Looking For A Better Job While Working

Q. I’m currently one of those who is underemployed. I’m considering looking for a better job and would like to know what is the best way to go about it while working?

I would start with your current employer. Situations like yours often happen when a candidate is in need of a job. That is generally why they accepted a lower position in the first place. So I believe some level of loyalty should be given to a company that helped you when you needed it. You might check to see if a position will open up as the economy continues to improve, are they open to expanding your role in the company, or if you are working part-time will they convert you to full-time? If you haven’t already, you might consider giving them this opportunity before throwing in the towel.

If you still decide it is best to move, then you will have to conduct a search. Many candidates search while working. Start by building or updating your LinkedIn profile, post your resume on the job boards, let people you trust know you are open to something different, attend networking meetings before or after work hours, check the Web sites of potential employers in your industry to see if they post open positions, and when appropriate engage a recruiter and respond to ads. Most companies are willing to conduct interviews during off hours for those people working.  You basically have to get out and let people know you are open to referrals or find a position via job postings.

Join our LinkedIn Job Search Networking Group. It is one of the biggest and most active groups dealing with job search issues on LinkedIn. CLICK HERE to join.

Download our FREE Job Search Self-Assessment Scorecard. Take the evaluation and discover if your search is all it can be. CLICK HERE to download.

Visit our audio library. No library card required – all audio files can be downloaded for free. There is an extensive amount of files on all of the different topics surrounding a job search. CLICK HERE to review the library.

If this was helpful, then please help others by forwarding it on to your network, posting on your Facebook page, Tweeting with the link, posting to your LinkedIn groups or status update.  Let’s all do everything we can to help those looking for employment.

I welcome your comments.

Brad Remillard

Distinguishing Yourself From All The Others

Question: What is the best way for an executive to distinguish themselves from all the other executives chasing the same positions?

This is one of the most important issues all candidates must tackle during a job search. In today’s job market companies are very specific when hiring. You cannot be a jack of all trades. You must be the king or queen of your trade so it is imperative that you determine what distinguishes you from others.

Most candidates have a hard time doing this for fear of being excluded from a possible position. I disagree. Candidates should find their sweet spot and build a search around that, instead of around some long shot opportunity that might come their way.

I have coached many executives and they all have something that makes them unique. It may be international experience, M&A, turnarounds, startups, changing a company’s culture from dysfunctional to one that thrives on success, a specific technology, and so on. I recommend you survey your peers, bosses, customers, vendors, subordinates and trusted advisors for what they believe distinguishes you from other executives. With that information you can build your brand and job search around those distinguishing characteristics.

Join our LinkedIn Job Search Networking Group. 6,000 other people are benefiting from the discussions and articles. CLICK HERE to join, it is free.

Turbo-charge your search  by evaluating its strengths and weaknesses with our FREE Job Search Plan Self-Assessment Scorecard. This will help you and your accountability partner get your search started out right. CLICK HERE to download your scorecard.

Need a great cover letter? A free sample cover letter that has proven to get you noticed is on our Web site for you to use with your resume. CLICK HERE to download yours.

If this was helpful, then please help others by forwarding it on to your network, posting it on your Facebook page, Tweeting with the link, posting to your LinkedIn groups or status update.  Let’s all do everything we can to help those looking for employment.

I welcome your comments.

Brad Remillard

Short Video for KABC Radio Job Search Program

Here’s a little promo clip for the KABC Radio Los Angeles broadcast on Job Search January 16, 2011 from 3-5 pm PST.  The pre-recorded show will air on the Los Angeles Station and be syndicated to other ABC Radio affiliates across the country.

Once the show airs, you can download it from the KABC radio station or their iTunes Podcast Listing.

Great panel – great discussion – great questions (okay I’m biased since I participated). It’s still an excellent program that all job seekers should tune into.

This segment was about whether the job market is starting to come back with observations at all levels of employment trends.

