September 19, 2016 – Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter's Blog

Stop Hitting Your Head Against the Wall

September 19, 2016 by Jeff

Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter speaks to those who are finding it impossible to find work and offers them a suggestion that will help.

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For some of you, you been hitting your head against the wall in your job search now for what seemed like an eternity. Your getting no results. And by the way, an eternity is not a week. But this can apply to you as well during the time that you are searching. But this is really a tip for the long-term unemployed. For folks who are just hitting their head against the wall. And this could be true of veteran individuals and it’s certainly true of people who try to launch – – graduated school – – and just not getting anywhere.

What can you do? What can you do in the face of all this mounting pressure that you’re feeling to find work? All the the lack of results that you’re getting. What can you do? The answer is create your own job.

Creating your own job can be as simple as, if you’re a writer, you start doing freelancing. You market yourself as a freelancer. You blog. You do a variety of different things that help other individuals through your efforts. Through that, you are going to publicize yourself. People will find your the web. You will mobilize yourself to get out and about in completely different ways so that, when all is said and done, people are going to learn about you.

I found with one person I was speaking with yesterday, she wound up with offers based upon her writing and her blogging and a variety of other things that she was doing. The same can happen for you.

You may be a marketing person. You may be a salesperson. You can still teach others to sell and market. You can still write about some of your ideas along these lines. You can pick up freelance work in your local community or around the country… or for that matter around the world.

Do you have to get the highest rate imaginable? No. You just need to work and, through the working, to build relationships and develop the skills and efforts that are going to be very helpful to you. So don’t just simply look for big companies to hire you. Don’t just simply try and knock on doors of small companies and say things like, ” Hi! I am a fast learner. I can learn anything you give me to do.” No one cares.

What they care about is can you give the results that helps them based upon what they need. Starting your own firm, creating your own job, starting your own small business, marketing your skills and talent – – I’ve seen it help so many people land work during this “great recession/depression” everyone referred to it as.

So don’t just settle. Promote yourself. Create effort. Pick up freelance work. There are online sites like Upwork, for example, to help you find work. Get out there.

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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.

Connect with me on LinkedIn

Why Is It So Difficult for an Unemployed Person to Get a Job?

September 25, 2016September 19, 2016 by Jeff

[svp]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5dPGDNqaS0[/svp]
The answer is simple and, no, it is not that all employers have entered into a conspiracy against unemployed people.

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The question is, “Why is it so difficult for an unemployed person to get a job?”

To me, the answer involves confronting a belief that a lot of people have about all the bias that companies have about hiring unemployed people. That’s the easy answer; the honest answer, the one that you don’t want to hear is that (#1) you don’t have the skills that the market wants or (#2) you don’t know how to job hunt. Let me break it down for you.

In terms of job hunting, if you’re not getting interviews, your resume stinks. If you getting interviews but not being invited back, you don’t interview as well as you should. If you are being invited back and nothing is happening further, you are connecting with people as well as the need to.

See where I’m going with this? There are clear skills deficiencies that you have that can be corrected.

There are lots of different ways to learn how to do things better. Yes, you can hire a professional resume writer to write your resume for you. You can also join the site like mine, JobSearchCoachingHQ.com, where I have curated information that can pick you up all along the line and help you dissect the problems plus you can ask me questions so I can help you dissect it.

After all, as Malcolm Gladwell points out so well in, “Outliers,” an expert would be someone with 10,000 hours of job search experience. You have how much? You are by no means an expert and you have about no idea what firms look for. You are guessing at it.

Get some help. That’s the thing you really need at this point. It’s not that firms go out of their way to discriminate (although some firms do for chronic long-term unemployed people). They do it because they believe that in a good job market, as they believe it is now, there is a reason why someone is unable to get a job for a long period of time. For those people, they use the fact that you been unemployed for a long period of time as code for, “Other people have screened he or she. They found you deficient. We’re not gonna find anything different.”

That’s the problem – – you know how to do the search right. You’re an amateur and you think you know how to do the search better than you do.

Tough message but one that needs to be heard.

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Do you really 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.

Connect with me on LinkedIn http://bit.ly/thebiggamehunter..

Do What Rookie Recruiters Do – Job Search Radio

September 19, 2016 by Jeff

You can respond to work the recruiter by the superficial questions they ask and the lack of understanding of your answers.

On this podcast, I encourage you to act like a rookie recruiter, learn and grow.

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Years ago, I used to train beginning recruiters–

You know, little puppies who never did the job before eager wanted to do the right thing. Always asking me, “what do I do now? What do I do now?” Like a big sheepdog… loveable . . . You would like them and they want to do the right thing . . . They would get on the phone and sound horrible! They we get off the phone very depressed.

“I did a terrible job on this one.”

I would pack them on the head. “This is your time to make some mistakes. I’m going to give you a list of firms to call and I want you to practice saying what I tell you to say and with time you are going to get better. You’re going to have to make your mistakes and get used to the fact that at the beginning you just don’t know what you are doing.”

“When you interview job applicants, I’m going to give you some basic questions but, at the end of the day, you don’t really know what you doing yet. You will only collect basic information and, from there, I will send you back for more.”

They would follow my instructions and, from there, they would get more confident and get further down the interview Road. If they were doing business development, they would get better at it because they were learning along the way. From those experiences, they would develop more confidence and more expertise.

You know where I’m going with this one, folks?

I’m talking to you. There are times you just got to make your mistakes. I want you to call firms and talk with them about opportunities. Don’t start with the “A” organizations That you really want to work for. Start with the “C’s,” the ones you don’t really care about that much.

Just get on the phone, call them and talk to the hiring manager. Making mistakes and get better. It’s not going to take you all that long, just like a dozen with these people.

With the rookie recruiters, they usually don’t even know the feeling that they’re working in. Thus, in IT, they had to learn the basics of technology in order to discuss it intelligently. They have to learn the tech terminology. You wouldn’t have to do that, would you?

Of course not! You would have to learn the sales stuff just like they had to learn. It doesn’t take long and you start to get better as you start to have successes.

That’s really my advice for you– start getting on the phone. Start calling people. Introduce yourself, tell them what you are trying to accomplish and start to promote yourself. Start getting information about you out there. Reach out to people, ask for advice. Make your mistakes (yes I want to practice before you call, like I would with the rookie recruiters. I expect you’ll become fearful like most people do at the beginning but then, after the call you all grown and say to yourself, “That was awful. That was terrible.”

Then, I will ask you to ask yourself, “What could I have done better? Where was the mistake? How did it break down? What can I do differently next time?”

This is a learning process.

You see, you’ve been trained out of this industrial mindset to be perfect. You’re not. You won’t be. But, I want you to start getting better.

The only way you can get better is by practice, repetition, making your mistakes and not really worried about the consequences of it. Do you think this hiring managers going to say, “Hey! I spoke to this one. He’s an idiot!” Do you think

He’s going to say that to you? Do you think she’s going to insult you over the phone? Do you think she’s going to yell at you, “What is wrong with you?”

Of course not. So what are you afraid of? Just start talking to people, like working recruiters for 20 years old and no less than the door and just are making your mistakes.

You are not going to make many in the basic mistake you’re going to make is going to come from the fear. The way you overcome fear is through practice and repetition.

So practice, then repeat. Practice. Repeat. Get better things and then, lo and behold, you will have great conversations with people

Should you expect it to be your first call? Probably not. Do you think you will get better by the fifth or sixth call? Probably. Are you going to be perfect? No. With time and practice you will be getting better..

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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 … Read more about this episode…