In keeping up with many blogs in the job search arena we came across in interesting blog post that I initially took me as being rather blunt and insensitive. The original post came from the Rich Gee Group. You can find it here.

The piece that hit the hardest was as follows:

But there is another group of clients. They’ve done NOTHING. No phone calls, no meetings, no real opportunities.
All they do all day is send out a few emails, check the job boards, tighten up their resume. That’s it.

Then he goes to to say, “you are just avoiding getting a job!”

After pondering on it for a second, I realized how right he is. If you are not putting real effort into finding a job, you are likely not going to get one. You have to put forth an effective plan and that plan should have a component of reaching out and meeting real people that can help you land your next job. If your plan doesn’t attempt to get you in touch with people that can help you find champions or hiring managers then you are missing out on a critical piece of a job search. By reaching decision-makers, champions, or key influencers you are greatly improving your odds of landing an interview (and getting hired).

While Rich Gee and JobCannon may not have the exact same plan for reaching those decision-makers we do agree that this is critical to the success of a job search.

So if we can give you nothing more to think about today it would be this: get out and meet some real people. Step out of your comfort zone and try and reach key people that can help you find your next job. We at JobCannon believe email is an effective medium for making those initial inquiries and finding key people to support your job search, but no matter what method you use choose (phone calls, written letters, carrier pigeon, etc) you are only helping yourself.

This fall it became possible to watch the TEDTalks on my TiVo. Since then, they’ve made up a significant portion of my TV viewing as I’ve been trying to get caught up with all that remarkable content. If you aren’t familiar with TED, they hold conferences with some of the most inspiring information I’ve seen and make it all available for free online. Recently, I watched one that has now made its way around our office and has since impacted the way we at JobCannon think about what we’re doing. It was David Logan’s talk on Tribal Leadership.

I’d like to encourage you to watch the video before reading my comments below.

The executive summary is this:

• All people are members of tribes
• There are five stages of tribes:
  1. “Life Sucks”
  2. “My Life Sucks”
  3. “I’m Great (But You Aren’t)”
  4. “We’re Great”
  5. “Life is Great”
• Most people are in Stage Three tribes
• People in a tribe at one stage can move one up or one down, but can’t move up or down two stages directly.
• Great leaders can communicate to people at all stages and help move them to a higher stage tribe.

There are several ways that this model is interesting to us. The first is that the tribe of Job Seekers is clearly a Stage Two tribe (“My Life Sucks”). Many people are able to maintain their relationships with Stage Three tribes (“I’m Great”) even when unemployed, but it can be a significant effort to do so.  It’s worth making this effort because if you’re solidly in a Stage Two tribe, you may not be able to reach a Stage Four tribe (“We’re Great!”) successfully, and those are clearly where the best jobs are.

The second interesting observation is that much of the power of JobCannon is in allowing you to reach into other tribes using our email blast approach.  As you use it, you may find it interesting to categorize your contacts as to what kind of tribe they’re in and focus on those who work for companies which are at Stage Four.

However, this may not even be necessary as people in higher stage tribes are actually more likely to be willing to offer assistance than those in lower stage tribes. As you reach out to people who are farther afield, those who opt-in to your emails are increasingly likely to be in Stage Four tribes. That’s where you’ll find your powerful Job Champions. Interacting with people who are currently in Stage Four tribes can help you stay out of the Stage Two muck and for that reason alone, you may do better in the process to find work even when you’re not using JobCannon.

1. If you’re surrounded by people who feel their life sucks, find a tribe at a higher stage. You need to feel better about yourself and be with people who feel better about themselves.
2. Reach as far as you can to find people who not only think they’re great, but also think the people around them are great. If a friend tells you about a mentor or a job coach they like, talk to that person at least once. This attitude can help you find a stronger tribe.
3. Help the people around you and be open to the idea that people in Stage Four (or even Stage Five) may want to help you just because it feels good to do so.
4. Watch the TEDTalks.  TED is a Stage Four tribe striving for Stage Five.  Also, engage in anything else that can keep you inspired.

On the Magnificent Soar Blog, I just read how Anita Salinas found a new job by using her network.

She did not use JobCannon, but much of the process she used to find a job is exactly what we encourage people to do and her process could have possibly been eased by using our tools.

Important lessons from her search include (but are not limited to):

Reactivated my network by sending personalized, not blanket, emails to folks in my network asking for help, references, and introductions.  Luckily, I already had a good 300+ documented in linkedin.

Networked my way to interviews by first finding a posting, then identifying someone in my network who worked at that company, contacting then for intelligence, and asking them to call/send an email of recommendation and my resume directly to the hiring manager.  This was the singlemost effective action to acquiring the position.

Aggregators simplyhired and indeed became my job boards of choice, as they provided more useful results/better matches.  I started out paying for TheLadders but did not feel it yielded as good results.  Eventually, I set up alerts for my areas of interest/skills ie. “BPM Marketing in Atlanta”, for automatic delivery via RSS or email.  While I did not get my job via these mechanisms, they were still useful, as over time, as I got a sense of what types of jobs were out there, what was popular, who was hiring, how quickly posts would come and go, what key words to put on my resume, and how to better position myself.

