A 25-Hours-Per-Week Job Search Schedule

Transcription

1 A 25-Hours-Per-Week Job Search Schedule by Liz Ryan

2 Recommended Job Search Schedule: 25 Hours Per Week A job-seeker who commits to a pro-active job search has a huge advantage. Still, we won t get the best results spending hours searching the big job boards like Monster.com and responding to jobs posted there. The probability of getting a job this way is very low, because of the volume of resumes received when a job opportunity is posted on a mega-job site. In fact, most of the resumes received in response to these job postings are never read at all. No one in the employer s office can read them, because there are so many of them and because of internal processes for setting up phone screens and face-to-face interviews. There is a better way to use your time as a pro-active job seeker. Following is my suggested job-search schedule (weekly) for a full-time job seeker with 25 hours per week to spend on a job search. That s a lot of time! We don t recommend spending more than 25 hours per week about five hours per weekday on your job search, because we don t want you to burn out! You need time for exercise, friends, reading, cooking and whatever you like to do in your spare time. This is a 25-hours per week (five hours per day, five days per week) suggested schedule of activities. This schedule includes three kinds of job-search activities: responding to posted job ads; making overtures to employers who haven t necessarily posted jobs; and networking. If you follow the schedule closely, there is more time in the schedule devoted to researching and reaching out to employers than there is time devoted to networking. That s because networking is exhausting! and also because we don t always have an infinite number of people to network with. Still, I encourage you to think about your job-search activities in three buckets : a networking bucket, an overture (no posted job) bucket and a respondingto-posted-jobs bucket. Daily Schedule (5 hours per day spent on job search activities, five days per week) Online Job Search Identifying Employers: One hour per day (5 hours per week). Target: 5 new employers identified per day. Researching Employers: One hour per day (5 hours per week). Preparing and Sending Materials: One hour per day (5 hours per week). Tracking materials sent, and following up on materials: One hour per day (5 hours per week). On- and offline networking: One hour per day (5 hours per week). Total: 25 hours per week.

3 Section Two: Job Search Steps in Detail Online Employer Research I recommend one hour per day spent researching employers in order to identify five overture-worthy organizations. Here are some ideas for identifying target employers: Organization websites industry associations, e.g. LinkedIn conducting People Search by zip code and using keywords to identify employers that you may not have been aware of; Your local newspaper s website (Movers & Shakers, People in the News and business stories about individual companies or local industries) Recommendations from friends and first-, second- and third-degree networking contacts, or researching employers you ve become aware of in your travels. Researching Potential Target Employers on LinkedIn You can use LinkedIn to help you target employers. Visit LinkedIn and use the Advanced Search page (you ll see the Advanced People Search link at the top right of most LinkedIn pages) to type in a job title, such as a job title you d be interested in. Then type in your zip code under Located In or Near in the Location field on the Advanced Search page. You will find people, possibly dozens or scores of them, who have the job title you re interested in, and are in your geographic area. You don t have to reach out to these people directly through LinkedIn, although you can do that if you like. You already know from LinkedIn that these people do work that you re also interested in doing, and they do it in your backyard. These are companies to research and possibly reach out to. You can also use the same Advanced People Search page on LinkedIn but in this case, use a keyword (plus your location) versus a job title. In this search, you ll turn up people who live or work in this region and whose LinkedIn profiles include keywords like the keywords you typed into the search. More employers to explore! Another way to research local employers is to visit the local Chamber of Commerce websites. Once you have the company names, go back to Google and to the companies own websites to research them. You may see jobs listed on their websites. It is perfectly fine to apply for jobs on the company websites it is better to do that than to apply for the same jobs on large career sites. Companies typically review the resumes that come through their own websites, first. This Black Hole isn t quite as daunting as the Monster /CareerBuilder Black Holes. A fantastic (aggressive) goal is to get five packets out the door, every day, five days a week. By packet, I mean a Pain Letter /Human-Voiced Resume combo. You may find exciting companies online in your pure research, unrelated to the job openings you found

