Today’s topic and I can sympathize with many people is six months and I am still, still in a job search six months, and I am still in a job search while we go through this presentation, this podcast today.
If anybody’s got any questions, any questions on executive career management, doesn’t have to be related to job search. Why am I still in job search it? Anything to do with career management? Your career, your career advancement, please put your co your question in the comments and I will answer it as we go through this.
So today’s topic again is six months, and I am still in a job search. How terrible is that? That is not a good sign today when hiring is so strong, so robust. Doesn’t matter what level you’re in, what, what function you’re in, what country you’re in, what profession you’re in. Hiring is the best I I’ve ever seen it.
And I, I work with clients across the world. I can understand your frustration. It must be very, very trying on you. Not just on you, but your family units, those around you, because it’s not a thing that people want to go through. A job search can in itself, let alone the length of time of a job search can be very trying.
Best thing is to do to bite your tongue, but hopefully I’m going to share some ideas with you that I maybe know the reason why you are in job search for such a lengthy time, in such a robust, such a strong hiring recruitment environment. If you are frustrated and that’s okay, that’s human nature. Don’t show your frustration, your anger, your rage, and wanting to tear your hair out to career decision makers.
Have a team of cheerleaders, people who motivate you, people who uplift you. During your job search that you can let all your frustrations go, please don’t do it in an interview or a networking event that’s going to Kai Bosch is going to kill your career advancement with those career decision makers, so keep it private, bite your tongue, and plan and execute a very aggressive job.
So yes, it can be very frustrating, but I cannot understand why people today are in for over six months on their job search. So the whole job search is like a jigsaw. One piece missing. It doesn’t all come together, so you have to have all the pieces to make it want to fit. It’s a strategy, it’s a project, so treat it as a work project, treat it as a full time.
Appointment now, this could be one of the reasons why you are not getting any traction. In fact, I probably know that it’s not, you’re not getting any traction. It’s like anything, the more you put into it, the more rewards will come your way. So if you’re only doing two hours, There’s going to be minimal, very few rewards if you’re doing four hours, a few more, six hours, a few more on top of that, but eight hours minimum.
Treat it as a full-time gig. Don’t sit on the couch and think that a, a job will fall in your lap. It doesn’t. You have to be very proactive. You have to go after it, and you have to be, show your, your determination, your, and, and air, your, and express your skillset, your value, your personal brand to everybody.
You. Keep on an upper level, keep your morale high to people who can be career influencers. And I said, if you want to let your frustrations go, let them go with your cheerleaders, your coaching team, people around you every day. But not with career decision makers or anybody else who can help you with your career advancement and your job search.
So treat a job search, and I suspect as listening today and on the replay, I suspect that this is a reason, a main reason why you are not getting traction. Treat it as a full-time job. I get people say, well, I’m just doing it two hours a. That’s not going to work. Doesn’t work. So get into the mode, even dress up in your suit or whatever you wore in your last job, and make yourself feel cozy.
Feel comfortable with yourself. Treat it as a full time gig. It’s not a part-time. If you can do 12 hours a day, you are closer to landing. And remember, every interview you get, you are closer to a win. So keep on getting those interviews and keep on flowing through. Yes, you have to conquer the fear of rejection during an interview if you get, if you get turned down.
But the more rejections you get, the closer you are to a win. So it’s a marketing and sales journey. And that journey today, because of the robust hiring recruitment across the world, in any function, any industry, any level, any profession is very, very strong. But treat it planet. Treat it as a campaign. You are a product and you are sending that product to the market.
The package for that product is your LinkedIn profile, and hopefully that is fully complete. That could be a snag in your lengthy job search. You haven’t. Fully completed your LinkedIn, and we’ll come to that in a couple of minutes. And your resume, those are the two package points that you are the product inside them.
So sell, sell, sell. Get into that mindset of selling. Now, different cultures, you know, from Asia and other regions across the world, they have difficulty because their culture is very humble. That could be a reason to. Now, don’t let your culture inhibit your career or job search wins. So get into the mindset that you are the best candidate, you are the best candidate, and you wanna sail through that job search.
And you can, but you ha it’s mindset, not just process. So get into a good mindset. Think about what your promise or value. Think about your competitive edge. Why should they choose me over Mary Mark or Paul? There is a differentiator. What is your differentiator? So look at the planning, your sales and marketing strategy, your job search tactics, and then execute.
