Managing Your Job Search

Managing an effective job search campaign takes hard work; a substantial amount of time, energy, and determination; and blatant optimism. This process is meant to get you interviews and offers so that you can choose the job you want, not take the job you need.

The first real key to any job search campaign is to call on your best project management skills. Your campaign to find a job is a project like every other project you have managed in your work (and your life). You will use your strategic thinking, preparation, planning, and organizational skills, along with a little common sense.

Your ability to implement your plan with determination and tenacity is even more important given the fact of unreturned phone calls, limited response to direct mail campaigns, and repeated rejections. Rejection (or nonresponse) is a part of this project work. It does not mean that you are rejected, it means that for one reason or another, the job does not seem to be a good fit. That reality is certainly more difficult to accept when you are not the one making the determination, but it is part of the process that you will manage.

Interviews and Offers

The goal of any job search campaign is to get interviews and offers. If you are not getting interviews, you need to review your up-front work (values, skills, talents, and targets). If you are getting interviews, but no offers, something is missing during the interview process.

In this project to get interviews and offers, you will work out the who-what-how of your career transition: You will define your skill set, your values, your marketing plan, and your target companies, and you will certainly pursue those targets with intelligence and integrity.

The Who Review Chapter 1 and your Values Worksheet (Exhibit 1-3). Use these results, along with your skills, to develop your professional objective. What do you enjoy in your career, and what would you like to avoid repeating (Exhibit 10-1)? Next, create a vision statement for yourself (Exhibit 6-2), including the most likely titles for your next position. (You will be able to use the results of this work to communicate your value in your r sum and when interviewing, and to evaluate the best cultural fit for your style in the organizations you target).

The What Next, identify what it is that you want. List at least six potential job titles that would fit you, determine how you will package the services you have to offer (create a r sum ), and decide what market segments are most likely to buy those services. Consider the following issues:

• How will you describe yourself in order to establish your credibility?

• What accomplishments best speak to your abilities?

• How can you differentiate yourself from others in the marketplace?

• What potential liabilities do you have (for example, you were terminated or you appear to have been job-hopping), and what strategies can you develop to overcome these potential liabilities?

The How Next, you will be targeting your market, not looking for jobs that are posted, but looking for those unpublished jobs. You will be selecting the most appropriate geographic areas, the most appropriate industries within those areas, the most appropriate companies within those industries, and the individuals within those companies that you would like to meet, as well as preparing networking strategies to connect with people you know who know the people whom you want to know. Each of these phases requires a good deal of research and analysis, planning and organization, and how well you perform each of these phases is a measurement of your job search productivity.

To keep you going in your search, keep track of your contacts on a daily and weekly basis. Using the Job Search Productivity Worksheet (Exhibit 14-1), keep track of the number of hours or minutes you spent on each activity, including research, networking, and interviewing.

Exhibit 14-1: Job Search Productivity Worksheet

Item		Number of Hours
Company research
Networking/phone, email, or letter
Networking/in person
Responding to posted positions (Internet/print)
Researching search firms
Responding to search firm postings
Contact with target company
Interview with hiring manager
Follow-up and thank-you calls and letters
Other
Total Contacts

At the end of each day, calculate the amount of time you spent on each activity. Your productivity at this point is calculated on the actions you have taken: If you have made significant contacts, if you have conducted significant research, if you have spent time in any of the major categories, you have been productive.

At the end of each week, tally your totals in each area, and review your statistics. Tabulating these daily and weekly successes is important in your assessment of your effectiveness; it is a way to focus your time on the technique with the highest ROI and to gauge your productivity based on your activities. If you are working your plan, but you are not getting interviews, you can easily see what part of your campaign you need to change. If you are getting interviews, but no offers, you can again see what part of your campaign you need to change.

At the end of each month, ask yourself:

• How many interviews have I had? What generated the interviews (networking, letter writing, recruiters, direct mail, or job postings)?

• How many offers have I had? From what source (networking, letter writing, recruiters, direct mail, or job postings)? If I turned them down, why?

• Which parts of my marketing plan are working well, and which parts of my plan need to be modified?

• How conscientious have I been in following my plan? Where am I least effective, and why? Where am I most effective, and why?