Highly Effective Job Search

Starting a job search and starting an effective job search are two different things. You can start job hunting by posting on a couple of job boards. This takes very little time or thought.  But will it take your career in the direction you want to go? If you haven’t already done so, please take a few minutes right now to consider the best ways to do this project.

In starting an effective job search, the best first steps are deciding what kinds of jobs to pursue, defining your personal job market and creating a communication plan to talk to that particular market – a targeted core message about your qualifications.

Many job hunters don’t even consider defining their personal job market, but doing that is a central part of an effective search. After all, those statistics you read about the national or local job market may not apply to you. Your personal job market could be quite different and you need to plan accordingly.

Once you’ve defined the job market appropriate for your career and personal needs, you can write a better resume because you know who you’re writing for. And that same focused core message – targeted to a particular set of jobs in a particular set of organizations – is important in interviewing and all other search communications as well.

Even more important, you can use the definition of your personal job market to create an actual list of employers. This allows you to conduct a well-organized, proactive search, researching those employers, and systematically contacting the most promising.

Which takes us to the most important part: The most effective job hunters don’t merely pursue job openings, they also pursue the right organizations prior to the announcement of job openings. To do this, you need to plan your search project carefully, the way you would plan any important project.

In job search, the key elements of the initial project plan are: (1) deciding what kinds of work you want to do, (2) defining the personal job market that makes sense for that kind of work, and (3) creating your best core communication message for that job market.

Once you have this kind of project plan in place, implement it proactively, using objective measures of your progress as you go.

Now is a great time to get started – or to re-energize your search if you’ve already started.

May you find the right job soon.

If someone calls you on the phone and says, “I can guarantee you a better new job at a higher salary in three weeks or less,” please don’t give them your money. Hang up the phone. Walk away.

As you know, finding a new job takes some effort. Very few people really enjoy the entire process. Most would love to have some surefire shortcuts.  All of which opens the door for people selling “solutions” of all kinds.

In my 30 years in job search assistance, I’ve seen hundreds of excellent career consultants provide very useful services. I’ve also seen a wide range of scams.  Many promise to deliver huge career improvements very fast.

Let’s start with the “Fast!” part. If you’re qualified and sober, you might very well land a minimum wage job in a three-week job search. But any experienced professional in the career services field will tell you that job searches for educated managers and professionals usually take longer than three weeks.

How long? It depends on your qualifications, the condition of your personal job market, and most of all, how effective you are in job search.

The good news is that once you’re defined your personal job market and begun exploring it, you can make a pretty good guess on whether your search will take more or less than the average time. And, of course, those who plan and organize the search succeed more quickly than those who don’t – regardless of the condition of their personal job market.

While the “super-fast job search” is a myth, a “better job at higher pay” is very often possible. But no one can guarantee it, since it depends heavily on your effort, your last compensation, and the condition of your personal job market.

Your knowledge of salary negotiations helps, but the truth is that you need to do reasonably well at all elements of the search, from start to finish in order to take a step up. How you present yourself will convince people you’re worth more money — or not. The good news is that people with only average qualifications can often make a very good move if they understand how to play the job search game, and talk about themselves in the right way.

I guess that covers the “guarantee” part, too. Even the person doing the hiring usually has to check with others before making any promises, much less any guarantees. So in the end, you are your own best guarantee of career advancement.

The bottom line? There are scams in the job search assistance field, ranging from lousy CDs, books and websites to shoddy “services” costing thousands of dollars. Anyone who puts their resume out on the Internet could get a call from a salesperson hawking one of these.

Follow the same rule you use in avoiding any scam: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably isn’t true.

I’ve suggested resources for job hunters on my website. None are expensive. If you use some of them, you can learn to play the job search game better than average, and that plus persistent effort add up to the best guarantee of success that you can get.

Over the years, I compiled a list of the ten top reasons why it takes people too long to find a job. That list is reprinted here — with proper permissions of course — from my first book, The Unwritten Rules of the Highly Effective Job Search.

The Ten Top Reasons Why It Takes People Too Long To Find A Job

1. They don’t put much time or effort into job hunting.
2. They waste time on unproductive activities.
3. They have no way of measuring their progress.
4. They’re not sure what kind of work they’re looking for.
5. They don’t make a list of prospective employers – or it’s not long enough.
6. They don’t define and analyze their own personal job market.
7. They have no systematic approach to the job search project.
8. They only pursue announced job openings and use no proactive approaches.
9. They don’t realize that search is a numbers game – or they seriously underestimate the numbers needed.
10. They go it alone, without any objective advice or support.

My book, of course, was written to help job hunters avoid all ten of those. But in case you haven’t read it, I’ll give you the short version of the solution to all ten right here: Create a Marketing Plan and a Target List of at least 40 organizations you will proactively pursue. Use objective numerical measures to gauge your progress in search each week. Remember, it’s not about how many hours you devote to job hunting, it’s about what you do with those hours. Effective job hunters have a lot of real time conversations every week with a wide range of people.

Use networking as well as Internet postings and recruiters. Talk to other job hunters as you go to compare notes and get better at the job search project. Do this on a Job Search Work Team if possible, or simply do it informally with job hunters you meet at networking groups.

May you have a highly effective job search.

Have you found an insurance policy that covers you if your job search takes too long? How much would you pay for that kind of coverage? Have you talked to Lloyds of London yet?

So far as I know, you can’t buy one. But you can create one for yourself by paying particular attention to managing three areas of your search project. The following are three questions to guide you. The third one is the most difficult and probably the most important.

1. How good is your overall plan?

Any project works better when you have a good plan, and the central plan for job search is your marketing plan, the one you developed in Milestone Four, right?

In product marketing, you need to know exactly who your prospective buyers are and what they need. Then you offer to fill those needs, talking about the product in terms that your market will understand and appreciate.

Job search is no different - except for the very good news that you only need to close one sale.

2. Is your target market large enough?

“I’m not sure” is not an acceptable answer to this question. Not if you’re serious about getting a good job any time soon. Working a market that’s too small is one of the top reasons job searches don’t go well.

If you haven’t done the exercise called “Evaluating Your Target Market” please go do it right now. In order to do it, of course, you’ll need a marketing plan and a written target list.

3. What is your job market telling you?

In a job search, you are in a conversation with a particular job market, the one described by your marketing plan. If your networking is even halfway effective (and that’s all it needs to be), you are talking a number of people about a small group of organizations – probably less than 50, and almost certainly less than 100. You’re researching that same job market using the Internet and printed materials. And you’re talking to people currently employed by that group of organizations.

If you ask the right questions and are able to stay objective, you can ascertain the needs of that market well enough to see where you would best fit in. In the course of your dialog with your personal job market, you may find that you need to adjust your plan. You may need to shift the mix of organizations, expand their number, adjust your message about yourself, or even go back to the drawing board on your marketing plan.

In order to stay objective, it helps to discuss your progress with other people from time to time.

Paying attention to these three areas – and of course doing enough networking every week — is what makes your job search unusually effective. It might not be quite as good as a million dollar policy, but it’s as close as you can get.

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.

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.