So sell, sell, sell. You only get one chance to sell yourself. Now, ironically, the worst profession for selling themselves are salespeople. I dunno why, but they are the world’s worst in selling themselves. They can sell anything else, but when it comes to their LinkedIn profile and their resume, they are awful, terrible, terrible.
I’ve yet to see. Well, very rarely do I see a good LinkedIn profile and a good resume CV from a sales guy. Please. If you’ve got any comments, any questions on career management, hop in and put a something in the comments and I will answer it as we go through this. This Tuesdays at two. So you are a product, so design a marketing and sales strategy built around that project.
Build it and be aggressive. Don’t be passive. Be very proactive and the more work you do and the more work presenta preparation work you do in getting yourself ready for the launch of your job search. If you’ve been in a six months, you may as well take a break and really think about who you are and what are your, your differentiators.
Why should you. Yourself. Look at your resume. Look at your, your other marketing tools, including your LinkedIn. What is wrong? What is wrong in your tactics that you are, that’s not working? Because six months, yes, in a bad economy is okay, but six months today is not okay. So get into the salesman if you, what, what, what are you doing wrong?
What isn’t gelling? I’ve already given you some ideas of perhaps what you are doing wrong. If you’re just sitting around on the couch, you’re only doing two hours, three hours, four hours a day. You there, there is a problem there already. So you need to focus on it and treat it as a full-time gig. Here are some tips.
The bulk of the jobs. Aren’t on job boards, so I suspect this is another problem many people. Think that the bulk of the jobs are on job boards. In particular, the LinkedIn job board, you are wrong. Sadly, you are wrong. Don’t focus on the job boards. Doesn’t matter where you are in the world. It does vary according to geography country.
But the, the job boards are only. Small, a small percentile of the overall jobs that are available to you right this minute. So here in Canada, the advertised jobs, that’s not just job boards, but that’s the corporate websites and the national newspapers, regional newspapers, lo local newspapers are only 8%.
8% of jobs are advertised in the US It’s about 19% in the uk. 25% and, but it varies country to country. But you can see it’s not the be all and end on job boards. Don’t bring you always the value that you think you are going to snag. You are going to win. You are going to get an interview of a job board.
Where are they? They are hidden. That’s where you use all the internet tools that are available to you today, in particular, particular LinkedIn. So of that 12 hours, eight hours a day, spend half of that time, half of that time, 50% of that time on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is going to be your best. Don’t ignore it.
It’s a huge platform, a very valuable platform. I often say to myself, I mean I was in this business before LinkedIn and I wonder how people did their searches and whatever before LinkedIn. It’s a wonderful tool. So is all the other tools. Even Facebook is now becoming a site where, Executive recruiters and other influencers are searching for talent.
Yes. Facebook. So you need to embrace social media. So what are you doing wrong? You are focusing on job boards. Don’t focus on job boards. Yes, use them, but don’t think you are gonna get an. Response as well from job boards, because if you apply today, what are we, we are Tuesday. Let’s say a job went on yesterday, or normally Mondays jobs goes on.
They could be, it could be a four or even five or even a six week period when it’s on that job board. And then they, they pull it off and then they take one or two. To decide on which candidates to call for the interview. So if it was posted yesterday, it could be eight weeks, eight weeks before you hear anything from a job board as, as a result of applying for a job board.
So don’t expect it’s going to be instant. Once in a while that does happen, but I’m gonna tell you, I’m being honest. I’m a true coach. I’m a realistic coach. It doesn’t happen very often, so don’t focus on jobs. Job boards, you need to go and hunt down using my old trade as a detective, a police detective, and going to hunt down those jobs.
And if you go to my YouTube channel, please go to my YouTube channel and press subscribe where you will find some videos, some videos. Particularly on that the, the subject of how to uncover, how to find hidden jobs and how to go after them, that is a particular subject in itself. Yes, it again, it can be very frustrating.
A job search is not all happy. Very rarely is it happy, but you will be happy when you win. You’d be happy, even happier, as some of my clients are right now, and many of them are getting themselves into multiple job offers. So I’m doing multiple job offer coaching, so focus on the hidden jobs. That is the bulk focus on.
Ex, if you’re at the senior executive level, focus on relationship building. It’s all about relationship building with executive recruiters. Now that’s another subject, but executive recruiters can be your best friend in your overall career management. And may I direct you again? To YouTube where you will find more videos on how to build relationships with executive recruiters, how to find them, how to build and to retain those relationships.
