Jobseekers face dependencies like dominoes!
Perhaps the biggest flaw in people’s job searches is “The Great Imaginary Dependency”. I get it all the time and what I find is that the least successful job seekers have this issue more than any other.
What tends to happen is that people get it into their heads that tasks can only be accomplished in a sequence of complete and isolated events. This may be true in whatever job they have or used to have, but the job search is a different animal.
You can’t wait for one lead to complete before moving on to another. For a job search to work, you absolutely MUST run multiple leads at the same time. Waiting for a lead to turn into something before attempting to make traction with another lead is silly and counterproductive. But I see it all the time!
Why?
I think sometimes technical people are in technology because of problems. They’ve always been the one who could look off into the future and see all the problems that needed to be solved. They got into technology because they could visualize and predict behaviors of systems. In fact, they were generally better at staving off issues because they could see them ahead of time. Further they could see the sequence of events leading up to an issue.
This is one of the reasons why meetings between management and R&D can be so frustrating. A manager, tasked with providing a result, sits down with us techies and gets answers like “well, we can’t do that because…” and “if we do that it will…”. Many managers and leaders of tech companies get so frustrated with that type of conversation that they acquire other tech groups or companies because they see results with the other group. They think, “maybe it’s just my team.” Likewise, when you’re trying to solve a problem and all you get is the ways in which it won’t work, you’re more likely to ship the problem off to people who charge less to tell you all the ways it won’t work before solving the issue! We call this “off-shoring”.
The job search is different. You may get paid once you have a job to define the 37,000 ways something won’t work, but when we’re turning leads into interviews we have to identify the ways a lead COULD become an interview. Jobseekers have to make opportunities and turn those into interviews and offers – NOT avoid them because of all the ways they won’t work.
The active jobseeker has to work at every lead every day and every time they get one. The active jobseeker has to have more than one lead going at every moment.
If you’ve read my article on “The Numbers Game” then you know those who simply respond to positions that are posted (and nothing more,) need over 125 leads to get an offer (my non-scientific numbers). If you’re waiting for even 2 business days (and generally it takes more like a week) to get feedback and there are 200 business days in the year, that’s only 100 leads per year. So, it would take 1.25 years to get 1 offer! And how many offers are good offers?
What I’d recommend to all jobseekers is get organized. If you need a tool to help with getting organized, check out these. Organization leads to efficiency and multi-tasking. Identify dependencies when they exist, but put more effort into eliminating dependencies than identifying them. Create processes for yourself that force you to double-check yourself so you don’t miss vital communications and events.
Organize your job search like you would your job and eliminate dependencies to progress your search!
What’s helped you make your job search more efficient?
