In reality, though, they both have the same problem -- that of using the investment in their time more effectively. This becomes even more important when you take a proactive approach to the job search than when you are being purely reactive.
Replying to advertisements imposes its own discipline. Review the newspapers on the appropriate days, and get your applications in. The only way of improving your time utilization is to be more selective, putting more effort into responding to fewer, but more appropriate, advertisements.
While the hidden approaches are, in themselves, a more effective use of your time, they do also have their hidden dangers. It is all too easy to get carried away by your enthusiasm and to start thinking more about input as measured by the number of calls you have made and the number of letters you have sent, than about monitoring your output measured in terms of tangible results.
Target Practice
The ultimate tangible result is, of course, the new job, but you are not going to get a job offer every day of the week, nor even once a week, nor -- generally speaking -- once a month, so you need to come one step back in the process. Set yourself a target in terms of the number of meetings you achieve with people who either have a job opportunity for you now, who may have one in the foreseeable future, or who can at least put you in touch with other people who will have opportunities for you. Employed job seekers may well set a lower target than those who are out of work, but then they generally have longer to find a new job. The unemployed should aim for several meetings a week, while one or two a week would be acceptable for those who are in employment -- in practice, as you will see, networking can often be combined with normal business activities.
And do you not then have to go back and set further targets for the number of calls and letters you need to initiate in order to achieve that number of meetings? Yes, but... the but being that anyone can, within a given amount of time, make a set number of telephone calls or mail off a certain number of letters. In itself, that achieves precisely nothing. What is more, it can become an end in itself. Having been along to the post-box with the week's batch of letters, you sit back and congratulate yourself on having achieved your target, even if it was just another load of junk mail.
Letters and calls are only the means to an end. If you keep that constantly in mind, you will and it easier to concentrate on quality rather than quantity. You will also do far more for your confidence and your enthusiasm. Think about it, which would you rather get: two bites in a hundred (the average for junk mail) or three meetings from just a dozen calls or letters? That kind of average is perfectly achievable if you pay proper attention to your research and targeting.
Budgets and Plans
Time needs to be budgeted and planned just as scrupulously as money, arguably even more so, since any time you waste cannot be regained in the way that financial resources can. For those who have full-time jobs, the main requirement is to set aside a certain number of hours a week, preferably at the same times and on the same days each week because that reduces the risk of distractions eroding your precious resource.
Those who have the whole day, every day, at their disposal need to do a bit more planning. The first task is to impose a structure. Just as a day at the office has a structure, partly imposed on you by others and partly set by your scheduling of your own priorities, so must every day that you spend on your job search. An element of routine helps most people although, as in any job, you must be flexible enough to be constantly reviewing your progress, and reassessing your priorities in the light both of the stage you have reached at any given point and in response to other people. As soon as you get an interview, for example, thorough preparation for that meeting must go to the top of your list.
While everyone's situation will be different in one way or another, the following checklists should provide a useful starting point for most job seekers.
Daily tasks
- Check diary for appointments, follow-up calls and other reminders.
- Deal with incoming mail.
- Review newspapers and periodicals for:
- news items to follow up.
- Reassess priorities for day in the light of the above.
- Make daily networking calls.
- Complete daily quota of speculative letters.
- Do your filing -- it is essential to be well organized.
- Visit library for research.
- Prepare for interviews and other meetings.
- After interviews and meetings:
- review, and learn from, your performance.
- Periodic contacts with headhunters, agencies etc.
- Keep yourself up to date professionally.
- Learn new skills.
- Carry out regular progress reviews and diarize whatever action stems from them.
Failure to meet your targets could be due to failure to target in a different sense, that of the accuracy with which you have identified what you have to sell and who is going to buy it. On the other hand, it could also be due to the question raised at the beginning, for there is more to using your time effectively than just setting targets, important though that undoubtedly is.
Time Management
Most executives are not nearly as good at managing their own time as they like to think they are. If you need proof, just look at the amounts of money that business organizations spend each year on time management courses.
How efficiently do you manage your time? Take a look at the following list of fundamental time management principles. Where could you improve?
- Effective time management, according to Roy Brighton of Time Management International, is not doing things faster or better but doing the right things. The first step should therefore be to identify your key goals.
- The second step is prioritization - putting those goals into order of importance.
- Important does not mean the same thing as urgent. If you plan properly, you should be able to avoid things unexpectedly becoming urgent and consequently distracting you from those goals which are truly important. Priorities will, naturally, change but ideally only when something is important as well as urgent, like preparing for that interview you have just been asked to attend.
- Having identified the most important thing to do at any one point in time, concentrate on it 100 per cent, to the total exclusion of all else.
- Once you have started a task, always try to finish it. Stress, tiredness, anxiety and loss of motivation are often brought about by the thought of things you have left outstanding or unfinished.
- Do not put off tasks you find unpleasant or difficult. They too will sap your energy - and putting them off will not make them any easier.
- Be aware of when you are at your best. Do the more creative and demanding job at these times, and leave tasks which call for less concentration for other times of the day.
- Make large amounts of work manageable by chopping them up into bite-sized pieces.
- The best way to save a lot of time is to spend a little. Always think before you act. Then, once you are clear both about your objective and the best way to achieve it, get straight on with it.
- Save money as well as time when you use the telephone by preparing for each call before making it. Keep your objectives clearly in mind, and have all the paperwork you will need on the desk in front of you.
- Keep yourself well organized with only one job on your desk at a time and the rest sorted into appropriate piles.