So don’t focus on hidden jobs. Executive recruiters, they may not be able to help you in this job search, but may maybe later on in the year or next year or the year. A job that is perfect for you if you are on their radar, will come down and hopefully they will give you a call. Networking. This is the crux that the huge benefit of job search is going to be come from networking.
Yes. Now, for some people, especially people who are introverts, it can be very frustrating to. But you need to, again, bite your tongue and get out there. Now, there are many networking events in, in your function and your designation in your industry. Go to conferences, go to symposiums, and all sorts of different meetings that your industry, your profession put on, because the more people you.
The closer you are to landing a job, but make sure when you are networking online that you have a defined audience. Don’t network like this. Just network within a defined audience. So networking online. Building your profile and networking in person, actually shaking somebody’s hand, yes, that is back after covid is going to bring you huge value.
The bulk of the jobs, the bulk of the jobs are through networking and uncovering hidden jobs. So using LinkedIn, you need to go and be very prudent, but use LinkedIn. Probably more than 50% of your time each day, but don’t just be dormant on LinkedIn. You need to be proactive. You need to, it gives you, it’s a platform for you to market yourself as a viable candidate or a subject matter expert, somebody who’s really looking, who’s ambitious.
So you need to exude, express all that ambition. So don’t just connect with people. You need to post, post some articles, post some so you, if you have an industry public, You can go through that industry publication online, and if you see a very, a, a, a blog or an article or something that you think is quite interesting, you can share it and then you can, you can provoke comments.
So open dialogue with people and the more you share, so you can create content, you can comment on content, and you can share content. So do that be your activity. On, on LinkedIn is one of the measures that people look for when they are, when they have a candidate pool and they want to scale it back prior to the interview stage.
So you need to be very active. If you haven’t been active in the last two weeks or so, you need to engage on LinkedIn and start sharing, start commenting and create your own. Content there is so much available today, so use LinkedIn. Finally, if your resume. Isn’t a t s friendly. That could be the major stumbling block on why you are in career transition for over six months.
What do I mean by a t s? That is the applicant tracking system, the scanning application that before your resume get or CV gets to a human eye. It is processed by scanning machinery built around a certain format and a certain content. One character wrong, one bullet wrong, one line wrong, and you can count yourself out, and you can be in job search for infinite item longer than six months, much longer than six months, just simply because your resume isn’t ATS friendly.
And lastly, or your CV as well, make sure that your LinkedIn profile is fully complete. What do I mean by that? Is not a skeleton. LinkedIn, each section has a number of characters. And that chara you, we need to fill those character spaces up. So you need to fill it out. The more you fill it out, the more traffic you will get to your LinkedIn platform or your LinkedIn profile.
Also, make sure you have a picture, but make sure it’s a professional picture, not a unprofessional hugging your spouse or with your, your kids or. Have it you dressed appropriately in suitable attire and also customize your LinkedIn. If you don’t know whether you’ve customized your LinkedIn address, you should go to your look at your LinkedIn url, and if you’ve got numbers and letters after your name, you haven’t customized your LinkedIn url, you need to go and take those numbers and letters out after your name and instantly Google will recognize it and will give you a 400.
Percent uplift for free for free in your took traffic to your LinkedIn profile or algorithm traffic to your LinkedIn profile. It’s pretty simple, so do yourself a favor. Go and review your resume, your cv. And your LinkedIn profile, and if you want a free, no obligation resume critic, I’m going to put my name, my email in the bottom here, and I’m more than happy to give you a free, no obligation, no sales pitch.
You only get that first impression. If your LinkedIn doesn’t impress people, then they’re going to they’re going to go on to somebody else. So you need to have a dynamic LinkedIn and an ATTs friendly.
Focus on those hidden jobs, not job boards, and concentrate on networking in person. And online using LinkedIn. LinkedIn is going to be your best friend. So anybody got any other comments? I look forward to connecting with you Raya. Be happy to give you that free resume critique. Anybody got any other comments?
If not, I will be back next Tuesday when we have another Tuesday. And the topic will be, the culture at work is toxic. I need to get out. The culture at work is toxic. I need to get out. I hear that sadly all the time. So many people are unhappy in their jobs. There is no need for you to be unhappy in your jobs in today’s robust, so today’s strong recruit.