Highly Effective Job Search

That is a question that many job hunters ask on their first day in job search. For the majority, the answer is “no, don’t bother with tweeting.” But wait, don’t log off yet.

Let’s put it in context and look more carefully. In case you haven’t tried it yet, Twitter is a micro-blog that publishes messages that are shorter and more frequent that ordinary blogs.  Those “Tweets” are sent to your readers’ phones and computers, kinda like an instant message.

For job hunters, the central question with both blogs and micro-blogs is this: Who will read them?

With Twitter, you need to collect “followers” who volunteer to read your Tweets. It seems to me that you’re not likely to collect a whole lot of Hiring Managers inside of your targeted companies. Or even a whole lot of employees in those companies.

With a full-blown blog, the problem is exactly the same. If you know how to publicize your blog so it can be found among the millions of competing offerings, it could be a career and job hunting asset. If it is read by the right people. And if your content is useful to readers in your profession or industry.

The “if’s” are significant.

Unless you already have a following on Twitter or a successful blog, my suggestion is to forgo these approaches. There are many more productive areas where you can invest your job hunting time. Writing even micro-blogs is a time consuming process.

But reading blogs and Tweets is another matter.

For someone in job search, following Twitter feeds related to targeted companies can be useful. You can go to Twitter.com, search for the information you want by using keywords and sign up.

The same is true of full-scale blogs. Following the blogs of industry or professional experts can be useful for job hunters. Technorati.com is an easy place to go shopping for useful blogs. But writing a blog is useful only for the few who are strong writers and willing to learn the game of competing for readership.

What if you follow a number of Twitter feeds and some of the authors volunteer to follow yours? Well, if they’re the right people, it might be useful to tweet back now and then. For some people, Twitter can have some value as a social networking site.

But please, please don’t get too wrapped up in this stuff. The majority of job hunters still find jobs by talking real time to people they know and getting introductions from those “first generation” contacts to people at targeted employers. Blogs and micro-blogs can be useful tools. But blogs – and all the rest of the Internet – can also be the job hunter’s biggest time waster.

In the 30 years I’ve been doing career consulting, this question is probably the one I’ve been asked the most.

There is a popular rule of thumb that a job search takes one month for every $10,000 in compensation. While there is some evidence that a higher comp search might take a bit longer – or at least require a bit more effort – than a lower comp search, I never subscribed to that one month per $10K idea. Is it going to take someone at $200K twenty months to find a job? I certainly hope not.

Try coming at it like this. How long will it take to put a cubic yard of sand in your pickup truck? Throw three shovelfuls a minute and it will take twice as long as it would if you threw six a minute. But why not start up the backhoe and save yourself a heart attack?

The intensity of the effort of the job seeker is the single most important factor in how long a search takes. And right behind that is how efficient and well planned the search efforts are.

You’d think that would be obvious, but I’ve talked to a lot of otherwise very smart people who seem to miss it. People sometimes like to say it’s about the difficulties of the job market. “It’s a tough job market,” they say, “No one’s hiring.”

But that’s kind of like saying that it’s the sand’s fault that the truck isn’t loaded yet. “That daggone sand is too heavy!  And it just sits there!”

Sometimes I have conversations with job seekers who have been “looking” for months and haven’t had any interviews. What’s behind it is nearly always the same: insufficient efforts.

I remember a time when I asked one such person to precisely enumerate his efforts. It turned out that in two months, he’d sent twenty resumes to advertised jobs, emailed three dozen resumes to employers who hadn’t advertised, posted his resume on six job boards and made two dozen phone calls.

In other words, his average weekly activity amounted to sending eight e-mails and making three phone calls. While I’d never expect a job hunter to exert the same level of effort, an executive recruiter might make 100 phone calls in one day. With the right resume, I’d expect one invitation to interview for every 40 ads, so 20 is only half way to the first interview.

And you’d have to ask whether spamming potential employers is the most productive effort one could make.

How long will your search take? If your compensation is under $100K and your search is of average difficulty, then my favorite rule of thumb is that it will take as long as it takes you to have conversations with 25 appropriate hiring managers. Talk to one a week and it will take 25 weeks. Two per week is a 12 1/2 week search. For those between $100 and $400 in base comp, the rule of thumb is 35 hiring manager contacts. This is based on research done by Lee Hecht Harrison.

