You’re Hired!: Job Search Strategies That Work

SECTION I

Overview & Welcome!

SECTION ONE: PART ONE

Overview & Welcome

1 OVERVIEW & WELCOME

Hi there! Welcome to You’re Hired! Job Search Strategies that Work.

Make no mistake. Searching for work … is work!

It takes time, effort and a lot of self-motivation to be successful in your search.

While you have your skills and experience in place to be able to apply and land your dream job, or one that leads you to it, searching for a job requires a whole different set of skills.

This book provides strategic techniques to maximize your job searching effectiveness.

Nobody can make a promise that if you follow their program, you will be guaranteed the results you are looking for and I won’t either.

However, I’m confident that if you follow the strategies outlined in this book, you will be successful in landing a job.

From my experience, one of the biggest problems that job seekers often face is that they feel that they are coming from an inferior position and they don’t have a lot of personal power. The belief being that the Employer has the superior position and has all the power.

Yes, they have the job and they have the power to give you the job … or not.

What you may not realize is that many Hiring Managers are under similar pressures as you, the job seeker. They have the pressure of finding the right candidate for the vacancy they need to fill.

They are accountable to their superiors should the person they hire not work out. It has been said that an inappropriate hire can cost the organization an additional 30 to 50 percent over the job position’s annual wage. This would include lost productivity incurred when the new hire is oriented, the cost of advertising for new applicants and the time taken to interview and follow up with applicants.

Hiring managers are under pressure to hire the right candidate.

Your task is to become the only choice. The right choice!

As I mentioned earlier, we are likely not experts at searching for jobs and landing one. It isn’t something we do on a regular basis.

As I researched the content for this book, I found that the problem is compounded by a lack of hard facts on what are the best-practices for job searching.

I’m reminded of an old parable about a group of blind men that were required to touch an elephant and to describe their observations.

Each one felt a different part, but only one part, such as a tusk or the trunk. When they compared notes, they learned that they were in complete disagreement.

I found the same to be true when researching strategic job searching skills.

Each webpage from my search results on the internet spoke from the perspective of the writer whether they were a resume writer, an Employer Hiring Manager, recruiter etc.

Much the same as the blind men describing what an elephant looks like, their advice is from their perspective. That makes sense to me. We all create our own reality. My reality is completely different than anyone else’s.

The problem is that the job search ‘experts’ state their observations as hard facts. They believe what they write is absolutely true. And then it seems that the next article you read, will dispute what the first expert had said and they will present their truths.

How can something be both true and false at the same time? You must never do this. You must always do this.

Same advice. Can something be both yes and no?

I don’t consider my self an expert at job searching.

What I am very good at though is taking subjects that people struggle with, finding better, easier ways to do things and breaking it down to basic strategies that work.

I create systems to solve problems.

Years ago, I moved my family across Canada to a city where I didn’t know anyone.

I had a brand-new home built for me, but I didn’t have a job waiting for me when I got there.

At the time, the new location was very hostile towards people that had moved from the east to the west coast.

I often heard you Easterners come out here and steal our jobs…

I found that jobs were limited. I found that getting an interview for a position I had applied for was like winning a lottery.

I also found that my new geographical area had what they called a ‘Sunshine Tax.’

As it is a desirable place to live, the cost of living is higher and employers believe that they can get away with paying their employees lower wages. The idea being that you the worker should be grateful to have a job and that the employer can get away with paying you less.

‘If you don’t want the job, somebody else will!"

I got so tired of hearing about stealing local jobs that I started to change my story when I attended local business networking events.

Instead of saying that I was unemployed, I would say I had retired early.

I was 39 years old and the illusion I had retired early seemed to resolve the ‘you Easterners’ complaint.

However, I used to add ‘if the right job came along, I would likely consider going back to work."

It was somewhat tongue in cheek.

It took me a good six months to land a job. It wasn’t as good a job as I had hoped for.

It was definitely a compromise until something better came along.

I describe my employment experience at my new location as being like a roller coaster ride.

I went from being unemployed, to employed. I went from not getting enough hours to getting too many.

I went from being employed to being laid off.

