A friend of ours has been in-between jobs for a couple of weeks now and, while he was looking for work for himself, he decided to put together this guide for others. He has graciously agreed to let me post it here, in case any of our readers might benefit from what he has learned.

I’ve split it up into a five-part series, which I will be posting over the next week or so:

Part One: Finding Jobs
Part Two: Cover Letters and Resumes
Part Three: Pre-Interview
Part Four: The Interview
Part Five: Salary Negotiations

If you have any comments or questions, please leave them below and i’ll pass them along to Patrick.
————————————————————————————————–
Part One—Finding Jobs:

Ok, this is long. For qualifications, I’ve never (even in the worst of times) been jobless for a full month. I’ve normally gotten my first offer within 2 weeks of losing my last one. I’ve passed this info along to other people and their mileage varies, but the plan hasn’t failed anyone yet. Or if it has, nobody’s let ME know. The longest I’ve heard of anyone looking after they started ploughing through like this that I know of was about 2 months…

Now if I say something that you disagree with, or you have something to add, let me know. I’m not a professional job hunter after all, and there are a lot of nuances that change from one industry to another, but this is what I’ve learned. Take it for what it’s worth.

Finding jobs:
If you’re unemployed, finding a job is your full time job. If you have another job then you still will be doing something 3 times a day if you are serious about moving to another job. You’ll just be spending less time doing it, and go slower overall.

But here are the things you need to do daily.
1) Send your resume to 3-5 places before 10 am. (If you’re employed, send 1 a day M-Th)
2) Follow up just after lunch with a note asking if the resumes were received correctly
3) After your follow ups (or after work if you have a job right now) find your next place to send your resume for tomorrow.

From here on in I’m going to assume that you don’t have a job. If you do, most of this still applies, but you probably will need to handle things differently depending on your current situation.

So the above 3 things are your basic framework for your day. Your day should still begin by 9 am. You should wake up, shower, get dressed and cleaned up, etc. every day you are job hunting. Honestly I’ve seen several situations where you can go a week with no hits and then have someone call and say “can you interview today?” So be ready for that. Also it gives you a sense of place while you float.

It’s also important to get as many job leads as possible. So, no matter how embarrassed you are that you lost your job, or your emotional state, tell everyone that you meet that you’re looking. You are STILL whatever you were at your last job, but you just don’t have an employer right now. So when you meet someone at the grocery store or at church or wherever you meet people be sure to let them know that you are looking for a job. Tell all of your friends. Tell them to tell their friends. Use your social network for everything it’s worth.

And don’t let the social network end there. If you don’t have a facebook, plaxo, or linkedin page, you should have one. On all 3 places. And with your facebook page, don’t put pictures of you out at the bar… potential employers really do look at that stuff hese days. Also, don’t use the myspace or facebook blog. Those things are overly accessable for potential employers. You want a page, and you want to make it look like you have friends, and you want to make yourself look like you have personality and are fun, but you shouldn’t look like a frat boy, and don’t want to inadvertently say anything that might be embarassing.

Post your resume on careerbuilder.com and on monster.com and make an update to it every 3-4 days. When you update your resume it goes back to the top of the lists. Also set up automated job hunts for those two boards to email you with new job leads that fit your criteria. But those should not be your primary places for your job hunt. They pretty much take care of themselves; you just need to keep your resume up there for potential employers to find you and have them email you offers.

Instead use www.indeed.com and www.simplyhired.com for your active job searches. They have fewer listings, but they also are aggregators for smaller sites and give you jobs where the employer is looking to move more quickly. In addition there are dozens of job boards for certain professions. I know for myself I can use www.dice.com and www.guru.com if I need some quick cash flow. I can’t help with everyone’s profession, but google can.

The main thing is that you now have your friends looking for you, 2 websites looking passively for you, and 2 more you’re actively searching. The last step is headhunters. If there is a lot of demand for your skill set then the headhunters will call based on your monster and careerbuilder resumes. If you aren’t so specialized then you’ll need to find some headhunters to help you. Regardless, find someone else in your industry, preferably in HR in your industry, and find out who the companies are that have a good reputation and get placements. Then get your resume to those people as well. I tend to hate headhunters generally, but they find job leads and give you information like what you can expect to make in your next job, what your resumes strengths and weaknesses are, and how to present yourself better.

Headhunters like to be in an exclusive position with you, but that doesn’t help you much. You should find 2 or 3 that you want to work with, and keep careful tabs on where they want to submit you. Companies don’t like to get the same resume from different places. It makes their hiring process really messy if they bring you on.

Also you should make yourself a job-hunting business card. Print it yourself or use www.vistaprint.com but it should look like a “real” card, even if it’s very simple. Make sure it has your name and a business title (John Smith - Professional Cheeseburger Taster), your # years of experience with that title, a few things that you want to highlight (17 years food critic for burgers monthly magazine, 40 years enjoying burgers) any degrees or professional certifications that are relevant, and your cell phone and/or home phone number, a PERSONAL, professional sounding email address (yahoo, hotmail, or gmail if you don’t have one already), a website address where your most recent resume can be downloaded, (www.geocities.com/johnsmithburgertaster) and absolutely nothing else. This is your 2×5 sales pitch. You’re going to give this to everyone you meet and they won’t need to remember what you do or how to find you and it shouldn’t be cluttered with a lot of extra info. You can put any extra information that you want to convey on the simple web page where you can keep multiple versions of your resume, create a general cover letter, etc.

As for the email address, there is absolutely nothing wrong with creating a new email address just for your job hunt. Regardless though, it should be professional sounding. johnsmith2122@yahoo.com is a far preferable email address to bigsexyjohnson@yahoo.com. So if you have any double entendres in your regular personal email address, you should create another one just for the job hunt.

Now you have to keep up with everyone who is looking at your resume. Every time you send a resume out or your headhunter(s) submit you then have a spreadsheet where you list the company, when you were submitted, who actually did the submission, the job title, and a sentence or two about the company. You’ll want that information later when the company calls, or when another headhunter wants to submit you for another position. Large companies would never notice if you were submitted 3 or 4 times so long as you are applying for different jobs in different places. But you need to make sure that you aren’t being double-submitted ever.

The other thing to think about as you go through the job hunt is that your last job should not necessarily be your next job. Many people get into a thought process that looks a lot like “this is what I know how to do and I’m good at it, so I should do it forever.” But while you are looking, you really should start looking at positions that are not exactly what you did before. If you’ve done the same job for 8 or 10 years, maybe you should go into business analysis or business process consulting for that industry. If you’ve spent your career jumping from one field to another, maybe you could look into becoming a headhunter yourself. If you’ve always been a salesperson then maybe marketing or sales management or product development could be a fit. But you should think of the things you were best at in your last job and figure out how to apply that to as many different jobs as you can. Then you can apply to a lot more, and maybe find something that you’ll be excited by because it isn’t EXACTLY what you had before.

As I look around at the job market today, in November 2008, I know that marketing jobs have decreased by 25% in the past 18 months. So my friends in marketing are having a lot of difficulty finding jobs. And I won’t pretend to know what they will need to do to find work, but I would suggest that they start looking to any professional associations they can to find out how they can change and grow themselves.

————————————————————————————————–
Coming Soon:
Part Two: Cover Letters and Resumes
Part Three: Pre-Interview
Part Four: The Interview
Part Five: Salary Negotiations.

Patrick Gary is a Dallas based technical consultant and multifaceted musician who refuses to let any single realm of life or group of interests completely define or encapsulate him.
You can read more about him at Troupatour.com