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Job Search Handbook Part II: Job Search Strategy

in How-to,Job search,The Job Search Handbook,Tools

symphony
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!

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Guy Kawasaki is a Tiger!

in Job search

Yes, it is official.
Guy Kawasaki
Guy Kawasaki is a tiger. A CareerTiger if I may add.

For some of you that have already been through some of our bootcamp sessions,  you know that LinkedIn is our favorite job search tool.

And Guy’s recent post provides validation in spades.

Difference of opinion

Our only disagreement – is his bullet # 7 ‘Getting to the right HR person’.
We believe that the road to your next job does not necessarily have to go through HR. In fact you might be more successful not going through HR and directly targeting the person that could be your future boss.

Validation is great

Having said that though, validation of some of our techniques is great especially coming from someone like Guy.  And having been a Guy fan for almost a decade, it is truly uplifting.

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Economy shrinkage and growth

in Market Trends

Looking for job opportunities during a recession can be really challenging. Would you be willing to look outside your local area for jobs?

Let’s take a look at the following charts (hat tip – NYT).

Chart A: Metro areas where the economy is shrinking


If you are looking for a job in these areas, you might need an extra ounce of effort and patience. Because local business climate will continue to deteriorate for some time. That type of business climate will result in lower revenue visibility for companies located in these areas. The result? More cost cutting + little to no hiring.

Now, let’s look at the next chart

Chart B: Metro areas where the economy is growing


These are areas where the economy is growing – although that growth might not be spectacular. At this point, I’m willing to take any amount of positive growth over negative growth.

These are the areas where it will be relatively easier to find a job. If you are already a resident in these areas – great. If not, you might want to see if you can exercise some flexibility and target companies in this area.

One quick tip:

Companies in these areas (like San Jose, Denver etc) are very open to remote employees. Assuming that you know your stuff, you can bring a really interesting value prop to the table:

  • An employee that has somewhat lower salary expectations (as compared to a place like, say San Jose)
  • Proficient in the subject area
  • Can work in a different time zone – this could be a differentiator in some jobs like customer service etc

See, you can target companies in these growing metros with out (potentially) moving there. Now, all you need is a way to focus your job search. Good luck!

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