Strategy #39: Play In The Job Hunt Sandbox

There’s a work-search technique that hardly anyone uses, but one that’s guaranteed to propel you into the top league of job hunters if you put it to good effect. There’s nothing complicated about doing it and it’s a simple concept to get your head around. Would you like to know the secret to perfecting any kind of interpersonal encounter during a job search, from informal research meeting all the way through to full-blown interview and salary negotiation? I’m guessing that you would.

Practice makes perfect, as the saying goes, and perfect practice massively contributes to an ideal job-search outcome. In this article I’m going to tell you about a sure-fire strategy to implement a perfect practice routine that will leave you brimming with confidence and ideally prepared for whatever your next job hunt throws at you, and that’s sandbox practice.

As a reminder, this is the third of three strategy articles in which I'm describing an imaginary conversation in your favourite café. I’m giving you an hour of my time and offering you my best advice about how to crush your next job search, and in any upcoming interview in particular. This is when the chips are down and you’re under pressure to perform at a high level because you want to be offered a great new job and win a lucrative work contract with a fantastic employer. The subject of this section of my advice is about the importance of rehearsal.

You probably remember your childhood days when you had a sandpit or sandbox or something similar in your garden, or when you got to play in one at school or at a friend’s house or at the park. There was no purpose other than to enjoy yourself, make shapes and build sandcastles before bashing them about and starting all over again. Nobody was there to judge you. It was pure and simple fun that you had, just for the hell of it.

Job-search sandbox activities are pretty much the same. It’s a way of exploring, practicing and enjoying yourself without judgement or fear of failure. It’s a process that allows you to develop your skills, ideas and techniques in a safe environment. There’s never any failure involved because success is measured purely by your activity levels and not judged by any end results.

This is how it works. You select a few companies that your preliminary research has thrown up. These businesses must be ones that you’re not interested in working for and under no circumstances should they be any of your short-listed employers. As a reminder, these are the ones on your leads list so leave those well alone for this sandbox practice activity. Identify lower-tier businesses and then go to work on them by conducting dry runs, exactly as you would if this were a real approach to an employer you’re genuinely interested in, but on the clear understanding that you can bale out at any point.

The beauty of these burner companies is that you get to do as much role-playing as you can handle. You can work on weak areas of your approach until you’re comfortable doing them for real. Dummy companies, which are real ones of course but dummy because you have the choice of ducking out of any conversation at any time, are great to have up your sleeve.

There are some rules of engagement with sandbox activities. Be as bold as you like. Try out fresh ideas and different approaches to your heart’s content. If you’re confident, go in hard and fast and throttle back to discover the level of attack that suits you. Alternatively, if you’re the timid sort, start off quietly and ramp things up until you reach your optimum comfort zone.

The most important feature of any sandbox job-search practice is that you must aim to get rejected. This might sound like an odd objective but it’s a crucial one to understand. Fear of rejection is one of the most crippling characteristics of people who fail to fulfil their potential. It happens in all spheres of life and includes proactive job hunters without a doubt.

One of the major reasons that anyone who follows my courses doesn’t succeed is that they can’t overcome a fear of rejection. And you will face rejection, I can tell you that for certain, but you can’t allow this to stop you in your tracks. There will be point-blank rejection that happens in an instant. You’ll also get long-winded rejection that starts off as encouragement but points in only one direction.

This is why you must use sandbox practice activities for as long as necessary, until you’re quite comfortable with rejection. You need to learn not to take it personally by shrugging off a rejection and getting on with the next person on your list. Only by toughing it out can you expect to emerge on the other side of rejection. That’s why it should be a specific aim. Make rejection your friend during your sandbox calls and meetings. Notch them up like a champion, and the quicker and harder they come, the better. Learn to glory in rejection.

Sandbox practice is a concept that most of my course participants grasp but, based on feedback I get, too few of them do enough of it, or even any at all in some cases. I don’t enjoy berating anyone for things they don’t do but I’d be dishonest if I didn’t say that it’s a major mistake if you don’t embrace this essential activity. We’re all busy people and I recognise that doing things that take a little time and effort are sometimes easy to skip over.

What’s usually at the root of an absence of sandbox practice is a combination of poor self-discipline and the perception that your attention is being diverted away from doing what’s most important. I can’t defend the former but I understand the latter to some degree. I sympathise with you if you’re under the cosh, due to time, financial or other pressures, and when you feel an urgency to get a job offer on the table as quickly as possible.

But that doesn’t get you off the hook. However much you want to get the personal contacts ball rolling, and no matter how quickly you want to schedule a genuine hiring meeting, I strongly advise you to make a couple of dry runs before you commit to doing these things for real. If I was in your position, I’d make solid practice a requisite part of my job-search strategy. I wouldn’t even consider speaking with anyone who was likely to influence my research outcomes, let alone a decision maker who might hold my employment destiny in their hands, until I’d ironed out any bugs or malfunctions with my various pitches.

Performers wouldn’t dream of going on stage without learning their lines and rehearsing the way they deliver them and nor should you. Without adequate preparation, an actor might forget what he’s supposed to say next or miss his mark in some way. The worst that will happen is a moment or two of embarrassment or awkwardness. If the same happens to you, the repercussions are likely to be more dramatic. In a worst-case scenario, you’ll get blown off the pitching stage and end up flunking the hiring meeting.    

Arranging sandbox practice meetings is simple in practice. It begins by listing second-tier organisations that you’re genuinely not interested in working for. Use your research data to identify insiders and then approach them in order to dig deeper into the cogs and wheels of the company they work for. Follow the trail, see where it takes you and experiment with different gambits.

This is exactly what you do with any potential new employer, minus the experimentation of course. The big difference is that sandbox practice focuses exclusively on businesses you’d otherwise reject because they don’t fulfil some essential part of the criteria you set at the beginning. Keep in mind that the objective of this activity isn’t the quality of the information you get. It’s maximising the quality of the interaction with the people you speak with, developing the confidence to conduct cold approaches and trying out a range of tactics.

Let me summarise the issues I’ve spoken about. My strategy would be to develop my motivation to do plenty of sandbox practice. Speaking personally, I wouldn’t find this particularly difficult because I recognise the huge benefits of carrying out practice that closely matches what will happen when things happen for real. If I needed a zap of encouragement, I’d get myself into the mindset of an actor who had a big performance in the pipeline because I knew that rehearsal is a preliminary part of the real thing. I’d visualise any upcoming conversations or meetings in my head. They’d all go perfectly, because I’d assiduously practiced what I was going to say and do inside the comfort of my imagination.

I cannot recommend you embrace sandbox practice enough. There’s such a compelling case for using this deceptively simple, yet stunningly effective technique which really does allow you to perform at your best, that you can’t ignore it. You asked me what I’d do if I was in your shoes and this would definitely feature in my strategy. 

Well, that just about wraps up my three café-based conversations with you in strategies #37 to #39. I hope you found them helpful.

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