Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter points out what seems obvious — job hunters think they spend more time than they actually do in their job search and tells you how to solve this problem.
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One thing I know about job hunters is that you think you do more than you actually do. You think you spend all day looking for work when in fact you spend most of the day blowing it off.
I want to help you. I want to help you see how much time you actually spend job hunting on any given day. This is going to be true if you’re working full time and doing this during the evening. It’s a very simple philosophy and one that will help you discover how much effort you are actually expanding versus how much time you spend thinking about job hunting.
What I want to do is keep a log daily in your phone, write it in a notebook on a spreadsheet, I don’t care.! I just want you to record your activity every day to support your job search.
It can be very simple. Looked at Indeed. 8:45 AM to 8:57 AM.
Called so-and-so. Left message about networking.
Did research into organizations the to the kind of work I am interested in.
Whatever it is you write it down and the amount of time you spent doing it.
Give yourself two weeks. Review it. See what you’ve actually done and how much time you’ve really spent job hunting.
This will probably lead you to an aha moment where you realize that perhaps you spend an hour a day doing work related to job search. Maybe it was two hours.
It will beg the question, “what did you do the rest of the time?”
Now if you can get that an hour up to two, if you can get that to up to three, this will be a lot of progress for you folks.
The only way for a lot of you folks to learn how little you did is to keep this kind of a log, tracking the effort that you actually spend, and staring at it and been faced with the data.
Then you will realize, “Gee, I’m not really doing that much. I’m really wasting a lot of time with nonsense.”
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Do you think employers are trying to help you? You already know you can’t trust recruiters—they tell 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 is there to change 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.
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