The premise of today’s market is that looking for and finding a good job is an art that is independent of basic job qualifications and independent of whatever personal attributes may distinguish you from everybody else. I'm not suggesting here that qualifications and personal qualities aren't important and aren't going to go a long way toward determining the kind of job you ultimately get. But there's a big difference between having the "right" qualifications and the "right" personal qualities for a particular job and getting hired on the basis of them. The brutal and fundamental truth about job hunting is that "the most qualified person" is not necessarily the person who gets the job. It's the person best able to convince the people doing the hiring that he or she is the right person for the job. The art of finding a good job, in other words, consists not so much in having what you need, but in using what you have to the best advantage.
I can teach you this art; I can help you get hired for a job that's right for you. I can make this promise because I have been helping people get hired for nearly all of my adult life, and I understand the process for what it is and not for what it is sometimes painted to be in job books. I know what employers are looking for when they interview job candidates, and I know how candidates routinely knock themselves out of the running without realizing how they've done it. I know the job search methods that produce results and those that simply spin your wheels. I know what I would do if I were looking for a job today and what I, in fact, did do many years ago when I had little trouble getting hired for a good job during a severe recession. And I know that my approach and methods would differ greatly from the approach and methods of most job seekers and, for that matter, from the approach and methods advocated by many of the job books currently on the market.
Except for emphasizing how important it is that you have a fairly clear idea of what you're looking for by way of a job, I'm not going to spend too much time helping you decide what you want to be when you grow up. What you want to do with your life and the kind of personal satisfaction you're expecting from your job is your affair. I can't tell you where to go, only the best way to get there.
There is a psychological component to job seeking, and you need to come to grips with it, but I am not a psychologist—I am a specialist in getting people hired. So I am not going to tell you things about job hunting just to make you feel better. I am going to be as honest with you as I know how to be, and give you the same realistic advice I would give to a good friend. I have no axe to grind, no magic formulas or gimmicks guaranteed to get you hired by next Thursday—or even by Friday.
What you will get from me is a lot of very solid, down-to-earth, success-oriented advice. You'll learn how to set up your own job search campaign, how to utilize your best source of job leads—personal contacts; and how to customize your approach to each job lead you follow up. You'll learn how to put together a resume with "sell" in it, one that does more than simply list your background and qualifications. You'll learn how to generate job leads on your own. And you'll learn how to prepare for and do your best in job interviews—the moment of truth in virtually every job situation. You'll learn, too, how to organize your time and how to use it more efficiently than you may now be doing.
But don't expect too many shortcuts. Tough as it may be out there in the job market, you can be one of the winners—one of the people who gets a job he or she truly wants. Still, you're going to have to put forth plenty of effort. The way can get you hired; but you're going to have to do the work.
Reflections on the Job Hunt
Nearly everybody has ideas and advice on what works and what doesn't work when you're looking for a job. The trouble with most of these ideas and this advice, though, is that they're not very useful. At best, the general advice you get from most people doesn't address itself to reality. At worst, it can waste a lot of time and effort.
Some "experts" advocate what might be called the "bold stroke" school of job hunting. The idea here is that you need some sort of gimmick in order to beat out the competition for a good job. You write your resume in the form of a sonnet, or have it printed on fuchsia-colored paper. You park yourself on the doorstep of the company president until you get a personal hearing—make a pest of yourself, in other words. With a letter you send to the president of a company you want to work for, you include a photograph of yourself on top of an elephant. You go out of your way to be noticed.
True, in certain situations and in certain fields, you can be bolder in your approach. And certainly if everything else has failed, it doesn't hurt to try something unusual. But I would hardly recommend organizing an overall job search strategy around this sort of strategy.
Gimmicky approaches to job hunting are like trick plays in football. Once in a while they work, but you can't devise an offense based on trick plays. The fundamentals of job hunting, as I see them, may lack glamour. They may seem tedious to you. But execute them well and you will succeed. The difference between successful job hunting and unsuccessful job hunting isn't so much the steps you take but how well you execute each of these steps: how strong a resume you prepare, how compelling a story you tell in the letters you write, how enterprising you are in cultivating and expanding your contacts, how effective you are in the interview situation—in short, how well you market yourself as a job candidate. In other words, go the conservative route, but execute the fundamentals better than anybody else.
Just what are these fundamentals? Let's look at some of them.
