Job Search covers basically the following activities: preparing your desired-job description, preparing your credentials for your resume and interviews, developing your marketing plan, approaching sources of jobs and contacts to introduce you to possible employers, interviewing, follow-up, negotiating and analyzing offers, and making the final decision.
Your goal should be to get three offers that meet a high percentage of your job requirements. If you can select from three good offers you will considerably minimize the risk of a poor choice.
Now let's take a look at a detailed example of how this process is carried out. The detailed steps that Sampson took are described in the steps below.
You'll have a pretty good understanding of Gordon Sampson from his "Who Are You?" write-up, which follows:
All of the items up to "My strengths" are facts, and were easy for Sampson to record. "My strengths," "My weaknesses," and to a lesser extent, "Personal," are subjective items. These subjective items are not always easy to identify.
Sampson's next task was to carefully determine their priority. He did this by using the prioritizing tool.
You can determine priorities by your own intuition, but it's not easy to put such a complex set of variables into reasonable order. You will find the prioritizing tool is helpful. Take each important job requirement and test its priority against every other requirement. Focus on each pair of factors, as though they were the only two keys to the decision, and ask yourself which is the more important to you. The matrix used by Sampson will show how this is done by comparing the relative importance of each item to every other item.
For example, in thinking of his ideal job, Sampson asked himself, "Is having a low risk job more important to me than its location?" In this case, he decided that location (namely, not moving) which was factor 8, was more important than having a low risk job (i.e., factor 9). Thus, in recording 8 versus 9, 8 (location) is circled. After each factor is evaluated, the number of circles selected for each factor are totaled.
The factor with the highest score is the top priority, the second highest, second, and so on. When there are ties, the higher priority is considered the item of the tie which was the choice over the other. Thus, if location (8) and low risk (9) are tied, the former is considered the higher priority. On the other hand, if 9 was the choice over 8, low risk is considered higher priority. Be careful about having too many factors, for the matrix then becomes unwieldy. Ten factors are probably a practical maximum.
Before you accept the results obtained with this tool, list the priorities in order and see if they make sense. You may find that one or two seem to be rated too high or too low. Examine the answers given for these items again-your rating may change. This tool should give you a pretty good order of your priorities based on your current thinking. When you do your research, and particularly when talking to various employers, you probably will find that your thinking will change. So, after you have done this research, use the matrix tool again-you may get a different result.
At the start of his campaign Sampson identified some career alternatives. Let's review his thinking. Over the years he had worked closely several times with management consultants. He liked their role of investigating and making recommendations-two activities he enjoyed and from which he had derived satisfaction. He preferred this to line supervision. And he liked the variety of things consultants were exposed to-so he thought of consulting as one possibility.
Several good friends had bought their own businesses with limited capital. They had done very well, and Sampson envied them being their own bosses-running their own shows and having comparative freedom. Sampson had been in charge of several large community activities, had achieved good results through his ideas and leadership, and had gotten a lot of satisfaction from them. He felt he had the leadership qualities to operate his own business successfully, if he could find an appropriate one which he could finance reasonably.
About 10 years before, Sampson had been encouraged by someone high-up in educational circles to find a job teaching business courses and consulting on the side. He had given it some thought, but decided at the time he wanted line experience, which a job he had been offered would give him. But since then he had thought about this teaching-consulting type of career occasionally and wondered if he hadn't made a mistake not pursuing it. Sampson liked the idea of an intellectual atmosphere.
Finally, he thought seriously of getting a production-management job such as he had before. This is where he felt his most marketable skills lay.
Any spare time in the first six weeks of Sampson's campaign was spent basically in researching each of these four alternatives. Some was done by reading, but most involved talking with four to six people in each of these fields. He explained to them that he was looking for help and information, and most of them were willing to see him. They also provided him with valuable referrals to other, useful people. During this period his resume included the objective, "Production management", which was basically compatible with all the fields he was exploring.
The following is a list of the principal people Sampson saw in this research stage: Two firms. Two buyers of consulting services. Two consultants who failed. Three small-business owners. Two small-business owners who had failed. Two venture-capital analysts. Two bank loan officers. Two major customers of small businesses. One supplier of small business. Three top production executives. Three professors. One executive vice president of a business school.
