Category: Job-Search Strategy

Employment Data Shows Pockets of Opportunity

by • Career Change, Job-Search Strategy •

The latest BLS report showed the unemployment rate stuck at a dismal 9.1%. BUT, more positive news for many jobseekers can be found within the data. In particular, the unemployment rate for those with a bachelors degree or higher remained much lower than the overall rate, at 4.3%, More

Four Ideas for Getting Interviews Via the Hidden Job Market

by • Getting Interviews, Job-Search Strategy, Social Media •

Post originally appeared in the blog for the Marketing Executives Networking Group (MENG)
Most of my job-search clients are getting interviews these days by tapping into the hidden job market; they are both reaching out to their network and contacting people directly who they don’t know.  You, too, want to prioritize efforts that will allow you to bypass the glut of applicants going through ads or recruiting firms.  Spend only 20% of your valuable job search time on ads and recruiting firms, and the remainder on the hidden job market.  Here are four ideas to get you started. More

In a Job Search? You Should Be On LinkedIn

by • Getting Interviews, Job-Search Strategy, Resume, LinkedIn, self-promo, Social Media •

LinkedIn, accessed for free at www.linkedin.com, enables users to keep in touch with and expand their professional network, get introductions to others outside their network, and join groups of professionals organized around industries, professions, and associations.  Recruiters routinely use LinkedIn to scan profiles for viable candidates.

LinkedIn has become essential to conducting an effective, productive job search! I hear from clients almost every day about how they got an interview or informational meeting via LinkedIn.  Below I’ve included a few success stories culled from my clients’ experiences, to help generate ideas on how you can use LinkedIn.  Read More

Employment Trends: Health Care Hot, Real Estate Not

by • Career Change, Getting Interviews, Job-Search Strategy •

Indeed.com, an online job-search engine that aggregates job postings from across the web, released an analysis of employment trends by industry and geography.  Their findings could be helpful to those of you who are looking to develop job targets– I recommend checking it out.  My observations from their data:

  • The health care sector shows the largest opportunity by far, with a total of 813,000 job-postings, followed by Retail More

Using LinkedIn for Job-target Research

by • Career Change, Getting Interviews, Interviewing, Job-Search Strategy, Social Media •

Many (or most) of you are probably on LinkedIn to some extent (if you’re not you should be– www.linkedin.com).  LinkedIn is an awesome tool for getting results in your job search.  But are you really getting the value out of it that you could be?  Use LinkedIn to advance your search in three ways: More

Initial take on LinkedIn’s new “Career Explorer” beta

by • Career Centers, Career Change, Job-Search Strategy, Social Media •

In LinkedIn’s blog and a recent Wall Street Journal article, a new LinkedIn capability was described. Career Explorer is designed to help college students use LinkedIn’s network to make career decisions; it’s now being tested in 60 schools. More

Diagnosing a Stalled Job Search

by • Job-Search Strategy • Tags: •

If you feel stuck in your search, understanding where the problem lies is the key to moving forward. To diagnose your search and find the “cure”, ask yourself these questions, split into three broad categories: Your targeting, your marketing, and the volume in your search. If your answer to any of these questions is not clearly “yes”, you may have a gap that you need to address.

For the targeting, consider– am I going for the right position for me? Is it a fit with my background as I’m presenting it, or is there a mismatch? Is my search focused enough, or am I trying to be all things to each target? Am I pursuing 2 to 5 clearly defined targets in sequential but overlapping order? (At the Five O’Clock Club we define a target as a combination of three parts: 1) specific position or job description, 2) company type or industry, and 3) geographic area. Changing any one of these parameters may require different positioning.)

For your marketing, consider– are your pitch, resume, and cover letters/emails all sending out the same message for each target? Are they written clearly and with the appropriate message and tone for the audience? Do you have a marketing plan, listing the organizations you are interested in by target, and are you showing this plan to those who could help you?

Are you marketing yourself by using all four ways to get interviews (networking, direct contact– directly contacting people you don’t know, search firms, and ads), and are you prioritizing the first two? Networking and Direct Contact have been shown in Club research to be far more effective in landing interviews. In interviews, are you asking the right questions, and following up assertively to influence the outcome? Are you speaking to your target audience about how you can help them, or are you just talking in terms of the last job you had? All these areas get to the quality of your marketing effort.