There is more information in her post and I encourage you to read it, as her formula for finding a job was not only effective, but what we at JobCannon believe you should be doing to be most effective with any job search.

The United States Department of Labor announced that 190,000 jobs were lost in October, sending the unemployment rate up to 10.2 percent, a 26-year high. 15.7 million Americans were jobless in October.

Economists predict that the unemployment rate will continue to climb into 2010, even though the pace of job losses has slowed significantly since the peak of the recession at the end of 2008.

The construction, manufacturing and retailing industries suffered the biggest losses, while health care companies added 29,000 jobs in October.

These numbers may be discouraging to anyone still looking for a job right now. If so many companies are downsizing, where are job opportunities supposed to be found?

At JobCannon, we want to help you make the most of whatever opportunities might be available to you. An encouraging thought is that a large portion of filled job positions may never be posted publicly; companies tend to hire candidates with personal connections on the inside. That’s where your network can help you.

Contact your network to find which of your friends, family and colleagues are working at companies that may be seeking new hires internally. You can then ask your contacts if they would be willing to hand in your resume for you. Even if your contact doesn’t know the HR manager personally, the fact that you know someone in the company can make a big difference in getting noticed.

These helpful contacts are what we call Job Champions. Try reaching out to your network and see if you can find some. Job Champions can be found in the most unexpected places, so don’t be hesitant to contact everyone you know – the results may surprise you! You can read more of our thoughts on Job Champions in this previous post.

I wanted to add some general thoughts about job champions. At JobCannon, we believe there are at least four key things a champion may be able to do for you. They are as follows:

1. Give you insider info about company or position
2. Hand your resume to hiring manager
3. Recommend you
4. Keep you away from bad deals.

This does not mean that a champion has to be a person that will go to bat for you and insist that you be hired. It does not mean that your champion has to give you a glowing recommendation. While those scenarios would be ideal and having a strong champion will certainly give you an advantage. However, a champion might just be someone who can vouch that you would fit into the company culture. Or that you could do the job.

Sometimes just the fact that a resume was submitted from an internal source or that someone knows you is enough to differentiate you from a whole stack of resumes and get you an interview. Sometimes just getting in the door is the most difficult part. If you’ll look to find champions at places you want to work you’ll certainly increase your odds of getting more interviews. Once you get an interview make sure to follow up with everyone you interacted with and your champion. It is amazing how often people today do not follow up. By following up with your champion, you show appreciation for their assistance. They’ll be more likely to help you in the future and they may be able to further help you follow up with the decision makers. Finally, they are more likely to continue to be behind you and possibly with even stronger support throughout the process if you will follow up.

A champion may not be able to get you a job, but by finding and utilizing job champions during your job hunt you’ll go a long way to improving your odds.

Use your Champion Strategy to find Mentors to give you direction in your Career

We talk a great deal about the importance of Champions at JobCannon. Champions people who can connect us to the hiring manager for any job, and will give you a much better chance of getting an interview.

Champions are great because they can:

• Give you insight into what the hiring manager is really looking for.
• Send your resume directly to the hiring manager to keep you off of “the pile.”
• Recommend you to the hiring manager.
• Warn you away from jobs that are a bad fit.

In fact, we believe that you will get very few interviews without some direct connection the the hiring manager.

Two Kinds of Job Seekers

Skills Holder Irene Krasnoff runs the Austin Marketing Job Club. She has observed that there are two broad groups of job seekers:

1. Those that know exactly what they’re looking for
2. Those that don’t

If you’re still trying to figure out what you want to be when you grow up, join the crowd. There are a lot of us.

So, how do you find out what role you want to play in an organization? You do some research. This is where the power of the informational interview comes in.

Champions are often in the same line of work as we are, or can introduce us to those who are. Anyone who works in the industry, profession or department that we think would fit us is a potential mentor.

The Mentor Strategy

The Mentor Strategy works like this:

1. Contact the people in your network asking for connections at companies you think you would like to work for.

2. Contact those connections and ask for a little of their time to better understand what they do and how you might fit into such a role.

3. Thank them and keep in touch.

Those contacts whom you click with are potential mentors. Ping them before you apply for jobs. Ask them to critique your resume.

And be sure to thank them when you land that perfect position.

Image courtesy http://www.sxc.hu/profile/mzacha

The length of your job search is directly proportional to the size of your active network

There are a number of ways to manage your job search. For years, I used Excel and Outlook with mixed results. The major job boards have job management features. The main problem is that these solutions really manage resume submission.

Submitting resumes does not get you more job offers. Interviews do.

If you want to get more interviews, you have to have a connection to the hiring manager. This connection can be a tenuous, friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend link, but it will increase your chances of getting any interview 10-fold.

If you’re skeptical or discouraged by this, don’t panic. I outline the process of finding a connection with any hiring manager at any company you want to work for in my 20-minute presentation If You Want the Interview, You Need a Champion.

JobCannon is designed around getting more interviews. It is a tool that will help you organize and grow a network of email contacts, and then guide you through the process of politely and respectfully enlisting their help.

If you want to know more about the strategies that make JobCannon work, get your free copy of The Market for Me: Surviving Job Loss and Building Your Lifetime Career Network.