Finding Job Openings

Knowing all the places took look for a job is important. Many miss out on great opportunities because they don’t even know they are out there. Make sure you are connecting with all the job openings listed.

Through our job hunting information system, you will be able to connect with virtually all openings from all worthwhile sources. But, the first thing that is important to understand here is how the public job market is formed.

When employers decide to hire someone… there is an event that leads to their decision. Typically, someone has retired, quit or been separated. Turnover leads to over 95% of all jobs opening up. Now once that decision has been made to fill a job, what do employers do first? Well, they look within their company… and they look at candidates on file in their recruiting database.

If they can’t fill a job that way, what do employers do next? Some consider referrals and those who network their executives. If that doesn’t work, they need to go public and see if they can fill their job openings.

Let’s briefly talk about public openings. Over 300,000 employers now post their openings.

You can also find openings in 2,000 newspapers, 2,100 magazines and over 1,500 job boards. Employer websites represent the fastest growing means of recruiting staff. There are more than 300,000 employers who recruit this way… and many of them recruit through their website exclusively. The sole exception may be when they go to an executive recruiter for a very senior executive. So, if you’ve pinpointed your best prospects, check out their websites.

Newspapers have declined rapidly, but in many instances can still be a good source for lower and mid-level openings for professionals. Trade magazines are a worthwhile source for those seeking middle level and upper mid-level openings. Many director and vice president openings, where industry knowledge or experience is important, can still be found in these publications.

The problem with all the job boards is simple. Once you get past the major boards, most will have only a few listings suitable for you. Even on the largest boards, a person can waste an enormous amount of time, only to find out that there are many duplicate listings, and some appear over and over again for months. By the way, whenever you respond to any type of opening, if you respond by email, also send a response by first-class mail.

One way to increase your number of opportunities is to understand the process of upgrading or downgrading ads. For example, a company advertising a Vice President position may be willing to hire an Assistant Vice President or Director, who could move up to Vice President within a year. After all, it isn’t so much the title they are after as the skills and talent. That’s an example of downgrading the opportunity you see… and encouraging you to respond to situations you might have otherwise bypassed.

For more Free Job Hunting Info be sure to follow us on Twitter, check us out on Facebook, read our blog, or visit our website!

Have a Plan

Just like with most things in life, the better you plan, the better off you’ll be on your path. Looking for a good job is the same in this regard.

In today’s competitive arena most people will never get enough interviews with a hit-or-miss approach. This leaves too much to fate. Think of it this way. Chances are you’re marketing a “product” with millions of dollars of earnings capacity remaining in your career.

That much value deserves your best effort. Besides, job hunting is a numbers game. So, why take a chance at doing a lot of things haphazardly, without a well designed plan? Similar to any company who is about to market a new product, a good plan can cut job hunting time in half and save money. It also helps people produce better results, and when people generate a lot of activity in a concentrated time period, they feel better and do better. Much better.

Recapping the components of your overall marketing plan

Job hunting goals:

We surface all critical information about you and then decide on the goals that will best advance your career.

Liabilities: We identify liability issues that might restrict your success… and arrive at ways for minimizing their impact.

Assets and transferable skills: We pinpoint these and incorporate them into your resume, letters, and your personal website.

Industry alternatives: We will suggest the industry alternatives that we feel are best for you.

Action plan for getting interviews: We will lay out a step-by-step plan… a weekly agenda… that will guide your search. This is your complete track… a game plan. It will include a plan for your approach to interviewing and negotiations.

We all have seen many career fields change dramatically over the last decade. Fields that once offered great opportunity have become financially confining with limited growth possibilities. Does print advertising offer the same career possibilities as it did a decade ago?

Does selling in the steel industry? Does being a doctor and a general practitioner? Career fields change at a much faster pace than most people realize. Experience has proven that if you take a narrow view of yourself, you could be making a mistake. For example, if you see yourself as a specialist (e.g., a banker), you may believe you are locked into a given career. On the other hand, you may feel you have few options because you are too much of a generalist.

The better you plan your search, the better your results. Do your homework and find out what is best for you. What do you really want?

For more Free Job Hunting Info be sure to follow us on Twitter, check us out on Facebook, read our blog, or visit our website!

Marketing Your Skills

Knowing all that you have to offer is important. You may not being finding the work you want because you are not marketing yourself. This may be because you don’t realize all you have to offer. You may have skills that would crossover into other industries that you have not considered.

You’ll need to do more than just present your background. Don’t trap yourself by thinking, “This is simply who I am, where I’ve been and what I’ve done.” People fail because they never surface and communicate all that is marketable about themselves… and they never build their appeal beyond factual credentials.

