Maybe you've been thinking about switching jobs, or maybe you want to put a toe in the water by applying for a job or two to see what happens.
Maybe you've been job-hunting for months without success, and getting the feeling that what you need is a job-search plan! Here is a step-by-step guide to getting your job search underway, whether you're out of the closet as a job-seeker or keeping things hush-hush until the right job offer comes along.
Getting Ready
If you're going to be conducting a stealth job search that your current employer doesn't know about, use caution. If you update your LinkedIn profile as many job-seekers do, set your notification settings to Off so that your contacts (including your workmates and clients) don't get notifications from LinkedIn advising them of your profile-updating activity. Here are a few more things under-the-radar job-seekers can't do:
- Go to job fairs
- Post their resumes online at career sites
- Send blast email messages to their friends to say "Hey! I'm job hunting!"
You're thinking "Why can't I blast-email my friends? They don't work with me." I guarantee that one of your wonderful friends will space out and blast your "Help me find a job" email to all of his or her friends, and the story will work its way back to your boss. That is the Murphy's Law of job-hunting. You can tell your friends about your hush-hush job search, but do it on the phone or in private email messages that use the word CONFIDENTIAL (in all caps) at least twice per message.
- What will my ideal job title and description be?
- How will this ideal job help me grow as a person and a professional?
- What will my ideal job pay?
- What sorts of people will I be working with?
- What sort of company or organization will I be working for?
- What kind of Business Pain will I join the organization to solve?
Getting Altitude
Now you have an idea of what you want in a new job. If you didn't, you'd run the risk of jumping from the frying pan into the fire, going from one so-so job into another one. Get your ideal situation clear in your mind so that you can compare real-life job opportunities with the Ideal Job you designed for yourself.
Your next step is to get altitude -- that is, perspective -- on your own career so far. What have you learned in your current job, that you'll take with you to the next one? What have you found to be your greatest strength as a working person, the one thing your colleagues would say you were born to do and should always be doing?
If you're a visual person, draw a roadmap on a piece of paper and fill it in with your path since childhood. Where did you live at each point in your life, and what did you enjoy? If you're a writer, write your autobiography. Your life story has incredible wisdom hidden inside it. Unleash that information now as you prepare to make a major life move!
Zeroing In
Your job search's success relies on your ability to target the employers you can help the most and vice versa. You can't go on a white-collar job search in 2014 with the brand "I can do anything." The nineteen-eighties style resume with bold text trumpeting Sales! Operations! Customer Service! Accounting! went out the window years ago.
These days, the name of the game is targeting. Your career sweet spot lies at the intersection of the things you do especially well, the things you love to do and the things employers will pay for. That means there must be pain points associated with your area of specialization. When you're clear on those three elements, you've got your sweet spot and you're ready to brand yourself for your job search.
Every job-seeker is a marketer, now!
Here's an example. Our client Elana worked for a telephone carrier (one of the Ma Bell spinoffs) for twenty years. She got laid off and was ripe for reinvention. She didn't want to stay in telecommunications, but she wasn't sure what else to do. Elana's sweet spot lay at the intersection of these three elements:
- What she loves to do (training, program management and customer hand-holding)
- What she's good at (all of the above plus budgeting and managing staff members) and
- What the market will pay for.
Elana learned about the market's desire to pay by browsing the job ads on Indeed and SimplyHired. She took the terms from her first two bullets above (program management, e.g.) and plugged them into the What field and added her city location to the Where field on each of those two mega-job-search sites. Her search gave her back lots of job ads for Account Managers and Sales Training positions, so that's where Elana will focus her job search as it begins.
Targeting Employers
Now Elana needs to create a target list of employers. She is not going to waste her time tossing off resumes in response to every job ad she sees. She is driving her own job search, not reacting to job ads that happen to be posted online. Elana is going to divide her scarce and valuable job-search time and energy into three equal parts. One-third of her time and energy will go to responding to posted job ads that meet her sweet spot requirements. A second one-third will go to her own outreach to hiring managers she finds on LinkedIn. These folks don't have job ads posted, or if they do Elana hasn't seen them. That's okay!
It's a new day. You can send a Pain Letter to anyone you want. The last one-third of Elana's available job-search time and energy will go to networking. That's not just for leads and advice -- she can use the moral support, too! Networking also gives Elana a chance to advise her friends, a great thing for anyone in transition to do. When we help our friends with their issues, we remember how smart and capable we are!
