What You Don’t Know About Finding A Job
It happens to well over 50% of the people when job searching. It results in limited invitations to interview and fewer job offers.
It’s a mystery of the human psyche it seems and it takes its toll in limiting careers.
What is it?
You’ve heard it before; the old adage of “you don’t know what you don’t know“. That’s it – or in other words – what you don’t know about the job search process can stop a successful job hunt in its tracks.
I’ve been in the world of professional recruiting – see my bio – for over 40 years and I’m still amazed every day to see the same mistakes made during the job search process.
Why does it exist?
I think there are several reasons that mistakes are consistently made when looking for new jobs. Here are a few of the top reasons.
- Relying on personal experiences. All too often candidates limit their job search strategies to their own limited set of experiences. Even if you’ve been employed for 20 years or longer and worked for several different employers, the scope of what you’ve been exposed to is limited. Granted, it is much wider and better than someone with less experience, yet it’s still limited when compared with professional recruiters who see more varied career circumstances in a month that you’re likely to see in five years. Depth of experience matters.
- Taking short cuts. The Internet has caused a change in attitude for all of us and if we’re not careful, it will limit our job search methods. Here’s what I mean. We tend to look for free job search information, free resume advice and no cost approaches to our job hunt. Because there is so much instant information available on the web, and much if it is free, we tend to stop with that. Sometimes it’s because of information overload and sometimes it’s just plain lazy. Regardless, we don’t seem willing to go the extra mile to ensure our job success.
- Reliance on job boards. Employers are not publishing a great many of their jobs on the major job boards. Instead they’re using some alternative methods. I discuss one of them here. I know not only from my professional reading, but from the fact that I certify corporate recruiters in the Adler recruiting methods. Again see my bio for more about that. But just last week as I was evaluating certification case studies, I noted several employers – whose name you would recognize – had used alternative job sourcing methods to identify candidates. If you looked primarily on the job boards, and did nothing else you just missed them.
- Confusion over what works and what doesn’t. This can be about almost any aspect of your job search, but some of the areas where I see the most confusion occurs around how to write a resume that gets interviews, how to prepare the right way for an interview, and how to ace the employment interview, especially behavioral and/or case interviews.
- Unwilling to invest money in your job search. This one is truly amazing to me. I routinely ask candidates how much they’ve invested monetarily in their job search and/or how much they’re willing to invest. I follow that question with something like, how much have you typically spent per month on eating out or how much did you spend on your last vacation. The contrast is usually stark and quiet revealing. Some of this may be due to free expectations discussed in number 2 above, but regardless if you’re not willing to invest monetarily in your job search, you either aren’t serious about your career, or you’re just misinformed, but either way it often sends your career into a mediocre growth curve.
Some reasonable conclusions
Become open to new ideas and concepts. Web 2.0 and now 3.0 is changing the job search process for ever. Either change or be left behind. Don’t assume you know enough and become willing to invest in your resume.
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