10 Tips Job Search

You might think that looking for a job is like trying to bang your head against a wall, but if you USE your head (not for banging purposes) then it may seem easier than you think……….

Hope these thoughts and tips will help you….

1. You have got to think like an employer –

get inside his/her head – so think back to the exercise where I got you to consider the role of HRM/DRH in creating a system of recruitment which is:

• Effective – gets THE right person
• Economical – does it within cost constraints
• Efficient – a system which actually works: does it quickly, easily, simply, without complications and with a low unit cost per right individual selected.

2. Consider what an intelligent employer would do in practice?

• seek to  / prefer to generate a relatively small number of applicants of excellent quality
• avoid masses of applicants whose applications, CVs and covering letters would all have to be looked at (which takes time and will cost a lot of money)
• adopt a process that reduces the time between knowing the company is going to lose a member of staff and having the right replacement in post (‘time is money’, remember, and while no-one is in post, the remaining staff are carrying the extra load and getting tired and stressed, service quality is probably going down and the costs of temporary replacements from an interim agency are going through the roof).
• wherever possible, to cut down on  the costs of advertising the post.…
  • Higher costs:
    • headhunting,
    • search via employment agencies,
    • high advertising-cost newspaper advertising (this latter being bound to generate unwanted high applicant numbers of mostly average quality as well)
    • TV (gigantic cost – and too many general responses)
  • Lower costs:
    • using corporate Professional Association Membership facilities (free after annual subscription usually to post job offers on the Association’s site and view individual member profiles, CVs and career aspirations).  Has the triple benefits of being zero additional cost, immediately accessible and likely to be the crème de la crème of the pool of potential applicants.  The manager recruiting can pick the interview candidates he wants almost instantly.  Can use Association meetings to headhunt amongst the Association’s members F2F.
    • using the company’s own website.  Low/no cost and modest/small number of applicants (unless a major industrial player).  Fast.  A sort of a ‘screen’ – only ‘good’ candidates are likely to find you and the post: they would need to be looking at your site very regularly because they really want to work for you or be searching in a fairly sophisticated manner. One could also use the organisation’s social network to broaden the post promotion beyond the website.
    • Proactive searching via LinkedIn etc…. narrowcast searching.
    • Jobs bulletin boards like Monster…. it is cheap and quick, yes, but the broadcasting tends to mean larger numbers of applications will have to be treated which takes time and costs.

NB. Some companies are going much further – they are creating their own databases of potential future applicants.  Then, when a post comes up, they seek for what they need across the database and then ask the best candidates if they would like to put themselves forward for the post in question.  Airbus Industries does this, for example.

So what does all this mean to you?

3. Consider joining a Professional Association, NOW.

Associations tend to cover either sectors (banking, tourism, education etc) or business functions (marketing, planning, finance etc).  If you are really lucky, you might even find one that focuses upon your preferred sector AND your preferred function.  For example, for me, with my former professional interests in new technologies (function) and their applications in Travel and Tourism (sectors), I was very interested in the International Federation for Information Technologies, Travel and Tourism (IFITT).  If I were looking to recruit a specialist in these fields, I would look no further than thier membership list!

So, consider your interests in sector and function terms and see what you can find.  Analyse their offfer and its relevance to you and your career aspirations. Things you might like to know as an individual professional member might include:

• what geographical areas does this association cover?
• how many individual and corporate members are there – and are any of the latter the sorts of companies you might want to target.
• does the organisation allow members to put up their CVs, profiles and career aspirations. For corporate members,  – can they put up job offers on site? (As a non-member, however, you won’t be able to see these of course, but the Membership Benefits section is bound to tell you.)
• Does the association run regular meeting and seminars which you could go to to ‘press flesh’ and network?
• Is there an advice unit / library / professional journal from which you can benefit.
• Does the association offer training courses / continuing professional development programmes? Are these programmes industry-recognised?
• What is the membership fee – and are students able to join pre-graduation at a reduced fee?

So then compare and contrast your findings. Imagine how much more powerful your letters can be if you can start them with something likle: ‘As a fellow member of the Association of….. I am writing to you…..’   Or… ‘Further to our discussions at the Paris Association of x/y meeting on the 23rd, I am writing….’    Just think: as a member you’ll also have the membership and contact details of hundreds or thousands of potential employers and you are all members of the same club.  Job-seekers who are not members of the Association will simply not know there is a vacancy: you will be a select member of a small pool of candidates.

So… if you are serious abot this – do your research and JOIN!  It gives you the Halo Effect – employers and individual bosses will see you as like them…. and that is essentially what they are looking for!   Perhaps only 1% of students will consider such memberships…. better to be in the 1% no – you’ve already beaten 99% of the competition!?

4. Do your homework: target potential / preferred employers.

Build yourself a page of web-links to their own webpages and particularly their recruitment pages…. set it as your boot-up screen and discipline yourself to review it once a day.

If they offer you the facility of being notified when a new post appears – sign up.

The question is, however, how will you find employers who might be using their websites if you don’t know the name of a company – you just know you want to work in a particular place and in a particular function.

Well, one way of doing this, is of course to search laboriously for ‘Search-engine optimisation jobs in Alsace’, which admittely may come up with something (usually jobs on agency websites), but better you get to know online directories like KOMPASS (the link is to Fr – but Kompass has other country sites worldwide)…. you can tell it the geographical area by commune or postcode AND the sector you want to work in.  It will then usually deliver you a long list (which you can narrow down).  Some companies pay KOMPASS to host links to their website so you can go direct….. sometimes you just get the company name and address and you can stick that into a search engine to find their website.

Here’s an example:

Area: France      Sector: Digital Marketing

At least this way you are not taking ‘pot luck’ – rather you are hunting for what you want and where you want it …. which becomes more important once you settle down, buy a house, have children etc…

5. See what employers can find out about you online.

Imagine, a potential employer has found your cv on an association website (along with a few other promising candidates).  Is he just going to call you to interview or is he going to have a ‘nose around’ online to see  what he can find out about you? According to 2018 research by Careerbuilder.com, 70+ of potential employers check out their shortlisted candidates online to see their social networks’ presence. [Aside. The same report suggests that 40+ of employers do the same thing for their current employees!].

So, play the role of potential employer – look yourself up online and go a bit further than Pg1 of search returns.  What can be found out about you by anyone who bothers to look and is this flattering?  How might the potential employer react?   As a ‘fun exercise’, I might even give your name to one of your classmates, to see what he/she as an employer could easily find out.  If that idea fills you with fear or dread, then you really need to scan online and see whether there is anything you would rather not be there and remove it / get it removed.

6. Make sure your CV / online profile is always updated

… and that you have the framework of a covering letter ready to go (headings, introduction and ‘outro’ paragraph etc)…. though the ‘meat’ of the letter: a couple of paragraphs about you and the Job Description plus a couple about you and how you embody the Person Specification will need re-writing for each post. So the second you hear of an opportunity you can post it on the association’s website etc.   Same goes for any LinkedIn / Facebook / other social networks CVs / profiles.   Remember you need consistency here across all platforms.

7. Full Post Details: get them (even if you have to ask!)

If you are searching and you find a simple job offer (i.e. without details of Job Description and Person Specification), then don’t just apply for something when you don’t even really know what the job is – ASK for further details of the post (JD & PS) – If you get these details and others do not, you will have a distinct advantage.  They are also likely to recognise that, in asking, you are very much ‘on the ball’ … and your competitors aren’t!

8. Go ‘narrow’ rather than ‘broad’.  

Aim at what you really want to do first and foremost – don’t just try for anything and everything that is very visible online – try to be more sophisticated.  Make yourself a career-seeking missile.  You need to be honest with yourself about things you really like and things you don’t and produce a short professional targets statement. This you can then circulate though your networks: personal, familial, professional.  I always find it easier, when I am asked for advice and help for someone seeking a job, if I really know what they are looking for…. ‘a job’ doesn’t help much, frankly!  Give me some focus and it helps trigger my memory for specific things.

9. Dare!

I know you find yourselves in a difficult sitution trying to get yourself ‘off and running’  – after all I have kids who are: 30, 27, 26, 24 and 21 (at the time of writing) and they are all going through this….  All I would say is that:

• you’ll be working for the best part of 50 years – better, then, that you find something you like/love and enjoy as you are going to be doing it a good while!
• once you are in the long-term partnership and family-forming stages (late 20s to early 30s maybe), you will have more constraints that are likely to restrict you to some measure in your free choices…. SO ….. while you are ‘footloose and fancy-free’ as we say, why not ‘shoot for the moon’?   What do I mean by this?  Well, dare to dream and believe that you can make things happen.  This might involve doing something unexpected and improbable: maybe digging out Richard Branson or Elon Musk’s contact details and seeing if you might ‘shadow’ them for your internship, or offering them your services to take them out of ‘Earth Orbit‘ and to literally ‘Shoot for the Moon‘ marketing-wise!  If you have your heart set on something – then dare to believe the impossible!  Not all Directors and Chief Executives live in ‘ivory towers’ – many are prepared to give time and experience to those who are starting out.  So don’t just wait for something to come along…. make your own luck!

10. Self-Employment.

About the time of the start of the Industrial Revolution, statistics tell us that less than 15% of people were employed – the VAST majority were self-employed.  Let’s just think about employment a minute and its attributes:

• (depending upon the nature of the contract), some security of income over a period of time
• employee total loss of control over the what, when, where, why & how of working…. we are become cogs in a wheel buried under rules, regulations, heirarchies, systems, instructions, measurements and evaluations etc etc etc….. where did our freedom go?

Nowadays the figures have reversed: in the developed North and West 85%+ are in employment and less than 15% self-employed.  Maybe it is time to regain our freedom, to believe in ourselves, our ideas and our capabilities… remember in 1994 Jeff Bezos hadn’t even started Amazon.com!  25 years later he is NO1 or 2 on the world’s rich list and his company turns over 60 odd BILLION dollars a year….   What of Tim Berners Lee’s idea [you depend upon it hundreds of times a day, every day]?  In 1987 he was about to finish a ‘stage’ of 6 months at CERN Geneva…. at colleagues’ leaving do he scribbled a sort of code on a restaurant napkin which might serve to keep new stagiaires and ex-stagiaires in touch with each other and with their date in real time….. which was essentially the birth of HTML code and the hyperlink!  Although he didn’t commercialise it himself (or he would have been the world’s richest person by FAR) his life changed that day.  Same goes for two university students in England who invented LastMinute.com to solve longstanding industry problems for anyone with a depreciating product approaching it sell-by date!  Ideas can lead to self-employment which can be personally and financially fulfilling!

So… dare (again) to believe that self-employment could be for you….. many people are seeking to escape the strictures of employment.  Self-employment may not be easy… but there is a freedom about it at least!

11.  So be serious & about your search!

This is the first part of differentiating yourself from your competitors in the job market and this is the ultimate ‘name of the game’.