Pain-Spotting
Elana is focusing on Account Manager and Sales Trainer roles. Next she'll focus on the Business Pain that a hiring manager would bring her in to relieve. What sorts of pain do Directors and VPs of Account Management have? Accounts worthy of their own Account Manager spend big bucks with vendors. They can't be left to languish. They need to be handled with kid gloves. VPs and Directors of Account Management worry that big accounts or could-be-bigger accounts are falling through the cracks.
Their calls don't get returned. Their orders aren't shepherded through an order processing system. These are the pain points Elana will focus on when she's pursuing the Account Manager side of her job search.
On the Training side, the pain is different. Training Managers know that it's hard to get time and attention from busy and overscheduled trainees, yet executives and regulatory bodies require people to have up-to-date training. Elana knows that Training Managers worry about trainers who can't engage an audience, or aren't flexible when face-to-face or synchronous training isn't the right answer. (Synchronous training is the kind that happens when all the trainees are being trained at the same time.)
When training isn't working, people are disengaged and don't participate. Their managers get frustrated, and reasonably so. Elana is going to hit these pain points when she sends her Pain Letters to Training Managers.
She's nearly ready to go!
Writing a Pain Letter
Elana is going to write her first Pain Letter. She'll write one for a Director of Account Management whose job ad she found online. She'll write a second Pain Letter to a Training Manager she spotted on LinkedIn, at a company about five miles from her house. In order to write her Pain Letter, Elana is going to spend time on each company's website to identify her hiring manager (if she can't find the right person on the company site, she'll zip over to LinkedIn and use the Advanced People Search function there) and to get clues that will help her be even more specific as she writes about each manager's Business Pain.
Customizing Your Human-Voiced Resume
Now Elana needs a resume to send in the mail to her hiring manager (No Black Holes! Life is too short) along with a customized Pain Letter. She'll start by writing a hard-drive version of her Human-Voiced Resume to keep on file and update whenever she gets the urge. Next, she'll create two variations on her Human-Voiced Resume: one for Account Manager jobs, and the other for Training opportunities.
As a final tweak, Elana will customize her HVR even more for each hiring manager she approaches. Her first Account Manager opportunity is with a major lending firm. When she was with the phone company, Elana had a big lender as a client, so she'll throw that brand name into the version of her HVR that she sends to the Director of Account Management at the lending firm. The more you can look like a 'friendly' in your first approach to a hiring manager, the better!
Let 'er Rip!
Elana is ready for prime time now. She's going to print out her customized Human-Voiced Resume and her Pain Letter, each one printed in black ink on white bond paper (she'll use a better grade of printer paper than she uses for her everyday printing, but she'll avoid the 1980s-style nubbly beige and pink "Resume Paper" that brands her as out of date and out of touch).
She'll staple her one-page Pain Letter to the front of her two-page Human-Voiced Resume with one staple in the upper left hand corner of the page. She'll sign her Pain Letter at the bottom and then slide the Pain Letter-HVR combo, unfolded, into a pristine white 8.5 x 11-inch envelope. She'll block-print her hiring manager's name on the front of the envelope, in the center, along with his or her job title, company name and company street address, which she found on the company website.
She'll block-print the recipient information rather than send the envelope through her printer. She learned at our job-search workshop that printed envelopes from non-clients-or-vendors get tossed in the wastebasket in the company mailroom, while hand-printed ones are allowed to sail through to the hiring manager's daily mail delivery.
Tell Your Network
Elana relaxes with a cup of iced tea once her Pain Letter-HVR packet is in the mail. The next day, she starts writing a list of people who should know about her job search - friends and ex-coworkers, book club members and everyone she knows. She'll write to these folks in small batches and invite each person for coffee or lunch. If she's saving money (and who isn't?) she might invite them for a walk around the lake instead. At her one-on-one networking get-togethers, Elana will talk about her job search but much more than that, she'll catch up with her friend and help them with whatever life issues they're facing now.
Elana didn't realize until she started reconnecting with old friends how powerful their medicine is for her as a mojo-depleted job-seeker!
Rinse and Repeat
Now Elana has a plan. She's going to shoot for two networking get-togethers each week and four Pain Letter-HVR combos going out in the mail every week, too. Pain Letters historically have a 25% hit rate. That means that hiring managers will respond positively to a Pain Letter about one-quarter of the time. So Elana figures that by sending out four Pain Letters a week she'll generate a new, live job-search lead once a week, and that's not including her networking contacts!
Elana feels like a person again and a professional after a hard blow when her job disappeared. She's got a plan, a vision for herself and a brand that shows the world what she's done. She's unstoppable!
You can be like Elana with a little time and energy invested. Why not start now?
