Successful Job Search in 4 Months

by Mark Meshulam
(Articlesbase.com)

Author:

Mark Meshulam

Today?s job search market requires not only a great resume and cover letter, but also persistence and repeated communications with the person who is hiring for your position. Because competition for jobs is at an all time high, and job availability is low, only the people who employ extraordinary methods in their job search will get the good jobs, while others who use the same old methods will sit at home and wait.

If you follow my simple program for programming repetetive communications and tasks into your job search, even in these troubled times, you are guaranteed to get a good job in 4 months.

The Internet has Helped and Hurt the Job Search

The internet has helped the job search by making it easy to file an online application. Unfortunately this also hurts your job search because everyone else is also applying online. This increases competition for that precious job.

Online job applications can also hurt your job search by creating a barrier between you and your target. When you click ?submit?, if you are lucky you might get an automatically generated response acknowledging your application. You never really know if there is a human at the other end. The process is impersonal and human contact is missing.

When you submit an online job application, your resume could become one of hundreds of entries in someone?s mailbox, getting buried lower on the list with each passing day. If your job search relies solely on filing online applications, be prepared to be unemployed for a very long time.

A Successful Job Search Involves Repeated Human Contact

When searching for a job, it?s ok to file the online application, but that should only be the starting point. In addition, you must reach out to your target in a way that is outside the normal channels. This takes research, both online and by phone, to find a direct line to your target.

Once you have established a direct line to your target, you must create reasons for and methods for communicating on an ongoing basis. Think of this as ?scheduled communication?. If you communicate too often, you will turn off the person you are trying to reach. If you communicate too sparsely, they might forget about you.

Scheduling your communications allows you to be ?present? during a much longer time in the target company?s consciousness. Remember, they might only hire someone once every six weeks. They might spend the other times collecting and reviewing applications, or on unrelated tasks. If you communicate on a scheduled, ongoing basis, you increase your chances of being present when the decisions are made and the ?magic moment? of hiring occurs.

Imbue Your Job Application with Greater Value

Have you made a purchase at an expensive store? Did you notice that, even if you bought a small, mundane item, the store wrapped it beautifully and placed it in a beautiful shopping bag? Important forces are at play, and you can learn from them.

When a customer is handed a beautifully wrapped item, they feel that they have been given something of value. Beautiful wrapping conveys greater value, and customers regularly pay more in these stores because they perceive that value. Is the lipstick or tie any better than the one on sale at the drugstore or discount store? Possibly not, but it feels so much better to buy these things in a pretty environment with wonderful wrappings, that we pay more for this experience. Quality retailers know that wrapping facilitates buying.

It?s time to apply this to your product. In a job search, your job application, your resume, your cover letter and your words will convey a perception of a certain level of value. Are you maximizing this? Did you take special care to have your resume and cover letters reviewed by a few other people, and get some input about ways to make them better? These things must be top quality and perfect. Get some help and sweat over all of your printed materials.

If you send hard copies (which I totally endorse because of the added value they convey), are you using a nice quality paper and matching envelope? Is it clean and perfect? Does it have an original signature? If not, your good efforts could go to waste.

Become a Job Search Factory

Let?s say you have the job search basics in place. You have a great cover letter and resume, and they convey very good value. You file online efficiently. You have found ways to track down the key players in the companies to which you are applying. You reach out to them by phone or email on a periodic basis. What?s left?

There are two things you must now set into play. The first is production. You must add a minimum number of new prospects to your list and get them into play at a particular production rate. I propose committing to start 10 new prospect companies every day. That means every single day you will file online at ten companies, then hunt down the key contact person for each company, and obtain their mailing address, phone number and email address. Then you must put them into a follow-up job search system to create regular, scheduled communications in the future.

If you commit to this rate of production, at the end of the first week, you will have 50 companies in your job search program. At the end of a month, you will have 200. In 3 months you will have 600 companies in your system. If you do your job right, their interest in you will be just arriving at critical mass. This is when offers will start to come in.

Using a System

When you operate at this level of intensity, you need a powerful system to support it. Remember, if you plan your first follow-up call to be 1 week after sending the resume, then in week 2 of your job search campaign you will be not only adding ten new prospect companies, but also making ten follow-up calls from the previous week. These tasks will soon mushroom like a pyramid scheme. The follow-up tasks are not very difficult, but they will be coming at you fast and furious.

A powerful job search must involve a system of managing scores, even hundreds of new business relationships for months into the future. In this system, you must find a way to give each prospect the attention they deserve. They must feel as if they were your only prospect. These communications must occur at planned intervals. Done right, these communications will be your stepping-stones to a successful job offer.

You will need a system that:

1. Quickly tells you all of the past history of your prior communications with the prospect. This includes the ability to see the resume and cover letter you sent, along with any notes you have gathered about prior conversations in your job search. In other words, you need a way to ?get up to speed? very quickly. Who did you talk with? What was said? You will need all of this quickly uploaded into your brain, so you can seamlessly continue the thread in your next communication with that person.
2. Quickly tells you what you need to do next in your job search plan. If your plan was a follow-up call a week after sending a resume, and a friendly note two weeks later, you will need to have this task laid out for you, so you can easily act on it and move on to the next one.

With the right job search system in place, you will be able to process many ?transactions? in a short period of time. You will become very effective and blow away your competition! You will soon get appointments and job offers.

Getting Appointments

Your first job search objective is to get an appointment. An appointment is an important milestone along the path of getting a job offer. You will probably have many appointments before getting an offer, so the sooner you start interviewing face-to-face, the better. Preparing for the types of questions you will inevitably be asked in a job interview is a topic for another article. Suffice it to say, you will need to be prepared.

Getting Offers

If you have pursued the program diligently, doing all of the tasks you need to do, adding you 10 new prospects per day, you will eventually get to a point where you will have a job offer. In the ideal case, you will have two or three.

Remember, your job search program is an intensive, targeted system. It will produce results if applied. Your goal should be to get multiple job offers in the same time period. If you have multiple job offers, you will now have the luxury of choice, being able to select the job that suits you best. Also, with multiple job offers, you might be able to get better pay by carefully using the employer competition.

Don?t become discouraged when job searching. Persist, persist, persist and you are sure to achieve success!

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/careers-articles/successful-job-search-in-4-months-1407826.html

About the Author

Mark Meshulam offers the fastest job search at iTickleMe.com