Today’s job seekers need more than a brilliant brag sheet and clever cover letter to land a job they’ll love. Only dogged determination, positive thinking and smart strategies will take you where want to go in today’s job market. Now’s the time to be tenacious.
Here’s how:
1. Dogged Determination
Don’t skimp. Put all your effort into finding the right job. Start by spending a couple of hours each day at your computer searching for opportunities online. Your work won’t be as cumbersome as making door-to-door cold calls or bulk-mailing resumes to hundreds of potential employers, but it will call for persistence and a lot of your time.
Job seeking has never been easier. At the same time, it’s never been harder. Despite the advantage of the Internet, it still takes extraordinary energy to outsmart your competition. As many as 50,000 other people could be vying for nearly every job listing you find online. You’re no longer competing with your next-door neighbor, fellow high school or college graduates or talented candidates in your state or region. Today, job applicants come from anywhere in the world.
In the job search, just as in sports, if you want to win, you have to work harder than your opponents. (Click here to tweet this thought.) If the best players on your arch-rival’s team practice 100 free throws a day, you need to do 200 a day to beat them. Apply the same theory to your job search.
How many online job openings can an ambitious job seeker find in an hour? With the use of good keywords, it’s possible to locate a dozen or more opportunities in 60 minutes or less. If you devote just two hours a day to searching, you could apply for 24 new jobs every day, without even leaving your house.
Most job seekers seem satisfied to apply for only a few online listings at a time. To outdo them, don’t stop there. Develop a daily game plan, setting high standards for your search:
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Register for as many online job posting sites you can find in a good Google search. Consider Foundit, CareerBuilder, Indeed and others.
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Once you’ve settled on the best keywords for your search, sign up for daily job alerts as well.
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Visit each site daily, changing keywords until you find at least a dozen job openings.
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Don’t leave your computer until you’ve applied for all 12 of them.
Many people register only with the most well-known sites. You can be more determined than that! Find places to look that other job candidates may not visit. Don’t opt for only the big names; be doggedly determined to discover everything on the Internet that will help you find a job.
2. Positive Perspective
Remain confident, even when the going gets tough. Be especially guarded not to give up after a few months. Successful job searches often take six months or more. It’s possible to land some jobs overnight, but rarely the kind of work you really want.
Strive to develop confidence in your skills and abilities. Act as if you believe in yourself, even when you don’t. Remember the lesson you learned as a child from The Little Engine That Could: If you think you can, you can. If you think you can’t, you can’t. Start believing you will, and you will get the job you want.
Don’t swallow any of your own excuses or let yourself be discouraged by someone else’s opinion that you’re:
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Too inexperienced or too qualified.
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Too young or too old.
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Too scared to try something new.
If you can imagine that you could be the right person, you will be. Maintain a positive attitude. On a highly competitive playing field, positive self-talk often separates the wannabes from the will-bes.
Don’t underestimate yourself. Even if a job description sounds daunting to you, apply anyway. Maybe you don’t have five years of experience in the healthcare field, but you may have something else that matters just as much. For example:
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Experience in caring for sick children.
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Volunteering in a nursing home.
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Caring for elderly parents.
Substitute similar experience or background if yours isn’t exactly the same as what’s advertised. Some job seekers go for days without actually applying for a position. They keep waiting for just the right thing to come along. They’re probably being too hard on themselves. You will rarely meet every single qualification employers would like.
Set your goal and apply for at least a dozen jobs every day. Consider anything that sounds interesting to you. You have nothing to lose. The more applications you fill out, the better you will get at it. And any interviewing experience you have will come in handy when the right job surfaces.
You don’t have to accept a job just because you interview for it. Stay ahead of the competition by altering your attitude. Give yourself a break. Be positive about your skills and your ability to learn and grow with any organization.
3. Smart Strategies
Save yourself a lot of frustration (and stress) by mapping out your job search the way you would sketch your dream house or plan your wedding. Ask yourself, “What would I really like to do to earn a living? What steps do I need to take to reach this goal?”
Once you’ve set a solid career goal, write down all the strategies that will help you reach it. Let’s say you’ve decided you want to eventually head a marketing department in a Fortune 500 company. Some strategies to help you reach that goal might include:
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Identify Fortune 500 companies that sell products or services that interest you.
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Go directly to their websites to find and apply for their job openings.
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Keep your eyes open for these well-known employers while you’re searching job posting sites.
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Network with people from these companies via career fairs, conferences, trade shows or site visits.
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Call a few Fortune 500 companies and request informational interviews to learn more about them.
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Make sure you let Human Resource people know how much you’d like to work for their companies.
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Follow up with thank you emails and handwritten thank you notes to interviewers.
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Build relationships with the people who hire at each of these companies. Keep in touch.
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Continue your job search with dogged determination until you’ve reached your goal.
Finding a great job takes more than luck. It takes more than a dazzling resume or a jam-packed portfolio. Such self-marketing materials make good job search tools, but they won’t work without the above three elements to job hunt success.
How can you apply these attitudes to boost your job search success?
Author, consultant and career coach Susan K. Maciak heads her own company, CAMEO Career & Corporate Consulting LLC, along with publishing career-related books and articles. Find career tips and training topics on her blog, cameoconsultingblog@wordpress.com. For self-help books, career and corporate services, see www.cameo100.com. You can also find Susan on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.
Image: Flickr