These aren’t all interviews. They’re mostly informal conversations that make the hiring manager aware of your ability and availability – usually before there is an announced opening.

How long will your search take?

That’s all about how hard you’re working on it, isn’t it?  And how smart you are about being effective in that work. Millions of people have learned how to do effective job hunting. You can too.

Ever have the feeling that people are talking about you? While it could be paranoia, it’s more likely that it’s true.

You can guess what some of it is. “Fred got laid off.” “Cynthia got caught in that downsizing over at United Amalgamated.” “I heard Harry lost his job twice in the last five years.”

Some of it is gossip. Some of it is genuine concern. Some of it is just that people always talk – about whatever happens to come up. What’s interesting to me as a job search expert is that you actually have some control over what they say. Feed people negative information, and it will very likely get circulated in the gossip circles.

On the other hand, if you choose what you say carefully and repeat it often enough, you can get good-hearted people repeating information that will accelerate your job search. What information is that? Your Core Message about yourself and your skills is one example. You want everyone to know what you have to offer and that – for the right opportunity – you just might be available.

You want people to remember and talk about you in a useful and positive way, so why not phrase it well and repeat it often? The same is true of information from your Project Plan, especially your Target List. You want people to know what organizations you are pursuing, and what kind of information you’re seeking about those organizations.

You can provide a real opportunity for people who like to talk by asking them the right questions about your targeted organizations and people who work in them. You should be sure to speak positively about organizations on your target list, because your interest and enthusiasm will also be talked about.

I’m not suggesting that you become a Pollyanna, that you never say a negative word or never discuss problems related to career transition. But I am definitely suggesting that you limit such discussions to a carefully chosen inner circle.

If you’ve held management jobs, none of this is different from how you behave at work. You’re the boss, so you’re careful about what you say because you know people will repeat it. And dissect it. And discuss it.

So why not use the same thoughtful, disciplined communication in your job search? After all, job search is a communication project. So if people are talking about you, that could be a good thing.

When I lose something around the house – reading glasses, my favorite pen or my car keys – I look for them in the usual places. If I don’t find the missing object with that casual search, I get more systematic.

People in job search usually behave in the same way. They start by doing the obvious – posting their resume on a couple of online job boards, maybe, or contacting a few recruiters.

If that doesn’t work, they’re ready for a more systematic approach. But the problem is that most people don’t know how to conduct a systematic job search. What does that mean? More job boards? Different recruiters? Networking?

Whatever techniques you use, how do you get systematic about it, and how do you best gauge your progress? Most people don’t know.

I think there are two key pieces to a systematic job search. First, you need a plan that defines your personal job market. You’re not, after all, going to search for any job in the world. You want to work in certain organizations and not in others. You may not want to use a shovel all day but maybe you also don’t have a PhD in microbiology.

So you narrow it down, focus in. When I’m looking for my reading glasses, I know they’re in the house somewhere, because I used them to read the paper this morning in the kitchen. So I don’t consider looking for them at my sister’s place or in Starbucks. In the same way, you can define your personal job market by eliminating some parts of the larger market and focusing in on others that are more attractive and more promising.

Once you have a solid plan, the second thing you need is a way of measuring your progress toward landing one of your preferred jobs in one of your preferred organizations. Interviews and offers, of course, are proof positive that your plan is good and you’re using the right search techniques. But how do you measure your progress before your first interview?

There are, in fact, about a dozen simple, time-tested, numerical progress measurements that you can use throughout your job search. These, along with some “rules of thumb” about how the average job search works allow you to see – early in your search — which techniques work for you and which do not. They also help you tell whether your overall project plan is effective or whether it needs refinement.

All this adds up to systematic approach to job search. It’s described in my first book, but I’ll give you a quick summary right here. Research tells us that the average person in the average search talks to 25 hiring managers on the way to being hired by one of them. And the average person in search has about 14 conversations in order to make contact with one hiring manager.  Most of those 14 conversations are with friends and acquaintances. A couple are with people inside of targeted organizations. (Yes, that’s networking.)

I hope you study up on effective job search. But whether you do that or go your own way, I hope you’ll find a way of conducting a systematic job search. Because, after all, whether it’s lost reading glasses or a great new job you’re looking for, a systematic approach to search just plain works better.

People who easily found jobs last time around may be more likely to have trouble this time. Or so it seems, based on a study of people in career transition.

