Job-hunting - lines in the water

"If you chase two rabbits at the same time, you will go hungry."
(Chinese proverb)

Whether in good times or bad, I recommend my clients pursue an all-guns-blazing approach to pursuing job opportunities. Multiple angles of approach, multiple angles of research, knowledge-is-power. Full-on stalking!

But above all, it needs to be focused.

My rule of thumb on this is that you simply cannot be genuinely excited about the prospect of working in more than a handful of companies. If you are, you probably have commitment issues ... You need to focus your efforts down to a small number of organisations that you know a lot about and that you can apply for in a meaningful and impressive way.

Thus I see little point in firing off hundreds, or sometimes, thousands of unsolicited applications willy nilly. The standard thinking on this is that if you pursue a direct mail approach and get a 2-3% response rate, you will secure a handful of interviews every month and, by the law of averages, some kind of a job is bound to fall in your lap as a result.

Hmmm. This is why on the blurb on the back of Where's My Oasis it says, "in today's marketplace, job-hunting is for dummies - the smart people career-hunt."

If the full extent of your research is using the Yellow Pages to find a bunch of companies to apply to, what are you going to do if you do manage to land an interview? You'll have to do a bunch of cramming to get up to speed on their business, their sector and its issues in the few days available to you before the interview. If they screen using phone interviews, you'll have even less time available to you.

The single most common failing point for candidates at interviews is under-preparedness. In many instances, this means that the candidate can't answer basic questions about their approach and style. But more often, it's lack of knowledge about the sector, the company and the role they are applying for which trips up the candidate. Hiring is a process of elimination - if you are short of basic facts about the issues the hirer is facing, don't be surprised when they draw a line through your name.

And that's before we even consider the problem of whether you would have any kind of fulfilling career with this company. Will you fit in? Do they develop their staff? Do you respect their senior management and buy into their vision and corporate culture? Is the sector healthy? What about their new product pipeline? Do you really want to work there? If you are job-hunting, the answer to that question is simple. If you are making any effort whatsoever to manage your career, that question requires a whole lot of thinking ...

So focus your efforts. Identify a handful of organisations you would genuinely love to work for and start building your knowledge-base of them. In the days before the interwebs, this meant much pain and major shoe leather. Now, you can find out a gargantuan amount of information on the basis of some pointing and clicking.

Get to it - build up a CIA-style dossier on the handful of places you would kill to work in. Then meaningful wooing can commence ...

I remember an episode of Friends in which Ross and Rachel exchanged the 'laminated list' of celebrities they would be allowed to sleep with, should they ever have the opportunity to do so. I don't think you need to go quite as far as laminating your companies-I'd-love-to-work-for list, but the concept has merit. And seeing as it's not laminated, you should build a list of alternates too. Have a second string of another 5-7 companies; so if you get a curt "No thank you" from one of your top five, you immediately slot a new one in to replace it and commence bunny-boiling wooing again.