Barry Deutsch

Name 100 Job Search Activities

Here’s my throw-down challenge to all job seekers:

Make a list of 100 job search activities you could be doing – but are not doing now in your job search. If you’re doing 2 things in your job search, what are the 98 other ideas out there as best practices, strategies, and tactics?

Are you stuck at 10?

Perhaps, you couldn’t list 25.

There are hundreds of things that need to be done in a job search to make it effective. If you’re not working on at least 100 separate tasks or activities, you’re probably doomed to fail in your job search.

Let’s define job search failure:

• It’s taking way too long for you to find a new job
• You have no light at the end of the tunnel other than to cross your fingers and hope for the best
• You’re about to take any job – just to have a job – who cares if it’s a good job?
• The last real interview to which you were invited was over 2 months ago.
• You’re doing the same thing over and over – hoping for different results (Benjamin Franklin’s Definition of Insanity).

I challenge you to post your list in the comments to this blog posting. Let’s run a contest. We will give away a FREE copy of our Job Search Book, “This is NOT the Position I Accepted” to the first job seeker that can list 100 separate job search activities that everyone should be working on to conduct an effective job search.

One job search activity most people don’t do is prepare for a phone interview. The vast majority of candidates never make it past the initial phone interview. How can you do all the painful tasks leading up to a phone interview – and then blow it because you were not prepared.

One of our most popular downloads is the FREE Chapter of our book, titled “How to ACE the phone interview”. I insist every candidate I interview read that chapter before I talk with them about one of my executive search openings. This chapter should at least double the percentage of times you get invited to a face-to-face interview from the initial phone interview. You can obtain the FREE Chapter on Phone Interviewing by clicking here.

Barry Deutsch

Why You Must Use a Job Search Coach

I received a note from one of our LinkedIn Job Search Discussion Group members today. By the way, if you’re not currently a member of our popular LinkedIn Discussion Group, you can join by clicking this link. He posed a great question after reading my latest blog postings on why it’s important to have an executive job search coach.

You can read the previous blog post on job search coaching by clicking the link here.

Here’s the question that was posed in the LinkedIn Discussion Group:

Just curious, what specifically could a job search coach instruct a talented executive to do that they don’t already know how to do themselves? Maybe the talent level of the executive plays a big part!

I’m going to assume that I did a terrible job making the point in my blog posting that in most cases, executives need a job search coach to help them conduct an effective job search.

Here’s my first recommendation (which by the way I suggested in the previous blog article):

Take our FREE 8-point self-assessment of your job search. If you can’t score in the upper levels consistently on every single item – you’re a candidate for job search coaching. You can download the FREE job search self-assessment by clicking here.

Let’s now assume you’ve taken the assessment and like most executives, your job search is only about 40-60% effective. This translates into the fact that if you had conducted an effective job search in the first place, you could have found a role most likely in 6 months – instead it’s now a year later and you find yourself back at square one with no real prospects.

What Can a Job Search Coach Do For YOU?

The next step is to determine if a job search coach can do something for you that you can’t do for yourself. A job search coach (such as the work Brad and I do with executives) can help in two fundamental ways:

1. The job search coach can provide specific recommendations, techniques, and strategies that you are either not aware of OR are not effectively executing.
2. The job search coach can hold you accountable to the multitude of job search tasks that must be completed daily and weekly to find a great opportunity quickly.

Let’s take a specific example to bring the dialogue down from 40,000 feet at a generic level to a precise illustration. This example is one tiny element of an overall effective job search:

One of the many tasks I do with my clients in job search coaching is to review the capability of their existing network to generate an abundance of job leads and referrals. One tiny element of this assessment/evaluation and improvement involves breaking down all your network contacts that you track (in ACT, Outlook, Goldmine, LinkedIn) and putting them in specific buckets.

Trusted Advisors as Networking Contacts

Let’s zoom down and get more specific in terms of one of the buckets or categories:

Trusted Advisors selling services to your future boss.

These Trusted Advisors are high level professionals who have a deep trust level with their clients – and their clients share lots of information, make requests, give and receive referrals in areas that have nothing to do with the Trusted Advisors’ functional expertise.

