Only when they have become thoroughly anxious and frustrated, and sometimes filled with a sense of despair, do they seek a better way.
Save your energy and your self-esteem. Approach your search as though you were launching a valuable product (which you are) and need to sell it quickly to the right buyer (which you do).
If you have prepared yourself, you are well ahead of others in the market. Most will have started looking before they were prepared and will have bombed out in any number of interviews because lack of preparation weighed heavily against them. Now, without question, many who are still in the market have grown wiser and are doing the homework they should have done before they started interviewing. Proper planning is an investment, not an expense.
Employers Also Have Problems
It's ironic that many employers with managerial openings express their frustration with the recruitment and hiring system. They say it is often difficult to find the right person to fill an open position. First, they are screened out by all those who don't want to work in their geographic areas. Next, they are often forced to exclude all potential candidates except those who have specific knowledge of a particular industry or field. They are also forced to exclude candidates for whom the offered salary ranges are not appropriate. As though that were not enough, they have to exclude candidates who lack the specific kinds of experience or credentials required.
When employers advertise for candidates to fill an open position, they often receive a rash of resumes from people who fail to meet specific requirements that may not have appeared in the ad. When they turn to personnel agencies, their experience is often similar, even with agencies that specialize in the industry or profession.
THE ROOTS OF THE PROBLEM
Why is that so? Why do both sides of the sale have difficulty in making a good match? The employer has little alternative but to continue with the traditional approach to finding the right people. The candidates, on the other hand, have this to their advantage: They know they're looking; the employer doesn't. The employer can speak with them only if they let the employer know they are available.
Thus, responding to an employer's often fruitless efforts to find candidates merely feeds into a system that hasn't worked well from the outset. It's not the best way to handle the problem. As a consultant, if I want to sell you my services and you haven't heard about my organization, it would make little sense for me to wait until you ran an ad or contacted a third party to tell me you are trying to find someone who offers my services. So why should this approach work for a job hunter? Consultants know that clients rarely announce an available assignment to the outside world. When the initial contact is made, even the client may not have decided that there is a need for services. Thus, people in other departments-especially service departments such as personnel and purchasing-are certainly not going to know about them.
Frequently, if they are brought in at all, they become involved after the fact-after the agreement has been made.
Consultants gain most of their client assignments through direct contact; by using a combination of referrals, direct mail, and phone calls. And so should you. In fact, the only right way to find a job at the executive or managerial level is to let people-the right people-know you are offering your services. You're not looking to flip hamburgers at a fast-food chain, honorable though that task may be. You need a different approach to job hunting.
Yet, despite the logic of what we have just considered, executives still persist in selling their services in the wrong ways. Here, ranked according to amount of time spent, are the ways by which the majority of people at this level went about looking for a job before contacting me:
- Asking friends and acquaintances if they have an opening
- Calling on employment agencies and search firms
- Contacting placement services provided by professional associations
- Responding to newspaper ads
- Seeking out counseling services
- Writing ads about themselves
- Using direct mail
