by Randy Place
Your Career Service recommends you look before you leap into a job finding campaign. When you lose a job, the first tendency is to send out resumes willy-nilly and call your contacts instead of taking the time to prepare thoroughly.
It’s natural to be eager to start your job hunt. But you need to plan a search as carefully as you’d prepare any work project. Most of you spend more time planning vacations than planning job-finding campaigns. No wonder it’s taking so long to land.
The solution — You need to be the project leader for your successful job hunt. No one else can take that responsibility; not even a career counselor.
The first step in planning a campaign is determining what it is you want to do. This becomes your job objective, which is built on your strengths, not just what you want to do. You’ll know you have a good objective when it resonates inside and you feel great about it. If you don’t feel convinced about what it is you want to do, you will be unconvincing with contacts and interviewers alike.
Your Career Service will explain more about job objectives in our next report. In the meantime, here are the first two steps you need to take in planning your job search –
- Determine a job objective that’s realistic. To accomplish that, list your three top strengths and write your objective around them.
- Create a campaign plan to meet your objective. Your resume and cover letters need to support the objective you’ve listed.
An effective job finding campaignis all about finding the best opportunity to use your talents. This means you need to consider your job of finding a job as your new full time job. So commit yourself to using many of the techniques taught int this blog.
A campaign executed well should result in more than one offer. Then you’ll have a choice of jobs. Click here to read, “How to find a job during a recession,” a related post on Your Career Service.