Why are Trusted Advisors an important networking contact “bucket” or category for executive job seekers?

Keep in mind that the hidden job market is roughly somewhere between 70-85% of all executive jobs (depending on where you get your information). At a minimum, 70% of all jobs you might be interested in are NOT published on job boards or advertised in the newspaper. Imagine what happens the next time a Trusted Advisor calls on a CFO and the CFO says “We’re looking at hiring a controller, who do you know?”

You want to be that referral.

Before that referral to you gets made, there are many steps to go through – including being able to identify the Trusted Advisor in the first place.

Unfortunately, less than 10% of all professional service providers could be tagged as a Trusted Advisor.

One of my tasks as a job search coach is to help guide you to identify the majority of trusted advisors in your geographic area that are selling services to your future boss. We’re just talking identification at this stage – we haven’t even moved to discussing the process of introduction, engagement, nurturing, and generating job leads and referrals from this specific networking “bucket” or category.

If I am a Trusted Advisor working for a payroll processing company and I suggest to the CFO that he/she should speak with you about their current controller opening – you’ve got an instant interview based on the strength of that Trusted Advisor Relationship. That’s the value of networking with not just anyone who sells services to CFOs – but rather networking with those who have the added credibility of being a Trusted Advisor.

I see from looking at your profile that you are a Controller. Let’s assume one of the titles for your future boss will be CFO. Who in your city or community sells payroll processing services to CFOs at the size of company you might be interested in joining? Now let’s expand our list to who are the top trusted advisors selling benefit programs, 401K processing services, temporary accounting services, CPA (tax and accounting/auditing) services, banking professionals? The list probably has 20-25 categories. You should have in your network the top 3 people for EACH of those categories.

The Value of a Job Search Coach

So, now let’s return to “what’s the value of a job search coach?”  Here come some tough and introspective questions:

• Have you done this assessment of your network for trusted advisors?
• Have you made dramatic gains over the last 30 days in adding to your network these trusted advisors?
• Do you have the 60-75 trusted advisors in your network that are selling high level services directly to CFOs?
• Could you build this component of your network on your own within the next 30-60 days?
• Have you gone through an exercise to identify who the very best, well connected, influencers are in your local community selling services/products to CFOs?
• Who is missing from this bucket of network contacts?
• What’s your precise strategy to connect, engage, nurture them – and ultimately get them to open up their rolodex to you for job leads and referrals?
• Could you come up with a detailed plan to connect, engage, and generate numerous hot referrals on your own from Trusted Advisors?
• Have you even thought about how this is one of numerous high value activities and tactics in your job search?
• Do you have a specific written plan that you follow daily/weekly to build the “trusted advisor” bucket of your network?
• Have you established metrics to measure the effectiveness of this networking strategy and do you have corrective options and back-up plans?
• Have you established daily and weekly “stretch” goals for yourself around building your network with trusted advisors?
• Who is holding you accountable to hitting those goals and objectives every week? What’s the pressure, consequence, reprimand if don’t hit the goals. Do you have someone giving you “tough love?”

That’s a lot of detail and work to build your Trusted Advisor Network – and it’s only one small component of an overall effective job search.

Imagine a job search coach walking you step-by-step through hundreds of similar activities, tactics, and strategies.

The number one problem in whether to use a job search coach, such as myself or Brad, is that most executive job search candidates are “unconsciously incompetent” (see my previous blog posting on this subject by clicking the link here) – you don’t know what you should be doing to conduct an effective job search.

I would be willing to wager a bet that most executive job search candidates have not even considered this as a strategy, or if they have – there is confusion over how to get started (unconsciously incompetent).

How many other powerful and impactful job search strategies are you MISSING because you’re too proud to admit that maybe someone with the right expertise could offer a lot of value to you?

I couldn’t pretend for a moment that I could do your job as a Controller – why would you believe that you could do the job of an expert in the area of job search coaching?

