Being Human in the World of Job Hunting
I would bet that everyone reading this has at some point been a jobseeker. It seems impossible to me that you cannot at some point have been looking for work. If you were the child entrepreneur, then maybe the last time you looked for a job was from the cornershop owner who paid you do a paper round – or when you were looking for babysitter gigs. But I bet you have looked for work at some point in your life.
And we all know some of the most stressful things in life – weddings, moving house and, of course looking for a job. And it’s equally as stressful for a grad fresh out of university as it is for someone who’s been in there job for a while and needs to look for something new.
I have been a recruiter for 20 years now and have recruited in the UK and globally. During that time, I’ve spoken to thousands of people about changing jobs. Boy, trust me when I say the world of job searching has changed more than I could ever imagine. People talk about how lastminute.com changed travel, about how Uber changed taxis, about how AirBnB changed hotels. I think how LinkedIn and Indeed have changed recruitment is up there with all of these.
What has happened is that finding your next job has become a vast universe of online data that can be easily entered by anyone, but not easily accessed to get where you want to get to.
Think about it. You have lost your job in these crappy COVID times, you need to secure a new role. What do you do? Talk to some recruiters, which ones – there seems to be so many. Do they all have the same jobs? Are these jobs even real?
What about looking on the job boards, which ones? Do I register on all of them? Are they advertising the same jobs? What about LinkedIn jobs, where do I start? There is so much data out there and I don’t even know how much is true.
Even when you do start, you spend time on a well-written CV, you upload your nicely prepared CV on to that website and of course your well-written cover letter, you click on the send button and off it whizzes into the system. You then get a nice polite automated message back thanking you for applying and then 9 times out of 10, never hear a word again!
And when you have done that 10 times, 20 times, 100 times, how do you keep motivated and how do you stay positive?
I’d like to share with you an idea on how you can make your job hunting a more personal, human experience that will also keep you motivated and result in finding opportunities that aren’t even out there on the LinkedIns and the Indeeds of the world.
This might sound pretty obvious, but I am jumping ahead of the basics here – I am assuming you are already clear on what you want to do and have confidence in yourself that you can work in that field. Self-confidence is a vital ingredient in securing that role that you want. You need to stop short of arrogance, but demonstrating confidence in your desire to do a role, you will come across well to those you want to impress.
So let’s talk about what you can do – I have broken it down into three parts…
And those coffee meetings with as many people in your field is the mantra you need to find those hidden opportunities – you should be aiming for 50 informal coffee meetings with people in your target field as that will create some serious opportunities for you.
So yes, you will be spending a lot of time online building your platform, but then the human connection element will help you stand out in that busy job search – get it right and you will already have some relationships in place and they will want to talk to you about joining their organisation!
So to summarise: