Strategy #1: Hire Yourself A New Employer

 In this first strategy article I want to introduce you to my job-hunting system and explain why I take a very different approach to the usual one. So, let me begin by asking a simple question. What if you could design the perfect work-search strategy? Well, let’s imagine what this might look like, in theory at any rate, without constraints or pre-judgements about what’s actually possible, nor any concerns about the limitations of almost every conventional job hunt.

You’d start off by discovering some lucrative employment opportunities that are perfectly suited to your talents and ambitions, and with high-quality employers of course. You’d totally eliminate all of the competition from other job hunters and, as the only person being considered for the position, you’d get personally introduced to influential company insiders, people who urgently need your particular skills and have the authority to employ you on the spot.

You’d seize the immediate attention of hiring decision makers. You’d take charge of any kind of job interview, deliver a supremely-effective and highly-persuasive hiring pitch, then negotiate a top salary from a position of true power and strength. You’d be in complete control of every key decision and action you take during the entire job hunt, which would inevitably allow you to assert agency over every aspect of your working life. Well, all of this describes not only the theory of a perfect job search but the reality of my system.

Job hunting can be tough at the best of times. If you follow the herd instinct by doing what nearly everyone else does, choosing to adopt conventional job-hunting strategies, it’s even tougher. In today’s hyper-competitive employment market, this is particularly the case if you want to get hired by a reputable employer to do well-paid, secure and genuinely fulfilling work.

For starters, there’s massive competition for the best jobs with hundreds of people applying for even quite ordinary positions. You’ve got to hope the right vacancy comes along at the right time, that you’ve got the right track record and that your CV or resume stacks up in the right way. If things go wrong, if there are inconvenient gaps in your work history for example, or you apply for a job that isn’t a good fit, you face an uphill task when the screenings and checks kick in. With a bit of luck you get invited to final interview, most of which are specifically designed to expose your failings and weaknesses. I’m sure you know the routine.

But what if you could avoid all of these problems? No competition, no CVs or resumes and no worries about glitches in your background. No application forms, no screening meetings and no standard job interviews. You remove all of the hassles and hurdles you usually get and take total control of any job hunt – that’s the essence of what my work-search training programme shows you how to do.

Looking for a new job is a regular event in almost every working person’s life. On average, we change jobs 12 times in our career so that means that we can expect to dust off our resumes or CVs every 3 or 4 years. For lots of people it’s much more often than that. Then comes the search for a suitable work opportunity, scouring the job boards and vacancy listings, sometimes taking a punt by making speculative approaches to employers. We become experts at filling in application forms, attending screening meetings and going through various employment pre-checks. If we’re lucky, we receive an invitation to a final interview. All the while, we get to fight against hundreds of other people who are desperate to land the same job as we do.

The harsh truth is that a standard job search is woefully inadequate in today’s hyper-competitive workspace. It’s riddled with problems from start to finish. If you’re serious about managing the direction of your career, you have to understand what’s going on beneath the surface of nearly every conventional job hunt. You then need to adopt a strategy that eliminates all of the problems you’ve identified. This is what the most successful people do, the ones who never struggle to find the highest-quality jobs with the most prestigious employers.    

They have a crystal-clear understanding of their skillset and the true value this delivers to employers. They eliminate competition by positioning themselves in a way that makes them the sole candidate for any position they want to be employed to do. They identify work opportunities before anyone else has found them, often designing a new role for themselves which didn’t exist before, sometimes with an employer who isn’t currently hiring new staff. 

Elite job searchers do things very differently such as ditching their CVs and resumes. They realise that these documents actually hold them back from achieving their objectives, and for a whole range of reasons. I’ll explain why this happens later in this series of strategy articles.

Above all, these people don’t have to go through any more negative and adversarial job interviews. Instead, they meet with potential new employers on a level-footing and don’t endure the usual sort of combative meetings that pick apart their work history and probe for personal failings and weaknesses in their candidature. Elite job hunters build a powerful presentation pitch that grabs the immediate attention of hiring decision makers. They position themselves as highly-valued, and highly-remunerated, A-team players. They take control of every job change that comes along and effectively hire themselves a new employer whenever the need arises.

Asserting agency over decisions and actions is one of the defining characteristics of elite workers. It’s fundamental to a successful working life, but I’ll be straight with you. Not everyone aspires to become one of the elite because they aren’t prepared to consider, let alone implement an alternative strategy to the usual one. The fact of the matter is that most job hunters are happy to stick with the disadvantages and problems that are intrinsic to an old-school, dysfunctional method of work search.

My experience in recruitment and interview training, and this goes back some 30 years, tells me that these people comprise upwards of 95% of the workforce. Therefore, I recognise that my programme will only appeal to those who aspire to join the top 5% of workers who are open-minded enough to consider a very different and far better way of finding new jobs.

Throughout this series of strategies, one of my principal aims is to provide enough information for you to decide whether you’re one of my target audience or not. If you are, that’s great and I look forward to being your guide along the path towards a better job and much better work.

If not, it’s maybe best that we part company right now and I’ll leave you to take your chances with a hyper-competitive recruitment process that’s riddled with problems. I’m telling you this now so that you’ve got the option of bailing out now because, at the end of the day, it’s for you to decide which group you belong to and I don’t want you to waste your time on a project that you’re not interested in

So, that's a very brief introduction to some of the headline features and benefits of my Vocation Master programme. Look out for the second in this series of articles when I talk about the reasons a standard job search fails almost everyone. This is a super-important concept to get your head around before you do anything else, so make sure you fully understand the problems before you move on to the solutions. Confronting the realities of a normal job search might challenge your thinking but I’m sure you’ll find the concept interesting and informative.

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;

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