A job search can be a tough slog. It takes a lot of research, a ton of fortitude and a great deal of determination to navigate the talent market these days.
The easier a particular job is to get, the worse the job is likely to be! Job-seekers who have been on the market a few times become savvy. They learn to spot recruiters and hiring managers who don’t tell the truth, and to back out of job opportunities that don’t hit their gut the right way.
If your job search isn’t working right now, your first priority is to figure out what is broken in your job search. Nobody who has spent time in the new-millennium talent market would expect any job-seeker to get a great job quickly or to hear back from every employer they contact about job opportunities.
That’s not realistic. Still, if you are getting no responses at all or only a tiny percentage of employers you reach out to ever reply, then your branding and/or your job search approach are the impediments in your way.
Your branding is very important. Your resume is the first and loudest message from you to any employer you get in contact with. Your resume has to hit its mark. When you write your resume with a human voice and bring much more of your power and personality into it than you would in writing a traditional resume, hiring managers will notice.
I was an HR chief for ages. It was boring and exhausting reading the same awful resume jargon dozens of times every day. I felt sorry for the smart people who had all written their resumes the same way. The only differences from resume to resume were the company names, dates and street addresses. That’s sad!
How could your brilliance shine through that wall of sludge? It is nearly impossible for a smart and capable person like you to be noticed in a stack of resumes that all sound the same.
You have so much more to offer employers than your “more than seven years of experience” and your “motivated self-starter” status. Your story is your brand, in the end. No one has your story or ever will. Own it and sing it. It’s you. You have nothing to apologize for and no one to impress!
You don’t have to describe yourself like a can of peas on a shelf. You are not a bundle of skills and certifications. You are a complex, funny, smart and resilient person with your own take on things. Not everyone needs to like you or understand you. Your job is to find the people who do!
It’s not the fault of job-seekers that they all tend to brand themselves the same way.
Almost all of us were taught to write our resumes using the ghastly, robotic fake-business language that employee-handbook-writers and corporate-policy-writers also employ.
The worst way to describe yourself and your amazing story is in sentence fragments and using stiff, governmental and done-to-death jargon.
No one cares that you think of yourself as a “results-oriented professional.” Countless other people think of themselves the same way. “Results-oriented professional” is such a lame, over-used phrase that your resume might be more effective if you call yourself an “oxygen-breathing biped.” At least that way you would stand out!
The days of boring resume language are thankfully over. You can write about yourself the way you talk about yourself with your friends. You can bring your voice and personality into your resume.
Of course, a friendly and conversational resume is not written to impress a keyword-searching algorithm. If you want to grab your hiring manager’s attention with your resume, you’ve got to find a better channel to reach your hiring manager than the anonymous, techno-mechanical Black Hole recruiting portal where job-seekers are instructed to fill out an online job application.
That’s the worst way to get a job. Your chances of hearing back from an employer after filling out an online job application (even if you are perfectly qualified for the job) range from slim to none. Keyword-searching is the worst possible way to hire people or to screen job applicants, but keyword-search-enabled Applicant Tracking Systems became standard in the early 1990s and most medium-sized and large employers still deploy them.
You have to find another way to reach your hiring manager — the person who will be your boss in your new job. In most cases it is easy to do so.
Now you’ve got a resume that speaks to your hiring manager directly, in a human voice. You need a letter to send your hiring manager along with your resume. It’s called a Pain Letter. Now your job-search approach is more targeted, more direct and personal and removed from the keyword-obsessed Applicant Tracking System.
Not every hiring manager will respond to your Pain Letter and Human-Voiced Resume, of course, but you will start conversations that would not have happened had you stuck around to languish in the Black Hole.
You will create a Target Employer List to guide your job-search outreach efforts. Don’t let posted job ads dictate your job search priorities. Plenty of employers who don’t have job ads published will still talk with you about their needs if you take the initiative to reach out to them. Why shouldn’t they? Conversation (up to a reasonable point!) is free.
You are a consultant now. You can get a business card to give out to new people you meet, branding you as the consultant you are rather than a needy job-seeker. Every conversation you have about consulting — not to mention every consulting gig you secure, no matter how small — will grow your flame, your confidence and your credibility. We are all entrepreneurs now.
If your outreach to employers is getting you interviews but you’re not getting job offers, then something different is broken in your job search.
Think about the question “What sort of Business Pain do I solve for employers?” The answer to that question is more important than your skills or the endless list of Essential Requirements in a job ad. You are a pain-solver first and foremost. You are a specialist in relieving one or more business problems. Make that problem — and its solution — your focus!
Have stories ready to tell at a job interview — pithy Dragon-Slaying Stories that tell the interviewer in vivid terms how you came, saw and conquered in past assignments. Every job-search problem is solvable.
What if your job-search obstacle is something outside your control? What if the employers in your area don’t have the right kinds of jobs available, or what if age discrimination or some other unfair condition is making your job search harder?
There are always going to be obstacles that we can’t control. Your focus has to stay on the things you can control. It is tempting to decide that fate is simply working against you and that therefore your job search is hopeless – and then to give up.
How would giving up help you?
If you made the economy, your age, the gap on your resume or evil employers the villain in your job-search saga, you would have someone or something to blame for your frustration but you wouldn’t have a job.
Don’t make anyone or anything the villain in your story! You are mightier than any roadblock that might appear in your way. Focus on the things under your control. You can keep taking steps and keep growing new muscles in your job search, even if some ignorant people discriminate and even if you don’t see job ads that match your experience.
You can bend and stretch and keep learning. You can be creative in your job search and expansive in your view of your own capabilities. You can reinvent yourself at any age. You are mighty. Managers in pain need smart people like you to help them. They are waiting to hear from you!
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