I don’t mean for this to turn into a personal selling message. Whether it’s me, Brad, or some other job search coach – the key point I would like to end this message on is that for most executives it is critical to hire a job search coach to help you navigate the changing job search landscape in one of the worst job markets since the great depression.

Barry Deutsch

Why is hiring a job search coach so unusual for most executive job seekers?

As I mentioned in a previous post, I just presented to one of the largest gatherings of job seekers in the Los Angeles area. The program was sponsored by the Catholic Arch Diocese and Interfaith Council.

Thousands of job seekers showed up who were desperate, not sure what to do next, and had been our of work for 6-12 months or more.

I don’t know about you – but I couldn’t handle being out of work for a year – and the bad news is that the job market will likely stagnate or get worse before it starts to turn around. It’s likely to be a year or more before we see a significant improvement in the job market.

Difference for coached/non-coached job seekers

This morning I started to think about what is one of the key differences between the executives I’m coaching in their job search, and those who showed up for the job search conference titled HOPE WORKS!

The key difference is that the job seekers I’m working with are getting coaching and the others are not. Allow me to be more specific:

Almost every executive candidate we have agreed to take on to conduct job search coaching has found a job within 90 days. By the 30 day mark, they are getting numerous leads, referrals, and interviews scheduled. In addition to real job opportunities, they are typically deluged with temporary and consulting opportunities. By the 60 day mark, they have a continuous stream of abundant job leads, referrals and opportunities. Their pipeline is full to the point of overflowing and they are overwhelmed with the response from their expanding network.

These candidates who are being coached have hundreds of job search tasks and activities and the combination of all those best practices is yielding great outcomes.

Conversely, the candidates not using coaching are floundering, frustrated, and not sure what to do next. Many have actually lost hope and have taken themselves off the job market.

Why are you not using job search coaching?

So, why are you not using coaching to help you in your job search?

I don’t mean the soft kind of career coaching that helps you figure out what you want to be when you grow up – I’m talking about the nitty-gritty, hardcore, focused effort around finding a great job in your specific niche.

You’ll invest in coaching for your kids piano lessons, baseball, basketball, and math tutoring – but you’re unwilling to invest in yourself to find a great job quickly.

I don’t get it.

I don’t see the logic.

Many of you might say “I can’t afford job search coaching”

Keep in mind the cost of effective job search coaching is inconsequential compared to the lost income of not being employed for another 6-12 months.

Let’s break it down into simple math. Let’s assume you earn $120k per year. If you go another 6-12 months without landing a job – which is very likely unless you’re generating at least 2-3 interviews a week right now – you’re going to be out-of-pocket $60-$120k in savings. Can you afford to do that?

What would you invest in yourself if you could cut that time in half and save $30-$60k?

It’s nothing more than a cost/benefit equation.

Okay – there is one huge issue bigger than the cost – picking a coach that has the proven ability to help you find a job within 3-6 months at the executive level.

Most job search coaches are useless – they don’t understand the process of networking, leveraging social media, blitzing an opening, having multiple strategies, and circumventing HR and recruiters to get to the hiring manager. As one example, most job search coaches tell you that it’s important to network, but they can’t walk you through step-by-step the 50 different things you have to do to generate an abundance of job leads and referrals.

Has this been your experience or frustration?

Self-Assessment of your job search

If you would like to see firsthand the value of good job search coaching, take our FREE Job Search Plan Assessment which you can download by clicking here. If you’re not hitting in the top 90% on your self-assessment, you desperately need job search coaching to accelerate and improve your job search plan. If your current job search coach is NOT covering everyone one of these issues, it’s time to make a change.

EVERY SINGLE DAY that goes by in which you don’t substantially improve your job search techniques, strategies, and tactics – means that you can basically add another week to the length of your job search. For example, if you HAVE NOT made huge leaps forward in your job search over the last 5 days, you can count on your job search taking another week tacked on to the end of 6, 12, or 18 months.

How many weeks are you going to add onto your job search, before you decide to invest in yourself like your parents did when they hired coaches/tutors for you when you were young, or like what you do now with your children.

STOP

STOP being in denial about how hard it is to conduct a job search!