- Set deadlines for everything you have to do - and keep to them.
- Keep interruptions and distractions to a minimum. If this area gives you problems, analyze why interruptions occur, then you will be able to take appropriate action to prevent them.
- Make time to relax and unwind.
- Make sure you know exactly how you are using your time. Keep a log for a week or two. Most people find the results enlightening, if frequently embarrassing (but you do not have to show them to anyone else).
Facilities Management
If you are lucky enough to have outplacement services provided for you, you will have access to a work station, secretarial services and so on. You may have similar advantages if you are under notice but still able to use your employer's office facilities. Failing either of these two options, it is absolutely essential that you set yourself up at home, or elsewhere, in a way which enables you to operate in an efficient and competitive manner.
Start with the room you are going to use. It is no good thinking you can operate effectively by perching on a corner of the dining room table, where you have to move your papers every time lunch or supper comes round. If your home has a study, fine. If not, you are going to have to take over a spare bedroom or at least a part of a room that can be yours and yours alone during the hours you need it. Do not under-estimate the importance of privacy. Not only must you be able to concentrate, you must also be able to talk on the telephone in a businesslike manner without such distractions as noisy children or a blaring TV set in the background.
Since it is vital to be well organized you will need an adequate work surface and sufficient storage space for your files. Furthermore, because you are going to be spending a significant amount of time in your new office, you should have a comfortable chair, good lighting, adequate heating and ventilation, and, preferably, pleasant surroundings.
Speaking of the amount of time you will be spending there, it is essential that you establish a clearly defined working day, just as if you were going off to your place of employment. During that time you must shut out the rest of your life, resisting the temptation, when the sun is shining, to potter in the garden or go off for a round of golf. What is more, you must impose the same discipline on your family, ensuring that they respect your need to put in a full working day. You have to make it absolutely clear that, during those hours, you are not available to ferry the children to and from school, do odd jobs or even sit around chatting over endless cups of tea and coffee.
For some people the domestic situation may be a real problem. For example, Luke had four children, two at junior school and two who were preschool age, and therefore at home all day. On top of that, he and his wife were going through a bumpy patch in their marriage. Working at home, in those conditions, was a virtual impossibility. Luke's solution was to borrow, during the daytime, the flat of his grown-up daughter by his first marriage, who lived only a few miles away. He was even able to use his daughter's PC.
Speaking of PCs, some form of word processing facility is essential. If you do not already have a suitable home computer you can, for £200-£300, purchase a dedicated word processor with a daisy wheel printer and the capability to handle basic layout functions such as variable font sizes, emboldening, italics and so on. This is much more flexible and efficient than the alternatives of relying on someone, such as a partner who works in an office and can do your typing at their place of work over lunch or after hours. It is also both more efficient, and cheaper, than using a local secretarial service.
Whether to use a PC as a database for such things as lists of target companies is debatable. PCs can impose a useful discipline but, like so many other things, they are only a means to an end. If simple files and card index systems can do the job just as well, beware of spending valuable hours tinkering around with your computer when you could be making calls and sending out letters. To some extent it depends on how much of a computer buff you are. Unless you are pretty keyboard literate, entering large amounts of information can take an awfully long time. On the other hand, if you are completely computer illiterate, it really is time you learned!
Moving on to other pieces of equipment, a telephone which is not constantly in use by other members of the family is clearly a must. So too is an answering machine, unless you really can rely on someone else both being around whenever you are not and also being capable of taking clear messages which never get lost or forgotten about before they reach you. You may also find it worthwhile to invest in a fax machine. They are now relatively inexpensive and having one makes you look just that bit more professional, putting you one more step ahead of the competition. Photocopying, on the other hand, can easily be carried out by a bureau, by using the machines which are available in libraries and shops, or by getting a friend or member of your family to do it at their office.
At the less high-tech end, an efficient filing system is absolutely essential to hold correspondence, copies of advertisements, records of networking contacts and all the other information you may need to retrieve at short notice when someone calls you. It is also worth investing in some good quality business cards -they are not very expensive - and in high quality stationery, although this need not necessarily be preprinted, given the quality which can be achieved these days using your home computer.
Project Management
Having set up your office and organized your time, what else is there to think about? The last thing, and arguably the most important, is to ask who is actually going to manage your job search.
No, that is not meant to be a joke. Think about it. When you carry out a project as part of the job you do for an employer, the terms of reference are given to you by your boss and, while you take responsibility for the project, you probably either delegate at least some parts of it to other people, or organize a team or working party to help you.
When it comes to your own job search, not only do you have to play all of these roles yourself, but you are also the product that you are trying to market. No wonder so many executives manage their own job hunt so badly!
In practice, you may be able to get a certain amount of help from other people. For example, just as, in a business organization, the accountant tells the other managers whether they are in line with their budgets; you may be able to get someone to make you 'report to them' on your performance against your targets. This could be an outplacement counselor, the person who runs your local Job Club, or a friend or member of your family, so long as they are willing to be sufficiently strict with you.
You may also be able to recruit into your team, at least on an occasional basis, a few people to use as sounding boards for your ideas, others - like the reference librarian - to help with research, and, most importantly, someone to turn to when you are feeling demotivated. There is, however, one thing no one else can do for you, and that is to take responsibility for the whole project. Before you go any further, pause for long enough to let the full implications of that sink in. You have to appoint yourself manager of your own job hunting campaign with sole responsibility for running it efficiently and seeing it through to its successful completion.
"Changing your job . . . is reckoned to be one of the three most traumatic experiences you can go through."
