Getting a job is all about making a single sale to a willing customer. Your employer is the customer and your employment contract is the sales contract.
Lets review the numbers, to get a job you want, you need three job offers, to get three offers you need three to nine interviews. To get the three to nine interviews you need to be seen by 100 to 500 recruiters or employers with jobs. The bottom line? to get the job you want, you need to be seen by 13,500 people looking to hire. With 94% employment, the good news is jobs are available, with 6% unemployment, the bad news is that you are competing with thousands of other people for those jobs.
The 13,500 people looking to hire is called your target market. The five hundred people reading your resume are called prospects, the people interviewing you are called sales leads, and the employer who makes the offer is called a customer. In sales, the progression from target market to customer is called the sales funnel. Its called a funnel because its wide at the top and thin at the bottom. There are multiple steps in the funnel and each step is intended to convert these people into customers. You have a similar goal. Convert as many companies with jobs as you can into companies are making you a job offer. Since you are only one person, you get to choose your one customer. I understand that when you are under pressure to find a job, the thought of selecting from many jobs seems strange, but if you follow the 66 Days program it will happen, in fact I guarantee it.
The Standard Techniques Job Hunters In Toronto And Elsewhere Are Doing
Job Boards
A recent Workopolis ad in the Globe and Mail highlights the challenge of using Job boards for your job hunt. Workopolis used the ad to try and find employers who would become customers.
The Workopolis ad stated 1,375,000 people have posted their resumes on Workopolis, 206,000 on CareerBuilder.ca, 376,000 on Working.com and 698,000 on Monster.ca.
For every job posted on Workopolis or any other job board, at least 500 people will respond to that advertisement. Assume only 10% or 50 people are qualified. Let’s assume that only 10 people are going to be screened and called for face to face interview. You can be perfectly qualified for the job, but if you are the 11th person in the 10 person qualification queue, you will not be called. And your not being called for the interview, doesn’t have anything to do with your skills to do the job, its about you not being first in the queue.
Networking Events
Another technique for Job hunting includes going to networking events. Networking events work and people do find jobs at them. But you can only have half a dozen good conversations at networking event. Networking at events does work, but its physically challenging and can get expensive. To be successful you need to find the correct networking events and know how to talk with people. Asking a stranger for a job will almost never work. Talking to somebody, getting there confidence, and then telling them you are looking for a job works significantly better. The process of gaining their confidence is why you can only speak to 1/2 dozen people at one networking event. That means to find 60 connections requires you to go to 10 networking events.
Contacting Employers
Mailing out resumes is another effective choice for the job hunter. Sending out resumes is similar to direct marketing and you should expect the same results. Direct marketing generally gets 1/2% return. An excellent direct marketing program with great list with the named people, multiple letters, and a great offering has a 2% return. To get 100 responses, expect to use a list of 5,000 letters.
Moving To The Next Level – What The Better Approach Is To Job Hunting
All the standard job hunting methods do work, but they take time, effort and consistent application.
The reason they take time is that they are called “Push ” methods. By push methods, we mean that you are “pushing” you and your resume to recruiters. To make your job hunting efforts effective, you will need to add “Pull ” methods to your job hunt. Pull methods mean that recruiters and employers who are actively looking to fill positions are “Pulled” to you. They are pulled to you because when they do their search for candidates your resume comes up first in the long list of resumes and they choose to call you first.
To get to the point – you need to be able to do two things a) make sure that 13,500 recruiters and employers read your resume, and when they read it, they want to call you. In a nutshell, this is what 66 Days To A Job Guaranteed! delivers. If it doesn’t you get a job, you get your money back.
Finding prospects – why the online resume must be different
I know that you have been working hard on your resume. You have read resume articles, maybe some books, possibly had it looked by a non-profit organization like TDSB (Toronto District School Board) or the YMCA. You may even have paid to have it professionally written. A paper resume is not the same as an online resume and its not the same as a sales letter. A paper resume needs to be short and concise. An online resume needs to make sense to search engines, which is a whole different way of looking at the resume. What makes a paper resume great makes a poor online resume, what makes a great online resume, makes a poor paper resume.
and
Google is the best search engine and most popular one, but its not the only one used by recruiters. Recruiters many times use the search engine that is internal to the website. Internal search engines work differently than Google, because their assumptions and objectives are different. There are two important differences between Google and internal search engine that effects the job hunter.
Google uses a concept called Page Rank to select pages to return in a search, the page rank is only one of several variables it looks at when selecting pages to present. The Page Rank is an important variable, since Google selects from the highest ranking pages. Every page has various page ranks depending on the search criteria is and the context of the search.
