First and foremost, enjoy the long Holiday weekend! Our freedom has never been free, nor has our independence been shaken.
Job search does not happen in a digital vacuum.
I have long suggested that steps one and two of our 12-step Process M.A.P. give us all the ingredients we need to “get in the galley” and cook up a three course meal of our personal marketing collateral materials. Most job seekers seem to prefer starting with a resume, so that they can begin simply applying to any job that seems remotely close to what they can do…
Thursday, July 7th… Implementing your PMP: The ‘First Wave’ and beyond
I encourage you to work with all your ingredients at the same time…if your desired result is a nice prime rib dinner, don’t start with the meat—start with the seasonings and vegetables, even get your dessert started…
Because that “meaty” resume is the easiest and quickest of what you need to prepare!
So…job seeking ‘chefs,’ let’s look at the ingredients that you have identified through assessment of your galley shelves, and your dinner of choice.
You have learned in earlier sessions that the key to the whole notion of productive and efficient networking is to generate INTERACTIVE communication, the initial basis of relationship building! When involved with active job search, part of our preparation is to develop our set of Personal Marketing collateral materials, the vehicles by which we deliver our “story.” We season our job search performance by building confidence in that story through practice and research.
Ah, and finally our just desserts… the CAREER pay-off is the network we build through the focus of targeting and the management of our contacts.
Networking is a contact sport!
The ‘FIRST Wave’
Your purpose in this ‘first wave’ of networking is to gain information, advice, and most importantly names of other individuals you can call. You can create INTERACTIVE communication with NO rejection! The lifeline of networking is to always get more ‘contacts.’ So, be sure to ask each person if they have a minute to talk to you, and when finished talking thank them for their time.
Make networking calls in a block of time. Each call is more comfortable than the one before. Do not call people and ask them if they have any openings at their company… This is almost always totally non-productive. By starting with people you already know, or have a reason to know, you will be gaining confidence with every conversation!
THE PRINCIPLES BEHIND A SUCCESSFUL JOB SEARCH ARE ALWAYS THE SAME: the search process itself is time consuming work, and the more productive time you spend on your job search the more interviews and job offers you will generate.
So the question at this point is “Where do you find out about job openings and on which avenues of job search should you spend the most time?”
THE BEST (And Worst) OF BOTH WORLDS
Technology has done a terrific job of consolidating posted job leads. Web crawling software can reach out and consolidate classified ads, recruitment posts and company posted job opportunities. We know these consolidated sites as Internet Job Banks… and some of them contain a huge amount of postings.
Unfortunately, their very size makes it challenging to stay current and eliminate redundancy. Also unfortunate is the fact that these very same job banks have consolidated your competition and rejection from Corporate America. This is not even mentioning that Corporate America is also missing it’s goal of better qualified resumes to fuel its recruitment effort… they’re simply getting MORE resumes to process!
Solution? Use the Job Banks to generate your most attractive leads, then network your way into those targeted organizations. This is getting the most from your use of technology instead of being abused by it!
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