Using our career history and marketability profile, our starting point will be to organize your lifetime of experiences and achievements. Whether you are a young attorney or a company president, there is probably much more to your story than meets the eye. We’ve learned that people need to identify 10 to 12 skills that can make a major difference in their career opportunities.

About 20% of the clients who come to us have settled for less, simply because they are not able to communicate their real skills. One client was earning a $65,000 base after almost 20 years. Three years later, she is earning $180,000. Another executive came to us at $125,000. Three years later, he is a CEO at many times that amount.

The key in both situations was to market their true assets. Psychologists, spiritual leaders and coaches have often said that the most restrictive limits you face are those you put on yourself. So, don’t put any limits on your thinking, and look at some factors that you may have overlooked… which will expand your marketability.

Identifying transferable skills is critical (e.g., organizing, group presentation skills, problem solving and so on).

Employers place a premium on men and women who can move from challenge to challenge, handling assignments that draw upon skills. Your experience can also be reviewed according to various “functions” that apply to most businesses, such as sales, production, accounting and human resources.

All areas in which you have knowledge should be identified. At the same time, you need to think of your experience in terms of “action words” that describe what you did, and then translate those activities into achievements, e.g., controlled, wrote, reshaped, etc.

Do you have knowledge of a job, a product, a process or a market… from work, hobbies, alumni relationships, research or suppliers? If so, it may be marketable. Personality, of course, is just a word for that combination of traits that either attracts us to someone or leaves us unimpressed. More employment decisions are based on personality and chemistry than any other factor.

For example: “He’s certainly professional and quick-thinking. I like him, and better yet, I trust him. He’ll fit in with our team. I need to get him into the firm.” The perception of your personality has to do with your interest and enthusiasm. How many people get hired because they showed real interest? A lot.

For more Free Job Hunting Info be sure to follow us on Twitter, check us out on Facebook, read our blog, or visit our website!

A Strong Interview

Once you have gotten to the place where you are getting calls from businesses that want to bring you in for an interview, make sure you are ready to go. Do not think of an interview as just a simple back-and-forth of questioning. This is where the boss will get to know you and your personality so make sure you give them something to remember. No one wants to hire someone who comes off as boring, monotone or disengaged altogether. Make sure you let them know you are the person they want, without actually saying that.

Thousands of case studies can’t be wrong. In more than 5000 documented successful job searches, one of the factors people mentioned most often for their success in interviews was learning how to tell action-oriented stories that were clear examples of how they’ve contributed in the past.

When you think about it, you can see why it’s so effective. To prepare hard-hitting stories, people need to be specific about the challenges they faced, the precise actions they took to get things done, and the results.

When you are specific, you are telling a memorable story that gives you a lot of credibility, and it’s also very accurate, neither overstating nor understating your role. Employers appreciate this, they get a firm grasp of the way you operate, and how your approach would work for them.

Improving interviewing skills is just one of many things ERI does for its clients. We have to give people everything they need to in order to run a successful job search — clear goals, their best industry prospects, a better resume that neutralizes liabilities ahead of time, and dramatically greater exposure to opportunities in the public and private job markets.

Free Job Hunting Info users are 10 times more productive with whatever time they have to devote to their job search, because of our Job Market Access Center (JMAC), which puts at their fingertips 97% of the public openings right for them, and makes them 40 times more effective at accessing private openings that are not published or online. It took years and millions of dollars to develop, but it has totally changed the way people find jobs above $50,000.

Free Job Hunting Info creates a personal marketing website for them so they can network with many more people in much less time. JMAC also provides news that signals emerging jobs in a person’s area, and we also provide research on companies and industries for direct contact with employers who are good targets.

For more Free Job Hunting Info be sure to follow us on Twitter, check us out on Facebook, read our blog, or visit our website!

Create Your Own Job

The job you want may not be out there, not because it is not available, but because it doesn’t exist…yet. With the world of technology changing, so too are the positions being created by companies that need to be in the mix of where their industry is going. This means the creation of new jobs.

Keep in mind this simple thought. We all hire top people when we are persuaded that the benefits of having them on board will sufficiently outweigh the dollar cost.

You can get offers, even if no job openings are said to exist.

You simply need to present yourself as a solution to a problem. The “create a job” approach is for executives who want a job tailored to their best abilities. A few examples might include an executive who can develop new products for a company, a sales executive with contacts in particular markets or a general manager who can start up a division in a specific industry.

Aside from executives, the “create a job” approach can also be considered by anyone who may have difficulty winning offers through other means. This includes those who have a narrow market for their talents, people who wish to change industries, or those who have been unemployed for a while or who want to stay in a specific geographic or industry area.

In these situations, to win the job you want, you may have to create it by making an employer aware of your ability to make contributions. The following pages will give you some guiding principles as you consider this approach. You must focus on small to medium sized firms, go directly to people with the authority to create jobs, have a clear benefit proposition, take strong initiatives in your first meetings, and stir the employer’s imagination.

