I wanted to add some general thoughts about job champions. At CardboardResume, we believe there are at least four key things a champion may be able to do for you. They are as follows:

1. Give you insider info about company or position
2. Hand your resume to hiring manager
3. Recommend you
4. Keep you away from bad deals.

This does not mean that a champion has to be a person that will go to bat for you and insist that you be hired. It does not mean that your champion has to give you a glowing recommendation. While those scenarios would be ideal and having a strong champion will certainly give you an advantage. However, a champion might just be someone who can vouch that you would fit into the company culture. Or that you could do the job.

Sometimes just the fact that a resume was submitted from an internal source or that someone knows you is enough to differentiate you from a whole stack of resumes and get you an interview. Sometimes just getting in the door is the most difficult part. If you’ll look to find champions at places you want to work you’ll certainly increase your odds of getting more interviews. Once you get an interview make sure to follow up with everyone you interacted with and your champion. It is amazing how often people today do not follow up. By following up with your champion, you show appreciation for their assistance. They’ll be more likely to help you in the future and they may be able to further help you follow up with the decision makers. Finally, they are more likely to continue to be behind you and possibly with even stronger support throughout the process if you will follow up.

A champion may not be able to get you a job, but by finding and utilizing job champions during your job hunt you’ll go a long way to improving your odds.

Back-to-school season has me thinking about school and it’s similarities to career planning. When searching for your next job, you should think of networking as your schoolwork—you should concentrate on contacting your network about opportunities and following up with the leads. As in school, sometimes getting the job means cramming for an interview and doing extra credit work to get past some unexpected hiring obstacles.

Below, I’ve outlined three additional things—essentially homework assignments—which will help you get past some of the hiring obstacles.

Assignment #1: Keep up with your chosen industry

Whatever industry you chose to work in, you need know the current trends and the forecast for the future by reading publications and blogs. You should also go one step past that and follow blogs and tweets of those companies you where you want to work. Keeping up with the industry has the advantage of helping you expand your network by introducing you to others through blog comments or tweets and gives you an advantage in knowing which companies are in trouble and which ones could be hiring soon.

Another good way to keep up with their work and changes in their clients or organization is to use Google Alerts to receive articles and blogs about that company. It is also a smart idea to follow industry gossip blogs to know about internal strife and situations in a company.

In addition to keeping up with the industry, you should leverage LinkedIn groups and join those relevant to your target industry. This will help broaden your network and expand your profile on LinkedIn while keeping you updated on the industry.

Assignment #2: Update phrases for your résumé, cover letters, and correspondence

With computer programs scanning résumés for certain key words and phrases it is imperative to do the research and know which ones they will be seeking out. Usually those words are in the job post. If there is not a job post—say you have a contact within the company and are passing on your résumé through them—then you should look at similar job posts and job boards. Comb through your résumé and cover letter for outdated terms and titles and eliminate them. Using the current industry terms and phrases shows you are up-to-date and give your résumé a higher score by the scanners, making you stick out of a crowd.

Extra Credit: Brush up on necessary skills

Sometimes great job candidates are excluded for lack of skills. If an opportunity you want calls for skills you don’t have, you should take the time to learn those skills. Courses are usually available at local colleges, Apple Stores, and the U.S. Small Business Administration. In addition, several sites offer online tutorials and webinars for skills and software. This homework assignment may be more time consuming than the others, but will pay off when you get past some of the hiring hurdles keeping you from your next job.

Taking the extra time to keep up with your industry, update your language, and learn any necessary skills will help make you more marketable and help you find your next job.

Use your Champion Strategy to find Mentors to give you direction in your Career

We talk a great deal about the importance of Champions at CardboardResume. Champions people who can connect us to the hiring manager for any job, and will give you a much better chance of getting an interview.

Champions are great because they can:

• Give you insight into what the hiring manager is really looking for.
• Send your resume directly to the hiring manager to keep you off of “the pile.”
• Recommend you to the hiring manager.
• Warn you away from jobs that are a bad fit.

In fact, we believe that you will get very few interviews without some direct connection the the hiring manager.

Two Kinds of Job Seekers

Skills Holder Irene Krasnoff runs the Austin Marketing Job Club. She has observed that there are two broad groups of job seekers:

1. Those that know exactly what they’re looking for
2. Those that don’t

If you’re still trying to figure out what you want to be when you grow up, join the crowd. There are a lot of us.

So, how do you find out what role you want to play in an organization? You do some research. This is where the power of the informational interview comes in.

Champions are often in the same line of work as we are, or can introduce us to those who are. Anyone who works in the industry, profession or department that we think would fit us is a potential mentor.

The Mentor Strategy

The Mentor Strategy works like this:

1. Contact the people in your network asking for connections at companies you think you would like to work for.

2. Contact those connections and ask for a little of their time to better understand what they do and how you might fit into such a role.

3. Thank them and keep in touch.

Those contacts whom you click with are potential mentors. Ping them before you apply for jobs. Ask them to critique your resume.

And be sure to thank them when you land that perfect position.

Image courtesy http://www.sxc.hu/profile/mzacha

One mistake job seekers make is to focus their job search only on online job boards. In this economy, those job seekers have a high amount of competition and are unlikely to find a job using that method.

A few recent articles and blog posts highlight the growing evidence against focusing solely on online job boards.

From the Wall Street Journal blog Laid Off and Looking, a post titled Why Online Job Boards Are Virtually Useless:

In the year I’ve spent in the job search, I’ve realized that Internet job boards (both internal and external) are the most puzzling aspect of my search. Job boards were a big part of my focus early on, but have since become very minor (a networked connection is obviously the most preferred method). In theory these services specialize in aiding career searches. I believed that such sites were a good way to get hired. I mean, isn’t it what they claim?

