Begin your job search before there is pressure to do so
Shortly before this went to press, Ben K called me at about 9:30 one night to set up a "crash" appointment. For months Ben had attended off and on a series of job-search seminars I had given in New York. I asked what made him wait until this particular moment to call. "Well," said Ben, "I got canned this afternoon, so now I want to put my campaign into full gear."
The sad fact is that Ben should have put his campaign into full swing six months earlier! How do I know? When I questioned Ben, he advised me that a year ago his boss told him: "You're not working out the way I hoped you would." Delaying his search has cost Ben a great deal more than he realizes. By the simple fact of being out of work, Ben is now less of a candidate in demand. As suggested on sources of assistance, recruiters much prefer to steal an executive away from a company, than to recommend to their clients someone who is out of work. (It seems as if they did their job better.)
Another thing, by delaying his job search until it was too late, Ben may have to reduce his job-search goal. At this point, Ben needs a job in a hurry. He has a family to feed and a mortgage to pay. He's under pressure to accept the first offer that comes along. So Ben may take a position that is really second best simply because he is afraid to hold out for the right one. Unfortunately in cases like this, the first job that comes along isn't always the one to take, and Ben could be back in the marketplace six months after he gets a job because things didn't work out the way he expected them to.
What steps should you take to make sure that you start your search on time? First of all, realistically appraise your position with your present company on a periodic basis. If you haven't been promoted in several years, or at least have not had regular increases in responsibilities and salary, sooner or later the boss is going to start thinking of replacing you with someone younger and less experienced but who, in his mind, has greater "potential." Don't wait until that happens.' Even more important, if you're not getting along with your current boss as well as you once did, read the handwriting on the wall. Or if the business you are in is not doing as well as it used to do, and layoffs are taking place in other departments (perhaps even in your own) don't assume that it will never happen to you. It just might. Most people find it tough coming to grips with the fact that they have to go and seek out a new job. There's comfort and assurance in just having the old one, even if the boss has become unpleasant of late, and even if the raise you'd counted on never materializes. But on balance, facing up to the task of conducting a job search is far better than facing up to it too late.
Conduct a complete job search-anything less is not enough
Several months ago I met with the former president of a $130 million-dollar subsidiary of a major U.S. Corporation. Eleven months before, this president was told, after twenty-five years with the same company, that his services were no longer needed. He was given eighteen months' salary as severance and let go. When I asked this former president what he had done during the eleven months since then to secure a new job, he advised me that he had sent his resume to approximately two dozen top-flight recruiters and had lunch once a week with friends who he thought might know of chief-executive-type positions. With further prodding I learned that this executive had secured no offers during the previous eleven months with these techniques. Why hadn't he done more to secure a new position? Undoubtedly, one reason was that he was financially secure for the moment. But in actuality this former president thought he was doing all that was necessary to secure another job at his level.
This president's experience is not unique. A vice-president of a leading Wall Street firm advised me that she did not answer blind ads in any newspaper. It wasn't that she worried that she might be answering an ad for her own job. After all, in this case, her company already knew she was leaving-it had planned her departure. She did not respond to blind ads simply because she had a hang-up about them. A third case: when a former strategic planner for one of the largest conglomerates in the U.S. asked me to evaluate his search strategy, I discovered he had limited his search just to answering ads. When I asked why, he told me that he planned to do other things when he felt he had "exhausted the possibilities through answering ads."
Job-seekers who do a piecemeal campaign prolong their job search, cause themselves needless frustration, and worse still, lose out on opportunities with leverage to gain better positions. Why so? Because the candidate who touches all bases simultaneously has a far greater chance of getting the job he wants at the salary he would like. According to a U.S Department of Labor study involving ten thousand executives and professionals, job-seekers discover their next job from a wide variety of sources, as the table below indicates.
What it boils down to is this: If you concentrate on personal referrals, you limit yourself to only one out of every five possible job opportunities.
