Approaching a Job Search
Why is it that lining up to buy tickets, going to the dentist or
initiating a job search are rarely approached with enthusiasm, gusto and
exhilaration? Have you ever heard anyone say, “Oh boy, I get to stand
in line for an hour!” or “I am so excited about my root canal!” and “I
am just delighted to have to do a job search!”? No, neither have I. In
some cases, the means to the end are not nearly as satisfying as the end
itself. The old adage of enjoy the journey doesn’t apply for most of us
when it comes to a job search.
The problem is magnified in a down economy, when starting out on the wrong foot can derail the whole job search process. In good times when your friends and contacts open doors for you to walk through or search firms clamor to contact you, an actual job search is irrelevant. To compound matters since 2003, Social Media tools are changing the job search landscape beyond recognition, making tools and processes obsolete within months.
Who would have thought that the top executive search firms would establish a formidable online presence to provide a full menu of career services and connections to executive job seekers?
In the spirit of this new era, here is how to approach a job search with some new twists and updates. If you are just starting out on a search, see how you can start off on the right foot.
Determine the Focus and Direction of Your Next Career
Who was it that said life is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration? The point is that laying out the ground work for a search is a huge amount of work but it does start with that 1% of inspiration. As in any business endeavor, you need start with a clear direction in mind and that is no different for a job search. This is actually the optimum time to re-examine your career to determine and affirm your next direction. Take some time to take stock of your accomplishments and achievements, and review the application of your strengths and talents thus far. How will you want to direct or redirect your career?
A clear focus and direction is required to open the right doors. Too often the mistake is made to want to be a generalist and leave options open for whatever comes your way. This is far less viable in a recession. Companies are looking for a specific set of skills and experience for a position. While they may consider a broad background of experience as desirable, you have to hit their requirements as exactly as possible.
Layout a Goal-Driven Strategy and Build a Plan to Get There
Typically, the knee-jerk reaction is to rush out and tell all your contacts that you are looking, alert your search firm contacts, and then end up with few leads, a burned up network and not much to show for it. As Dennis Hopper, the actor says in the Ameritrade ad, “You got to start with a plan”. Then you drive your goals by search milestones to reach in getting your job hunt “to do” list done.
Yes, a job search is by nature ambiguous because no one, not even you, will know where you will eventually end up. Consider it a safari. You may be looking to bag a lion but end up with a bear instead. Though that’s the nature of the game, you still have to lay out a detailed accurate plan with maps and a cargo list to conduct a successful safari.
The same goes for your job search today only the list is now much longer than it was a decade ago due to the dramatic changes the Internet has wrought on how people are sourced and hired. Your plan begins with market research. What’s the market for you out there nowadays? What are the trends in your field and you up to date with them? What sectors tangential to your current one are growing?
Your plan includes all your self-marketing collaterals in print and online as well online social networks, social media tools and other web-based resources. There is no point in calling up anybody unless you have your built your brand and extended it online, with sectors targeted and the kind of opportunity you want identified in general terms.
Your plan must have a strategy for how you are going to leverage your current network to expand it to new sectors, and new people. You cannot afford to rely just on who you already know as that may not be enough to see you through.
Of course your plan must take into account a global search, though you will probably be still working locally. Companies from many countries seek and hire executives worldwide now. Your strategy must account for this by identifying and implementing the growth of your network both locally and globally, vertically and horizontally.
Develop Your Marketing Collaterals and Build Your Brand Visibility Online
Gone are the days when a well written resume, and a decent cover letter, would carry the day. Your resume has to not just be well written but it has to have a good user interface because most people will be looking at it on a computer screen. Good layout and graphic design skills come into play not to mention the new multimedia additions of video blogs, podcasts, links to slides and documents of your entire body of work. Visit www.visualcv.com and participate in this new world of multimodal, interactive resumes.
