Highly Effective Job Search

Sometimes it’s like a tsunami. Layoffs sweep through an industry and a lot of people in a lot of companies are swept out of jobs.

You may remember when it happened in the steel industry in the 1980’s. I do. I was one of the many people providing career transition services in that one. In the end, much of our steel production was swept offshore, and tens of thousands of jobs were swept away.

The layoffs and ensuing changes were massive. Bethlehem Steel, one of the top employers of the 20th century, ceased to exist. Another storied industrial giant, U.S. Steel, released thousands of employees and also disappeared, replaced by a repositioned company, USX.

But this kind of tsunami doesn’t kill people. And you don’t need to let it kill your career either. If you’re willing to make the effort, you can and will get re-employed in a good new position, even if the industry where you’re accustomed to working is not doing so well. You might decide to start a new career, and it might even be better than your last one. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Two things are essential. You need to understand the career transition game, top to bottom. Completely. No kidding. And you will need to put in a lot of hours at a difficult and sometimes unpleasant job called job hunting.

If you’re willing to do that, I know that you will get re-employed in a job you like. How do I know?  I’ve been doing this for over 30 years. Lee Hecht Harrison, the company where I work, has been doing it even longer. Over the years, LHH has assisted over a million people as they went through it. We know how the career transition game works. It’s not that complicated.

After a massive layoff in a single industry, the job market in that industry is flooded with candidates and short on jobs. That does not mean there are no opportunities, since massive change always creates opportunities. But it does mean that you will need to be better than the average job hunter in the areas of career change and industry change, because you may need to do one of those.

Here are two places you can get started.

Reading. I’ve written two books on job hunting. But I’m not the only career author. There are – no kidding – thousands of books on the topic. Please do examine the author’s credentials before using a book. Read several books, just as you would when undertaking any important project in an area where your experience is limited. And don’t rely solely on information on the Internet. It’s fragmented and you don’t always know who wrote it. Or why.

Talking. Talk to other job hunters – but not about how bad the job market is or how difficult unemployment is. Those conversations don’t make things any better. Why not start a conversation about how to be really effective in job hunting in a tough market?  See if you can find a job search networking group that you like. Or you could start a Job Search Work Team.

You will also need to make sure your finances are under control, since you may have limited income for a while. And you may need to work on getting your emotions under control because you have important work to do.

You’re going to get a great new job with a great new employer. Millions have done it before you, some in ordinary times, some in tsunamis. They got jobs. You will too, if you work on it.

Steel industry employees found new jobs and careers. And, in case you didn’t notice, U.S. Steel staged a comeback.

So can you. And a lot faster.

Everyone knows that networking is important in job search, but what if you’re having trouble making it work for you? In fact, many job hunters have problems with networking, especially early in their search. If you’re in that category, I have some suggestions for you.

But first, a question: can you get interviews without networking? If so, maybe networking is less important for you. Are you one of those lucky people who can do the entire search with job postings or recruiters?

If you can get interviews through ads and Internet job boards, count yourself as blessed. Most people can’t. If you can get one good interview from every 40 or fewer resume submissions, and you’re finding 20 or more appropriate ads or postings a week, networking may not be an essential part of your search.

Here’s the math. On average, it takes five appropriate interviews to land a job. If you’re hitting one interview for every 40 submissions and making 20 submissions a week, that would be an interview every second week and you would land in ten weeks. If you’re further out toward the tail of the bell curve and it takes eight interviews, that’s 16 weeks.

Now recruiters. If you sent resumes to ten recruiters and got one invitation to interview, maybe you should send out resumes to another batch of recruiters. You might get the offer on the first one, but remember that recruiters often present a slate of four to six candidates. You may not hit on the first try, so get more resumes out now.

On the other hand, suppose you sent resumes to 50 appropriate recruiters three weeks ago and haven’t heard from any of them. I hope you’re not just sitting and waiting. It’s time to start working harder on your networking, right?

In that case, my first two questions are these: “Do you have a target list of at least 40 organizations on paper, and have you made a list of at least 100 people that you could potentially contact as part of your networking?”

Most people have more trouble with the 100 than with the 40. People usually start by saying that they don’t have 100. But they do. I’ve been doing this for 30 years and even young antisocial introverts who work in a cubicle all day and go home and watch TV alone every night have 100.

To make your list of 100, you may need to ask for help from a few people that you know well. The 100 do not need to be well-placed or in your home town. They can be anyone anywhere that you have easy access to on the phone.

