Job hunting is sometimes overwhelming and frustrating. The most common terms used to describe the emotions of job hunters is stressful and depressing. Job hunting represents a difficult time in a persons life. With the financial burden that comes with a loss of a pay cheque factored in, many people feel lost. Many job hunters describe it as an emotional roller coaster.
There are a lot of factors that cause the stress in the job hunter. Obviously, your own personal circumstances has a lot to do with your level of stress. But, beyond your personal situation, there are things you share in common with other job hunters.
- The uncertainty of not knowing how long you will be looking for a job. The uncertainty of how long the job hunt will take is particularly challenging. The uncertainty causes one to hesitant to plan important family activities such as attending weddings. Many times vacations and other major purchases need to be put on hold. Every time you say to your family “After I get a job …” you are adding a little more to your stress.
- The lack of experience in Job Hunting. Most of my readers have not looked for a job in a long time. The longer between job hunts, the more difficult the job hunt is. Most of the readers of http://www.ZaleTabakman.ca are professionals and good at what they do. The experience of doing something that you are unfamiliar with is always difficult and disconcerting. (For me, its like being lost in a fog.) A common question, is “Am I doing this the correct way?” is frequent and scary.
- The feeling of not being in control of the situation. Feeling out of control is a horrible feeling. Job hunters who solely rely on two or three recruiters or one or two job boards have made themselves dependent on a limited number of people. When you feel your job hunt is based on what others do, you don’t feel in control of the situation. I relate the feeling of being out of control to being like a pinball being bounced around at the whim of the flippers. The more you are in control of the situation, the less stressful the situation is.
While I cannot help with the specifics of your personal situation, there are things that you can do to reduce the stress caused by these three stress inducers. The first and most important thing you can do, is create and follow a plan for your job hunt.
- With a plan – you can follow the progress of your job hunt. You can track how many recruiters or employers you have contacted, what was successful, what wasn’t, where the efforts paid off, and where they didn’t. You can improve your efforts and see the actual results.
- When you follow a plan created by somebody else – you are leveraging somebody else’s time and experience. This means you don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time. Using a well designed plan means you do not spend time “learning” new skills. Your job hunting time is moving you closer to the job you want.
- When you follow a plan you are taking action. With action you are in control of the situation. You don’t have to wait for somebody to “get back to you”. With a plan, you are continually in motion. The person who is going to get back to you, will miss out on you if they wait too long. With a plan, you will have choices every day.
The challenge for the typical job hunter is that they don’t have the experience to create their own plan.
There are two levels of plans for the job hunter. The most common is the tactical plan – all the low level stuff, sending out resumes reviewing job boards, all this is important and critical. Most job hunters jump into this phase and then wonder why nothing happens.
This is because the most effective planning always starts with a high level strategic job hunt plan. The strategic job hunt plan makes sure all the individual tactical plans work together. It means you lose t spend time doing something wasteful. It means you can leverage things across multiple channels.
Job hunting must be thought of as a major marketing effort. When you job hunt is as sophisticated as Wal-Mart, McDonald’s or any of the other great marketing companies, you job hunt will be as successful as they are.
I have provided here a core strategic plan for you. The strategic plan looks simple, but when you start to work through the details of it, you will see how each part connects to each other part. In each step, there are multiple tactical plans. Once you get rolling, it will seem there is an endless amount of work to be done. And realistically, until you get a job, there is.
I don’t expect you to follow this strategic plan step-by-step, but I do expect you every step in the entire plan, and the go back to the beginning and start again. You must keep refining and implementing as you go along. You never stop, until you have the job you want.
While there is no certainty this plan will get you a job, it will certainly increase the probability by a significant amount. It will reduce the stress described above. Remember, these are just the high level steps in the plan, other articles on http://www.ZaleTabakman.ca go into much more detail. Unfortunately, my website is not organized in such a way to follow the articles in a reasonable manner, so I send each member of the 66 Day Job Club an e-letter with a link to the articles in the proper order with specific actions that you need to be take. You can join the 66 Day Job club here.
Let me make something very clear.
If you are unemployed and staying at home and
you you don’t spend 6 hours everyday looking for a job,
you are not a serious job hunter and
my plan is not for you.
Job hunters who are currently employed and looking for a new job, the amount of time you put into reflects how important a new job is to you. The more important the new job is, the more time and effort you should put into it.
- Get organized – This is the first step. Getting organized starts by having a designated work area, a time schedule, and a budget. The work area is where you are going to do your Job Hunt work. It must have a computer and high speed Internet, places to keep notes and files. You must have a telephone with an answering service dedicated to the job hunt. I recommend a special phone number and answering service for your job hunt – check the privacy resources for some ideas. Your schedule needs to include a fixed wakeup time, bed time, and 30 minutes a day of exercise. I recommend (as a minimum) a brisk walk where your heartbeat is 60% of your maximum. Don’t schedule anything other than job hunting activities during your designated job hunting hours. I understand that your spouse may want you to do things like cook, car pool the kids, and shop since you are not working. You need to maintain your relationship with your spouse, so include these items in your schedule, but make sure you have six hours a day for working on finding your job. When finding a job is your number one priority – treat it like a number one priority, your job hunt time is scheduled and remains as inflexible as your regular job was. With the time scheduled, then you will have time to do all the rest of the plan.