Though self-marketing begins with your resume as online talking paper, it doesn’t end there. Your profiles on social networking sites such as Linkedin.com and Zoominfo.com can be deal-breakers if not done correctly. In recent survey, 83% of recruiters and 45% of professionals looked up someone’s name in a Google search after receiving their resume or referral. Obviously, now your brand visibility online is crucial in today’s job market.
Develop Your Networking Scripts
Assuming you did a thorough review of your accomplishments, skill sets and how you would like to apply them next then your task is to create a versatile elevator pitch that articulates your value proposition to a breath of audiences. Before you contact even your closest associates, if you have a clear, scripted, well-focused pitch you will generate far better results. Further, good scripts on your side will better manage the relationship and keep the ball in your court. Too often a phone call starts with a brief “I am looking” to which they respond, “Send me your resume” and you do, and that’s the end of it. Scripts replace resumes with stories your contacts can take action on in your behalf.
Put Your Current Database in Order and Start Drilling into Your Network of Contacts
If you don’t know who to ask for what, your database of contacts is useless to you. Build a complete and thorough database of all your contacts in your field and sector. Categorize them by geography, position, groups, products, etc. Then figure out who you are going to ask for what. The thing not to ask for is job opening as few if any people have those top of mind. They will pass on your resume to a likely contact and they are done with you. Asking for introductions to people, information and data at their disposal, or resources they can provide makes the best use of contacts.
Also, by not asking for a job, you don’t wear out your welcome. Your search could take awhile with many twists and turns. If you keep coming back asking for job leads they might start to wonder about your viability in the world of work. If you continue to ask for resources, information, and more introductions you simply appear busy, engaged, and involved in projects, and business. There is an art to this process, which you can miss in your anxiety to get the search over and get on with a new role.
Building out Your Network
How many professional associations to you belong to? Are you active in your alumni associations? How much have you extended your online network beyond a small circle of colleagues? Are you known in your profession? It is a long, slow and steady process to accumulate connections and grow a network of varied and valuable relationships. The good news is that everybody wants to do it. You are not the only executive seeking fellow professionals to connect with. Linkedin.com among a plethora of social networking sites has 40 million users for that reason. Your challenge is to stick with the plan. Remember the plan you made? Target your networking to those in your field, your sector and adjacent affinity groups. A random or scattered network is simply not effective. A related interconnected network leverages itself on your behalf because everybody knows somebody else.
Working Your Company List
Too often we chase job postings as low hanging fruit assuming that if they are posted that’s all that’s open. Wrong. In a recession most positions tend not to be posted but rather created for the right candidate when the need arises. You are challenged to find those opportunities through search firms, and networking connections. Starting with a list of about 40 companies (big, middle, and emerging) that are in a sector or family of sectors, you must direct a lazar focus on making connections, not finding job postings. When working with a list of companies , your next questions will always be, “who do I know there” and “who can I get to know there?” Correlate your list with the applicable openings that your executive search firm contacts may have at the ready as well.
Setting up a Schedule
It is a given that you will use every digital tool you can find to manage your database, your contacts, appointments, and your time. Tools that I find useful include Addressgrabber.com to grab contact information out of websites and emails, ClearContext.com to keep my Outlook inbox in order, WEMEUS.com as my personal CRM system to stay in touch, send out announcements, etc. I am sure you will find many more online and by asking friends that will create efficiencies and expedite your search. The point is that you need to do everything possible to set up a routine, and schedule that keeps you on track and moving forward. Make sure you are meeting people weekly in person or by phone.
Get Help
Reading this article is a form of getting help. The problem is that you don’t know what you don’t know. So where do you begin? It used to be so simple, but there would not be a burgeoning career coaching business if it was now. A professional career coach can bring you up to speed on the ins and outs of using Twitter and other online tools, the latest techniques for writing resumes, and how to put together an effective search in an online/offline global economy that is on the way to recovery yet. They can keep you honest with yourself and act as a sounding board and guide to your search plan and strategy.