In the first place, getting a job means getting somebody to hire you. This is an obvious point, but it's one that an astonishing number of job hunters never fully grasp. Somebody—another human being—has to decide that you are, in fact, the right person for a particular job. Whether you are the best person for the job isn't the issue: it's whether you are able to convince this person—the hiring authority—that you can handle the job better than everybody else being considered. Convincing this person amounts to making a $1 million sale, because if you are younger than fifty, chances you're going to have earned at least $1 million before you retire.
But something has to happen even before this decision gets made. You have to stay in the running long enough to get into the interview situation. And even before this happens, you have to be aware that a job opening actually exists.
So, when we talk about the art of job hunting, we're talking basically about three things:
- Tracking down job leads.
- Responding effectively.
- Winning the interview performance.
Let's take a closer look at each.
Tracking down Job Leads
If it is true that getting a good job is often a matter of "being in the right place at the right time," it is equally true that being in many places vastly increases your chances of being in the "right" place. One of the things you have to do is to put yourself into as many places as possible.
"Places" are job leads—situations in which you have a chance at being hired. Some leads are obvious: ads in the classified section. Others you have to sniff out on your own. Personnel agencies and personnel recruiters are good sources of job leads, but the best source of job leads is the people you know: relatives, friends, colleagues. Indeed, virtually everybody you meet is a potential job lead source—even the person who fired you.
A big part of your education in job getting is learning how to utilize the contacts you already have. It is important to know how to expand, or "pyramid," your list of contacts. Ideally, you are looking for contacts who can lead you directly to the person who makes the ultimate hiring decision, thereby reducing your chances of being eliminated. But any contact that can be a source of any promising job lead is a contact to be cultivated.
Responding Effectively
Two types of people should concern you once you begin tracking down a job lead: the people who have the power to say yes or no, and the people who have the power to say only no. File this in your mind and don't forget it: Getting a job is largely a matter of avoiding the process of elimination that is basic to the hiring process.
The reason most people don't get hired isn't that they don't fare well in the final job interviews. It's that they never get that far to begin with. Somewhere along the line—maybe the day their resume arrives in the mail, maybe the day they go through the preliminary interview with somebody in personnel—they get dropped from consideration.
Unfortunately, the criteria that can get you dropped from consideration at any stage in the process may have nothing at all to do with your ability to handle the job. In some instance, the criteria are downright prejudicial. Depending on the situation, you could be dropped because you didn't go to Harvard or because you did go to Harvard; because your resume was too long (in the mind of the personnel executive reviewing it) or too short; because you're a woman or because you're a man; because your resume was clumsily written or because it looked to have been professionally prepared; because you're too short or too tall; too thin or too heavy; too talkative or too quiet; too ambitious or not ambitious enough; because you don't have enough experience or because you have too much experience. I've seen situations in which candidates were dropped from consideration because an interviewer simply didn't like the part of town they lived in.
It can get even more absurd. I had a client once said to me: "Don't send me anybody who is left-handed. Left-handed people are stupid." Another client gave me specific orders not to send him anybody who was from Brooklyn because, as he put it, "people from Brooklyn steal." I've had clients who were interested mainly in the candidate's birth date, not because of how old the candidate was but because of the sign he or she was born under. I knew one executive who would only hire Capricorns. I often wondered what the office birthday parties were like in that company during December.
I mention all of this not to depress you but merely to make you aware not only of what it's going to take to get you hired but of the factors that could knock you out of the running.
You can't control many of these factors—is it your fault that a personnel manager has a personal gripe against Aquarians, or about the college you attended? Still, you can protect yourself to some extent. How? By presenting yourself in so strong a light that despite arbitrary criteria, you stay in the running. Pulling this off involves what I call a "customized" approach to job hunting.
By "customized," I'm talking about an approach that showcases those features about you that make you right for a particular job—right, that is, in the eyes of the people whose decisions determine whether you get the job or you don't get it. This doesn't mean telling lies or otherwise misrepresenting yourself. It doesn't mean playing a role you're not cut out to play. What it means is highlighting those aspects of your back ground skills and personality that are relevant to each job you pursue. It may mean having as many as four or five resumes all containing the same basic information, but each emphasizing a different aspect of your job experience. It means being able, on occasion, to adjust your personal style and manner in order to make a favorable impression on a personnel executive whose approval you need before you can be interviewed for the job you want.
Keep in mind that the goal of a "customized" approach to job hunting isn't so much to get the job but to get a job offer. And before you can think in terms of a job offer, you have to get to the person who has the power to make that offer. Your route to this person may differ substantially from job lead to job lead, but your goal is always the same: to get into the next interview situation.