- Identify who you want to work for – When you are building a business the most important thing is to know who who your customer is. When you completely know your customer, your marketing will be better and more focused. You will create “marketing messages” that meet the needs of these companies. Everything you do will repeat these marketing messages. Knowing who you want to work for will help in every single phase of your plan. The lousy entrepreneur says, :”Everybody is my customer”. and lousy job hunter says “I can work for everybody”. The better and sharper your job hunting focus is, the faster and quicker you will find a job. Make sure these companies move you towards your long term life goals.
- Create Your Marketing Materials – Some Job hunters think the marketing materials is their covering letter and resume. In reality you know (or will learn) it includes multiple resumes with different marketing messages, online resumes, business cards, fax letters, your answering message on your voice mail, your telephone messages to employers, your personal and extended network, your e-mail signature, and how you connect to people, just to name a few of the different things you can do. Each of the marketing materials has the messages that are important to the companies you want to work for.
- Create A Marketing Campaign – People need to know you are available. There are multiple ways of solving this. This includes creating your LinkedIn profile, contacting recruiters via e-mail, resume distribution methods, fax, job boards to name just of few. The marketing campaign is designed to bring people closer to your more detailed marketing materials. Think of it this way, BMW creates an ad that encourages you to visit their website which then encourages you to visit a dealership for a test drive which leads to a salesperson making you an offer that is hard to refuse. Your marketing campaign needs to attract employers with a job to have you in for a job interview (the test drive).
- Sales Presentation – - The job interview is the sales presentation that represents the culmination of all the marketing you have done. During the job interview you should be in front of the correct company for a job you want and are qualified for. Remember a job interview is two sided, the employer wants a top notch employee, and you want employer that is the fit for you. Since the interview can come at any point in time, you need begin to prepare for this step as soon as you have started your first marketing campaign.
- Closing The Sale – In this step, you will be negotiating for the salary and benefits that you want. The job offers won’t start happening until a week or two after your first job interview., so to prepare for the offers that will come, (if you do the previous steps properly) make sure you prepare by knowing what you want, what is reasonable with your experience in the kinds of companies you are looking to work at. When you first starting your marketing program you can put less time into preparing the close, as your Marketing Campaign is being successful, you will must put more effort into handling this stage.
- Delivering On The Sale – This is your first three to six months on the job. During this period, you need to make sure you understand the company culture, what is really expected of you, and how to deliver on both the written and unwritten expectations.
You have probably all ready bits and parts of the above plan, here are some job hunting resources to help you with the tactical parts of implementing your plan. They are organized them according to the various stages in the plan.
The resources are intended for you to take action today. So check them out and do something to move your job hunt along.
Getting organized
- Job Hunting Resources – Complete Job Search Programs – The 66 Day Job Club is my approach to finding a job, here are some other choices that might suite your needs better.
- Job Hunting Resources – Tools To Maintain Your Privacy – These are resources to allow you to make it easy for a recurriter or employer to call you, while enabling you to maintain your privacy.
- Job Hunting Resources – Maintaining Your Health – I cannot emphasis how important maintaining your health is to your job hunt. If you are not in a regular exercise program, here are some ideas to get you started.
- Job Hunting Resources – Working At Home – You may want to allocate some of your job hunting time to generating some extra cash. These are resources intended for people wanting to work at home. Some are telecommuting jobs and some are one time cash generators.
- Job Hunting Resources – Paying People To Help You – A lot of time in job hunting is spent doing things that others can do for you and do it better. You might consider outsourcing some of the work load
Identify who you want to work for
- Job Hunting Resources – Setting and Achieving Goals - The companies you target should move you closer to your life time goals. If you don’t have long term goals, with dates and specifics, its time you created some. These resources will help you through the process.
- Job Hunting Resources – Targeted Job Boards – these job board are for your specific job hunt. There are two types of boards listed, industry and job type. Your skills may be suitable for industries that you hadn’t considered.
- Job Hunting Resources – Company Research – These are resources that can help you find the companies that you need to target.
- Job Hunting Resources – Recent Graduate Job Resources – Recent job graduates need some extra help, since they have no experience. These are resources targeted for them specifically.
Create Your Marketing Materials
- Job Hunting Resources – Resume And Cover Letters – Here is where we get into the meat of your marketing. These are resources to help you create great resumes and cover letters.
Create A Marketing Campaign
- Job Hunting Resources – Face to Face Networking Tools – Face-to-face networking must be a core element part of your marketing campaign
- Job Hunting Resources – Job Search Strategies – These are specific ideas on how to find the job you want.
- Job Hunting Resources – Targeted Job Boards – these job board are for your specific job hunt.
- Job Hunting Resources – General Job Boards – These are some of the places you will need to be marketing in.
Sales Presentation
- Job Hunting Resources – Job Interview Skills - Learn how to present yourself effectively.
Closing The Sale
- Resources will be added here in the future
Delivering On The Sale
- Resources These will be added in the future
Members of the 66 Day Job Club receive details and action items for this plan in an e-mail every three days. Join the 66 Day Job club at http://66DayJobClub.ZaleTabakman.ca and learn how to jump start your job hunt.
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