Turn It Up! | No BS Job Search Advice Radio

Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter shares some of his observations about working with recruiters and applies it to job hunting.

Serious mature businessman on call in front of laptop at desk in a bright office

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In my career, I’ve trained a lot of very successful recruiters. I’ve also trained some people who have washed out.  I put my best effort to try to help these people. But, when push comes to shove, ultimately, the onus falls on them to follow through a lot of the coaching that I give. Often, the biggest failure is around effort.

Most people (including job hunters in this) say they want to do a hard days work and they want to put in. Best effort. They want to be successful BUT when you examine what they do, they are not working as hard as they think they are.  That is true of job hunters, too.

How People Find Jobs

For you as a job hunter, statistically, people are finding work in a number of ways.  Consistently, statistics show, the job boards fill between 3% and 4% of all positions.  Recruiters fill an additional 20% to 22%.  I’m going to combine the numbers because some recruiters use job boards to find candidates.  And I will add a little more than that.  So, let’s assume that 30% are filled by job boards and by recruiters.  

70%, though, is filled as a result of networking.  In a recent statistic that I heard, 70% that of those jobs (70% of the 70%) or filled as a result of a network connection to someone that they didn’t know at the beginning of the job search.

Here’s the point.  You are not working as hard as you can to find people to connect with and develop a relationship with in order to become 1 of those people in the 70%.  What you need to be doing is putting in a “Max effort.”  You need to try that much harder, to operate at a much higher capacity than you are now.  I’m not saying to work like a maniac.  You need to have some fun and there, too.  At the end of the day, you need to kick it up some notches. You need to put yourself out there with some people you are not really talking to yet.  You need to track these relationships so that, in this way, you remember your conversations, what your commitments are and follow-up… Stuff flows along those lines… When push comes to shove, you have to kick it up. Some notches.

Again, it’s not who applies to the most jobs on the job board.  You are swimming in the lake with a lot of hooks out when you’re swimming in job boards.  There is a lot of competition with other fish in their for that hook.  You want to be out there swimming in streams and rivers that have hooks out there, but not a lot of fish there. This way, you are able to swim up and be able to connect with the organization.  In addition, you need to be able to come in with a referral from someone you know.

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Do you think employers are trying to help you?

You already know you can’t trust recruiters—they tell you as much as they think you need to know to take the job they after representing so they collect their payday.

The skills needed to find a job are different yet complement the skills needed to do a job.

Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter has been a career coach and recruiter for what seems like one hundred years.

JobSearchCoachingHQ.com changes that with great advice for job hunters—videos, my books and guides to job hunting, podcasts, articles, PLUS a community for you to ask questions of PLUS the ability to ask me questions where I function as your ally with no conflict of interest answering your questions.

Connect with me on LinkedIn

You can order a copy of “Diagnosing Your Job Search Problems” for Kindle for $.99 and receive free Kindle versions of “No BS Resume Advice” and “Interview Preparation.”

Don’t forget to give the show 5 stars and a good review in iTunes

Why Are You Making So Much Money? | No BS Job Search Advice Radio

Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter explains how to answer this tricky interview question, both when times are good and when economic times are not good.

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Do you think employers are trying to help you?

You already know you can’t trust recruiters—they tell you as much as they think you need to know to take the job they after representing so they collect their payday.

The skills needed to find a job are different yet complement the skills needed to do a job.

Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter has been a career coach and recruiter for what seems like one hundred years.

JobSearchCoachingHQ.com changes that with great advice for job hunters—videos, my books and guides to job hunting, podcasts, articles, PLUS a community for you to ask questions of PLUS the ability to ask me questions where I function as your ally with no conflict of interest answering your questions.

Connect with me on LinkedIn

You can order a copy of “Diagnosing Your Job Search Problems” for Kindle for $.99 and receive free Kindle versions of “No BS Resume Advice” and “Interview Preparation.”

Don’t forget to give the show 5 stars and a good review in iTunes

Choices

steinberg-newyorkerThe cover of “The New Yorker” above is one of its most famous. It accurately depicts the provincial attitude of New Yorkers who see the world as only they can–New York is the center of the universe and everything else is a barren cultural and food wasteland. Let’s not even get into the politics!

Your view of the world may be from Chicago, Duluth, Los Angeles, Dallas, Toronto, London, a rural town in Pennsylvania… Wherever you see home. Conditioning has suggested to you that making a change is hard. As a result, too many mornings you wake up wondering, “Is this all there is?” You should consider that the 1st signal to pay attention to.

It Isn’t Just Where You Live

To be clear, I’m not simply talking about where you live. What affects people more is often their work. After all, we make decisions about how to spend our work life in our teens and prepare for and work in that career for half of a century.  Do you think it’s possible we might be wrong? Judging by what I hear from people, the answer is often, “Yes.”

And just because you’re older, doesn’t mean you cannot make change.

Using myself as an example, in the summer of 2008, I have the epiphany that I didn’t really like living on Long Island, New York. I had a career that centered on New York, a house and a young son. We sold our house at the top of the real estate market and moved to Northeastern Pennsylvania 2 hours from New York City.  I was able to work remotely most of the time and start to break away from the hypnotic trance that New York City cast upon me. 

We now live in Asheville, North Carolina, I work from home and network with recruiters worldwide. In another month, I make the next transition from headhunting to coaching where I can leverage my academic background, interests, experience and abilities in ways that I choose, not as an employer chooses.

As I coach people now, I listen to many stories of people who are disappointed by life and feel trapped by it. Maybe they are in the job that sucks or living in a mindless routine that leaves them feeling lonely.  They are going through the motions, letting their employers decide too many things… What time to start work, what time to eat lunch, are you allowed to leave at a time where you get home before dark.

Have you ever considered that it can be different?

If not, you have not noticed that the world has changed a lot since you were little, started going to school and given the message to, “Shut up. Do what you’re told. Regurgitate a bunch of stuff we tell you is important. Or else!” You are just doing the adult version of that.

I’m not going to tell you the changes easy. It isn’t.  You will have to work at it and make sacrifices. You may feel masterful what you do now and have to return to being a beginner again. These past few years as I’ve moved into coaching certainly woke me up!

A friend of mine spends half the year in a condo in Puerto Rico. “In case you don’t know this, cellphones work in Puerto Rico and we have fast internet.” Another does work from Columbia. No one ever knows or cares where they are when they do their work.

Technology is now available that can change your life in ways that were impossible to imagine not so long ago. Yes, some of you will feel like pioneers until you discover ex-pat communities abroad or in North Carolina (Very few people in Asheville are from Asheville; they all come here for the ease, the milder winters, lower housing costs, the mountains and tolerance of difference).

I’m coaching someone now who has been screwed over by one employer or another and has decided to start his own business. “I can do this for more than a year and, if it doesn’t work out, I can always go back to corporate.” Sometimes, he’s scared. What a surprise. Then he taps into the old memory that the current one is linked to and remembers that, just because it happened in the past, doesn’t mean it has to happen in his present or future. After all, we tend to worry about a lot of things that never happen.

But as someone else am working with said recently, “I have prostate cancer. I don’t know how much time I have left but I just want to laugh again.”

Has your laughter gone away, too?

© The Big Game Hunter, Inc. Asheville, NC 2016

Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter has been coaching people to play their professional and personal games BIG for what seems like 100 years.

For more No BS Coaching Advice & encouragement, visit my website.

If you are interested in changing jobs, join JobSearchCoachingHQ.com

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