Finding a new job

I have spent the last four months looking for a new job.  It has been an interesting experience and I can provide a couple of pointers for those that are in this position.

The first is that networking is extremely important.  Those that you know can be very helpful.  However, that isn’t the end-all or be-all to job hunting.  What you want to do is to keep a “networking mindset” meaning that you want to talk to anyone that you can about opportunities.  But remember that when you are conversing with someone who is not a recruiter, then keep it on the level of “what is the environment like at your company?” or “what information can you provide about opportunities that you know about?”.  It doesn’t work to come right out and say “will you hire me?”.  You are gathering information.

The other is keeping a sales mentality.  It is easy to be in a technical detail mindset where you want to present all of the details about your experiences.  Unfortunately, this creates a resume (or other “marketing” piece) that is incomprehensible to the reader (i.e., recruiter/hiring manager).  What you need to do is to tailor your resume for every job opportunity so that it highlights the experiences (and ACCOMPLISHMENTS) that are applicable to the job description (and any other information that you have gathered about the opportunity.

One thing that I found very, very helpful was a program by Phil Rosenberg (http://recareered.com).  He does a weekly free webinar that discusses the basics (you can read more at http://ResumeWebinar.com).  You can check into that   Phil does a great job of changing your thought process when it comes to writing / modifying your resume.  The only thing that I a little problem with is his insistence that you need to pick out targeted companies and focus on them.  I don’t disagree with this as a concept (if you know of companies like this) but I don’t believe it should be the entire focus of your job search.

Part of the reason that I disagree with Phil is that I believe that limiting your focus to specific companies is limiting to your search.  In a major metropolitan area, there a thousands of companies that are potential targets and you don’t know that they are out there so you will miss a lot of opportunities.  Second is that the recruiters can be extremely useful in bringing opportunities to you but you don’t want to sit back and wait for them to come knocking.

The other tool that I found very useful was a job posting aggregator call ZipRecruiter (https://www.ziprecruiter.com).  You can setup alerts/searches that will be run on a regular basis and provide you with emails listing potential opportunities.  There are others out there but this one seemed to work the best.  One thing that I found about this was that it can be repetitive.  You are looking at the same opportunities several times a week but you begin to sort out the same jobs and skip over them.  I found that I only reviewed them twice a week.  It takes time and can be boring looking through all of these opportunities but finding a job should be a full time job.

Out of all of this, I was lucky to find a contract position with Ciber.  Interestingly enough, I was not submitting my resume to Ciber because I felt they were too big.  However, when talking to a friend, he indicated that they brought all of their contract PMs in through Ciber and that they were a good company.  With that I submitted for one position and was able to get a contract.  It worked out well for everyone.

Those are just some thoughts on my job search.  Good luck and let me know if you need any help in your job search.