Highly Effective Job Search

How many interviews have you really had so far? It might be more than you think, especially if you’re using networking as a search technique.

If you are getting interviews through the formal channels – recruiters, ads and Internet postings – the process is pretty clear. First there’s a formal contact, usually with a resume. Then maybe there’s a brief screening interview on the phone, and finally a formal interview. You know exactly how many of these you’ve had.

On the other hand, if you are like most people and you’re using networking as your primary search technique, things aren’t quite so clear. When you meet a hiring manager informally and have a conversation that does not include mention of a specific job, that’s definitely not a job interview. It’s a conversation.

But that conversation has great value. The hiring manager gets a free, no obligation look at a possible candidate. If you follow up persistently and professionally, that hiring manager may later have a need and invite you in for an interview.

Now, retroactively, that initial informal conversation becomes a screening interview – and one that you passed. The hiring manager probably didn’t think of it as an interview at the time it happened. This is an advantage for you, especially if you did think of it that way and acted accordingly.

One of the many advantages of networking is that hiring managers hire human beings, not just skill packages that can be displayed on resumes. And hiring managers usually behave like human beings themselves, relying on their instincts as much as rational judgment when they meet someone. So every time you informally meet one – or one of their subordinates – that’s a stealth interview.

And if you are introduced to the hiring manager by someone they trust, well, that’s a significant added advantage. The whole key here, of course, is to focus more on the people rather than on job openings. Openings will happen. They always do. It’s a question of when, not if. So meet enough hiring managers and the odds of a near-term opening with one of them tilt in your favor.

In case you haven’t yet read my Highly Effective Job Search book yet, you might want to know that for the average person in the average search, “enough” is 25.

Happy hunting.

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.

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.

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.