4 on career websites. Then you may decide to send out another one, two, three or four resumes each day! I highly recommend that you spread your energy between responding to posted jobs, and reaching out to targeted companies on your own, even when your job isn t posted. Nearly every employer has your kind of pain! Researching Employers One Hour Per Day Once we identify a set of companies you d like to open the door to to have a conversation or to quickly determine that there isn t a fit between your background and the organization s current needs you can add that organization to your job-search target employer list. I would keep all of your job-search related documents in a Job Search file on your hard drive, identified by company name (or search agency name, if the ad is a blind ad that doesn t identify the employer). Once you identify the five jobs you want to apply for, per day, you ll need to do some company research. Please don t send a non-customized cover letter! We ll send a customized Pain Letter, instead. Pain Letters I recommend one hour per day to research the five employers you ve identified. In each of your Pain Letters, it is important to talk about the employer first. We call this opening the Hook. You ll mention something wonderful that the organization has done, either something that got them some press coverage or something they ve posted on their own website (whether or not the item made the news). Then, in the second paragraph of your cover letter, you can talk about the most likely pain the organization and/or your hiring manager are experiencing, and your own relevant experience. The key is to show the employer that you have taken the time to learn about its business and that you understand how your background can make a difference against the dragon that is flying around the employer s (figurative) castle walls right now. What Sort of Research Should I Conduct? The first stop in your employer research efforts is the company s own website. Look over the About Us and Newsroom or Press sections of the site in particular. If the job ad is posted by an agency or if it is a blind ad, you may be thwarted in your research efforts. There may be no way for you to research the company. But before you give up, see whether the reply-to address is a company url. In that case, you can visit the url and learn all you need to know to write a brilliant, customized cover letter. Also, if you can spot any little bit of distinctive text in a blind job ad (like we are a premier publisher of New Age fiction ) you can take that phrase, keep it intact, cut & paste it into a Google Search box with quotation marks at the beginning and end of it, and very often find the employer s website. In this case the blind ad gets un-blinded. Hurrah!

5 What Do I Say in my Pain Letter? In your customized Pain Letter, you will start by congratulating the company on its success in a very specific way. You don t want to write congratulations on the growth of your company but rather a very specific observation, such as congratulations on the launch of your new Data Tracker application last month. It is wonderful to congratulate the company on an accomplishment that you found on the company s website, versus in the job ad itself. We call this opening The Hook. (See our E-book Anatomy of a Pain Letter for a step-by-step description of Pain Letter construction.) In addition to the company s website, you can conduct a Google search of the company and see what others have to say about it. Please check both the Web and News varieties of Google search so you can what the media has said about the company, and mention one of those media hits in your customized cover letter. Google News Alert It is an excellent idea to create a Google News Alert for any company you are targeting. You can go to click on News, and then click on the envelope-shaped icon on the left hand side of the page. Follow the instructions to create a Google News Alert using the company s name. After you do this, Google will send you an message asking you to confirm the Google News Alert. When you do that, you ll receive an notification in your inbox any time the company s name is posted to a Website. This is very handy for your followup efforts. You ll be right up to the minute with any company news maybe ahead of its own recruiters, at times! Introductions Trump Outreach Letters As you grow your list of first-, second- and third-degree networking contacts (and beyond), you ll want to keep some or all of these folks abreast of your job-search progress. These are the people you ll write to also when you need a contact at XYZ Company being judicious, of course, about how many times you ve gone to the same people for multiple contacts. Of course, LinkedIn is the first tool to use to determine who in your network knows whom at a target company, but if LinkedIn doesn t yield any useful contacts, we can reach out to your new-and-old network with the direct question, Do you happen to know anyone at Company X who d be appropriate for me to meet? Would you be comfortable making that introduction? Preparing and Sending Materials One Hour Per Day My job search program includes one hour per day spent on preparing and sending materials. Since you ll spend one hour researching five companies, each company will get twelve minutes of research. That will not be enough time at first, but over time you ll become very fast at this type of research, and 12 minutes will be enough time to note a couple of facts or news items from the employer s website. Do not worry, because you also get an hour per day to create your materials for those five job openings. That is another twelve minutes per employer. Your resume is going to be appropriate for nearly any letter you decide to write