Wash, Rinse, Repeat
Actually all of the above is now a never-ending process just with less intensity after you land a position. You can no longer afford to lag behind technologies, trends and the social media tools. The new world of finding jobs has just begun and may not even be recognizable in 20 years.
The problem is magnified in a down economy, when starting out on the wrong foot can derail the whole job search process. In good times when your friends and contacts open doors for you to walk through or search firms clamor to contact you, an actual job search is irrelevant. To compound matters since 2003, Social Media tools are changing the job search landscape beyond recognition, making tools and processes obsolete within months.
Who would have thought that the top executive search firms would establish a formidable online presence to provide a full menu of career services and connections to executive job seekers?
In the spirit of this new era, here is how to approach a job search with some new twists and updates. If you are just starting out on a search, see how you can start off on the right foot.
Determine the Focus and Direction of Your Next Career
Who was it that said life is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration? The point is that laying out the ground work for a search is a huge amount of work but it does start with that 1% of inspiration. As in any business endeavor, you need start with a clear direction in mind and that is no different for a job search. This is actually the optimum time to re-examine your career to determine and affirm your next direction. Take some time to take stock of your accomplishments and achievements, and review the application of your strengths and talents thus far. How will you want to direct or redirect your career?
A clear focus and direction is required to open the right doors. Too often the mistake is made to want to be a generalist and leave options open for whatever comes your way. This is far less viable in a recession. Companies are looking for a specific set of skills and experience for a position. While they may consider a broad background of experience as desirable, you have to hit their requirements as exactly as possible.
Layout a Goal-Driven Strategy and Build a Plan to Get There
Typically, the knee-jerk reaction is to rush out and tell all your contacts that you are looking, alert your search firm contacts, and then end up with few leads, a burned up network and not much to show for it. As Dennis Hopper, the actor says in the Ameritrade ad, “You got to start with a plan”. Then you drive your goals by search milestones to reach in getting your job hunt “to do” list done.
Yes, a job search is by nature ambiguous because no one, not even you, will know where you will eventually end up. Consider it a safari. You may be looking to bag a lion but end up with a bear instead. Though that’s the nature of the game, you still have to lay out a detailed accurate plan with maps and a cargo list to conduct a successful safari.
The same goes for your job search today only the list is now much longer than it was a decade ago due to the dramatic changes the Internet has wrought on how people are sourced and hired. Your plan begins with market research. What’s the market for you out there nowadays? What are the trends in your field and you up to date with them? What sectors tangential to your current one are growing?
Your plan includes all your self-marketing collaterals in print and online as well online social networks, social media tools and other web-based resources. There is no point in calling up anybody unless you have your built your brand and extended it online, with sectors targeted and the kind of opportunity you want identified in general terms.
Your plan must have a strategy for how you are going to leverage your current network to expand it to new sectors, and new people. You cannot afford to rely just on who you already know as that may not be enough to see you through.
Of course your plan must take into account a global search, though you will probably be still working locally. Companies from many countries seek and hire executives worldwide now. Your strategy must account for this by identifying and implementing the growth of your network both locally and globally, vertically and horizontally.
Develop Your Marketing Collaterals and Build Your Brand Visibility Online
Gone are the days when a well written resume, and a decent cover letter, would carry the day. Your resume has to not just be well written but it has to have a good user interface because most people will be looking at it on a computer screen. Good layout and graphic design skills come into play not to mention the new multimedia additions of video blogs, podcasts, links to slides and documents of your entire body of work. Visit www.visualcv.com and participate in this new world of multimodal, interactive resumes.
Though self-marketing begins with your resume as online talking paper, it doesn’t end there. Your profiles on social networking sites such as Linkedin.com and Zoominfo.com can be deal-breakers if not done correctly. In recent survey, 83% of recruiters and 45% of professionals looked up someone’s name in a Google search after receiving their resume or referral. Obviously, now your brand visibility online is crucial in today’s job market.
