Job seeking from a hunters perspective Blog

New Age in job hunting October 8, 2009

The techniques we used just 3-4 years ago do not work today. For those who have held the same job for 15+ years are really at a loss because those techniques are really outdated. What do you do where do you get up to date information?

Instead of buying books on job hunting except for a few, your best bet is networking groups for unemployed, searching the net, searching blogs on job hunting(oh look you found one) or asking fellow colleagues who are in the same boat you are. What boat is that you ask? Why the worse sales and marketing job there is. The hours are long the pay is pitiful and sometimes there is no support. Your customer base has and continues to dwindle. You say hey wait I am not in sales and marketing I was a (fill in the blank here). Yes you were! Do you remember all the skills you used to perform that job?  Do you  remember all your accomplishments? Are they in your resume? Is your summary telling the skills and what you can do for my company now?  Well I hope so!

There is a vast array of tools out there for the job seeker to use. As a job seeker you need to test each tool to see if it is the right tool for you. So you try this nice shiny tool and you use it for 2-4 weeks and you get no results. Now what? Put it back on the shelf it isn’t the right tool for you and now try another. You keep doing this until you find the right set of tools that work for you.  We all have different backgrounds and skills and tools we used to perform our last job. Well it is the same thing for job hunting and all the techniques. You have the find the combination that best fits you.

LinkedIn has become a very powerful tool for job seekers. But just having a basic profile doesn’t cut it if you are a seeker. You have to learn to use every portion of LinkedIn and understand what advantage it gives you.  To hel pout my fellow seekers I have a power point presentation on developing a web presence using LinkedIn. I am also going to conducting a workshop in a few weeks to help them further. How did I learn? By researching reading online articles and just using it until I got it right. Now I have added this  blog to my LinkedIn page.

People ask me, why haven’t you landed yet? I have a few red flags that I have to overcome in order to land. I do not see a problem with any of them as they are personal and will not effect my work or business ethic. I just need to explain that in person.

Knowing your short comings is half the battle. Having a strategy helps you face the inevitable. Ah! Strategy.

You are in a hunt of your life. You are 1 in 6 candidates qualified for a position. Do you have a strategy to show that your number 1? Do you know what you are going to say in an interview to come out on top? Do you have a plan to land your next position? You need to develop a strategy a game plan a project plan. After you develop it then execute it.

Networking! Is networking part of your plan? The BLS says that only 5% of jobs being filled are done through a job board and that everyone else is landing through networking. They also say that those that are in an organized networking group land twice as fast. I am actually in 3 networking groups in person and 4 more online groups via LinkedIn.

I will get into specifics of job hunting in later posts.