If you don’t know what to do with these two central lists, you need to study up on networking some more. There are several thousand books on job search and most of them include material on networking. Maybe you should go read some. You could even read mine.

And talk to other job hunters about how they network, what works and what doesn’t. Social networking Internet sites like LinkedIn.com offer sophisticated tools for organizing contacts you may already have, and getting in touch with new ones. But please don’t assume that you can get the job done entirely on the Internet.

You need to talk to people.

If the ultimate success in search is the acceptance of a great-fit, above-market offer, the penultimate success is multiple job offers in a short time frame.

In a perfect world, your quest would produce two or more excellent offers on the same day. In real life, two in a week would be just fine. If your base comp is solidly into six figures, a cluster of offers in the space of several weeks would do it very nicely. Having two offers on the table at the same time gives you excellent leverage – provided that you would be willing to accept either one.

If you’re thinking about bluffing the first one with a non-existent second one, I’d strongly recommend against it. There’s too much at stake — including your reputation if you’re found out.

With the right experience and resume, using a number of recruiters is one way to get to multiple offers. Don’t dribble resumes to them one at a time. Decide how many recruiters you want to contact and send resumes out in a batch.

You’ll want to have all of your prep work carefully done before making contact, so you’ll be ready for a callback. If you moved just a little slowly with the first recruiter to call, that might help. But watch it: Move too slowly and you’ll look uninterested.

Of course for most job candidates, recruiters simply don’t work. If you’re part of that majority, you can still use the batch processing approach to increase your chances of multiple offers. Make your initial target list 40 instead of four. Move all 40 along through initial research in a week or two.

Plan an intense week of initial networking to get introductions to insiders at your targets. When you get your first introductions to insiders, you might want to set the appointments out a bit so you can get a larger number of inside contacts working simultaneously.

When you are close to your first offer, look at your target list to see which other organizations might be considering you. Even if they’re not admitting to having an opening, express your interest even more enthusiastically.

Of course, when you get your first offer, you should go back to everyone at the top of your list again and tell them the bad news: you may soon be unavailable. Tell them again how interested you are and ask if it’s possible to speed up their process a bit.

The overall message here is simple: In planning and executing your search, don’t just consider effective activities, think also about their timing.

Locating multiple offers is not easy to do. It doesn’t require a miracle, but it does involve a certain amount of good luck on top of a solid plan and a more concentrated effort. The final result may not be the Holy Grail, but it is certainly a blessing – and a significant advantage in salary negotiations.

Orville Pierson is LHH’s Director of Program Design and the author of The Unwritten Rules of the Highly Effective Job Search (McGraw-Hill) and Highly Effective Networking: Meet the Right People and Get a Great Job (Career Press). With over 30 years’ experience in career services, he leads the team that designs LHH’s career transition programs. Orville can be reached at orville@highlyeffectivejobsearch.com with comments and questions that might become part of future postings, but he cannot respond to them individually.

They say that job search needs to be treated as a job, and I agree. But how many hours a week does that mean? On your last job, you probably worked 50 or 60 hours a week — or maybe even 80.

To get a great next job, do you need to do that in job search? Some experts will disagree with me, but I think you can work fewer hours. If you’re running an effective search, I think it’s possible to get the job done in 30 to 40 hours a week, with more four-day weeks than five-day weeks. I think it’s possible to have more time for recreation or other pursuits than you’re accustomed to.

Now, of course you need to keep your eyes open on your “days off.” You never know when the right opportunity for a very productive conversation will occur, and you certainly don’t want to miss opportunities by being off duty.

And I’m certainly not suggesting that you can just take it easy. You need to get the work done every week. You need to have a solid plan and you need to systematically work that plan for those 30 to 40 hours every week.

How do you know if you’re getting the job done? The most obvious measure is that you are making contact with one or two new hiring managers each week – usually through informal conversations.

That’s a tall order, contacting those new hiring managers every week. At the outset, you may not be able to do it in 40 hours – or even in 60. But it can be done. There’s a learning curve here just like there is in most activities. And there’s momentum: once you get the ball rolling it’s easier to keep it rolling. You need to learn to be not just active, but also productive.

There’s information on job search productivity and performance benchmarks in LHH printed materials as well as here on CRN in the eLearning. Even if job search is not your favorite job, you can attain a level of effectiveness where you do not need to work at it 40 hours a week.

But then maybe you’re one of those lucky people who is having lots of fun with your search, and just flying along very productively. If so, that’s great. And it’s okay with me if you work on it 80 hours a week.