I went from being employed to being self-employed.

Self-employment ended rapidly when I came back from a vacation to find that my only client had sold their business i.e. a vocational school and the new owners had no idea who I was or had need of my services.

Back to being unemployed.

Then I got a job in another city. It was a 90-mile round trip, daily.

I went from being at the employer’s beck and call for three years working as many hours as I could as a casual staff. Then I got fired!

Then I got unfired and a new job, same company, a few blocks away.

I went from full time, to no time, to part time, to even more part time. Then less time and even less time.

I had to tell my manager that I couldn’t afford to stay and I couldn’t afford to go.

We solved the problem by me picking up hours from another worker who wanted to work less.

The downside is that I work a lot of night shifts and it is still a 90 mile, 150-kilometre round trip for work.

I think you can see why I call it a roller coaster ride.

Over the years, I have been invited to numerous job search training programs as a guest speaker, promoting the value of public speaking skills to the job search and interviewing process.

As well, I share the value of professional, business networking skills to build your business or to land a job.

Throughout this book, I will be providing you with what I consider to be best practices for searching for a job.

Some of the content may disagree with what the so-called experts would say but then again… the next one would likely agree with me.

If you are a sports fan, you will recognize that any sport has a set of rules and varying degrees of competition.

Searching for a job, your job, is a competitive situation.

It could come down to two or more possible candidates, hopefully you, being one of them, having very similar credentials and qualifications.

If there was ever a time that self-promotional skills and self-confidence would come into play, it would be in the job searching and interviewing process.

Being able to effectively promote yourself can make the difference between landing the job and a ‘thank you very much, but we won’t be hiring you at this time."

This book is organized into Sections, covering specific topics with the content and strategies being delivered in individual Chapters.

While each Section provides specific content on a topic, it isn’t necessary that you progress linearly through the book.

For example, if you needed information right now on a specific topic, you could work your way through that Section and its chapters, then go back to other ones at your own pace.

Some of the Chapters offer additional optional reading resources that can add to or help your understanding of a topic, especially where there wasn’t room to expand upon the topic within the chapter. These will be featured at the end of the book under an Additional Resources Section.

In the next chapter, we will go through a quick overview of what is covered within this book.

Welcome aboard and I hope you enjoy our journey together!

2 OVERVIEW OF TOPICS & CONTENT

Here is a quick overview of the topics and content we will be covering in this book.

Here in Section I: Part One we look at a powerful strategy tool called the PDCA Model.

We also look at the psychology of job searching and the power of envisioning your success.

In Part Two we dive into the topic of how to create and leverage your resume. Your resume is the backbone of your job search.

In Part Three we learn how to create and leverage your Network Web. Some Job Search Coaches say that this strategy alone may very well be the most effective job search technique of them all.

In Section II we explore how to line-up your Cheer Leader Team. These are your references that will help land you your job.

In Section III we focus on the initial phone call from the hiring department. This is the phone call that you are waiting for. The one that invites you in for an interview. Your chance to wow them!

In Section IV we prepare for our first job interview for a position we have applied for.

In Section V we look at four different personality types of job interviewers you may encounter and tactics for dealing with each of them.

In Section VI we dig deeply into common interview questions that you may be asked and how to make the best of your responses.

In Section VII we look at questions you should be asking your Interviewer, or perhaps not!

We also review job interview mistakes that others have made, so you don’t make the same ones.

In Section VIII we focus on the follow-up phone call. This is where you phone them to find out if they have made a hiring decision and to keep your name front and center in their mind if they haven’t.

In Section IX we focus on working with Employment Agencies and Recruiters.

In Section X we explore job searching tips from the Pros.

In Section XI we look at personal marketing and promotion.

Section XII offers our conclusion and final comments.

In our next chapter here in Part One, we introduce the PDCA Model, a powerful strategizing tool for job searching.

3 INTRODUCING THE PDCA MODEL

You may apply for a job and get hired right away. You may find that getting hired is easy.

If this is your experience, I wouldn’t expect that you were reading this book.

For most of us, searching and landing a job is a challenging, if not stressful process.

The odds are that it may very well take us several attempts at applying for jobs, interviewing and waiting to see if we will get hired.

