Strategy #21: Discover Lucrative Work Opportunities

Imagine that you’ve come across a hidden treasure chest that contains a rare and glittering prize. Or perhaps you’ve stumbled across a path of tempting riches, one that leads you towards the land of your dreams. You’d probably feel thrilled with your discovery and excited about the possibilities that were suddenly opening up in front of you.

In a similar way, you’re about to learn how to uncover a vein of unique work opportunities that will make you marvel. In this strategy article I'm going to introduce one of the most important parts of my job-search system which is finding exciting and lucrative job openings with high-quality employers before anyone else gets to them.

This is the part of the job-search process where you start to do some digging for the sort of golden work opportunities that you’ve been itching to discover. It’s what all of your initial preparation has been leading up to, where the pay-off starts to really reveal itself. For most of my Job Search Masterclass course participants, this is the moment when their excitement about the job search project starts to inexorably ramp up. I hope you feel the same. And it’s important to remember that you do all of what I’m going to explain without having to look at job vacancy listings, use any kind of employment agency or all of the other traditional methods of finding work openings that are familiar to the huge majority of job hunters. 

Locating employers and work opportunities is the opening phase of a two-part information gathering process that’s closely followed by engineering personal introductions to influential insiders within these organisations. These two activities go hand in hand, so don’t worry if you think that I’m pulling up short in this article. In those numbered 25 through 28 I'll take you through this contact-development stage in more detail, so look out for those strategies which are dropping soon.

Getting back to an introduction to the concept and the aim of this part of the process is to take you from a blank-page, where there are quite literally countless employment options before you, then to narrow these possibilities and refine them until just a handful of targets remain. You do this by using a sifting and sorting process and I’ll explain the mechanics of doing this in article #24.  

Be warned that it won’t always be a direct route that you take. As you move closer to your end-point, which is getting in front of the person with the power to hire you, you’ll take some steps forwards. You’ll take a few sideways steps too, and inevitably some backwards ones into the bargain. It might be a circuitous route and it may involve a few bumps along the way but trust the process to deliver you in one piece. 

Which brings me to a quick pep talk as you need to confront a piece of hard truth here. And that truth is that the vast majority of potential employers that you consider will turn out to be duds. This isn’t a problem as they’ll only be flops because you choose to categorise them in this way but, if you’re not prepared for rejection, it can seem like uphill work.

All that glitters is not gold and because you’ll be doing a lot rejecting, it’s essential to keep some perspective on the research stage of your job-search project by understand its parameters and setting your expectations accordingly. Let me warn you that you’ll possibly have to do a fair bit of work at this point. Research requires good planning, diligence and attention to detail but if you follow the steps that I outline here, you’ll do absolutely fine.

The first phase is basically an information gathering and sorting activity. Some of this information will be in the public domain, easily accessible to anyone who has the gumption to look for it. The catch is that freely-available information is of limited value and merely represents the tip of the iceberg. The good stuff lies beneath the surface. The very best information, the sort you really want to get your hands on, is located far from sight. It lies in the dark recesses of the corporate ocean, only available to those who know how to find it. I’m happy to say that I’ll be your guide.

Some of the information you need will appear in the form of hard data. This includes facts and figures that are openly published in company reports, business proposals that are floated in public, industry publications and so on. Other data comes in the shape of words, opinions and insights that current employees disseminate. Much of this is easy to find but the best is decidedly not, unless you know where to look. And I can tell you that I know those places to snoop about.

The most valuable information will come from the mouths of people who’d probably prefer not to go on the record. I’m talking about confidential and often very personal things that might compromise careers if it were to become common knowledge. This is the motherlode of information. It’s totally invaluable and worth its weight in gold.

You won’t be surprised to hear that getting hold of this kind of information is the name of the game when it comes to finding high-quality opportunities. Possessing this in advance of meeting hiring decision makers, and deploying it in the right way, will transform your job search like nothing else. This latter activity is what the personal introduction stage is about and something I’ll be returning to in future.

So, let’s think about what my idea of high-quality research means in practice. Previously, before you came across Vocation Master that is, you’d probably apply for jobs without doing anywhere near enough background investigation. Even if you bristle at the suggestion that you didn’t do sufficient research when you applied for positions in the past, that you reckon you were one of the exceptions who nailed this side of things, I’m betting that you’re wrong. Hardly anyone goes into enough detail and this severely compromises them.

If you’re a typical job hunter, you’d look at the company website, read a few trade journals and hope for the best. If you’re anything like an average work searcher, you’d dispatch a stack of CVs or resumes and make applications in bulk, hoping something would stick. But you’d not truly know what the opportunity was, or even if a genuine opportunity existed in the first place. You probably wouldn’t know whether you were right for the job or not, or whether the job was right for you. That would come later, on the off-chance that you were offered a position. From now on, things are going to be different.

Now, let me take a quick sidebar and talk about the attitude you bring to this stage of the job search. In all of my Vocation Master training programmes, I’m addressing a pretty wide audience. Some of you will be operating in the upper echelons of the corporate world and you’ll clearly understand the relevance and importance of obtaining, and exploiting, privileged information. If this is you, the challenge of discovering what’s going on in the corridors of power and inside the minds of key people in a target company will be grist to your mill.

But what if you’re at the other end of the spectrum? Perhaps you’re fresh out of school or college, just starting out in your career or a working at a level that hasn’t involved anything like what I’m talking about. How do you conduct a research project when you have no experience of doing this sort of thing? All you want is a new job without messing around with company reports, rooting out confidential information, finding out what insiders are thinking and so on.

And, experience or no experience, it might be that you’ve already decided that the sort of employers you like the look of. Perhaps you think they’re too small, too tight-lipped, too new or whatever, to enable this sort of research of work opportunities. Well, let me tell you that all of that is nonsense.

The core principals of how to discover golden employment opportunities are the same wherever you are on your work journey. It’s for people with no work experience, right up to those who are approaching the end of their careers. It applies to the biggest, most intimidating employers through to the smallest, most convivial ones. There’s always a way of getting under the skin, digging the dirt, talking to insiders and becoming informed about what’s really going on beneath the surface of any organisation you like the look of.

Finding opportunities the way I outline is what will give you the edge, so ignore my advice at your peril. I‘ll draw this very brief introduction to finding lucrative work opportunities to a close but I’ll be returning to it soon.

If you prefer to watch training materials rather than read or listen to them, follow this link to my YouTube channel where you can access the video version of this article;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctBtBs3K-sk&t=14s

And finally, if you have any questions about the issues I raise here, or if you'd like to contact me personally, please get in touch via LinkedIn;

https://www.linkedin.com/in/vocationmaster/