STOP thinking you have all the knowledge to conduct an effective job search!

STOP thinking you have the internal discipline to stay focused on conducting an effective job search all by yourself!

STOP thinking in terms of fees for a job search coach, and start thinking about minimizing your lost income!

If you’re seeking a $100k or above level job, you owe it to yourself to find a great job search coach and immediately cut in half the time it’s going to take to find an outstanding career opportunity.

Barry Deutsch

PS – Once again, you can download the FREE Job Search Self-Assessment by clicking this link. If you’re not conducting an effective job search, perhaps now is the time to consider investing in a job search coach before you waste another 2-3 months.

Are You Unconsciously Incompetent In Your Job Search?

Recently, I was the keynote speaker for a large job search conference where there were roughly 1000 participants who had been trying to find a job for 6 months to a year or longer.

Very few job seekers in the entire conference were conducting an effective job search, and many had lost hope in terms of finding a new job.

The theme of the job search conference was JOB SEARCH HOPE. My opening remarks were along the path that HOPE comes from conducting an effective job search. A lack of HOPE stems from not knowing what to do next in your job search.

I proposed to the attendees that there are hundreds of job search activities that everyone should be working on daily and weekly in their job search. Unfortunately, many of the participants were stuck with one or two activities, such as calling on a couple of network contacts or answering job board ads. Many had put their proverbial “job search in one basket”. Have you made this mistake?

Why didn’t they know about all the other job search activities that could be doing – activities that would overflow their daily capacity and generate an abundance of job leads and referrals.

I call this the job search unconsciously incompetent syndrome.

If you’re a fan of Steven Covey, you’ll recall he puts forth a 2×2 matrix in “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”. In this 2×2 matrix, Covey puts Consciousness-Unconsciousness on one axis and Competency-Incompetency on the other.

One of the intersections is the Unconsciously Incompetent – translated to a job search – it means the job seeker is not aware that they are incompetent – they don’t know what else is available, possible, or useful. How can this be?

The job seeker has not taken the time to:

• Research best practices in job search
• Read job search blogs from well-known experts
• Purchase job search books from outstanding authors
• Download FREE materials from job search publishers

I’m confused.

Maybe you could help me.

Why wouldn’t you devote every opportunity possible to exploring how to conduct a better job search?

Most job seekers are still conducting their job search as if it’s the last recession 5-10-20 years ago.

Why do most job seekers believe they can “go it alone”, they don’t no stinking help from someone else, or “no one can teach them new tricks”?

I am shocked to my core, that most job seekers are unconsciously incompetent in their job search – in spite of extraordinary material available that is either dirt cheap or FREE. Much of this material could help the vast majority of job seekers to cut their job search time by 10%, 25%, or perhaps even, 50%.

I’m looking for your comments to help me understand this dysfunctional syndrome of ineffective job search.

I’ll close with this thought – until you make the committed effort to “master” a job search through learning what it takes to conduct an effective job search – you’ll be stuck between luck and wishful thinking.

Barry Deutsch

PS – Start to improve your job search right NOW by downloading our FREE self-assessment to determine the effectiveness of your job search. Within 4-5 minutes, you’ll have a deep understanding of where the holes, problems, and opportunities lie in your job search.

7 Reasons Recruiters Screen You Out

I know from all of the comments I receive, the tweets on Twitter, and the comments on blogs and articles about recruiters, that one of the biggest frustrations with candidates is about recruiters. On a daily basis I read, how mean recruiters are, how people claim to be qualified for a job don’t get past the recruiter, how people with years of experience  get weeded out by recruiters, and of course, the black hole resumes go in when candidates send them to recruiters.

First, let me clarify that I’m not trying to justify bad behavior by some and maybe even many recruiters. Every profession has them, some more than others. There are even bad doctors, engineers, pastors and so on. The purpose of this article is to clarify for candidates what recruiters do and why, to help reduce the frustration. I hope by understanding, although maybe not accepting, it will make it easier on candidates.