Orville Pierson is LHH’s Director of Program Design and the author of The Unwritten Rules of the Highly Effective Job Search (McGraw-Hill) and Highly Effective Networking: Meet the Right People and Get a Great Job (Career Press). With over 30 years’ experience in career services, he leads the team that designs LHH’s career transition programs. Orville can be reached at orville@highlyeffectivejobsearch.com with comments and questions that might become part of future postings, but he cannot respond to them individually.

You can get better job offers faster if you are smart about using market research. In the three decades I’ve been doing career work, I’ve seen it repeatedly. I’ve even seen people with admittedly weak qualifications get interviews and offers as a direct result of their effective use of research.

The first and most obvious piece of research, of course, is your target list. You do research to create it. Then you research each organization on your list. In doing this, you begin to form an accurate picture of your personal job market and the industries it includes. This research can begin with the rich resources right here on Career Resource Network (CRN). When you’re ready to move beyond CRN, the next stop is employer websites. You certainly want to visit the site of every company on your target list.

This kind of job market research increases your effectiveness in networking by allowing you to ask people the important organization-specific questions rather than bothering them with the basics. It also makes you a more interesting networking partner because you have information to share as well as questions to ask.

Even if you’re one of those lucky people getting interviews through recruiters or postings, this background research enables you to make smarter decisions about companies and compensation because you’re well informed. And, of course, looking smart in interviews doesn’t hurt either.

A more sophisticated form of research is directed toward identifying and understanding problems, issues and trends affecting your targeted organizations. The better you understand these and related initiatives and solutions, the stronger a candidate you are. Educating yourself on who is doing what — and why — is time well spent.

If you’re changing industries or careers, research is essential. You must become fluent in the language (and jargon) of your targeted organizations and jobs. If you also do the issues research described above, you can then select an issue that particularly interests you and research that one intensively. By choosing a narrow and manageable area that’s of interest to your target market, you can be seen as someone with real expertise.

But please don’t get carried away with research. While it may be your only activity for a week or so at the outset, pure research should be maybe 10% of your time throughout your search. Or course, you’re doing a great deal more research as you talk to networking partners.

As a closing thought, I want to let you in on a little secret about job market research. There is some really great on it here in CRN. It amounts to a whole course on job search research. It was written by LHH’s research librarians, the Infogenius people here in Blogs, News and Views. And they are indeed geniuses at locating relevant information.

Want to be a genius in job search? Your secret weapon might actually be librarians.

Orville Pierson is LHH’s Director of Program Design and the author of The Unwritten Rules of the Highly Effective Job Search (McGraw-Hill) and Highly Effective Networking: Meet the Right People and Get a Great Job (Career Press). With over 30 years’ experience in career services, he leads the team that designs LHH’s career transition programs. Orville can be reached at orville@highlyeffectivejobsearch.com with comments and questions that might become part of future postings, but he cannot respond to them individually.

It’s not too soon to think about how to negotiate compensation for your next job. Even though most people have some “no-offer” interviews, watch out. Offers can strike at any time. So it’s best to be prepared.

In case you’d like to start working on it, I’ll give you the short five-point version right here.

1. Know the “going rate” for the kind of job you want in the geographic area you’re targeting. You’ll probably need to work on this. Free, accurate compensation surveys are rare. And the higher your comp, the rarer they are.

The best way to get compensation benchmarks is to ask around while networking: “What’s the range Amalgamated has paid for that kind of job in the past?” “What about their competition, what do they usually pay?”

If you can get a recruiter who specializes in your field to talk to you, that’s outstanding. But if you can’t get numbers, you can at least be informed on which organizations are generous and which are stingy with comp.

2. Don’t discuss specific salary numbers with Hiring Managers early on. (If you haven’t heard that one yet, you must be new to career transition.)

3. Negotiate only after an offer is on the table, and before you accept. Yeah, I know that seems obvious, but I’ve seen a lot of people get carried away and believe they could do otherwise. Jumping the gun on this can cost you the offer.

4. Beyond compensation, there is a whole list of other things that can potentially be negotiated on the way into a new job. In some cases, this even includes the job description and title.

5. Remember that offers can be withdrawn, so be judicious about what to negotiate. Propose and discuss, but don’t push it too hard. On the other hand, if the offer is so weak that you would turn it down, maybe you’ve got everything to gain and nothing to lose

If you already knew those five points, you’re off to a good start. If not, you should probably go and read some books on it. There’s some suggestions right here on my website, and Jack Chapman has a pretty good one too.

Luckily for you, most interviewers are not trained in interviewing. Another piece of good luck is this: your central preparation is the same for both trained and untrained interviewers.