6 you find after you tweak it slightly. So, most of the customization work will revolve around your Pain Letters. Twelve Minutes? I know, twelve minutes seems like no time at all. Don t worry if your first few Pain Letters take much longer than twelve minutes, to write. You ll get faster over time! Congratulations on the launch of your new Municipal Fire Safety software application last Fall. My understanding is that the concept-to-launch cycle was under nine months a tremendous achievement. I wouldn t be surprised if the operational challenges involved in opening this new market are daunting. At Acme Dynamite, I built a reseller channel for our roadrunner-proof dynamite that produced $10M in revenue in the first year. I d love to get five minutes on the phone with you when your schedule allows, to talk about your leadership needs and my experiences. You will see a number of benefits to sticking to a schedule and a goal such as my recommended five packets sent out per day (five days per week). Those benefits include An increased level of callbacks/interview requests A stronger knowledge of the local hiring market A sense of daily accomplishment a job search is a job! Stronger online research skills learning where to look and More confidence in your stories, your talents and your value to an employer. HURRAH! Tracking Materials/Following Up (One hour per day Five days per week) When you begin sending out five new packets per day, and setting up Google News Alerts on each employer, you will soon find that there is an additional, administrative task involved in managing your job search. You can use an Excel spreadsheet or a free spreadsheet from Google Documents ( to list the employers you ve sent materials to. Or you can keep your records offline on a regular lined notepad. Either way, you ll want to capture this information for each packet you send out: Date Where job was spotted (or pure research targeted company) Job title (if applicable) Whom materials were sent to, and that person s title if you know it) Company url if applicable

7 Name of document showing original job ad, if applicable (save these documents in you re my Documents folder, in a sub-folder titled Job Search Fall 2008) Each day, you will spend one hour following up on sent materials. Three Ways to Follow Up on Sent Materials Here are three ways to follow up on the materials you ve already sent. You will want to wait a week before following up, but that only gives you one week off. After one full week of job searching according to this weekly schedule, you will always have five opportunities or target companies to follow up on, every business day the same number of new packets you re sending out per day. 1. Using company-specific news taken from a Google News Alert that came into your inbox, send a quick message. Dear Ms. Jenkins, I wanted to quickly follow up and express my continued interest in the Sales VP role at ABC Devices. Congratulations, also, on the Best-in-Show product award announced in this morning s paper! I d be very pleased to speak with you when your schedule allows, about the Sales VP opportunity and my background. 2. Make a phone call. This works best when you have a specific name to call. If you call early in the morning, before 8:30, or between five and six p.m., you have the best chance of reaching a live human being versus a recording. But if you try a few times and can t reach a live person on the phone, it s fine to leave a message, also. When you call, you won t start talking about yourself too uncomfortable! Rather, you ll talk about the pain you hypothesized the company to be experiencing. RRRRING! She: Mary Smith. You: Hi Mary, it s Carol Smith calling do you have a second? She: Hi Carol, what is this about? You: I was calling because I wasn t sure whether you were still looking for someone to build your Community Relations program (the pain is the focus, rather than the job ad). She: We still have that job open. You: I was curious about it, because I had the impression that you were looking to get a lot more local awareness for your philanthropic efforts, and looking to connect with citizen groups (e.g.) She: We definitely want to do that. Did you send us a resume? You: I sent you a letter with a resume attached to it, mid-last week. Shall I send you that by , again? She: Please do. My address is [email protected]. You: That s great Mary what s the best way for me to follow up with you? She: Will you please call me on Monday if I haven t gotten back to you?

