Strategy #3: Copy What Elite Job Hunters Do

I’m going to tell you about a fool-proof way of succeeding at just about any task.

One of the most reliable ways of gaining solid strategic knowledge of a new area is to identify the thoughts and behaviours of people who are at the top of the game you choose to compete in and want to win, and to then put these actions into effect as well as you can. There’s nothing new about this modelling technique. It’s what many of the most successful people have done, going back into history as far as you care to imagine.

The reasons that emulating other people’s successes is such a good idea are twofold. First, you can easily remove any doubt about whether you’re heading in the right direction or not. Being a trail blazer and devising a completely new way of doing things is one option, but it invariably features lots of failures along the way. Do you have the time or inclination to discover whether your novel approach is the right one or not? Maybe you do, maybe you don’t, but the smart choice is to eliminate any doubt by copying a proven success strategy.    

The second upside is that you almost always get to achieve your aims as quickly as possible. For busy people who don’t have time to waste, getting fast results is essential. It gives them energy to devote to other things that are more important in their lives, such as cracking on with doing a high-quality job that they really want to do, for example. In these circumstances, instead of you doing the hard work, you allow other people to spend the long hours, days and even years identifying the best success strategies. That’s the clever move.

And that’s what I’ve done myself, in my career to date and ever since I started to build the Vocation Master training programme. This has happened in two ways. I was a hands-on interviewer and corporate recruiter for many years and I met with thousands of potential new recruits who wanted to join the companies I worked for. I saw it all, the good, the bad and the ugly of interview outcomes, and I gained a superb understanding of precisely how the most successful candidates performed to seize my attention and get offered a job, not to mention what the average and bad ones did that meant I dumped them by the wayside.

I went on to start my own training business, and this goes back to the early 1990s by the way, which delivers intensive communication skills courses to professionals in all sorts of organisations, from multinationals all the way through to small family companies and many individuals too. My team and I specialise in creating and presenting negotiation, persuasion and presentation skills courses, including training recruitment personnel in advanced interview techniques.

And I’m pretty good at it, even if I do say so myself, in large part because I’d previously identified the behaviours of the most successful job candidates and watched and learned from them. I’ve now added Vocation Master to my training portfolio and use all of my knowledge and experience to help job hunters just like you to present themselves as well as possible.

So, I’m a living, breathing example of someone who’s done the hard yards so that you don’t have to. I can tell you exactly what the best, most impressive job changers do to become successful because I’ve seen them do it, time and time again. All you have to do is copy them, and my training programme presents a distillation of this concept. Their attitudes, strategies and actions are the basis of the model that I recommend you follow. It really is as simple as that.

So, where do ordinary job hunters diverge from highly-effective ones? Let’s start by thinking about the winning mindset of the best work searchers and job interviewees. An unwaveringly positive attitude towards acquiring a range of effective work-search skills is unquestionably the most significant difference between average job hunters and exceptional ones. This should be good news if you’re motivated by the thought of being successful in whatever it is that you do for work. If you’re lazy, unfocused or cynical, it’s probably bad news, but the choice is yours.  

Getting your head straight before you do anything else should come right at the top of your to-do list. I’ll be honest with you in saying that I don’t believe you can be a great job searcher until you’ve sorted your attitude out for the better and, fortunately for you, there are all sorts of way to do this.

Thinking about the specific techniques that elite job hunters use, you can generally divide these into two distinct areas. The big-picture strategies they incorporate into their job-search project and then the individual set of actions that they go on to implement. And what’s the difference between this pair? Quite simply, strategies go on inside your mind, perhaps also committed to paper or screen as a planning document, whereas actions are the physical manifestations of those strategies. Keep the two separate and make sure that strategy comes before action.

Ordinary job hunters often seem to leap into action without thinking about any kind of strategy in advance. Or so it appears to many experienced hiring managers like me, who watch the majority of weak candidates squirm and sweat in the interview chair. Don’t make this mistake. Follow the pattern of the elite of this world by adopting a strategy you can rely on, then formulate your deliverable actions as a direct result of proven success strategies. You’d expect me to say this but the fully-featured strategy I recommend is contained in my complete Job Search Masterclass. 

Turning to the actions that elite job searchers deploy, these follow on as a natural consequence of having the right attitude and adopting a solid strategy. That doesn’t mean you won’t benefit from some precise guidance in exactly what to do, of course. I don’t have the time or space to go into these today, but you can find detailed explanations of all of the actions that I advocate in the upcoming episodes in this series, through my complete training courses and in a range of complementary resources that you’ll find on my website.

OK, that’s about it for this very brief introduction to the benefits of copying what successful people do. I hope I’ve whetted your appetite and that you decide to incorporate this idea into your next job hunt. I promise you’ll be glad you did. I hope you’ll join me for the fourth article in this series when I outline the transformational job-hunt strategy and introduce you to the perfect work search. Until then, do whatever you can to join the elite of this world.

Neil Grant, Vocation Master, London, September 2022

If you have any comments, suggestions or questions about the issues I raise here, I invite you to contact me personally. Please get in touch via LinkedIn;

LinkedIn/VocationMaster