How Does the Job Search Pyramid Work? Step One

Let's first look at how to use the Pyramid to manage your entire job search from beginning to end. Then, I'll walk through it step by step, just as you might look for a job.

Before starting your job search, you need to know what type of job you want to pursue. So, you decide to explore several areas, both inside and outside the industry in which you've been working. First, you research several industry trends using the Internet, newspapers, and trade journal articles. Then, you look at job listings to help you understand what challenges these industries currently have and who is hiring.

The word "industry" refers to an industry, a job field, or both. For example, you may define the type of work you are looking for by naming an industry such as health care or food service. Or it may make more sense to describe it by naming a job field that exists in multiple industries, such as information technology or accounting. In some cases, you will narrow your definition to include industry and job fields, such as health care accounting. Think of your industry as being the phrase you use to complete the sentence, "I'm looking for a job in…"           

You contact professional associations that support the industries you are exploring and arrange for informational interviews with people experienced in those fields. Conversations with people in your current sector point you toward an area where they need people with your experience. But you also discover through researching some specialized job listings that your skills would easily transfer to a completely different industry, which interests you more. So, you decide to pursue this new career change when looking for your next job.

My favorite way to help know what you want is to use one of the O*Net Interest Profilers at MyNextMove.org. The Occupational Information Network (O*Net) is a free online database that contains hundreds of occupational definitions to help students, job seekers, businesses, and workforce development professionals to understand today's world of work in the United States.

Using the interest profiler at MyNextMove.org is free and straightforward to use. It helps you identify where your career interests lie, then points you directly toward career paths that might match those interests. 

Are you ready to graduate from Knowing what you want to Finding contacts and opportunities? Then, watch for our next post!

How to decipher the language of employers and recruiters

Here is an excellent article of how to break 4 enigma codes of the job market.  Read the entire article here.

WHY LISTENING MIGHT BE THE MOST IMPORTANT SKILL TO HIRE FOR

YOU CAN TEACH HARD SKILLS, BUT EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE AND ACTIVE LISTENING? THESE ARE THE SKILLS THAT REALLY MATTER WHEN LOOKING FOR A JOB.

Read full article here

The most effective job search methods help you remain active in your job search and can increase dramatically the number of interviews you can get and valuable contacts you can make.

Traditional job search approaches have job seekers define an interview too narrowly and make obtaining an interview harder than it needs to be.

Self-knowledge regarding your skills and interests is an essential element in helping you define just what sort of job you want. If you know hat your ideal job would be, you are more likely to find one that comes close to it.

How To Use The Job Search Pyramid To Stand Out

Climbing the Job Search Pyramid

Your job search may already feel a lot like climbing a mountain.  Yet you may not have realized that some pre-planning could help make it easier.  There are some stages of your climb when you won’t need a lot of help; in others, you could really use a better map, advice from other climbers, and improved equipment.  If you choose one specific stage of your job seeking climb of which to focus, you’ll be able to put the extra effort exactly where it is needed.

While each person’s job search is unique, you may be surprised to learn that the general route every job seeker follows is the same.  The “Job Search Pyramid” provides a map of the journey ahead.  The Job Search Pyramid is made up of five separate stages:

1. Knowing what you want

2. Finding opportunities and contacts

3. Applying to employers

4. Getting interviews

5. Getting a job offer and landing the job

There is a series of typical activities that takes place in each stage and these activities can change from person to person or job to job.  Knowing more about how the Pyramid works will enable you to determine exactly where to focus more time and energy in your job search.

In the Knowing what you want stage, you define the type of job for which you are looking.  In creating that definition, you are determining which positions, organizations, and industries match your unique and marketable skills and fit with your personal vision for your career.  Just as a company targets the market that is best suited for its products, you also must make choices about where your skills, abilities, and desires will fit best.

Once you know what type of job you are seeking, you enter the Finding opportunities and contacts stage.  In this stage, you look for people who can help your job search and for specific job opportunities - advertised or not.  Advertised positions are found through Internet job boards, trade journals, recruiters, agencies, and your personal network.  Unadvertised positions are those you discover through networking, referrals, research, and contacting employers directly.