Recruiters don’t really care if you are qualified, have years of experience, or have all the right skills, knowledge, and certifications. Obviously these are required. You must recognize that many candidates have these for every job. Recruiters don’t get paid  for finding candidates with these traits. I can tell you as a recruiter for 30 years, and one that still makes a living as a recruiter, how much I wish this was the case. If  it were the case, I would be writing this article sitting on my yacht, instead of my patio.  We get paid only for finding hireable candidates.

I learned this in my first year as a recruiter. I would ask the client if they liked the candidate and many times they would say they did. I would ask if they thought the candidate was qualified and they would reply, “Yes.” I would even ask if they thought the candidate could do the job and they would reply, “YES.”  These were all good questions that lead me to believe the candidate was going to get hired, only to find out someone else got the job other than my candidate. Why? How could this be? I was just as mad, frustrated, and upset as the candidate.

The answer was simple. One day I was venting my frustration to a much more experienced recruiter who informed me that I wasn’t asking the right question. He said those are all nice things to know, but those aren’t what I care about. The question I should have asked was, “Is the candidate hireable?” Now that question has a completely different meaning. It is what I and the candidate really wanted to know.

So what is hireable? Well, as one justice on the Supreme Court once said, “I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.”  So much of what is “hireable” is subjective by both the recruiter and the hiring team and is hard to define. The following is my best shot at trying to define it. This is by no means an all-inclusive list. Again, it is designed to simply help candidates better understand, with the idea that understanding helps reduce frustration.

1. The candidate has all of the requirements to do the job. This is a given.
2. The candidate is neither under qualified or over qualified. My experience is that candidates accept the under qualified, but rarely accept the concept of over qualified. Either one makes a candidate not hireable.
3. Presentation. I have written extensively about this. Recruiters care a great deal about how you present yourself. I don’t just mean physical presentation. I mean the complete package of presentation skills. Your presentation skills start the minute you answer the phone for the first time.
4. Communication skills must be appropriate for the position. This just happened to me recently. I was doing a search for a communications person in a PR firm. One candidate had all of the right qualifications on paper, a good background, good schools, but constantly used the word “like” in just about every sentence. One would expect a person in PR communications to know better. Sorry, but not hireable from my point of view. My client would question my judgment if I recommended them for a communications position and they couldn’t communicate properly.
5. Style is important. Granted this is very subjective, but this is why companies are willing to pay recruiters thousands of dollars. They trust our judgment on this issue. If the style of the candidate doesn’t match that of the hiring manager then the candidate may not be hireable. It doesn’t mean that  the person isn’t a good person, it just means that they aren’t the right person.
6. Fit is another highly subjective characteristic that determines hireability. If your personality isn’t going to meld with that of the hiring manager or the company’s culture, then you aren’t hireable for this position. Not everyone is the right fit. I interview candidates all the time that tell me they left the company because it just wasn’t a good fit. I know recruiters do their best to make sure this is aligned. Nobody benefits if the candidate doesn’t work out because they can’t adjust to the company.
7. Listening and answering the questions. This is part of communication, but needs special attention. Every recruiter is assessing how you listen and answer their questions. Recruiters know this is an indication of how you will perform in front of the client. This is the point at which most candidates eliminate themselves. They don’t answer the question asked, their answers are so vague it is impossible to know what THEY did, or they ramble on in hopes of covering everything. As a result, I would not only be embarrassed to present you to my client, but worse, my client would be upset with me for doing so.

From my position as an executive recruiter, these are just the top seven things a candidate must excel at to be hireable.

Is your resume not getting noticed by recruiters? Try using this sample cover letter. Candidates tell us this cover letter has tripled their response rate from recruiters. CLICK HERE to download this sample cover letter.

For a lot more on this topic, and other job search related topics, join our LinkedIn Job Search Networking Group. It is a great resource for career experts and discussion. It is free. CLICK HERE to join.

Is your job search going as well as  you thought it would? Is it moving slower  than you expected? If it is, then download our FREE 8-Point Job Search Assessment Scorecard. It will help you identify the strengths and weaknesses of your job search. CLICK HERE to download.