A doctoral candidate studying career transition methods conducted in-depth interviews with people in a career transition program. He used the research as the centerpiece of his doctoral dissertation.

One of the things he found was a correlation between a highly successful job search – an “easy” one – the last time around and a current job search not going well at all. People who had an easy last search seemed prone this time around to negative attitudes, a less effective approach to search, and complaining – about their last employer as well as the lack of job security in America. And, by their own account, they didn’t use many of the free career transition services available to them.

Now I’m not a social scientist and I may not be quoting the study with any kind of scientific accuracy, But I was struck by the dramatic difference in attitude between the two groups – those that reported an easy last search, and those that didn’t. Why would the first group perform so poorly this time around? And why would they have such a negative attitude?

After thinking it over, I’m guessing that it was mostly about expectations. You get started on a job hunting project that you think is going to be easy, so you don’t plan it and maybe don’t work too hard. You figure you’ll be back at work in no time.

But then time goes by and nothing happens. And then more nothing. Maybe you start to get discouraged, even sour.

Try it the other way. Suppose you’re expecting job search to be an arduous project, long and difficult. You believe you’ll have to talk to dozens of hiring managers. You’re thinking it’ll take months to get your first interview and that you’ll need 10 interviews to get an offer.

So you plan carefully, gird your loins and go into battle. You work hard.

But then you get an interview in the first month! You’re talking to two new hiring managers a week! You get another interview in the second month. You’re getting excellent feedback. You have some setbacks, but all-in-all, you’re on a roll. This is easier than you figured. Encouraged, you work harder than ever. You have a positive attitude, and you beat the averages to find a great new job.

All of this is probably more my musings than it is social science. But maybe it’s worth thinking about: what your expectations are and how that affects your work on the project and your attitude.

Anyway, for what it’s worth, the dissertation was accepted and that guy did get his doctorate.

You certainly can. While it’s not as effective as networking, it’s a whole lot more effective than nothing. If you do it well, it can produce interviews and offers. Like everything in job search, it’s all about the quality and quantity of your efforts. You’ve got to make enough contacts. That’s first. And second, you’ve got to make them effectively.

Lets talk about both of those, starting with what does “enough contacts” mean.

Let’s start with direct mail. It’s defined as mailing or e-mailing cover letters with resumes to organizations who have not advertised openings, organizations where you have no introduction of any kind. With this approach, there’s good reason to believe that your success rate will be in the general range of one interview for every 1000 sent. That’s right, one thousand, with three zeros. After all, when people use that same procedure with you, you call it junk mail or spam and rarely read it, much less buy anything. It does work, but it takes large numbers.

Don’t get discouraged. Please keep reading. The news gets better.

I haven’t seen studies on doing the same thing on the phone – telephoning strangers. This, of course, is what’s called telemarketing.  My educated guess is that it would take a smaller number of these to get an interview – something between dozens and a hundred or two, maybe. And I’m very clear that the lower the level of the position and the lower the compensation, the smaller the number needed for success. I often recommend this approach for hourly or entry level jobs.

The other thing I’m very clear about is that your success in using telemarketing is heavily dependent on your skill in making this kind of phone call. Are you comfortable with it? Do you have a good script? Can you use it in a way it doesn’t sound like a script — and sometimes even turn it into a real conversation?

The same is true of direct mail. It depends on your skill in writing the resume and letter. Sometimes a letter alone, one that encapsulates the resume, is better than a cover letter plus resume. And it depends on the quality of your mailing list. Do you have the right titles and names, spelled right? Does it look personal, rather than like a mass mailing? It’s entirely possible to beat the averages.

In short, when using direct mail or telemarketing in job search, it helps to do them more like the marketing professionals do them. That includes trying different approaches and tracking your success rate to see which gets the best results.

Here’s one last suggestion that most job search experts would agree with: Combine the direct mail with telephone follow-up. Send out a small batch of letters each week. Follow up on all of them on the telephone next week – and the week after. Hit each target with more than one piece of mail or email interspersed with repeated well-planned phone calls. It still takes some effort to get an interview, but the odds are much better than a single phone call or letter to each target. Persistence pays. I’ve seen people get jobs this way.

So if you’re not yet doing as much networking as you’d like, you can supplement it with some direct mail and telephone work – at least until you get your networking numbers up. And if you enjoy it and are getting interviews, then why not continue?