Today I have selected a thought from my The Top 10 Skills Needed By Job Hunters article.
(FYI - This is not David Perry, but Zale Tabakman providing guest posts for the week - see Monday's post for background on who I am.)
This article on job hunting is obvious especially if you read David's blog or his book or have purchased the Guerrilla Job Search System. I have tried to simplify several concepts down and generate some immediate actions items.
Continuous forward Action is the single thing that is guaranteed to get you a job.
Have multiple approaches to finding your job.
Finding a job is not about a single activity and never ever is it “Click and Apply”.
When you start your job hunting efforts, you don’t know where you will get the job, you don’t know how they will hear about you, and you don’t know what skill is the one the employer needs.
Therefore you need to have many different approaches to job hunting, and many different tactics for each approach.
Its a simple thought, but practically its a big job and should consume you until you get the job you want.
Here are four different approaches to job hunting - you need to have a plan for each one of them.
- Finding job openings - The standard include job fairs, another is online networking, face-to-face networking, job clubs, head hunters. The non-standard approaches are e-mail and direct marketing, and reading newspapers to name a few.
- Being found. The standards are LinkedIn and Zoominfo. The best non-standard approaches include becoming known as an expert, creating a newsletter, creating a website, answering questions on LinkedIn and Google answers.
- Direct contact of hiring authorities. In this approach you are looking to contact people before they actually are hiring. When they are wandering around the office asking - do you know somebody for this job? You want to be their at that time - so you are not competing with others.
- Marketing Yourself - This is related to the previous one, but the focus is slightly different. Instead of waiting to be found - you actually go out and contact people for the express purpose of letting them know you exist. With this approach you are putting yourself out. This method takes some guts - you will get rejected and you will get insulted. On the other hand, the rewards are greater. You will be quoted in newspapers and on peoples blogs.
These four methods can all use the same basic content you have created for solving the 12 different problems. (see Monday's post).
For how to implement these four approaches take a look at 77 Guerrilla Job Hunting Tips I have created. They are based on ideas from David and Kevin with a Zale spin on them.
To your success!
Zale
