The success of your job search and in your career is directly proportional to the amount of uncertainty you can tolerate and your ability to deal with it.
Job search, starting with your very first job, can be an uncertain and a daunting endeavor. Right out of the gate, as you graduate, you are seen as too inexperienced and green; while you navigate through your mid-career, looking for a better role, you can be seen as someone past their prime and unable to fit in with the younger ethos of the workgroup you are trying to target. All these barriers are real for those who encounter their manifestation in our everyday pursuits.
The mere awareness of these barriers and how they prey on your subconscious can militate against you to further compound your apprehensions around job search uncertainty and allow you to rationalize your defeats with such excuses. The real reason for many of these defeats is not so much that any of these real or perceived factors exists, but it is how you plan, design, execute, and conclude your job-search campaign and what avenues you use to differentiate your approach with those of your countless competitors; ditto, when it applies to your career success.
This blog is about a proven framework that reduces the inherent uncertainty in your job search. Keeping this framework as your career roadmap can also help you in the betterment of your career, especially as you change jobs for improving your station. This framework evolved from working with nearly 7,000 global clients of various stripes—from high-tech engineers, marketers, and account managers to those in manufacturing, hospitality, and healthcare fields. Some of these clients even work in the show biz and entertainment industries. Yet the problems they face in managing their careers and looking for a “better” job are universal to all these players who ply in their myriad vocations.
So, what are some successful “use cases” that demonstrate that this is a solid framework for job search and for managing your career? Here are just two: some 10 years back a middle-aged administrative professional, who had left the job market, was out raising her family and helping her husband in his business for 20 years, wanted to get back into the job market as her husband’s business tanked during the 2008 downturn. When she got into the job market after being out of work for two decades, she did not even know what an email was; she landed as a CEO’s executive assistant at a high-tech in 2009.
In yet another instance, three years ago, then a 73-year-old got laid-off as a Senior Fellow when his company’s famed R&D lab was closed—his company was also moving to a distant location—he invented a job of his dreams for himself as a VP and head of research at a newly-created, at his behest, advanced research lab, right here, in the Silicon Valley. There are more, but these successes illustrate that, often, it is our approach and mindset that defeat us and not the perceived limitations of our candidacy.
So, what is that framework that requires you to go beyond your immediate actions and forces you to look at your campaign—and your career—in a more holistic way? Fig-1 below shows the essential elements of this framework. The description of each of the major elements follows:
In this framework there are four main circles that come together in as many intersecting areas and create a common shared area in the center—the bullseye—that is labeled “Offers,” the ultimate result of a successful campaign. With multiple offers you have the freedom to make the decision to select the right job that fits your overall career plan and that gives you the status, salary, and growth that you are looking for.
Let us briefly discuss each of these nine areas and what it entails to manage them for a successful campaign and outcome.
- Résumé: Your résumé is the baseline document that showcases your carefully crafted leadership narrative that is based on the next job you are after (“Tomorrow”). To most professionals their résumé is about “yesterday” that showcases their responsibilities and tasks rather than their accomplishments and leadership narrative. An example will illustrate this point: A typical résumé bullet will showcase a task-focused message as follows:
lAs a manager, grew the team from 10 to 15 in two years, promoting two in the team.
This bullet is very transactional and does not tell the reader anything more than you did your assigned job. If, instead, you crafted that bullet differently and showed your accomplishment, it can be presented as follows:
lTo support rapid growth, first developed a hiring plan and onboarded one rock-star, who could mentor others. Id’d a high-potential team member, promoting her to Lead role to mentor others. Onboarded four junior hires (for a total of 15), resulting in a team that was now doing the job of 20. Then scaled the team even further with new test software and infrastructure.
Although the second bullet is longer, it captures the impact of your leadership in a much more compelling way. It is this differentiated narrative that separates you from the others and provides you the basis for telling great interview stories (see #8). Although developing such a résumé takes effort, it is a great way to differentiate yourself from all others, whose experience sounds very similar to the one expressed in the first bullet.
- LinkedIn Profile: Many do not understand the different roles a résumé and their LinkedIn Profile play in their career—especially in their job search. By the very nature of a résumé, it limits how much you can tell a reader about your past because of the space limitations (two pages or so) and how it is typically read. A recruiter or a hiring manager will spend about 5-10 seconds scanning a résumé and decide if they want to move forward with it.
