Job Search Handbook Part II: Job Search Strategy

Imagine a symphony orchestra trying to make music with no notes and no conductor. Though the players might be very skilled, but they would lack focus and coordination. And the result would be…well, not much to write home about.

That’s exactly what your Job Search Strategy needs to provide – focus on specific employers and coordinated job hunting efforts to get you in front of your target employers and most importantly, get you the job!

Components of a successful Job Search Strategy

The main components of a successful strategy are:

a) Market definition and focus: which industry will you be targeting, which specific employers will be your focus and what will be your target geography. The geography piece is getting interesting these days as more and more companies are open to work getting done virtually.

b) Unique value proposition – what do you bring to the table, brother?! As mentioned earlier, companies are all about defending and increasing revenues or drastically reducing costs. How can the combination of your skills, experience and working help your future employer to increase their revenue or lower costs? Clearly articulating your value prop can open more doors than you can imagine.

Also, you’ll need to bring in something that is absolutely unique about you, your skills and experience that will make you stand out from everyone else. You need to have purple cow effect (hat tip: Seth Godin) and it will immediately make the recruiters sit up and take notice.

c) Research and communication – researching your target market will provide you invaluable clues and a leg up over your competition in terms of intelligence. And then you can use your unique value proposition to communicate it to to your target market and add the specific intelligence you picked up during research. 

Communicating your value proposition has never been this good…and cheap! You can use a combination of websites, videos, slides, blogs, tweets and social networks to communicate to the right people.

Those are the elements of your strategy! 

In the next post, we’ll go over how do we bring your job strategy to life and get ready to execute!

Tagged as: Job search, LinkedIn, messaging, target, tips