About You, Me & Strategy 

Hello. I’m Neil Grant, the person behind the Vocation Master programme, and I’d like to talk about three things here: you, the job-search strategy I offer, and me and my background.   

Rather than offering a typical About page, doing what most service providers do on their websites by boasting about notable achievements, listing impressive clients and bragging about how much money they make, I prefer to start with something that’s far more important – you, my potential client.

Everything I do is focused on the needs of the people I work with, and that’s why I’m leading with you and your needs. It’s an easy claim to make but I’m sincere in saying that solving my clients’ problems drives absolutely everything I do, and that’s why I start as I intend to continue.

So, let’s kick off by thinking about some of the job-search challenges you might be facing if you do things the way that most people do.   

About You

When they look for a new job, the vast majority of employed work searchers are happy to follow a series of easily-recognisable actions.

They look at job-vacancy ads, write CVs and resumes, submit application forms, go through screenings with HR personnel and (hopefully) receive invitations to interview.

Above all, a conventional job search features massive competition for every available position. 

On average, 250 candidates apply for each openly-advertised corporate vacancy. 6 are invited to final interview. With 1 job winner and 249 job losers, this represents a whopping 99.6% failure rate. These facts are not in dispute. They come from Glassdoor, the well-regarded employment portal, by the way.    

If you're looking for a new job, this is the central problem that you face. It's the work-search challenge that my training programme addresses head-on.

When you need to land a job – maybe quickly and urgently, but perhaps at your leisure – there’s no getting around the competition factor, with the work-search odds heavily stacked against you. That’s problem number one which affects most job hunters to their significant detriment.

Bad though the competition issue is, problem number two is even more profound and sometimes lingers throughout a worker’s entire career. I’m thinking about the contributory factors that lead to the overwhelming majority of employees doing bad work, in the sense that they’re doing jobs that are incompatible with their needs, interests and ambitions in some way.

Disengagement from work is running at 85%, and workplace stress and anxiety have never been higher. Command and control management structures, ineffective bosses and a significant lack of workplace agency are rife. Couple these issues with an increasingly insecure employment market, plus many other negative systemic features of today’s workspace, and we witness more and more people doing what I call “bad work”. Add the compound effect of huge job-search competition, all of which leads to a major imbalance of power between employers and employees. 

If these issues concern you, there's a simple solution available, because my job-search strategy eliminates all of these problems at a stroke (more on this below).

Do you recognise any of this? More to the point, are you determined to do anything about it, to redress the balance and make a serious effort to do “good work”, starting by adopting a better way of looking for a new job? If so, you’re in the distinct minority. Research suggests that upwards of 95% of all job hunters stick with the usual way of finding work, despite its exceedingly dysfunctional nature.  

Which brings me to you – and whether you’re part of my target market or not. If you’re amongst the 5% of job hunters who believe that they deserve better jobs with better employers and are motivated enough to make “good work” a reality, my programme is for you.

If you want to seize agency over your working life by taking total charge of your job search, this programme is for you. If the idea of eliminating competition so that you become the sole candidate for any employed position you target, I’m very glad you’re here.

If you’d like to identify perfect work opportunities, engineer personal introductions to hiring decision makers, then assert control of any job interview so that you direct the agenda, content and outcome of these meetings, get ready to learn how to do these things.

If you’re open to an alternative hiring strategy, and you aspire to join a select group of job hunters who’ve solved the work-search problem, you’re the sort of person I’m interested in working with.

About The Strategy

More than 95% of work searchers follow predictable patterns. For these people, job ads, CVs and resumes, application forms, HR screenings and adversarial interviews are the norm. My strategy doesn’t feature any of these things.

You don’t look at vacancy listings of any kind. Nor do you need a CV or resume, hard though this may be to believe. There’s no contact with HR personnel or any other sort of formal application processes to endure.

Instead, you locate lucrative employment opportunities that are ideally suited to your skills, personal needs and ambitions, and with high-quality employers of your choice. It doesn’t matter whether they’re actively recruiting or not.

You manoeuvre yourself into the close orbit of company insiders who can inform you about the inner workings of the organisation you want to join. You facilitate direct referrals to hiring decision makers who have the power to employ you immediately. You take control of any formal or informal meeting that might lead to a hiring decision, and in a way that puts you firmly in the driving seat. You direct the agenda, content and outcome of all kinds of job interview.

Three words describe my approach to job hunting at a conceptual level: control, differentiation and authenticity.

You’ll learn much more about these ideas in my strategy articles, podcasts and videos, not to mention in my training and coaching programmes. At a practical level, you’ll learn how to put each of these things into practice by following a series of clear steps.

To summarise my approach in a single sentence, you’ll identify your most-unique skills and highest-level abilities, dovetail these with a named employer’s specific needs, generate a personal referral to the final hiring decision maker, then pitch yourself as the best (and only) person for the job.

I teach you how to do all of these things, as I’ve done for countless people before you.

You’ll create a long list of potential targets before gradually eliminating all but a handful of the most enticing employment prospects. You’ll dig deeper by speaking with people at the heart of the organisations you aspire to join, then use them as conduits to the hard-to-reach decision makers with the power to hire you.

You’ll design and deliver a powerful interview presentation using some of the most persuasive elements of high-level pitches. These enable you to exert maximum impact and influence over the outcome of these meetings. You’ll then learn how to negotiate job offers and remuneration packages, all from a position of strength.        

About Me

So, who am I and how did I get to this point?

Well, I cut my teeth in the commercial world, mainly in sales, sales training and general business management. Over the years I’ve also started and sold a number of my own companies, and interviewed thousands of people which is where my interest in this Vocation Master work-search project all began.

I’ve run my own training business since the 1990s and I’ve worked with people at every level of organisations in lots of different sectors, and in countries right across Europe, ranging from small family companies through to huge multinationals, national banks and government departments. 

I’ve also taught in business schools in France and Spain and run private training outfits large and small. I’ve written vocational training materials, taught on teacher-training and train-the-trainer courses and been an external examiner for various universities in the UK and overseas, including the University of Cambridge.

The focus of my training business is on developing business peoples’ abilities in outcome-critical soft skills, including their delivery of high-level presentations, pitches and negotiations.

I work with professional recruiters and interviewers, training them in advanced communication techniques. I also serve as a consultant for various companies, sitting in on hiring meetings when I advise on interviewer and candidate performance.

And as a side-line, through Vocation Master, I try to inspire and train people like you to find the perfect job as quickly as possible. There, that’s me in a nutshell.