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.