Highly Effective Job Search

In 30 years of career coaching and job search program design, I’ve found an interview question that I think you should always consider using. This is a question that you ask, not one that you answer. When you use it, you should use it as early in the interview as possible. It will lay the groundwork for success in the rest of the interview.

The short version of the question is, “Please tell me all about this job.” But I’d actually prefer that you use a longer version. This is an open-ended question, one that’s designed to get the Hiring Manager talking. It should provide a general framework for the kind of information you want, but not be too narrowly focused.

Here’s a long version, one that you could shorten if you like:

“Mr. Hiring Manager, I’ve seen the job description for this job and based on what I know so far, the job consists entirely of things that I like to do and can do very well. But this is my first opportunity to talk directly to you about it. Would you be willing to tell me exactly what you will expect from me in this position? I would like to hear how you see the job description, but also your expectations beyond the job description. What’s most important? In this role, what would I need to do to earn your highest rating in my first performance review?”

The more you can get the Hiring Manager to talk in this vein, the better you’ll know how to use the rest of the interview. Your job here is to tell the Hiring Manager why you’re a strong candidate, but you need to use their definition of “strong candidate.” The Hiring Manager’s response gives you an outline for the rest of the interview, so don’t hesitate to ask clarifying questions as he or she talks.

By saying things like “what you expect from me,” you are inviting the Hiring Manage to begin seeing you in the job. You are also beginning to behave like an employee, and a good one, someone expecting to deliver high performance.

Ideally, you’d like the Hiring Manager to talk in this vein for five minutes or so. While listening, you make a mental outline of the three of four things most important to them. Your job for the rest of the interview is to provide evidence that you can deliver those things.

Right now, Linked In is an essential career management and job search tool. It is widely used by recruiters and employers, and there are signs that it could be on its way to edging out Monster and other job boards as the top job site.

I say “right now” because Internet tools evolve rapidly. The old original successes in social networking – like Friendster and MySpace – were initially seen as novelties, sites to be used only by the young and single.  Now, of course, the category has evolved to produce serious business and career management tools. This evolution will continue and accelerate, so don’t assume that Linked In will be number one forever.

Social networking sites are not only about finding your next job, they’re also about locating people who can help you advance your career. They publicize you and your expertise to a broader audience.  They can accelerate the process of your making the real-life networking connections that will advance your job search now and support your career progress when you’re employed.

Perhaps most important, these sites allow you to more effectively manage your networking connections, so that you can use your precious face-to-face time only with those connections that you already know to be the most interesting and productive. They map your networks and the networks of people you know, allowing you to more quickly locate people with knowledge of the companies on your target list.

Real networking of course is about shared interests. It goes beyond professional interests to personal interests of all kinds, so social networking sites can enrich your life as well as your career. And, of course, the two are not separate. Your golf, yoga and parenting networks can and do help you make career progress and accelerate your job search.

You may want to have a page on other social networking sites beyond Linked In. Some are designed for special purposes and niche audiences and may be even more useful for some people. It’s also an issue of which sites your current contacts are on, since it’s easier for them to Link with you or Friend you if they already have a page.

Should you also have a personal website, linked from your social networking site? If you’re in a profession where a portfolio is expected – graphic design for example – the answer is yes.  But for most managers and professionals, it’s simply not worth the time and cost, since it’s likely to get little traffic. Using existing free social networking sites is more effective and less time consuming.

And when you’re job hunting, you don’t want to spend too much time on the Internet, right? You know you’ve got to talk to people real time. Because you know that those conversations continue to be the single most productive activity for job hunters.

So it’s essential to integrate the use of Internet tools with traditional approaches. Internet tools are not a silver bullet. But when they are properly selected and used in combination with proven career transition methods, they definitely improve your effectiveness – and results.

We live in an Information Age. Gathering the best and most relevant information is central to the success of most undertakings, and career management is no exception. Whether you are in active job search, or comfortable in your current employment, access to the right information is essential to future career success.

The problem is usually finding a way to easily locate the right amount of the right information. Employed managers and professionals have limited time. They need to be selective. And they cannot afford the time to go hunting for career-related information every day.

Unemployed job hunters may have more time, but they also have larger information needs, since they’re pursuing a target list of about 40 organizations.

RSS feeds are an excellent solution to this dilemma. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It is not a particularly new technology, but it’s increasingly important in the world of career management and job search.

Basically, it’s a way that web sites let you know when they’ve been updated, like LinkedIn’s mini-feeds. When a website tells you about their feed or asks you to subscribe, they are typically talking about RSS.

It’s likely that your web browser or e-mail client can already do RSS for you. Recent versions of Safari, Firefox, and Internet Explorer all have RSS and web-based services like Bloglines and Google Reader allow you to subscribe to RSS feeds and access them from any web browser on any computer.

Job Search Engines like Indeed and SimplyHired do what Google does, but only for job listings. They search the Internet for relevant results, and then allow you to search those results to find what you’re looking for. You can search by company name, job title, location, or any other keyword. You can then subscribe to an RSS feed for the search, so that when new jobs are found that match your criteria, you’ll be notified.

You can also subscribe to an RSS feed of any search that you perform through Google Blog Search. Most blogs have RSS feeds. Whether you’re looking for career advice, specific jobs, or researching a company, subscribing to RSS feeds is a great way to get quality information fed to your desktop as it’s published.

When that information is relevant to your job search, it’s a great time-saver and can speed your progress toward a new job. You want up-to-date information on every organization on your target list. RSS feeds automate some of that. After you find a great new job, you just might want to leave some of those feeds turned on.

One more thing. Whether you’re good at all this Internet stuff or not, please remember that virtually all job search experts agree that the majority of job hunters still find jobs through real time conversations, mostly with people they already know. The Internet offers useful tools. Use them. But make sure that you spend most of your time talking to people.

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.

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.

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.