Finding the Ideal Opportunity in Today’s Job Market

Identifying and landing a job can be a long and difficult process. Fortunately, the skills you’re developing in this course will give you a competitive advantage. This section offers a general job-search strategy with advice that applies to just about any career path you might want to pursue. As you craft your personal strategy, keep these three guidelines in mind:

■Get organized. Your job search could last many months and involve multiple contacts with dozens of companies. You need to keep all the details straight to ensure that you don’t miss opportunities or make mistakes such as losing someone’s email address or forgetting an appointment.

■Start now and stick to it. Even if you are a year or more away from graduation, now is not too early to get started with some of the essential research and planning tasks. If you wait until the last minute, you will miss opportunities and you won’t be as prepared as other candidates.

■Look for stepping-stone opportunities. Particularly in today’s tough job market, you might not find the opportunity you’re looking for right away. You might need to take a job that doesn’t meet your expectations while you keep looking to get on the right track. But view every job as an opportunity to learn workplace skills, observe effective and ineffective business practices, and fine-tune your sense of how you’d like to spend your career.

1 LEARNING OBJECTIVE

List eight key steps to finding the ideal opportunity in today’s job market.

If you haven’t already, read the Prologue, “Building a Career with Your Communication Skills,” before studying this chapter.

Writing the Story of You

Whether you’re about to begin your career or are already well into it, writing or updating your résumé is a great opportunity to step back and think about where you’ve been and where you’d like to go. Do you like the path you’re on, or is it time for a change? Are you focused on a particular field, or do you need some time to explore?

You might find it helpful to think about the “story of you”: the things you are passionate about, your skills, your ability to help an organization reach its goals, the path you’ve been on so far, and the path you want to follow in the future (see Figure 13.1 on the next page). Think in terms of an image or a theme you’d like to project. Are you academically gifted? An effective leader? A well-rounded professional with wide-ranging talents? A creative problem solver? A technical guru? Writing your story is a valuable planning exercise that helps you think about where you want to go and how to present yourself to target employers.

What’s your story? Thinking about where you’ve been and where you want to go will help focus your job search.

Learning to Think Like an Employer

When you know your side of the hiring equation a little better, switch sides and look at it from an employer’s perspective. To begin with, recognize that companies take risks with every hiring decision—the risk that the person hired won’t meet expectations and the risk that a better candidate has slipped through their fingers. Many companies judge the success of their recruiting efforts by quality of hire, a measure of how closely new employees meet the company’s needs.2 Given this perspective, what steps can you take to present yourself as the low-risk, high-reward choice?

Of course, your perceived ability to perform the job is an essential part of your potential quality as a new hire. However, hiring managers consider more than just your ability to handle the job. They want to know if you’ll be reliable and motivated—if you’re somebody who “gets it” when it comes to being a professional in today’s workplace. A great way to get inside the heads of corporate recruiters is to “listen in” on their professional conversations by reading periodicals such as Workforce Management (www.workforce.com) and blogs such as Fistful of Talent (www.fistfuloftalent.com) and The HR Capitalist (www.hrcapitalist.com).

Researching Industries and Companies of Interest

Learning more about professions, industries, and individual companies is a vital step in your job search. It also impresses employers, particularly when you go beyond the easily available sources such as a company’s own website. “Detailed research, including talking to our customers, is so rare it will almost guarantee you get hired,” explains the recruiting manager at Alcon Laboratories.3

Employers judge their recruiting success by quality of hire, and you can

take steps to be—and look like—a high-quality hire.

Follow the online conversations of professional recruiters to learn what their hot-button issues are.

Employers expect you to be familiar with important developments in their industries, so stay on top of business news.

Table 13.1 lists some of the many websites where you can learn more about companies and find job openings. Start with The Riley Guide, www.rileyguide.com, which offers advice for online job searches as well as links to hundreds of specialized websites that post openings in specific industries and professions. Your college’s career center placement office probably maintains an up-to-date list as well.