One obvious preparation, of course, is studying the company’s website and annual report to see what they have to say about themselves. And right behind that, Googling them to see what others say about them. Or, even better, using research tools right here on CRN to locate professionally compiled information.

But what I want to talk about today is your ability to effectively convey your superb professional qualifications to a stranger in a relatively brief conversation — preferably without sounding like an egotistical braggart.

When interviewers are trained, they are often trained in behavior-based interviewing. This is a method designed to have the candidate describe their actual behavior on the job at key points in their work history. The questions are frequently in the format, “Tell me about a time when…”

An example for a manager with P&L might be, “Tell me about the time when you brought in the weakest quarterly financial results, and what you did about it.” Another example is, “Tell me about the most serious disagreement you had with your boss, and how you both handled it.” Negative questions like these are usually mixed with positive questions.

Notice that the questions ask you to tell a story about yourself and your behavior in certain job-related situations. The interviewer can learn a lot about you from your choice of stories, from how you handled things and why, and from the words you use to describe events and people.

It looks to me like telling stories – relevant, true stories – is an excellent way for you to illustrate your answers with any interviewer, trained or not. Stories can be engaging and memorable. They are a way of demonstrating your strengths, rather than simply claiming to have them. Any accomplishment story can be told in two minutes or less, even if what you describe took years.

Rather than saying, “I’m the best salesperson ever to walk the earth,” you tell a story about a difficult sales situation and how you overcame the obstacles to win the account, resulting in your boss’ citing you for setting a new sales record.” The interviewer draws the right conclusion. You avoid the Egotistical Braggart problem,

My suggestion is to prepare stories that relate to each of your major strengths and to each of your key jobs and accomplishments. How many? My personal rule of thumb is five stories for every $10,000 in income you’re seeking, up to a maximum of 40 stories. You’ll probably never use all of them, and certainly not at a single interview. But always having the right one ready to use sets you up to ace the interview.

I often suggest an S-O-A-R structure for these stories. The acronym stands for Situation, Obstacles (to make sure the results are fully appreciated), Actions, and Results (for the organization, not merely for your department). It aids you in briefly and effectively describing accomplishments of all kinds.

And, yes, I admit it, that’s why I used that dumb “Soaring” title for this posting.

Ask a job seeker what their plan is, and sometimes they’ll look at you like you’d lost it. “Plan?” they sometimes say, “What do you mean, plan? My plan is to find a job.”

Or they’ll say, “My plan is to use the Internet.”

It’s like asking someone the question, “What’s your plan for building your new house?” And having them answer, “My plan is to use a hammer and saw.”

That’s not a plan. That’s a list of tools. A very short list.

That same person, on their last job, always planned every project in detail: precise goals, time required, resources, costs, Gantt charts, contingencies, the whole works. But now, in job search, they seem to forget everything they know about organizing work. They act like the search is something that’s happening to them, something they have to cope with rather than something to plan and organize.

Happily, not everyone is like that. The best job seekers, of course, work this project in the same way the have always worked projects. Research it, plan it, organize the work, implement in a disciplined manner, measure progress and adjust plans as needed.

The catch is that most people have very limited experience in this particular project. The best people at initial planning in this project are often marketing managers, since that’s the kind of thinking required. Later, sometimes it’s the senior managers, the PR professionals or the salespeople who do the best job in search communications.

Professionally-designed and -led programs like LHH’s are created to accelerate the process of learning to be effective in the job search project. The other most useful approach I’ve seen is simply talking it over with a diverse group of peers. Get a marketing person, a financial person, a senior manager, and a lawyer talking about what it takes to plan and implement an effective search, and everyone will learn something. Which, of course, is why LHH supports that with Job Search Work Teams (JSWT).

(If your LHH program does not include JSWT, you can create your own, using the instructions in the last chapter of my McGraw-Hill book, below.)

Personally, I think learning something about the most effective management of a job search project is a really good idea. This probably won’t be the last time you’ll do it. That’s the way the world is these days.

So get good at job search this time around, and the next time – should it come – will be faster and easier. The first step is a project plan. A good one.

Orville Pierson is LHH’s Director of Program Design and the author of The Unwritten Rules of the Highly Effective Job Search (McGraw-Hill) and Highly Effective Networking: Meet the Right People and Get a Great Job (Career Press). With over 30 years’ experience in career services, he leads the team that designs LHH’s career transition programs. Orville can be reached at orville@highlyeffectivejobsearch.com with comments and questions that might become part of future postings, but he cannot respond to them individually.