear about:

• Many companies going out of business
• Many people losing jobs
• Many families being forced into foreclosure
• Many businesses filing for bankruptcy

Are you prepared?

What will happen to your business if the economy does not recover for a long time? Going out of business should NEVER be the only option for any company. But then you have to have a Plan B.

Do you have a Plan B? If not, what can you do now?

• As small and medium business owners, you have to be more realistic, and more creative with your decisions. What is the right strategy for your business? Don't copy the decisions of larger corporations like IBM, Microsoft, GE etc. You are not in their league.
• No one will bail you out. You need to have a plan for saving your own business, feeding your family, and also helping your employees feed their families.
• Whether you have just one employee or one hundred, you shouldn't have to shut the doors of your business just because your revenue has declined and is now exceeded by your expenses. Your dilemma is what to do.

You know that your biggest and most important step is to find a way to reduce your expenses. Easier said than done.

This is where most small and medium businesses have trouble.

It has been ingrained in our minds that the only way to reduce expenses is to lay off some employees. We hear it every day, and we watch big corporations doing it. Unfortunately, it is often this action that traps our businesses in a vicious cycle, setting the stage for the eventual downfall of our companies.

Why? Because laying off employees reduces your ability to meet your clients' demands. You have to start juggling your employees to meet their deadlines and it's likely that your clients will notice this as having a negative effect on the quality and the timely completion of the work. As their bottom line and employee workflow start suffering because of this, they will threaten to cancel their contract with you (and some will follow through on it). This of course further reduces your revenue, resulting in even worse financial stability than before you decided to lay off some employees. Now, you are forced to lay off more employees because you cannot afford to pay their salaries. Unless you catch a break, you'll go through the same cycle again, moving your business closer to bankruptcy.

So how do we avoid this?

Cutting down expenses is important and critical for survival for most of us, especially when the world economy is crumbling. Yet, it is more critical to have enough resources to continue supporting your existing clients and to make sure that you don?t lose more clients than you have already lost. So, instead of just work force reduction as the only cost cutting measure, change your business strategy. DBA Web Technologies can help small businesses that need IT Services for their internal needs as well as to support their clients.

DBA Web Technologies offers an On-Demand IT Support Model to help small and medium size businesses who are going through the financial crisis due to downward spiral of the world economy which has seriously impacting practically every small and medium business in United States. In spite of financial crisis and lack of new sources of revenue, you still have to support your existing clients but it s becoming more and more difficult to hire full-time IT staff to keep up the ongoing demands from your current clients. But at the same time, you cannot afford to ignore current clients and provide a less than perfect IT support. The risk of losing current clients is too high and none of us can afford that risk.

If you do not have the financial resources to pay salaries to your IT Staff, Talk to us before you decide to lay them off. We will hire your IT staff and then reassign them to work with you at your site. You will maintain the continuity of work and your employees will not lose their jobs. If you need them only for limited number of hours per week, they will be directed to do so. You do not have to pay full salaries to them if you need them for fewer hours per week.

If you are a small to medium size business, you may not need a large team of full-time IT staff; but still you need on-going technical support to address day-to-day technology issues. And you definitely need a website to be effective and stay ahead of your competition in the global business markets, no matter which industry you are in and whether you have just one employee or one hundred. This is where; DBA Web Technologies, a fast growing IT Services Company can lend a helping hand to small and medium businesses of United States with their On-Demand IT Support Model. DBA Web Technologies, a Connecticut based global Information Technology Company has been providing IT Services to a number of small and medium size businesses as well as some prestigious multi-national companies.

Our On-Demand IT Support Model allows you to get the IT Support on an as needed basis only when you demand it, without the need of hiring full-time IT staff and paying high salaries with rocketing cost of insurance benefits.

FINANCIAL BENEFITS OF THE COST EFFECTIVE ON-DEMAND IT SUPPORT MODEL:
• Experienced IT Consultants On-Demand: You pay only for the hours worked by their consultants.
• Absolutely NO CONDITIONS to use minimum hours for using our IT Support Services.
• NO monthly or annual fee for any IT Services as charged by every IT Service Provider.
• No need to hire full-time senior IT experts and pay high salaries.
• No need to provide expensive insurance benefits as consultants are not on your payroll.

DBA Web Technologies feels very strongly about helping and saving small companies from total collapse. We have seen that when a company closes its doors, it destroys the fortunes for a number of families along with itself. Being a small and growing company, we understand the financial obstacles which small and medium businesses have to go through especially when the world economy takes a nosedive. While on one side, you are having difficulty hiring full time & permanent employees due to financial constraints, on the other side are the constantly growing pressures of meeting your client commitments with limited and sometimes over-worked IT staff. DBA Web Technologies has the expertise and resources to fill these gaps and help small & medium businesses to be successful by providing the following cost effective IT Services.

DBA Web Technologies offers the following specific IT Services:

• 24x7x365 IT Support - onsite and remote - Infrastructure and Databases support.
• Website designing, Logo designing, and Hosting Services for small and medium businesses.
• Hosting your infrastructure if you do not have the financial resources to buy expensive Servers.
• Turnkey Software Development Projects.
• Placement Services for Full Time and Permanent positions in all IT domains.
• IT Consultants on hourly basis for short-term and long projects in all IT domains.
• Onsite Interim CIO Services - Executive level IT Experts - CIO, CTO, VP of Technology.
• Local consultants in every state within United States available to work onsite at your location.
• Cost effective alternatives to set up, host, maintain and support IT infrastructures.
• Personal attention to every client with lighting fast response and customer service.