The Google secret sauce is all about how they calculate Page Rank. While there are many variables that go into the Page Rank calculation, links in and out of the page is an important criteria. Page Rank increases when the page has many links from pages coming in with a high Page Rank and links to many pages of High Rank going out. And the page ranks coming in and the page ranks going out must be relevant to the page. For Job boards, LinkedIn and other sites with internal search engines, every page follows the same structure and there are few links in and out of the pages. Page Rank makes little sense to the internal engines and is not relevant. Be aware, Job Boards do not allow Google to search and index the jobs or the resumes. This is because the Job Boards sell access to the resumes and the jobs, if you could access them with Google, Job Boards would lose their most valuable resource to sell.
A second variable in deciding which page to return is the relevant content on the page. I am not referring to the search terms, rather all the other words that are on the page. The more relevant these words are to the specific search terms, the higher the page will be ranked. Pages with related relevant content will score much higher than pages without relevant content. Job Boards and other site have standard pages formats, so the relevancy of the page content will result in a low rank in Google, but on the Job Board search engine, it will be highly ranked.
End of boring technical discussion about Google Searching
Google is for people searching for information, and so you want the most informative pages returned. Search engines on Job Boards want to return the most relevant resumes to the search. For the job hunter, you want your online resume coming up first, depending on the method used by the recruiter and employer to find a job. The way Google searches effects you in because if your online resume is based on the paper version of the resume, Google will probably ignore it. This effects is your job hunt because an online resume based on a paper resume will not show up in a Google search or any internal search engines using Google.
With thousands of resumes on Workopolis, CareerBuilder, Monster and Working.com, why do employers and recruiters bother using Google, LinkedIn and other places? Recruiters and employers are like you and me, they like to save money when they can. Using resume banks and posting jobs on them costs thousands of dollars. So if the recruiter or employer can find Ideal candidates without using Job Banks, they will.
To increase the number of “prospects” who find you with Google means you need to create a Search Engine Optimized online resume. The online resume looks and feels quite a bit different than the print resume. The effect on your job hunt? You need to be on the Internet where recruiters to look for candidates.
Converting Prospects Into Leads – or getting the employer to call you.
Once your resume comes up in Google or any other search engine from somebody in your target market (an employer with a job actively looking for somebody like you), the person reading the resume becomes your prospect for a sale. To turn the prospect into a Lead (somebody who calls you for an interview) the resume must present you as an “Ideal Candidate”. When you are seen as the “Ideal Candidate”, for the interviewer, the resume will jump out of the screen saying – CALL ME For an interview, before somebody else hires me!
For this to happen, the resume must become a sales letter. The resume needs to “sell” you to the potential employer. The resume has to be structured like a sales letter. While sales letters come in many styles, lengths, and formats, they follow a common methodology. The better the sales letter, the more sales are made. Your resumes and covering letters need to be written like a sales letter and have the standard components of a good sales letter. Headline, body, testimonials, Unique Selling Proposition, and call to action are just a few of the components needed.
Understanding The Job Interview – or the making the sales pitch
I know that if your sales letter (or resume) is effective and you are called in for a job interview, there is a high probability you can get the job. The person doing the hiring wants to solve their business problem. If you can solve their business problem better than any other candidate, you will get the job.
While the job interview from your perspective is nerve racking and challenging, its as bad for the interviewer.
Once they have interviewed people, if they have found enough viable candidates, they make a decision and hire the somebody. Employers do not want to interview people endlessly, they want to hire somebody and get on with their business. Interviewing is just part of the hiring process, not an end in itself. A recruiter is under more pressure than the employer, because the recruiter doesn’t get paid until you are hired. The sooner you are hired, the sooner they get paid. But a good recruiter is a good business person, they want repeat business, so while a recruiter wants you hired, they won’t push you into a job where you are not a good fit.
What does all this mean to your job hunt? Once you have been called you in for a job interview, you have been selected from the 50 to 100 resumes reviewed. The employer is pretty sure you an do the job. The next step is for you to be seen as the best fit for the company and for the job. Remember, the interviewer is trying to solve a business problem. And the business problem is not going to be solved by doing another interview, it will be solved by hiring somebody. Using the sales model once again, you are in an advantageous position – you have a customer who has a problem, the customer thinks you can solve their problem, and the customer has money to spend on solving the problem. The biggest concern the employer has, is that you can’t solve the business problem and that they make a mistake in hiring you. Your interview is all about making sure that you reassure the interviewer that you can do the job.
During the interview you must follow basic sales techniques, let the customer (interviewer) do most of the talking (they are convincing themselves), answer them completely, and above all, be honest and to the point. If your online and print resumes honestly and accurately reflects you, you will have a high probability of getting the job. The more convinced the interviewer is that you fit the job prior to the interview, the better is the probability that you will get the job. Your resume must “Pre-Sell” you. If the resume has done a good job of it, the less impact other things will have on the job interview.
The interview questions will be all about confirming their understanding of your resume and that you will fit the company environment. The interviewer wants to be convinced that about what’s on the resume is accurate and truthful and that your personality is a fit.
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