In the Applying to employers stage, you make contact with companies regarding the opportunities you have uncovered.  The work “apply” isn’t  meant to suggest you are necessarily filling out applications or sending resumes to human resource department, although you might be.  You also apply for advertised and unadvertised jobs by placing phone calls, writing letters and email messages, and scheduling meetings with people who are in a position to hire you.  These people may be individual managers, not human resources staff.

In the next stage, Getting interviews, you persuade organizations to interview you.  The interview may be formal or informal; it may take place in person, over the phone or in video chat sessions.  During an interview, you discover an organization’s needs and desires for a position and demonstrate how you can meet them.  You may have multiple interviews with a number of people from the same organization.

Following up with contacts and opportunities is important at any stage of the job search process, but it is in the applying and interviewing stages that follow-up becomes crucial.  You’ll need to follow up with your referral sources, hiring managers, recruiters, human resource staff, and any other key players.  This is how you will keep your job search in constant motion and avoid getting stuck.

In the Landing the job stage you manage your job search successfully from the point of being interviewed to receiving a job offer.  When you get an offer, you may need to do some negotiating.  When you don’t get an offer, you’ll want to follow up to find out how you compared to the other candidates and what held the organization back from hiring you.

How People Find Jobs

Finding a job is all about people.  It’s the people you know, people you meet and people you locate who have information, who will inevitably help you get a job.  Submitting your resume to hundreds of companies won’t work; neither will it work to sit by the phone or in front of your computer waiting for a response.  You have to find and connect with the people who will ultimately pave your way to getting hired.

There are literally millions of resumes sitting on managers’ desk or in their inbox right now that are headed for the reject pile, the wastebasket or the trash folder.  Many companies receive from 200 to as many as 10,000 resumes a month.  How will you and what you have to offer stand out in that sea of paper and email?

Surveys estimate that 75% to 84% of available jobs are never even advertised.  If you limit your job search activities to finding and applying for advertised positions, you’re missing many more possibilities than you are finding.  How can you find these unadvertised jobs?

Internet job boards are rarely much help.  In fact, some refer to these sites as “resume black holes.”  Whether you use them to seek out job postings or toe post your resume, only 2 to 4% of job seekers find a job using one of these services.

Finding the right opportunities, getting a company to invite you in for an interview, and then having to compete with so many other candidates for the same job appears to be a daunting task.  So how do job seekers find open position and eventually get hired?  Ask any successful job seeker that question and here is what you’ll hear:  “my network,” referrals,” “a lead from someone inside the company,” “word of mouth.” and “contacting people.”

Perhaps you already knew those answers.  So why don’t you have a job yet?  Do these reasons sound familiar?

• You don’t know where to start.

• There are too many things to do.

• It’s difficult to stay motivated.

If any or all of these obstacles have stopped you in our tracks, then you are in good company.  Job seekers rarely fail because there are no job opportunities.  They fail because they don’t contact and follow up effectively with the people who can lead them to jobs.

Why a job search is so challenging these days

Is it a bad economy, bad luck, outsourcing, cronyism, poor work ethic, too much reality TV...WHAT!?  Steve Dalton, author of The 2-Hour Job Search, and Program Director for Daytime Career Services, Duke University The Fuqua School of Business, attributes the challenge to something else entirely - technology.

Here is an excerpt from his book which I believe to be one of the most insightful how-to publications on the entire subject of job search success in this Information Era.

Technology has made our lives easier in so many ways, but it has only complicated the modern-day job search.  Before Internet job postings grew in popularity in the late 1990s, the job search was a simple (though tedious) process:

Step 1 (optional).  Find classified ads in newspaper.

Step 2.  Mail résumé and cover letter to potential employers.

Step 3.  Wait for invitations to interview.

That doesn’t sound so bad, right?  Ship out résumés and cover letters, and whoever is interested writes you back.  Very straightforward.  Of course, those with contacts at the potential employer still fared best, not having to rely on a piece of paper to make their first impression for them.  But cold calls by phone or mail were often all it would take to get an interview.

