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.

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.

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.

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.

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.