The first principle to understand is that to have your best chance at creating a job, your highest probability targets are likely to be small to medium sized companies. This includes firms that are growing rapidly, bringing out new products, forming new divisions, acquiring other companies or reorganizing.

These are the firms that need good people, often from other industries. They are free to move quickly. Large corporations are the least likely to respond to this approach. Budgets are usually allocated far in advance, and hiring practices tend to be relatively slow and methodical.

Of course, there are exceptions. All you need to do is assess your talents and contact the firms most likely to need you, regardless of their size. And if you know a market well or have talents in a particular function, just consider the industries where they would apply.

For more Free Job Hunting Info be sure to follow us on Twitter, check us out on Facebook, read our blog, or visit our website!

Consider Your Options

Knowing what you have to look for, and what you should be looking for, is not always clear to people as they search for work. With the economy slowly recovering, it is important to have a keen eye when it comes to looking at the working world so you can identify the options which are best suited to you finding success, the quickest.

The first way to do this is to increase your awareness of the fastest growing industries and companies. These firms have to go outside their industry to find the best talent and skills.

The second way is to list characteristics of your industries and find similar industries. We use software to compare your industry’s characteristics with 2,500 others, e.g., 35 industries may be an 85% match.

Keep in mind that projecting some form of an “industry hook” is the next best thing to having industry experience. Group your possibilities three ways:

(1) close industry hooks, easy possibilities

(2) medium industry hooks, next best

(3) far reach or stretch industry hooks

When changing industries, you also don’t want to overlook your leverage power, the added benefits you may bring by virtue of your contacts or knowledge. You may be able to bring a team with you that helped in similar situations.

Despite our recent economic slowdown, new companies have sprung up throughout America. Established organizations are reexamining the way they do business. Medium-sized companies are expanding. New industries exist that are employing tens of thousands.

The more you appear to know about an industry, the easier it is to generate interviews. Virtually all employers look for “common ground” when hiring a new person. For example, do you have experience in or knowledge of similar product lines, distribution channels, manufacturing methods or problems in their industry? There can be other similarities. Consider the scope of operations, the role of advertising and promotion, the importance of the sales organization, the influence of labor, and other items.

Naturally, the harder it is to demonstrate knowledge of an industry, the less likely an executive is to make a move into it. That rule applies to all major disciplines: sales, marketing, finance, manufacturing and operations. It is less important in staff disciplines.

Gathering as much information as you can while you search will help to give you guidance. Most people are throwing anything and everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. This won’t work as well as having goals in mind as you are hunting for your job as you may not be as focused, which means you could be missing opportunities.

For more Free Job Hunting Info be sure to follow us on Twitter, check us out on Facebook, read our blog, or visit our website!

Job Hunting Goals

When looking for a job, it is better to have goals in mind then to just want a job. You will get a job, but it is important to know what you want and where you want to go. The better your goals, the better your chances at getting a good job, quicker.

It may surprise you, but many people actually pursue the wrong job titles. However, if they understood their real transferable skills, they could be repositioned for different goals, and sometimes for much more advancement than they thought possible. Regardless of your most recent position, you need to think of yourself as “one of a kind” with diverse potentials.

We all have seen many career fields change dramatically over the last decade. Fields that once offered great opportunity have become financially confining with limited growth possibilities. Does print advertising offer the same career possibilities as it did a decade ago? Does selling in the steel industry? Does being a doctor and a general practitioner? Career fields change at a much faster pace than most people realize.

Experience has proven that if you take a narrow view of yourself, you could be making a mistake. For example, if you see yourself as a specialist (e.g., a banker), you may believe you are locked into a given career. On the other hand, you may feel you have few options because you are too much of a generalist.

More and more professionals are finding that they can have several different careers over the course of a lifetime. Sometimes you can’t see them and you stumble into them. Someone could be a radio sports broadcaster, then become an actor, then a politician… and subsequently governor of a major state and president of the United States (Ronald Reagan). And, of course, we all know many other examples, many famous and millions not so famous, but successful at many levels.

It may be that you should consider positioning yourself for more than one possible goal at this time, and running what we refer to as a “dual campaign.” For example, a logical step may be seeking a new job as a VP of Marketing. But you might also have accumulated knowledge and experience that would allow you to seek a position as a General Manager, or perhaps Chief Operating Officer, or even Chief Executive Officer in the right type of organization… in the right industry. Or you may wish to run a search for a higher paying job as a sales producer, while also exploring situations to move into a sales management role.

For more Free Job Hunting Info be sure to follow us on Twitter, check us out on Facebook, read our blog, or visit our website!