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How To Find Job Opportunities

This article is more than 8 years old.

There are quite a few moving pieces to keep track of on a typical job search. Unless somebody pops out of the bushes to offer you a new position, you're going to have to invest some time and energy in your job-search activities.

A full-time job-seeker might invest 25 hours per week on his or her job search.

A part-time job seeker can expect to invest anywhere from three or four hours to 15 or 20 hours per week on job-search-related activities like these:

  • Researching prospective employers
  • Searching for appropriate job opportunities
  • Creating your job-seeker brand and articulating it in your Human-Voiced Resume and your LinkedIn profile
  • Researching and writing Pain Letters
  • Networking
  • Following up on job-search correspondence

These job-search activities can take up a lot of your time. That's okay! You and your career are worth that investment.

You can be branded for your job search with a Human-Voiced Resume that you love. You can feel great about your career direction, your understanding of the Business Pain you relieve in your work and your revved-up job search engine.

With all those arrows in your quiver, you're ready to go! There's only one problem: you have to find opportunities to apply for!

You have to find keyholes, as we call them. A keyhole is an aperture into the wall between you and the department managers who could use your help. Any conversation can be a  keyhole -- a conversation at your  kid's school, at your place of worship or at the grocery store. A Pain Letter creates a keyhole. When you go to a business showcase event and hear a CEO speak to the audience, you've been presented with a huge keyhole.

You can write to the CEO and share an intelligent comment about his or her speech. You can talk to the CEO at the same event where you saw and heard him or her speak, if you have something interesting to say!

If you aren't working right now or you're working but you don't mind publicizing your job search, you can use your LinkedIn profile to let people know you're job-hunting.

You can talk to your friends and learn who's hiring. You can read the Business section of your local newspaper and see which companies are doing interesting things like opening new facilities or launching new projects.

You can check out Indeed and SimplyHired, two job-ad aggregation sites that post gazillions of job ads from employers, association websites, recruiters and job boards. You can search the vast Indeed and SimplyHired job-ad databases using a few keywords plus your preferred location.

You can create a Target Employer List for your job search, and I hope you will. You can't rely on published job ads as your own source of new leads. We recommend that you spend one-third of your available job search time and energy responding to posted job ads.

You can invest another one-third of your available time and energy reaching out to employers who don't have job ads published. You'll reach your hiring manager at each organization via your pithy Pain Letter.

The last one-third of your available job-search time and energy will go to networking. That's a well-rounded job search program. Don't forget to keep your mojo fuel tank full! Your mojo is the thing that will power you through your job search and into your awesome new job!