To learn more about contemporary business topics, peruse some of these leading business periodicals and newspapers with significant business sections (in some cases, you may need to go through your library’s online databases in order to access back issues):

■Bloomberg Businessweek: www.businessweek.com

■Business 2.0: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2

■Fast Company: www.fastcompany.com

■Forbes: www.forbes.com

■Fortune: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune

■Inc.: http://www.inc.com/

■New York Times: www.nyt.com

■USA Today: www.usatoday.com

■Wall Street Journal: http://online.wsj.com

In addition, thousands of bloggers, microbloggers, and podcasters offer news and commentary on the business world. AllTop (http://alltop.com) is another good resource for finding people who write about topics that interest you. In addition to learning more about professions and opportunities, this research will help you get comfortable with the jargon and buzzwords currently in use in a particular field, including essential keywords to use in your résumé (see page 365).

Translating Your General Potential into a Specific Solution for Each Employer

An important aspect of the employer’s quality-of-hire challenge is trying to determine how well a candidate’s attributes and experience will translate into the demands of a specific

An essential task in your job search is presenting your skills and accomplishments in a way that is relevant to the employer’s business challenges.

Don’t hesitate to contact interesting companies even if they haven’t advertised job openings to the public yet—they might be looking for somebody just like you.

Taking the Initiative to Find Opportunities

When it comes to finding the right opportunities for you, the easiest ways are not always the most productive ways. The major job boards such as Monster and classified services such as Craigslist might have thousands of openings, but thousands of job seekers are looking at and applying for these same openings. Moreover, posting job openings on these sites is often a company’s last resort, after it has exhausted other possibilities.

To maximize your chances, take the initiative and go find opportunities. Identify the companies you want to work for and focus your efforts on them. Get in touch with their human resources departments (or individual managers, if possible), describe what you can offer the company, and ask to be considered if any opportunities come up.4 Reach out to company representatives on social networks. Your message might appear right when a company is busy looking for someone but hasn’t yet advertised the opening to the outside world.

Start thinking like a networker now; your classmates could turn out to be some of your most important business contacts.

Put your network in place before you need it.

Networking is a mutually beneficial activity, so look for opportunities to help others in some way.

Building Your Network

Networking is the process of making informal connections with mutually beneficial business contacts. Networking takes place wherever and whenever people talk: at industry functions, at social gatherings, at alumni reunions—and all over the Internet, from LinkedIn and Twitter to Facebook and Google+. In addition to making connections through social media tools, you might get yourself noticed by company recruiters.

Networking is more essential than ever, because the vast majority of job openings are never advertised to the general public. To avoid the time and expense of sifting through thousands of applications and the risk of hiring complete strangers, most companies prefer to ask their employees for recommendations first.5 The more people who know you, the better chance you have of being recommended for one of these hidden job openings.

Start building your network now, before you need it. Your classmates could end up being some of your most valuable contacts, if not right away then possibly later in your career. Then branch out by identifying people with similar interests in your target professions, industries, and companies. Read news sites, blogs, and other online sources. Follow industry leaders on Twitter. You can also follow individual executives at your target companies to learn about their interests and concerns.6 Be on the lookout for career-oriented Tweetups, in which people who’ve connected on Twitter get together for in-person networking events. Connect with people on LinkedIn and Facebook, particularly in groups dedicated to particular career interests. Depending on the system and the settings on individual users’ accounts, you may be able to introduce yourself via public or private messages. Just make sure you are respectful of people, and don’t take up much of their time.7

Participate in student business organizations, especially those with ties to professional organizations. Visit trade shows to learn about various industries and rub shoulders with people who work in those industries.8 Don’t overlook volunteering; you not only meet people but also demonstrate your ability to solve problems, manage projects, and lead others. You can do some good while creating a network for yourself.

Remember that networking is about people helping each other, not just about other people helping you. Pay close attention to networking etiquette: Try to learn something about the people you want to connect with, don’t overwhelm others with too many messages or requests, be succinct in all your communication efforts, don’t give out other people’s names and contact information without their permission to do so, never email your résumé to complete strangers, and remember to say thank you every time someone helps you.9

To become a valued network member, you need to be able to help others in some way. You may not have any influential contacts yet, but because you’re researching industries and trends as part of your own job search, you probably have valuable information you can share via your online and offline networks. Or you might simply be able to connect one person