If you are a small or medium size business with limited needs for IT Services, please contact marketing department of DBA Web Technologies for more details on how we can help in providing IT Services on an as needed basis while keeping your costs reasonably low, thereby helping you survive when everything around you is crumbling.

DBA Web Technologies Diversifies into Technology Sales

DBA Web Technologies, a Connecticut based Technology Company, is an authorized reseller and distributer for leading brands from Software and Hardware Vendors. Among the largest reseller for leading IT hardware and software producers, DBA Web Technologies supplies a wide range of technology products to thousands of small and medium businesses (SMB), educational institutions, government agencies, and multinationals in multiple industries such as insurance, reinsurance, finance, mortgage, fashion, video, entertainment, publishing, educational, software development, service providers, solution providers and manufacturing. Thousands of companies across North America depend on DBA Web Technologies to meet their in-house IT requirements as well as technology needs of their external clients.
Whether you need small products such as Network Switches and Network Routers by Cisco, Belkin or Linksys or major technology hardware like servers (Windows, Unix, Linux), personal computers, laptops, monitors or printers manufactured by prestigious companies like IBM, HP, Dell, Apple, Compaq, Fujitsu, Sony, and many more. Or major software products by established companies like Oracle. Microsoft, SAP, Sun, Symantec, Macromedia and many others; DBA Web Technologies can server your needs.
In spite of being a young company, DBA Web Technologies has established itself as a vital link in the technology chain and has been identifying new avenues and technologies that will shape the IT industry of the future. Since its inception, DBA Web Technologies has been at the forefront of the world technology market by distributing and marketing IT products from hundred of hardware and software producers. One of our greatest strengths is our response time. We respond to your enquiries and purchase orders with a lightning speed.
We sell Technology Products manufactured by hundreds of companies. Some of the most prominent companies are:
IBM Cisco
Hewlett-Packard Compaq
Dell Citrix
Microsoft Fujitsu
Oracle Gigabyte
3Com Intel
3M Lexmark
Belkin LG Electronics
Computer Associates Linksys
Check point Logitech
Lucent Technologies Macromedia
Nortel Networks Novell
Panasonic RealNetworks
RedHat RSA Security
Samsung Sandisk
Seagate Sony
Sun Microsystems Symantec
Verbatim Veritas
Please contact us for your current and projected needs of software and hardware technology products and we will revert back within hours with competitive rates for your review. For immediate response and personal attention, please email us at:
marketing@dbawebtechnologies.com

Professional References can Make or Break your Career

Professional References can Make or Break your Career

Let me start with a real life situation that I came across when I was heading an IT department of a company. It was time for annual performance reviews which, as is the practice in the corporate world, is the basis of internal promotions and annual raises in the salaries of employees. As a part of the review process, most companies give lot of importance to peer reviews. Main objective is to judge each employee’s performance as viewed by his or her peers. This helps management to view how each employee is rated by peers on performance, domain knowledge, efforts to learn, professional ethics, ability to get along with others, etc. To rule out the cases of personal disliking of some employees by others in the same or other departments of the company, we ask employees to name one or two employees of the company who they would like to be their professional references. We, in the management, then ask the person named as the professional reference by an employee to rate that specific employee on certain criteria and send us the feedback in writing. One of my direct reports named a person in another department of the same company as his professional reference. And I asked the specific person to provide feedback on this employee based on certain pre-determined criteria.

I was taken aback by the absolutely negative feedback by the named professional reference about this employee. He did not write even a single positive comment about this employee. How could that direct report of mine be so naïve to choose this person as his professional reference who almost killed his internal promotion and a raise in his salar?

As it was a performance review within the same company and many employees as well as managers considered “this employee” to be a very good hardworking person with great professional ethics, he did not lose anything here but what if he used same person as his professional reference while searching for a job outside his own company? This professional reference could kill every good chance of his getting a job without he ever realizing what is killing is his every possible job offer.

While we should never use a close friend’s name as a professional reference but it is critical to understand and study your professional references before you start using his or her name as your professional reference. While, we in management, expect professional references to give honest feedback about the prospective candidate; some professional references go overboard and base their feedback on some personal grounds rather than professional role of the candidates.

It is important for you to understand your professional reference and his/her personality. Once a friend of mine went for a job interview; on his way out right after the interview, walking towards to exit door with the vice president of the company who had just interviewed him, he suddenly saw a friend who worked together with him in a previous company. That friend just said to him, as a joke, “Are you still having trouble with the law?”Needless to say, he lost the possible job offer as the prospective employer did not want to hire a person who once had a trouble with the law. Few weeks later, that person was confronted by my friend and his reply was, “I was just kidding”. My friend did write a personal letter to the vice president of the company, who heard “that joke” but it was too late. That Vice President did tell him that he had made a decision to extend a job offer to him but changed his mind after that comment which turned out to be “a joke”.

As a job seeker, you have to play very smart while choosing professional references. While some individuals could be complex personalities, others can be too outspoken. Some individuals simply cannot be sensitive enough to understand these little things. While you do not have control on what others say, you do have the power the make a good careful decision on choosing your professional references.

And a word of advice to my readers! If someone uses you to be his or her professional reference, please be sensitive and never use your personal liking or disliking of the person as a basis of the professional feedback. We, in the management, are interested to know our prospective candidate’s professional capabilities and ethics. And, please remember your “jokes” can kill someone’s career.

Please feel free to contact us if you need some help in your job search and we will do everything possible to help you succeed.