How Do You Begin Your Job Search?
When you were employed, you disciplined your activities and structured your time. The external requirements of the job plus your own internal desires forced you to get up at 6:30 every morning, shower, shave or put on makeup, eat breakfast, then commute to work. You organized the rest of your day similarly, and culminated your day with a regular evening regime and bedtime at a reasonable hour. You probably always considered yourself disciplined and work-oriented, and may have looked down a little on others who were not.
Make this lifetime of good habits continue to work for you. Avoid the temptation to take some time off for good behavior. Don't go off on a vacation (unless it has been planned for months and you'd lose the cost of the tickets) or take the first few weeks off to take care of some of the things around the house that have needed doing for years. A friend calls this "fixing-up" desire the "bathroom syndrome." When he became unemployed a few months ago, he spent the first month getting up every day and looking at his bathroom, planning the changes he was going to make on it. Then he spent the next month making those changes in a leisurely fashion. He had been unemployed a full three months before he got back to the really important matter at hand: finding a job.
By then, this man had geared down so much, that he had great difficulty gearing up for a concerted job search. But you don't feel like looking for a job, you say? You want time to lick your wounds and get yourself in shape? You're down in the dumps, and you don't want to see anybody while you're feeling like that? Some other time but not now. Pick yourself up by your shirt collar and get started.
Consider first these personal aspects of your job search. How are you going to keep up your spirits, present your best side to potential employers? How are you going to get your act together? The trick is to approach the job search with energy and use your time effectively, but that can be difficult to do unless you have a job search strategy that works on a daily basis.
A Job Search as a Marketing Campaign
Begin by thinking of yourself as a "product." You are one, you know, whether you like the idea or not. You have a certain set of skills-of features, benefits and attributes-that you need to make appealing to a potential "purchaser," a new employer. Your job search, then, is really a marketing effort, in which the product you are going to market is yourself. Your marketing campaign includes all elements of marketing: marketing research; advertising (your letters and resumes); packaging; prospecting for "customers"; and that very important part, personal selling (the interview), which includes closing the sale (getting the job), In a job search, each one of the marketing phases has a corresponding function particular to looking for a job. Some of the elements in each section are:
1. Surveying the Market in General
- What is the general economic situation?
- What are conditions in this market (location)? Should I consider another market place?
- What are the market segment(s)?
- What does the job market look like? What are possible markets for my skills?
- Where are the jobs? (Geographical location, business/industry/non-profit/government)
- What are areas of greatest opportunity?
- What do the market segments look like?
- How many companies are in the segment?
- What do the particular market segments need? (Skills, back ground, general and specific abilities)
- Which segment(s) do my skills most closely match?
- What can I do best for which position in the segment?
- Goals and objectives (What am I looking for?)
- Market Research (What kinds of activities do I need to engage in to get a job? What kinds of jobs are available? Where are they?)
- Product research (What are my strengths and weaknesses? What do I like to do? What do I want to do? What do I need to learn? What changes do I need to make?)
- Developing new skills
- Prospecting for possible employers (lead generation)
- Presentation (Resume, letter campaigns, preparing for interviews)