As I mentioned earlier, searching for and landing a job … is a job in itself. And like any job, the experience you gain while doing the job is valuable.

A big part of improving in any skill is learning from your mistakes and those that others have made. Another big part of this program, is maximizing the skills that you already have and leveraging them to your advantage.

You may have noticed that I have just started calling the contents of this book a program. This book is based on an on-line e-course with the same name as this book, that I have recently published at Live For Excellence Academy https://yourehirednow.com/online-course. And while it is organized and written like a book, it is very much a program of strategies designed to make your job searching more effective.

At this point, I would like to introduce the PDCA tool.

PDCA stands for (plan-do-check-act, sometimes seen as plan-do-check-adjust) it is a repetitive, four-stage model for continuous improvement (CI) in business process management.

The PDCA model is also known as the Deming circle/cycle/wheel, Shewhart cycle, control circle/cycle, or plan–do–study–act (PDSA). It’s quite popular in business.

You may already be using it in other aspects of your life and not be aware of it.

The first stage of the PDCA cycle is that of Planning. Likely, everything within this program falls in the Planning stage.

When your resume is complete, actually … it never really is complete because you should be adapting it for every job that you apply for and your Linkedin profile has been maximized for effectiveness, you are ready to move into the Doing stage.

This is where you are searching for job vacancies, applying for jobs and interviewing for jobs.

After every step you take, you should do a review of how you did. This is the Checking Stage.

Did your actions taken work for you? What worked? What didn’t?

This takes you to the final stage of adjust or acting .

You need to take a hard look at what worked and what didn’t and make some adjustments for the next time. Then you continue with the planning stage again, making changes as you go along.

You can have one overall PDCA cycle in your mind, where you monitor the entire job searching process or you can break it down into individual areas.

How do you eat an elephant?

Answer: One bite at a time.

While I really can’t imagine eating an elephant, nor would I, given the chance, the saying makes sense to me.

By breaking all the different aspects of your job search down to manageable chunks, you will likely be better able to strategize. You could create a PDCA cycle for each of the elements of your job search process.

This would likely give you a more precise view of how your strategies work.

In the next chapter, we look at an important element in job searching and that is the psychological aspects.

Your beliefs and thoughts about yourself can make a difference in your success.

4 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF JOB SEARCHING

If you were to take a poll among all your friends and colleagues and asked them if they enjoyed looking for a job, I would be willing to bet most of them would say ‘no’.

There will always be those who enjoy any activity that involves anxiety, pressure and uncertainty. But for the most part, most of us don’t. When we are uncomfortable with any activity in life, it brings out our insecurities.

Or perhaps it is the other way around? Our insecurities in life bring out our uncomfortableness with certain activities.

I made a comment in the first chapter of this section regarding our personal reality. Each of us is uniquely different.

You can’t make a blanket statement saying … ‘all job search candidates have the following insecurities …’

It wouldn’t hold true.

While some people enjoy getting out there and promoting themselves at networking events, others would rather have a root canal. Some may not necessarily enjoy job interviewing but they embrace the challenge.

Others may find the process of creating and writing an effective resume to be a daunting, stressful task. And yet for others, that could be the easy part!

You can’t generalize how people feel about the job searching process.

However, in my experience, there always seems to be a ‘however’ … an exception to the rule if you will.

I want to direct this chapter to those of us who find the job searching process to be stressful. If this doesn’t affect you, you might want to move on to the next chapter in this section.

If you do find any, or all of the steps in the job search process to be stressful, then let’s take a look at how we can reduce your anxiety and make you more effective.

I’ll try to break it down to common areas of anxiety and offer some possible solutions. Take a close look at any of them that apply in your situation.

As we looked at in the previous chapter, the job search process can benefit from using the PDCA process.

Over the following parts and chapters, new areas or topics will be explored.

Each step of the process will involve work on your part. It can be daunting to look forward on any task and be overwhelmed by how much work is involved.

Just remember the story of how to eat an elephant. We will be taking each step one at a time.

I’ve numbered the common problems job searchers have, to help organize them and to keep us focused. They