Most of the time when we receive a resume it comes with a cover email that reads “For your consideration in future opportunities”
What we typically find is that people who say they are job hunting are actually just job fishing: Setting bait, dropping lines and waiting for someone to bite. When we ask about targeted efforts we hear things like “I’m networking face-to-face in industry associations to find out about opportunities” and “I’m calling my contacts to see if they know of open jobs”.
Stop fishing and hunt! Follow these 3 steps:
1. – Identify your product. Study yourself and identify your product and your value proposition. What is your discipline, industry, product and process expertise?
2. – Identify who values your product. Who can benefit from your discipline, industry, product and process expertise? Prepare a good value proposition.
3. – Offer your product. Take sniper shots. Identify people in the organizations that can have interest in you and make a strong effort to network and identify connections that will help you avoid a cold-call or cold-email. Hint: HR is a bad target. Good targets are the people that have set goals and budgets that you can help achieve.
Here’s an industry secret. This is what good contingency recruiters do. They identify candidates with a strong proposition and they go sell them to organizations that can benefit from what the candidate has to offer. They call them MPCs (Most Placeable Candidate). In most cases they use MPCs to open doors with clients they don’t know. And they don’t sell them to HR. They don’t ask if there is an open position or opportunity. They make calls to key stake holders and make a case for why they should not pass on the opportunity to take advantage of the value proposition the candidate has to offer.
So make a case for yourself (it does not work without a good value proposition) and don’t seek job opportunities. Make them.
We help our clients acquire, develop and transition talent through services such as Executive Search, Project Recruitment, Talent Development and Outplacement. Our recruiters and consultants thrive to become trusted advisors to our clients.
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