8 3. Send a quick surface mail letter. You don t have to send your resume again. You can write a business letter that says Dr. Jack, I wanted to check in and see whether you re still looking at building out your Community Relations outreach program. (We re going to focus on the pain!). You ll add a short dragon story and mention that you d be happy to talk by phone or start an dialogue. Short and sweet! Followup is important in the pro-active job search right up there with research, overtures and networking. After your followup activities each day, be sure and update your tracking log to show that you ve contacted the company again. Note how you made contact and with whom. Weekly followup is the most appropriate. That way, you aren t a stalker but you also aren t leaving it to chance that the company remembers you and your interest in them or in a posted job. Online and Offline Networking One Hour per day (five hours per week) Online and offline networking is the key to the third component in our approach. Online and offline networking gets the word out about your job search. The more people who know you re job-hunting, the better. It can be tough to network with people face-to-face five days per week. It takes time to set up all those meetings, not to mention attending them, and that s assuming there are five new people a week to meet with! You may set a goal like attending one face-to-face networking event per week. However, you can always find a way and an hour or time to network online. It s easy, because you don t have to leave your desk. The best approach is a combination of online and offline networking. Online networking is fun and easy, but the relationships can be more superficial. Offline (face-to-face) networking takes a bit more effort, but it s worth it. When people meet you in person and chat with you about your search, and their job search or their career or their business, you begin to build a true relationship. It can be intimidating to walk into a room full of strangers, but it is absolutely worth it. (If you want me to attend a networking event with you Trish, just let me know!) Job-search networking can give you leads, contacts and moral support, all of which are so valuable to job seekers who can easily become isolated. Job Search Business Cards Years ago, job-seekers would bring copies of their hardcopy (paper) resumes to networking events, but this isn t done anymore. It is a great idea to purchase job-search business cards from Vistaprint.com. The cost is low just $2.95 for shipping. The cards themselves are free. Choose a simple design and include your job-search basics on the card: Name, phone and address Job areas desired

9 Quick summary of experience ( Community Relations Manager, for instance) Link to your LinkedIn profile Once you have a box of job-search business cards, give one out to everyone you know! Give one out to everyone you meet at a networking event. Take a card from each person you meet, also, so you can follow up with them via . Job seeking is a fantastic way to meet people in a community, and networking is absolutely critical during a job search. You never know, after all, what jobs other people may become aware of and can let you know about. Section Three: A Job-Search Day, Hour by Hour Nine a.m. ten a.m.: Visit job websites to identify and collect info on suitable job openings. Copy text of job ad into Word document and save in Job Search 2010 folder. Create an entry in job search materials tracking lot. Identify and collect information on at least five new opportunities during this hour. Ten a.m. eleven a.m. Research the five opportunities I identified during the previous hour. Visit company s own website, Google the company name, create a Google Alert on each employer; visit LinkedIn for more information. Note my findings on each employer, to be included in its Pain Letter. Eleven a.m. noon Create five outbound packets of information, one for each new opportunity identified earlier today. Create customized Pain Letter emphasizing the company s priorities and adding ways in which my background can help the company move toward its goals. If appropriate, tweak my resume to further show how my background meshes with the company s likely needs. Send the five packets out by surface mail or , and note the details in my job search tracking log. Noon 12:30 break for lunch 12:30 1:30 p.m. With my five packets already out in the mail (surface mail or ), spend an hour on pure research of likely employers. Using LinkedIn, business pages and information I ve gained from on- and offline networking, research companies I m interested in, ones that haven t posted relevant jobs lately on my target jobs websites. Learn enough about these organizations to add them to my outgoing packets-list tomorrow. Note the details I find on a document for my Job Search file, and add these organizations to my job search tracking log. 1:30 2:30 p.m. Online and offline networking. Check the paper for upcoming business events that may make for good job-search networking. Browse Ask Liz Ryan and LinkedIn for ideas and leads in my job search.

10 What is Ask Liz Ryan? Ask Liz Ryan is a career coaching and people strategy firm located in Boulder, Colorado and based on the worldview of Liz Ryan, a workplace commentator and columnist. Liz is the Corporate Provocateur for Bloomberg Business Week, a columnist for Kiplinger s Finance and the Huffington Post, Monster and Yahoo!, and a commentator for CNN, MSNBC, BBC Radio and NPR. Liz was a Fortune 500 HR exec for many years and is the author of Happy About Online Networking: the Virtual-ly Simple Way to Build Professional Relationships, as well as the leader of the 25,000-member Ask Liz Ryan Online Community. Liz is a popular keynote speaker on the changing workplace and a lecturer on personal branding and career strategy at the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Ask Liz Ryan works with individuals on their career direction, branding and strategy, and with employers on their employer branding, strategy, and communication with talent communities and their hiring and leadership practices. Our Career Altitude Club is an online resource, toolkit and community for job-seekers, career-changers and people looking for more altitude and control over their professional lives. Reach us at