A few weeks ago I received a phone call from the niece of one of my closest friends. My friend's niece is in her late twenties and was a schoolteacher before she got married seven years ago. Now she is divorced and looking for a job. She'd started her job search, she told me, about six weeks ago, but didn't feel as if she was getting anywhere—no phone calls, no interviews, nothing. She was discouraged and wanted to know if I could give her some advice.
I started out by asking her whether she was looking for a teaching job.
"No," she said. "I don't want to teach. I have a hard enough time with my own kids."
"Then what sort of job are you looking for?" I asked.
"I'm not really that particular," she said. "I just want a job that's interesting—something that will pay me enough to get by on."
I asked her where she had been doing most of her job looking, and she told me she was looking "where everybody looks—in the want ads." I asked her if she'd been to any personnel agencies, and she said she'd been to a couple but hadn't been impressed with the jobs they had suggested to her.
"How good is your resume?" I asked.
"Resume?" she said. "Well, I've been working on one, but I don't know what to say in it."
I'd heard enough. I told her, as diplomatically as I could, that I didn't think she was going about her job search in the most efficient way. I told her, for instance, that by not having a clear idea of what she was looking for, she was putting herself at an immediate disadvantage. I told her that while want ads are a good source for job leads, most job openings aren't advertised in the newspapers. You have to track down your own leads. I told her that a good resume was an essential basic, and that at this point in her job search she should have her name listed with at least two or three good personnel agencies. In short, I told her that if she was serious about finding a good job, she was going to have to work at it much harder and much more systematically. "About how many hours a day," I asked her, "are you spending on your job search?"
"I don't know," she answered. "Whenever something comes up, I look into it." Then she added, rather defensively, "Looking for work isn't much fun, you know."
As if I needed to be told.
I have been in the business of filling jobs for people for more than thirty years, and the one word you will never hear me use in any description of job hunting is "fun."
Looking for a job is not fun. It's hard work—harder work, in fact, than most jobs. It's lonely. It's frustrating. It's discouraging. And it can be tough on your ego.
But as hard and as lonely and as ego-battering as job hunting usually is, it's something that nearly everybody past the age of adulthood has gone through at least once in life. And, like everything else, there is a right way of going about it, and a… well, not so right way. That is to say, there is a way of looking for work that increases your chances of finding a good job, and a way that not only reduces these chances, but makes you all the more discouraged and miserable in the process.
Now some people—perhaps you know a few—seem to be instinctively good at finding jobs. They may not be very good when it comes to keeping a job, or advancing their career once they're working, but they know how to get jobs, and they are never out of work for very long.
Most people though, are not particularly good at what might be described as jobsmanship—the art of finding and getting a good job. Part of the reason, of course, is that the average person doesn't have much experience in looking for a job. But the big reason most people aren't very good at finding good jobs is that they go looking for work much like my friend's niece: haphazardly, hit or miss, with no sense of focus or direction, no clearly defined strategy. And this problem, incidentally, has nothing to do with basic intelligence, education, or present job level. I've worked with $100,000-a-year executives who hadn't the foggiest idea of what to do when they suddenly found themselves unemployed.
But the point is this: the more you know about what works and doesn't work in job hunting, the better the chances that you'll be one of the persons to get the better job.