Fast-forward a decade.  The Internet’s in full swing, websites will find relevant job postings for you, and résumés can be submitted online at any hour of the day.  Although it’s easier than ever before to find jobs, why does it now seem so much harder to actually get one?  In short, technology made applying for jobs so efficient that hiring became inefficient.

Throw in a global recession, and suddenly you’ve got a perfect storm.  However, even if the economy were to recover fully tomorrow, the job search still wouldn’t go back to how it was.

Technology has effectively ruined the “mail and wait” job search strategy because it is now far more difficult for employers to pick out the few interesting applicants from the massive new influx of casual applicants.

Applying for jobs used to require a significant amount of time.  Time to search classified ads in your local paper, type and print your résumé and cover letter on nice paper, and package them up in an envelope for mailing.  Not everyone had that kind of time, and applying to any job required at least a minimal amount of research - heading to the library to find what address to mail your résumé to, for example.

With the Internet, applying for a job can take less than a minute.  Google a possible employer’s name, click on the Careers section of their website, and submit your résumé.  Done!  When it’s that easy, anyone can do it (and everyone does).  Thus, recruiters who before Internet job postings used to get a dozen or so applications from mostly local candidates in several weeks for a job now get hundreds or thousands from across the country within hours.

Who has time to read hundreds of résumés?  Recruiters today read résumés the way most of us read websites; ignoring a majority of what’s on the page and just skimming the headlines; in the case of résumés, usually looking at only schools attended and previous employers, it that.

That’s assuming hiring managers actually look at résumés received online.  There is no way for a hiring manager to read all of those applications, the only fair thing to do is not ready any of them, so online applications may be avoided entirely.  (That this attitude saves a hiring manager many hours of additional work is hardly coincidental!)  Employers these days rely instead of internet referrals to decide whom to interview. Getting internet referrals efficiently is the core challenge of the modern job search.

One aspect of my mission is and always has been to provide the most up-to-date and relevant job search information available regardless of whether I created it or not.  Of the myriad of job search advice and success plans I review, Steve Dalton’s suggestions are some of the most effective.  I suggest strongly you purchase and devour his book, The 2-Hour Job Search, Using Technology to Get the Right Job FASTER.  You can purchase it directly from my blog at http://FindJobsQuickly.com along with other relevant publications regarding an effective job search.  Just click on the link “Best Job Search Books” on the navigation bar.

How to Introduce Yourself in Ten Seconds

Your ten-second introduction is what you say when you shake someone’s hand, call someone on the phone, or stand up in front of a group.  It describes who you are, what you do, and what you are looking for in a clear and memorable way.  One effective format is the benefits-oriented introduction, where you state a key benefit that you offer your potential employers before giving your occupation or job title.  Here are some examples created by C.J. Hayden and Frank Traditi in their book, Get Hired NOW!:

• “I’m Wendy Chang.  I help high-tech companies close sales with customers who need complex technical solutions.  I’m a technical sales rep looking for a new position in the Houston area.”

• “My name is Ian McDermott.  I develop leadership skills in management teams.  I’m a corporate training director exploring career opportunities in the financial services industry.”

The advantage of this format is that it positions you in the mind of the listener before they have a chance to form their own opinions about what you do.  If you introduce yourself as a project manage, for example, your listener has no way to know what a project manager does or what kind of projects you manage.  An introduction that begins, “I manage new software installations for corporate clients,”is specific enough to be understood and remembered.

Notice that all these introductions use plain language rather than industry jargon.  Unless you know exactly who are your listeners, use terms a twelve-year-old would understand.

How to know what type of job you want - Sample Job Descriptions

A critical component of knowing what type of job you want is learning what is is that companies want.  Sample job descriptions from the industries you are exploring will help you match your wants, needs and desires with what’s available in the marketplace.  When companies post an open position, they describe the specific skills training and experience required to be a successful candidate.  By examining descriptions of available jobs, you can get a much clearer picture of the job you might want.

Sample job descriptions are a good barometer for both what you might like to do in an industry and what would be the best fit for your skills.