Strategy #38: Earn The Maximum Job-Search ROI

There’s lots to think about when you launch yourself into a fresh job-search project. What sort of work do you want to do next? How will you find job opportunities that match all of your needs? What’s the best way to get in front of recruiters and to then convince them to hire you? Those are just a few of the questions to answer but there are a hundred and one others. You can easily become overwhelmed so to give yourself the best chance of success, you need to concentrate your efforts where they’re most likely to pay off.

How do you cover all of the core job-hunting bases whilst keeping your plan as sleek and organised as possible? What are your priorities, the most essential parts of the job search that you should focus on? Is there a way of maximising your job-search return on investment? Yes, I think there is and in this article I’ll explain what my approach would be if I were in your shoes.  

In strategies #37 through #40, I’m giving you some suggestions which should help you get on top of your next job search. We’re still sitting in your favourite café, if you recall the premise of yesterday’s article, as we move on from the psychological side of things and towards some practical ideas. So grab another tea or coffee and let’s continue our conversation.

You’d expect me to say this and I’ll get straight to the point. The best advice I can give you is to enrol in my full Job Search Masterclass if you’re serious about obtaining the highest-quality work with the best-possible employer. I give you masses of information, guidance and action plans and, if you’re dedicated, you can spend quite a while getting to grips with everything. However, if you want to earn the biggest bang for your buck, I’d target the following areas. Focusing on these three aspects of my strategy will almost certainly deliver the highest return on your investment of time and energy;     

1: Find work opportunities. There are a number of stages that come before this, and none of them should be ignored or skimmed across in any way, but this is when things get serious. Unless you can identify some suitable job openings you’re going nowhere fast, so the first essential element of your strategy should be to spend lots of time doing this, and as comprehensively as you can.

2: Engineer personal introductions. This is when you get inside a target employer and foster contacts who can give you privileged information and introduce you to other people within the organisation. I really cannot overstate the benefit of doing this well. If you can persuade insiders to open up to you, and to subsequently act on your behalf by leading you directly to the doors of hiring decision makers, you’ll be way ahead of almost every other job candidate.

3: Conduct hiring meetings. Everything is subservient to this pivotal encounter with the person who has the power to employ you which is why you must do whatever’s necessary to absolutely nail every single meeting you attend. There are two components to any pitch that you make in these meetings. The first is designing your raw content and the second is the way you deliver this content. I’ll be talking about interview content shortly.

So, let’s think about each of these areas in a little more detail.

Finding Work Opportunities

Researching work opportunities requires a very particular mindset. You have to simultaneously be able get up close to where the action is yet stand back enough to see the wood for the trees. You must also be happy to keep detailed records of information you discover, make comprehensive notes about everything you do and remember everyone you speak with. A methodical workflow suits some people and you may love nothing better than doing this sort of thing. If so, you’ve got a head start. 

If you don’t relish conducting an important research project, you have two options available to you. The first is to learn to enjoy doing it. The second is to use your frustration, or whatever other negative feelings you might have, to spur you on to complete this research phase as quickly as possible. What isn’t an option is to circumvent it. Putting this research part of your job hunt into a drawer and hoping it goes away isn’t an option, I’m afraid. Nor is it a task you can delegate so I won’t sugar-coat this. All you can do is suck it up and get on with it. That’s the strategy I suggest you use in this case.  

Engineering Personal Introductions

Let’s now think about the second stage in my system. As a reminder, this is when you start to make contact with company insiders and go on to facilitate personal introductions to hiring decision makers. Developing contacts and exploiting their influence and knowledge is incredibly important. Doing this in even the most superficial way separates good job hunters from average ones. Doing it really well is the sign of truly exceptional future employees. Showing that you’ve got the initiative to reach out to well-connected insiders is the hallmark of a person who’s focused on achieving their goals and is prepared to do whatever it takes to succeed. These are extremely desirable qualities in any worker.

