For Friends Who are Job Searching

Over the past few months several friends and former colleagues reached out to talk about job searching. These often turn from a 10 minute conversation to 30 minutes or much longer. This entry intends to provide a few pointers I have been sharing with each person so that a bit of work can be done up front by the job seekers and save some time for everyone. Keep in mind that I'm not a professional career adviser and face challenges myself whenever I'm in that situation.

First answer a few questions for yourself:
1). Where (physically and career wise) would you ultimately like to be, and what immediate goals are you trying to accomplish?
2). Given those goals, what are the type of jobs that will get you there (you may have to do some search... the roles don't have to resemble your current title/role)?
2). What skills or strengths do you have that will have you stand out with your potential competition, and what gaps/challenges are there?

Now you know the types of role you are going after, check the "general" pay to ensure you want to spend time/energy to polish your resume, write the cover letter, and network to get that first interview. A couple of resources I like are:
http://www.glassdoor.com/ and http://salary.com/

Job searching nowadays often involve the internet as well as your network... LinkedIn has become a popularly used tool... a few articles on this topic would give you a good idea on this (if these links don't work, just do a search on your browser with "LinkedIn job search":

How LinkedIn will fire up your career http://money.cnn.com/2010/03/24/technology/linkedin_social_networking.fortune/
Improving the Odds For Changing Jobs http://online.wsj.com/article/NA_WSJ_PUB:SB10001424052748704913304575371212488670790.html

Within LinkedIn, I suggest people first build out their profiles (start by searching for a few people in the same industry with profiles that look good and model after those). From there, search for jobs that may be of interest. An easy way is to select "jobs" on the upper right and click on "advanced", then isolate the search criteria to <100 jobs to browse through. With each job, you can look for people you may know who work at that company, or people you know who may know someone there. This helps increase your chances of getting your resume to the hiring manager.

Often people complain that they never get a call back, or any kind of response. There may be many reasons for that, but often the hiring manager never even got to the resume because there are so many people applying for it... and a strong candidate who is referred (you may be just as strong) got the interview. Take one example... when I applied to an earlier role via LinkedIn and at the company's job site, I also asked a former classmate who worked at that company to pass my resume to the hiring manager. I was later told that first day the posting went up on LinkedIn, there were 30+ applications, and the fact that I was a referral helped getting my resume looked at, and getting a phone interview within the same week.

Having a strong network on LinkedIn is key for online job search, as the search results are based on your connections. A friend (<100 connections) and I (~1000) did the same query where ~10 postings showed up for her and ~200 showed up for me.

Finally, after some of the prep work is done, make sure your resume and cover letters are crisp and relevant to the job... yes, you need a different cover letter for each application. Resources can help include professional career counselors/coaches, and websites that show samples... and yes, friends, too, but again, they are not professionals the help you receive may not help you get that job you want, and the ROI of hiring a coach may be worth it.