While your résumé is a “push” tool, which means you use it to send in response to a posted job opening, your always-on LinkedIn Profile is a “pull” tool. This means that employers looking for a candidate with specific qualifications will do a search and target those that meet their search criteria. On the other hand, your résumé is not searchable as a LinkedIn Profile is, which allows employers to search candidates with specific qualifications they are looking for. Unlike your résumé a LinkedIn Profile has elements that allows you to showcase yourself differently and gives you more space than does a typical résumé.
In a typical use case an employer will search for the right candidate on LinkedIn, contact them for further information, ask for their résumé in response and conduct the further due diligence. Thus, even with the same basic career narrative those two collaterals play a different role in how they are used. This is also why merely copying your résumé and pasting it as your LinkedIn Profile is not a good idea. Your résumé, as the baseline document, should drive your LinkedIn narrative. Further, if you can optimize your Profile to come at the top of search results based on your key word usage, you’ll get many inbound calls from interested employers. Thus, your résumé and your LinkedIn Profile should be presented in a complementary way. - Networking: This is yet another benefit of LinkedIn, where your right connections can help you with access to the right people in your targeted companies. Merely having a large number of connections without regard to their affiliation and status is not meaningful. Although 500 is the limit that shows up on your Profile to outsiders you can have full access to all your connections. So, manage your invitations carefully and leverage them in how you manage your access to the decision makers. The right connections in your network, together with the Recommendations from the right network connections on your LinkedIn Profile can be a boon to your job-search campaign.
- Interviews: This circle describes the important step once you get traction, and your campaign starts paying rewards for your message and access to decision makers. There much that is written about how best to prepare and deliver memorable interviews that result in a job offer, so this element is presented here more as it relates to the other three major elements and how the intersecting areas with the other elements define what to focus on as a part of your campaign.
- Branding: Occurring at the intersection of the Résumé and the LinkedIn Profile circles branding is a critical element that establishes you as someone that stands how you are seen in the job market. Consistency of message and emphasis on the right elements of your message across these two areas (Résumé + LinkedIn Profile) are critical to establishing a strong brand. Do not let your brand just happen by merely throwing together these two narratives without giving them studied attention, because it doesn’t!
- Footprint: Your footprint in the job market stems from how your Profile and Network work in tandem to spread your reputation and generate interest in the job market. With the right design of these two elements, you it is easy to establish a large presence in the job market because of your footprint.
- Confidence: This is a critical element in your job search that helps you to ace an interview and to get you that offer. More than what you know and more than whom you know inside the company for which you are interviewing, your ability to confidently deliver your responses matter in how interviewers perceive you. To gain this confidence you must leverage your network to get the insights you need to prepare for your interviews and then practice your interviewing skills staging mock interviews and learning from them by getting critical feedback. There is thin line between confidence and arrogance, so watch out for how you manage that for yourself.
- Storytelling: At the heart of any successful interview is your ability to respond with compelling stories about your leadership as you navigate through most of the questions. This is especially true during a round of behavioral and leadership questions. When the interviewer asks you, Tell me about a time when you had to fire someone…., your response must be an actual story about what happened and how you came out a hero at the end. The only way to narrate a cogent story without falling into the HR traps is to practice it and to make sure that you can do it with flawless precision. Do not rely on your ability to improvise a story based on some vague memory you have about your past actions. Concocting a story on the spot can prove fatal.
- Offers: To get multiple offers you must learn how to stage various job interviews and manage them so that you can get different offers in a short time period (about one week). A good way to manage these dominos is to leverage the progress on one front to tip the domino on the other. For example, if you are invited for the final round at company-A and company-B is still in its early stages, call the decision-maker at B and tell them that you are now invited to the final round at another company (no name) and you expect to get an offer a few days after that. This generally changes the priorities by which the company B will manage your process. One key point to remember is that when you get an actual offer from A do not tell B that you have an offer. Instead, say to B that A just called and told me to expect an offer in the next day or do. The reason for this subterfuge is to prevent B from saying, Sorry, we cannot move that fast.
Developing and managing a successful job-search campaign and your career require careful planning, diligence, and staying on top of many developments. The framework presented in this blog is aimed at providing a roadmap on how to do this right. Such an approach can result in an outcome that far surpasses your own expectations of how your career should progress, as is illustrated with the two hard-to-crack cases cited in this blog.
Good luck!
