The Familiarity Edge
Aggressive job hunting is based on two major principles: "Nobody Likes a Stranger" and "No Is Not a Dirty Word" "Nobody Likes a Stranger" refers to the tendency of most people to prefer dealing with known quantities. In job hunting this means that interviewers will tend to hire individuals with whom they have better rapport, people they believe they know better, or understand better, like better, or trust more. This applies in all cases. When all of the applicants are relatively equal in ability, such rapport creates a subjective familiarity edge that needs only to be relatively sight to swing the decision in the favor of the more sympathetic candidate. If the familiarity edge is strong enough, it can offset a multitude of sins for an applicant whose background is inferior. When one applicant is clearly the superior in terms of ability and experience (which rarely happens) and he or she also has the familiarity edge, that edge simply serves to reinforce that superiority. It is this principle that explains why incumbents tend to have a significant advantage in political elections. The better you know someone, the more comfortable you are with that person as your leader, co worker, or subordinate to the extent that the individual's qualifications are of distinctly lesser importance.
The familiarity edge is not restricted to persons whom the hiring decision maker has known personally, long, and well. The edge can be granted to candidates with whom the interviewer has talked more often or for a longer period of time, or to a person who has been recommended by a trusted third party, or simply to someone with, whom the interviewer is more compatible. The familiarity edge is used by the decision maker to reduce the risk of making a bad decision. The familiarity edge cannot be obtained by the job hunter through reliance on the resume but only through personal contact.
Therefore, in aggressive job hunting the strategy is to become the candidate who the most is well known, the least "stranger". To do this, you must become acquainted with as many influential people in as many companies as possible, talk with them on a regular basis to uncover job leads, determine who has the hiring authority for any given job lead that interests you, and then talk with that person face-to-face as often as possible using various techniques to build up your familiarity edge. The specific tactics to use in implementing this strategy will be addressed in subsequent chapters.
The Game and Its Odds
The second major principle of aggressive job hunting is ''No Is Not a Dirty Word." Most people are insecure to some extent in security is magnified in pressure-packed situations like job hunting. Being rejected by an employer intensifies the insecurity even more, especially when the no's outnumber the yes's, which they always will.
After a string of no's the average job hunter will begin to take the rejection personally and to look for the easy way out of the job hunting process: (1) take the first job offer that is received, regardless of its overall merits, (2) quit job hunting altogether, or (3) continue job hunting along with path of least resistance by relying primarily on the resume since rejection on paper is easier to handle. Each of these alternatives dramatically reduces the job hunter's effectiveness and his or her chances of achieving maximum job satisfaction.
The key to successful job hunting is to not take each no personally but to recognize that you are playing a game. The name of the game is "yes's and no's." The odds in the game are such that no is always the more probable outcome and should never come as a surprise. One of the rules of the game is that you will always get a yes after a certain amount of no's. Additionally, it is usually possible to predict approximately when the next yes will occur simply by observing the number of no's received to date and recognizing, based on past performance, when the next yes is due. Moreover, as you get better at the game, you can learn to reduce the number of no's between each yes. You can learn to change a no to a maybe and a maybe to a yes. So no is not a dirty word; it is just an interim condition in a game, and each no takes you one step closer to a yes.
Simply recognizing and overcoming the fear of rejection will make the average job hunter much more aggressive, enthusiastic, and effective.
Be Aggressive
Aggressive job hunting has been scientifically proven to be superior to the traditional approach. A group of aggressive job hunters was tested against a group of traditional job hunters over a three-month period. Approximately 60 percent of the traditional job hunters successfully found new jobs during the test period, whereas over 90 percent of the aggressive group found jobs during the same period, and they found better jobs, found them faster, and averaged higher starting salaries. The aggressive job hunters relied on the preceding principles but used only a portion of the techniques I will describe. Therefore, the actual difference in effectiveness can be even greater.
However, the greatest proof that aggressive job hunting is more effective is that headhunters, professional recruiters who only get paid when they are successful, use the techniques described in this book on behalf of their individual clients. The more successful the headhunter is, the more innovative and nontraditional he or she will be in general, and the less the headhunter will rely on the resume.
Some examples from my own recruiting experience are worth mentioning. I described in the first chapter a man who relied on his resume unsuccessfully for over one year and then got a job in only four days after aggressive techniques were implemented. In another case, a highly placed executive had been interviewing on his own for several weeks without success. After doing the preliminary home work, I found him a $55,000 job with one telephone call.
On another occasion, I recruited a young man with only one year of experience and then coached him into outmaneuvering another individual with ten years of experience to secure a management level position. Finally, I recently helped a 62-year-old gentleman obtain a position with a lucrative financial package of salary and bonus after numerous companies had rejected him because of his age.
I am sure other recruiters can cite similar, if not even more dramatic, successes. The key in most cases is to play the game aggressively and not according to the traditional rules. Do not look for your dream job in the want ads. Do not mail your resume to prospective employers. Do not apply to personnel departments. Do not wait for employers to come looking for you.
George Bernard Shaw said it best: "The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them." This is the theme of aggressive job hunting.