Develop Your Networking Scripts
Assuming you did a thorough review of your accomplishments, skill sets and how you would like to apply them next then your task is to create a versatile elevator pitch that articulates your value proposition to a breath of audiences. Before you contact even your closest associates, if you have a clear, scripted, well-focused pitch you will generate far better results. Further, good scripts on your side will better manage the relationship and keep the ball in your court. Too often a phone call starts with a brief “I am looking” to which they respond, “Send me your resume” and you do, and that’s the end of it. Scripts replace resumes with stories your contacts can take action on in your behalf.
Put Your Current Database in Order and Start Drilling into Your Network of Contacts
If you don’t know who to ask for what, your database of contacts is useless to you. Build a complete and thorough database of all your contacts in your field and sector. Categorize them by geography, position, groups, products, etc. Then figure out who you are going to ask for what. The thing not to ask for is job opening as few if any people have those top of mind. They will pass on your resume to a likely contact and they are done with you. Asking for introductions to people, information and data at their disposal, or resources they can provide makes the best use of contacts.
Also, by not asking for a job, you don’t wear out your welcome. Your search could take awhile with many twists and turns. If you keep coming back asking for job leads they might start to wonder about your viability in the world of work. If you continue to ask for resources, information, and more introductions you simply appear busy, engaged, and involved in projects, and business. There is an art to this process, which you can miss in your anxiety to get the search over and get on with a new role.
Building out Your Network
How many professional associations to you belong to? Are you active in your alumni associations? How much have you extended your online network beyond a small circle of colleagues? Are you known in your profession? It is a long, slow and steady process to accumulate connections and grow a network of varied and valuable relationships. The good news is that everybody wants to do it. You are not the only executive seeking fellow professionals to connect with. Linkedin.com among a plethora of social networking sites has 40 million users for that reason. Your challenge is to stick with the plan. Remember the plan you made? Target your networking to those in your field, your sector and adjacent affinity groups. A random or scattered network is simply not effective. A related interconnected network leverages itself on your behalf because everybody knows somebody else.
Working Your Company List
Too often we chase job postings as low hanging fruit assuming that if they are posted that’s all that’s open. Wrong. In a recession most positions tend not to be posted but rather created for the right candidate when the need arises. You are challenged to find those opportunities through search firms, and networking connections. Starting with a list of about 40 companies (big, middle, and emerging) that are in a sector or family of sectors, you must direct a lazar focus on making connections, not finding job postings. When working with a list of companies , your next questions will always be, “who do I know there” and “who can I get to know there?” Correlate your list with the applicable openings that your executive search firm contacts may have at the ready as well.
Setting up a Schedule
It is a given that you will use every digital tool you can find to manage your database, your contacts, appointments, and your time. Tools that I find useful include Addressgrabber.com to grab contact information out of websites and emails, ClearContext.com to keep my Outlook inbox in order, WEMEUS.com as my personal CRM system to stay in touch, send out announcements, etc. I am sure you will find many more online and by asking friends that will create efficiencies and expedite your search. The point is that you need to do everything possible to set up a routine, and schedule that keeps you on track and moving forward. Make sure you are meeting people weekly in person or by phone.
Get Help
Reading this article is a form of getting help. The problem is that you don’t know what you don’t know. So where do you begin? It used to be so simple, but there would not be a burgeoning career coaching business if it was now. A professional career coach can bring you up to speed on the ins and outs of using Twitter and other online tools, the latest techniques for writing resumes, and how to put together an effective search in an online/offline global economy that is on the way to recovery yet. They can keep you honest with yourself and act as a sounding board and guide to your search plan and strategy.
Wash, Rinse, Repeat
Actually all of the above is now a never-ending process just with less intensity after you land a position. You can no longer afford to lag behind technologies, trends and the social media tools. The new world of finding jobs has just begun and may not even be recognizable in 20 years.
