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This week I spoke with a Senior VP who said he was getting frustrated and despondent about his job search, now going on 13 weeks, and he did not know what to do.
So we spoke for a half hour about his mindset and his daily activities and his expectations and I found that it was no wonder he felt like a hamster running round and round on the wheel in his cage. After all conducting a job search without a game plan and a partner is the same as riding a stationary bike; lots of energy expended but at the end of the day you’re in the same place you started.
First off his mindset was that being unemployed was the equivalent of being on an unpaid vacation. He did errands around the house, went to play golf, and cooked dinner for the family. All are nice things to do; but not at the expense of your job search.The first thing I told him to do was to understand that he was not out of work; he had a job and it required 35 hours a week + OT.
The job he had was called JOB HUNTING!
I told him it takes priority over everything in his day-to-day existence and was at the top not the bottom of his list of things to do today.
We also discovered he had no game plan and no one to monitor and encourage him during his job search.
What we did then was set up a formal job search agenda. We decided to devote 20 hours a week (4+ hours each and every day) to networking and making at least three new contacts with people in his field each day, and following up with 3 people he already networked with but had not spoken to in the past 30 days.
We then agreed that he devote 10 hours a week to searching the internet and finding jobs that he might be interested in and responding to them.
The final 10 hours I suggested he devote to IPT (income productive time) by developing a consulting business in his field, which is marketing.
The last, and perhaps the most important thing I asked him to institute was a Friday meeting with his wife to go over his weekly activities and see if he followed his game plan. We discussed this with her during a conference call and she loved the idea and said she would work with him and keep him focused and on target.
If you have not done this in your job search, try it; it works.
Author:
Perry Newman, CPC, is President/CEO of First Impressions Resumes and can be reached for a no cost consultation at 646-894-4101.