If your targeting and marketing are correct, then it becomes a numbers game. You want to go for 6 to 10 things in the works with your “Stage 2” and “Stage 3” contacts. The reason we say this is if you go for 6 things, five of them will fall away through no fault of your own. Using the Club’s terminology, “Stage 2” means contacts you are talking with who are in a position to hire you or influence the hiring manager, but have nothing open now. “Stage 3” means the same “Stage 2” contacts, but now you are talking about a specific open position. So, do you have six to ten things in the works?

If you don’t have six to ten Stage 2 or Stage 3 things in the works, maybe your “pipeline” is running dry. Stage 1 contacts– essentially everyone that you know, are the people who can help you get the Stage 2 & 3 meetings. You should aim to get the word out about your search to 200 people in Stage 1 (including family and friends, co-workers you haven’t talked to in years, your dentist, etc.). Are you?

Similarly, on average you need to be targeting enough “potential”, roughly 200 potential positions, to end up with a job offer in a reasonable time. By “positions”, I don’t mean open positions, but rather a specific position in a company whether it is open or not. This number will vary depending on the industry growth rate. So, are you targeting enough positions?

If the volume is not there, are you spending enough time on your search? If you’re currently not employed, at the Five O’Clock Club we recommend spending 35-40 hours a week, and if employed 15-20 hours a week.

Age discrimination, or something else?

by • Job-Search Strategy • Tags: •

A recent article in the NY Times focused on how particularly difficult it is for job-seekers over 45 to land jobs in this market. I and others at the Five O’Clock Club have discussed this article and strongly disagree that this group should be singled out. In fact, everyone has been impacted by this “buyers market”, but some older workers, when they get discouraged, may misinterpret concerns about salary level as age discrimination. Personally, I’ve seen a similar rate of success among older job-seekers vs. other age groups, and have witnessed the power of a positive, can-do, energetic attitude in clients landing positions, no matter what their age.

The Times article also suggested that those older workers discussed in the article were getting turned down when “applying”.  Welcome to the world we are all living in, no matter what the age group.  Those older job-seeking clients who I have witnessed land jobs and interviews are not just “applying” for positions.  They are taking a far more proactive approach (one that all job-seekers should be taking)– aggressively using networking and effectively contacting people directly who they don’t know to build relationships, and not just waiting for jobs to appear via ads and recruiting firms.

The Importance of Targets in Your Job Search

by • Getting Interviews, Job-Search Strategy, Resume, LinkedIn, self-promo • Tags: , , •

I see a lot of new job-hunters who are unfocused about their job targets. They feel that their background allows them to do many things (e.g. I can be a project manager, marketing director, or a corporate trainer). So their whole approach to the search is to position themselves as generally as possible, in the hope that others (recruiters, network contacts, etc.) will decide for them.

This approach doesn’t work for a couple of reasons. First off, you need to make it as easy as possible for people to help you, and that means pitching yourself appropriately for a specific position. Don’t ask them to do the work to translate your varied background into specific targets– do this for them! Second, targeting is all about the benefits that accrue through focus vs. a less successful “scattershot” approach. You increase efficiency and momentum by focusing on a target, because you get to know the players and the issues specific to that target, you learn to speak the “language”, and you essentially become an “insider”. People want to hire insiders!

So what is a target? At the Five O’Clock Club we consider a target to be a combination of three items– 1) Job description/title, 2) Industry or company type, and 3) Geography. By varying any one of these, you change the target. Why? Because changing any one of these parameters will require different knowledge, conversations and positioning. For example, systems development in the Health Care industry vs. the Banking industry means different positioning (and networking), particularly because the business end-users could have very different needs. You want to ensure that your pitch, cover letters, and resume speak the language of the industry you are approaching.

Make sure you are specific with your target description, so that you create the most effective positioning in your resume, cover letters, and pitch. For example “finance, regional banks, NYC metro-area” is not specific enough, but “CFO, regional banks, NYC metro-area” is. Have 3 to 5 targets that you engage one at a time in priority order.

As you build momentum in one target you start to focus on the next. This way, if a target doesn’t work out, your job search is still moving forward because you’ve already started on the next target. If you need help researching targets, check out the industry/company research links on my website, as well as the job descriptions listed in job boards. And then consider setting up informational meetings with people in the targets you are pursuing to further validate the target.

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