Sending Out an SOS: How to Ask for Job Search Help

Getting off the dime and asking for help in a job search is often the hardest thing that people encounter.

It doesn’t have to be.

Here’s how:

  1. Be clear about what’s going on. If it’s better spoken, make a call and talk directly. It’s almost always best to make a call and talk directly with close contacts and colleagues before casting a wider net via a broadcast note. 
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The Trouble with Recruiters

There is trouble in recruiter-land.

Talk to any in-house recruiter and they know it. Talk to any job candidate and they suspect it.

Heck, as someone who has run small, medium, and large size talent acquisition operations I even know it.

You probably do too.

So what’s going on?

Back in the pre-online application days, circa 1996,  internal recruiters working for employers customarily carried (preface: at least the good employers who knew to balance workload with quality) 10-15 job requisitions – openings they were trying to fill – at any one time.… Read the rest

How to Juggle – or Hope to Juggle – Multiple Job Offers

Every job candidate’s dream is to have several job prospects that meet your job specs and simultaneously produce offers when you’re ready to make a decision.

Sometimes it really does work out that way; most of the time it doesn’t. And what you’re left with, as the anonymous poster on Quora this morning noted, is a “way to extend a job offer” so they can see what other offers surface?… Read the rest

The 3R’s of How-to-Job-Network: Small Town, Big City

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Research supports that networking is the best way for most (people like you, as Richard Nelson Bolles of What Color is Your Parachute fame and I would suggest) to find your next job.  It’s estimated that 80% of job openings are unlisted, which means that most jobs will be filled through networking, not tossing a resume into a company’s applicant tracking system or even having coffee with your favorite executive recruiter.… Read the rest

[Anatomy of Success] The Perfect Job (or Career) Hunt

The winners in this month’s women’s and men’s U.S. collegiate basketball “March Madness” tournaments will show us how to hit the sweet spot of three qualities that every job hunter or career considerer (try saying that word fast) should target as they think about their job hunt, or  career switch.

On the subject of careers, I’ll be one of three speakers on a panel this upcoming Thursday morning, March 25th in Oakland sponsored by the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of Financial Executives International.… Read the rest

[The Job Hunt] If the Recovery is Here, Are You Ready? 5 Ways to Be Prepared

One of the adages in career coaching is that the best time to look for a job is before you need one.

With the signs of both Spring (at least in San Francisco) and an economic recovery in the United States appearing, a thaw in job opportunities looks like it has hit. But the jobs won’t likely be in exactly the types of roles as before, and maybe not even in the same geographies as the bumpiness of an uneven recovery hits different parts of the country.… Read the rest