THE CAREER DOCTOR SO HOW DO YOU GO ABOUT FINDING THE IDEAL JOB? NETWORK – FROM YOUR PARENTS TO YOUR BOSS!

Finding the right job is a full-time job, so don't cut any corners in your search. If you want to get to the top, that's often where you should start. If you really want to work for a particular organisation, you have to woo them.

So you want a new job? How are you going to find one? The clients I meet who have grown disillusioned with the whole process of job hunting are typically the ones who haven’t had the time, inclination or knowledge to give the process the level of thought that it deserves. And that thinking starts with a few simple questions:

	How am I going to find this new job?
	The job that will make me happy and keep me happy?
	The job that will pay all my bills and leave me with a few Euros to spare?
	The job that has excellent career prospects?
	The Holy Grail of jobs?

People who have grown disillusioned with their careers or with the process of trying to move out of an unfulfilling job typically don’t have ready answers for those questions. So let’s give some consideration to five big questions before embarking on any sort of job hunt.

1. WHAT’S THE RIGHT CAREER FOR ME? AM I IN IT ALREADY OR SHOULD I MOVE?
This is the biggie. Obviously, you have to get this one right. If you are having doubts about your current choice of career, you need to do some (a) self-examination and (b) reading.

Richard Bolles’ What Colour is Your Parachute is the bible for those considering a significant career change. You should read this and complete all of the exercises in it before you do anything else. If you are going to spend time and money with a career counsellor, this book will lay a lot of the groundwork, provide you with a good deal of insight and ultimately, save you a lot of money.

2. WHAT ABOUT PLACEMENT AGENCIES? DON’T THEY HAVE ALL OF THE BEST JOBS?
Placement agencies do have some excellent positions for certain sectors, but many people make the mistake of regarding them as a “friend in camp” as they pursue their job hunt. Never lose sight of this simple fact - placement agencies make their money by selecting the best candidates for the vacancy in their client’s organisation and putting those candidates forward with the minimum of effort / time spent. Every phone call they make, every e-mail they send, is money out of their pockets in the long run. So, if you are in any way unsure as to what it is you want to do next, or how to approach the market, don’t expect to get any help from this quarter.

3. I HEARD THAT NETWORKING IS VERY IMPORTANT FOR JOB HUNTING, BUT IT SEEMS SO CRASS …
The other cry against networking that I hear all the time is, “nepotism.” Allow me to let you in on a little secret here - employers HATE hiring. It is difficult, time-consuming, expensive and rarely results in the perfect appointment. In these highly competitive times, it would be foolish for any employer to spend a lot of unnecessary cash on a recruitment drive if a few phone calls could short-circuit that process. If an employer lets it be known on their network that (s)he is looking for a certain type of person to fulfil a certain type of role, so much the better if the person that is ultimately hired is in some way a known quantity to that employer.

So get out there and start networking. Everybody you know is a potential networkee. School friends, college friends, people from training courses, your lecturers/trainers/teachers, old colleagues, old bosses, old boy/girlfriends, neighbours, club members, parents of your children’s friends, everyone you meet at parties, suppliers, customers, your doctor, dentist, vet and lawyer.

Someone you’ve met knows someone who can be useful to you in the early stages of a job hunt. That doesn’t necessarily mean someone who has the authority to hire you - it can simply be a conversation that gives you some information or insight into the way a certain sector or organisation operates.

If you find the whole idea of networking skin-crawling, then restrict your forays into this arena to research and perhaps getting a tip-off if a position is going to arise in a target organisation. There is nothing worse than opening the newspaper and seeing someone’s grinning mugshot in a company announcement of a newly-filled job that you would have loved to go for … except it wasn’t advertised. Hate networking? Get over it. Get out there.

4. WHAT ABOUT WRITING DIRECTLY TO AN ORGANISATION THAT I WANT TO WORK FOR? DOES THAT WORK?
Very, very occasionally. If you truly want to work for a specific organisation, you have to woo them. Find out everything about them and then send in your carefully crafted, immaculately tailored Curriculum Vitae and letter. DO NOT send your carefully crafted, immaculately tailored CV and letter to the Human Resources department unless you want to work in Human Resources. HR are the sentries of an organisation. They stand on the drawbridge and ask, “What’s the password?”

So, send your missive to the King or Queen. Send it to the person who has the power and vision to give you the job you want. And don’t give up. People with power and vision respect guts, tenacity and a thick skin. If the General Manager of Microsoft Ireland sends you a PFO letter, write to the VP for Europe. If he PFOs you, write to Bill Gates gently complaining about the lack of imagination being displayed by his European and Irish Managers. If Bill sends you a PFO, write to Steve Jobs, enclosing copies of your correspondence with Microsoft ... and cc Bill. They will remember you. You will get a response. Never surrender.

5. WHAT ABOUT ADVERTISED POSITIONS? IS THAT A GOOD WAY TO FIND A JOB?
Certainly – as long as your target organisation’s preferred modus operandi in recruitment drives is to advertise AND as long as you pay due attention to the difficulty of trying to distinguish yourself from the herd of CVs that inevitably respond to a big job ad.

You should be devouring the recruitment sections of all of the major newspapers, the relevant provincial papers, trade magazines and journals. You should have the key organisations’ websites bookmarked and visit their career pages weekly. You should phone their HR departments and find out which placement agencies they like to use, or which newspapers / journals they typically advertise in.

I don’t know who coined the phrase, “Finding a job is a full-time job” but he or she was right on the money. In starting out your career move, think very carefully about your route of entry. If you are too busy to pursue the hunt fully and effectively, your first purchase should be a good book on the subject of time management. You need to be blocking out big chunks of time for your job hunt and all of the research and preparation that it will entail. Why? Because someone else out there is and he or she will be hired ahead of you if you don’t. Full stop.

Rowan Manahan is Managing Director of Fortify Services, a Dublin-based outplacement and career management firm.

Original article here.