Wrong. It seems to me that companies are posting positions on job boards but aren’t really doing much hiring. While I know people who’ve landed jobs this way, the numbers to me, just don’t add up. I’ve realized it’s an employers’ market, and successes are few and far between.

From CNNMoney.com:

“Because most people are going through conventional methods of finding a job, you’re going to meet the most competition going the conventional way,” according to Cheryl Palmer, an executive career coach at Call To Career in Silver Spring, Md. …

“It’s a buyers market and the employer is the buyer, they don’t need to find you, you need to target the employer,” he said. “Whether they use Google maps or another resource, job seekers should target the areas they are interested in and find the major employers there,” King added.

Palmer encourages job seekers to think outside the box, particularly by bypassing job boards and going directly to the employer. As long as your tactics are “within reason,” she said, they will likely be impressed with your resourcefulness.

“If you’re doing the same thing everyone else is doing, how do you stand out?” Palmer asked.

Here’s blog on recent graduates in the Wall Street Journal blog, The Wallet:

“If [recent grads] just decide to have fun for a year, I think they’re making a mistake” and are likely to have greater difficulty finding a job later, says Bud Bilanich, a success coach in Denver. …

“I think it’s not a good idea to just go on to… any of the big job boards and just put your resume on there,” says Mr. Bilanich.

Instead, you should research a company and tailor your resume to highlight the skills that make you a good fit. Use active verbs and list specific goals you accomplished. Then go through your network to see if you know anyone who can refer you, he says.

Finally, Job-Hunt.Org suggests networking with people in an article on The Dirty dozen Online Job Search Mistakes:

Limiting your job search efforts to the Internet only.

Even if you have a job and can only job hunt at home in your spare time, don’t focus all of your attention online. People are hired by people, so the Internet is only useful as a way to reach the people with the job opportunities. Use the Internet as a part of your job search toolkit.

Evidence shows job seekers should look beyond job boards and seek out their network to find their next job. Don’t become one in the mile-high stack of résumés, use your network to stand out.

Sherri Wilson is a regular contributor to the CardboardResume Blog and a Skills Holder.

Photo courtesy http://www.sxc.hu/profile/channah

The length of your job search is directly proportional to the size of your active network

There are a number of ways to manage your job search. For years, I used Excel and Outlook with mixed results. The major job boards have job management features. The main problem is that these solutions really manage resume submission.

Submitting resumes does not get you more job offers. Interviews do.

If you want to get more interviews, you have to have a connection to the hiring manager. This connection can be a tenuous, friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend link, but it will increase your chances of getting any interview 10-fold.

If you’re skeptical or discouraged by this, don’t panic. I outline the process of finding a connection with any hiring manager at any company you want to work for in my 20-minute presentation If You Want the Interview, You Need a Champion.

CardboardResume is designed around getting more interviews. It is a tool that will help you organize and grow a network of email contacts, and then guide you through the process of politely and respectfully enlisting their help.

If you want to know more about the strategies that make CardboardResume work, get your free copy of The Market for Me: Surviving Job Loss and Building Your Lifetime Career Network.

This is a guest post by Sherri Wilson, market researcher and wife of CardboardResume employee Dan Wilson.

Recently the Austin American-Statesman had an article on Eric Jacobsen who has put up a billboard to advertise his job search and his website eric4hire.com

I give Jacobsen credit for his initiative. Getting the news out that you are looking for a job is an important step in getting your network involved in helping you in your job search. Jacobsen did a masterful job of public relations and I’m hopeful that he will be successful in finding a job through the billboard. The coverage from the press from his billboard has been featured in the Austin American Statesman and the Austin Business Journal and on TV news (KXAN, Fox 7, and KVUE). No doubt people who read the articles or see the stories on TV will be encouraged to visit his website.

However, I cannot believe a billboard would be more effective than a targeted networking effort using email and personal connections of people in his network about open positions at their companies or that they may know about.

Here’s why:

A billboard on a roadway is a poor idea, especially if it just has a website and a photo because that expects people who are driving to either, a) write down the website or, b) enter it into their phone. People should not be encouraged to do either one while driving a car, it is dangerous and I do not need to explain why. (Note: a billboard in a high pedestrian area or on public transportation would be safer.) c) remember the website address after they finish their drive.

Now, let’s assume that someone does remember they saw the billboard on their drive to work or on their drive home. Then they have to take the initiative to look up the website, that is, if they are not distracted at work by their boss or at home by their cat hacking up a furball. If they are not distracted, they have to take the initiative to pass on the website to someone or contact Jacobsen themselves. That is a lot of action expected of someone who does not know Jacobsen.

It’s the same story if someone reads about the billboard on statesman.com—there is too much initiative expected on the part of the reader.

Take a look at this Swivel chart which shows that only 2% of jobs are found through broadcasting a job search.

Using your network gets you into the interview, using a targeted and methodical approach to your job search is a better use of your time and money than aimlessly applying for jobs online or hoping someone sees your billboard.

I would suggest that CardboardResume.com offers a better—and more affordable—approach to searching for a job. The philosophy is built on the fact that 70% to 80% of jobs are found through other people, not through job postings, PR campaigns, or billboards. People you know will find you your next job.

One more thing I want to say about Jacobsen’s story: his story of being laid off is compelling and is a perfect example of what is said in The Market for Me “a corporation hires without joy, and fires without remorse.”

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