Harvey Mackay still good-naturedly pushes envelope

 

Experience and enthusiasm drive the veteran author's advice on job seeking and keeping.

BY RICHARD PACHTER

Use Your Head to Get Your Foot in the Door: Job Search Secrets No One Else Will Tell You. Harvey Mackay. Portfolio. 352 pages.

Harvey Mackay's books, starting with 1989's Swim With The Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive, reflect his relentlessly upbeat, can-do ethos. Back before I jumped on the weekly biz-books review treadmill, I gobbled up each of Harvey's missives in turn. They were, upon reflection, pretty similar, but also fast, positive tracts full of homey, commonsensical wisdom, relevant anecdotes, judicious name-dropping and practical advice. Nothing weighty, ponderous or tedious, yet MacKay's preternatural positivism was a great comfort and helped a youngish promo guy making the first of several career reinventions avoid feeling like Tony Curtis' character in The Great Imposter.

With the success of that first book, Mackay, who owns a Minnesota envelope company — and seldom fails to make pitch on its behalf — became an author of a series of books on self-improvement, sales, networking and marketing, as well as a syndicated columnist and speaker. And he continued to sell envelopes!

This new book is vintage Mackay, chock full of all the stuff that everyone who works for a living should know, though few do; the things that used to be called "common sense'' but have proven to be anything but. Harvey understands the process inside and out, having sat, spoken and listened from both sides of the interview desk. Luckily, he picked up on all the big and little things that too many others either ignored or just assumed, like how to dress, how to speak, how to deal with other applicants, timing and just about every other aspect of the job-search process.

And though the author is far from a kid, he's savvy about the ways of the Web, both as a tool and a communications medium, and as a weapon for self-inflicted wounds, especially in the social networking realm. There's great guidance on the hows and the whys and the musts-to-avoid. Plus, there are some wise hints on cleaning up one's errant reputation when the embarrassments inevitably surfaced.

But Mackay doesn't just draw from his own extensive experience. There are interviews and contributions from a fairly diverse group of outside sources on the various stages of the job-seeking process. There's even advice on what to order — and what to avoid — if a prospective employer decides to take an applicant out for a meal. And he goes further, by suggesting ways to keep a job, which is pretty valuable information to have in this precarious economy with its jobless recovery (such as it is).

There's some really great stuff within, and it's fairly current, too, with ample examples of Harvey's optimism and determinedly good-natured personality, though the book is also suffused with pragmatism and even some urgency, as befits the subject and the tasks that are involved.

You can do far worse than have a mentor, coach or helpfully friendly uncle like Harvey Mackay offering encouragement and advice in these difficult times. It's kind of nice to know, too, that in terms of employment and career books, the dear old guy is still doing his best to push the envelope.

Originally published in The Miami Herald