Highly Effective Job Search

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.