If you liked this article, please share it with others on your Facebook page, other LinkedIn groups, or with your contacts.

I welcome your thoughts and comments.

Brad

Is Your Job Search Stalled?

In a recent survey, over 50% of executive and managerial candidates currently conducting a job search have been out of work for over a year. Why is your job search taking so long? In this radio program, Brad and Barry talk about the most important elements of an effective job search. Are you ready to assess what is working and what is NOT working in your job search? Your success in finding a new job is NOT about 1 or 2 big wins, it’s all the little details of effective execution.

To download this radio show CLICK HERE.

Don’t Blame Me For Your Job Search Lack of Success

In one of my recent blog posts, I suggested that if your job search is now moving past one year, in most situations your job search is ineffective. You can read that post about job search failure by clicking here.

From my perch regarding ineffective job searches

I was deluged with hate mail.

It’s not my fault that your job search is taking so long.

I sit up on this perch and everyday talk to a lot of candidates and hiring managers. I’ve been doing it for 25 years. This is the 5th or 6th major recession and job market depression I’ve been through.

I’m sharing with you hard, quantifiable facts and information based on surveys, research, and talking to hundreds of unemployed candidates on a weekly basis.

I’m going to go way out on a limb here and suggest that if you’re still conducting a job search after one year, you’re not doing everything you could be doing to conduct an effective job search.

A number of candidates got indignant and upset that I could make such a suggestion.

Prove me wrong about your job search effectiveness

Then prove me wrong!

• Take our FREE Job Search Self-Assessment. Download the Job Search Self-Assessment by clicking here.
• Absolutely no obligation to buy a single thing.
• It’s FREE! Thousands have used this self-assessment to improve their job search.

If you’re not hitting 3’s (the top score) on almost every item, then you’ve still got a lot of room to improve. If you can honestly score yourself as 3’s on every item, I’ll stand corrected on whether you’re conducting an effective job search. I acknowledge that there are always “exceptions to the rule.”

However, in most situations, if 100 candidates were to complete the self-assessment, one out of ten – less than 10% – are conducting a job search that might be categorized as adequate or minimally effective.

In this job market – which has been compared to the Great Depression – and doesn’t seem to be getting any better – you can’t get by conducting an “adequate” or minimally effective” job search.

If you want to complete an executive or managerial job search in less than one year – you’ve got to take it into the top 10% NOT bottom 10%.

Once again, I’m going to go way out on a limb and suggest that the vast majority of unemployed candidates I’ve interviewed for executive search assignments in the last year and with whom I’ve conducted a brief survey – they are conducting at best barely adequate job searches and at worst completely ineffective job searches.

Don’t be conducting a job search after 18 months

But don’t take my word for it – take the FREE Job Search Assessment yourself and discover whether there is room for personal improvement in your job search. If you don’t think we’ve covered all the bases on the assessment or some of the categories are not appropriate – fire off a comment.

We’re always looking to improve based on feedback. Would you make the same comment about your job search?

I don’t want to see you still conducting a job search after 18 months. Brad and I want to help you bring your job search to a close right now.

However, you’ve got to be willing to move past all the excuses and explanations and do the things required to kick your job search into a high state of effectiveness. Are you up for the challenge?

Doing the same thing for the next 6 months that you’ve been doing for the last 12 months will mean that we’ll be having this conversation again when your job search is at the 18 month point. Don’t let this happen to you.

Here’s my offer to you – if you’re at an executive level and you’ve been conducting a job search for at least one year, complete the Job Search Self-Assessment and send it back to me. I’ll review it and check out your activity level on-line (you have to send me an invite on LinkedIn to do this) and give you a quick assessment and recommendations of how you might improve your job search.

Are you game for a “check-up” OR would you rather make excuses and explanations for why your job search is not working?

Barry Deutsch

P.S. Don’t forget to join our LinkedIn Job Search Discussion Group. Discover all the best practices that combine to make an effective job search.