I’ve got many years’ experience as a recruiter and interviewer and I can tell you that almost no old-school job candidates I’ve met with have made any prior attempt to establish contacts inside my own companies or any that I’ve ever worked for. Had they done so, I would have been mightily impressed. Just by digging around inside my business in advance of a job interview, they’d have shown me that they were made of some of the right stuff before I’d even shaken their hand. That’s something I always want to see, as does any hiring decision maker or employer.

The very fact that they’d taken it upon themselves to conduct this kind of pre-interview assessment of how the company operated, familiarised themselves with what my team and I deemed necessary in any new employee and so on, they would have vaulted themselves to the top of my hiring list. If they’d matched this with a clear demonstration that they understood the challenge ahead of them, and showed that they’d be on top of the job they’d be doing, I’d have signed them up on the spot. 

Mastering this contact-building skill is one of the secrets to getting hired by an employer you really want to work for. Why virtually all job applicants fail to conduct any kind of meaningful personal research is a puzzle to me. Perhaps they’re embarrassed to ask to speak with a few current employees. Possibly they feel that this isn’t an acceptable way to behave in advance of a job interview. Maybe they think they’re well-enough prepared by looking at the company website and the meagre guidance that’s on offer in the job-ad wording. Make sure that your strategy prevents you from falling into any of these traps.

Conducting Hiring Meetings

Let’s now think about the third of my most important job-search skills and that’s the hiring meeting itself. Everything’s riding on conducting this encounter supremely well so it should be no surprise that I include it in my list of priority activities.

Presenting the solution to a pressing business problem you’ve uncovered should be relatively simple, so long as you grasp the ins and outs of the job you’re interviewing for, you’ve done your homework properly and you’ve rehearsed your presentation well. Proficiency, preparation and practice should give you all the ammunition you need to deliver a knock-out interview performance.

Any pitch needs to consider the two constituent parts of content and delivery. In other words, you have to think about what you’ll say and how you’re going to say it. I simply don’t have the bandwidth in this short tutorial to advise you on delivery so let’s focus on the contents of your interview pitch.

You’re the authority in all matters connected with the job you want to do, or at least you ought to be. If you have even the smallest doubt about the nature of the work you’ll be doing, or you’re vague about how you propose to do it once you’re hired, you’re about to commit the arch interview crime of being an opportunist chancer. If this is the case, I strongly advise you to stop immediately and put things right. Any half-decent interviewer will see through you in a flash and you’ll be doomed to failure.

But let’s assume that you know what you’re doing, professionally speaking. Job knowledge is one thing, but how do you combine this with proof that you understand the problem you’ve identified and then present a persuasive explanation of how you’ll address it? Doing this well is at the heart of designing your pitch content and forms the foundation of your hiring meeting strategy.

Build your content around at least one of the three essential questions. To recap on these, how will you make the company money? How will you save them money? How will you help them do things more efficiently? Virtually every employer, almost without exception, hires a new worker because they can do one of these things for them. If you’re not making or saving them money, or doing things better (which is a variant of saving money because it reduces costs), why should you be employed? Justifying your inclusion on the payroll boils down to satisfactorily answering a minimum of one of these three core hiring-qualification questions.

Depending on the job you do, you must decide which of them is most relevant to your role. If you work in any kind of sales or business development arena, making money is clearly the question to focus on. A big part of purchasing is about saving money. Project managers have to conduct their work efficiently. This is basic stuff. It’s business 101.

But despite its obvious nature, many interviewees make things much too hard for themselves by trying to be too clever, and in ways you’d need to see to believe. Instead of directly answering one of these basic questions, I’ve seen all kinds of complication, obfuscation and prevarication from countless candidates in almost every round of job interviews I’ve conducted.

You don’t have to be a clever-pants or quick off the mark with smart remarks. Keeping things simple by answering one of these questions is the basis of great pitch content. The strategy I’d employ would be to focus on whichever one was most relevant to my work, with reference to the business problem I’d discovered. Above all, I’d be ruthless in eliminating anything that didn’t directly relate to solving it. That’s the key to constructing great interview content. That's the essence of creating the maximum job-search ROI.

Neil Grant, Vocation Master

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