Tuesday’s Tip: The Jobseeker Fairy Tale

Ralphie is a typical 2011 jobseeker. He was downsized, rightsized, laid off, let go, outsourced, discharged, restructured, position eliminated, or many other names just a year ago. Ralphie is over 50 and was with his last company for more than 10 years. Since he has had many positions in his 30+ year career, he knows how to find a job. He wakes up every morning at 8:00am, drinks a cup or two of coffee, and by 9:00am has already logged onto Monster.com and is just about ready to click "Apply". He will continue to do basic job searches on some other job boards and by 10:30am, shuts down the computer, pats himself on the back for finding 6 new positions that he found online, and waits for the calls to come in. Once or twice a month, he gets that call and is eager to tell the company all about his qualifications, but is surprised when that recruiter (who told him he would call again soon), conveniently looses his number. Over time, Ralphie surely knows that the right opportunity is just around the corner, and will soon find him, but he heard about these Networking Meetings and thought he would give one of those a try; after all, what harm could come from that. So every week on the same day, he met at the pre-determined location, and sat downed and waited for the "also unemployed" to hire him (or okay, maybe tell him about a position). He heard rumblings about opportunities, but since they never appeared on his magical job boards, he never applied for them. After all, he wouldn't think of bothering a Hiring Manager to talk about an opportunity. Ralphie is very pleased that he started coming to these Networking Meetings because he gets to see the same people every week, and also has received lots of advice on his resume, and this weekend, he is going to update it for his 23rd version. This version must be the final one, cuz a "professional resume writer" looked at it this time! Oh wait, a professional writer looked at version 3 as well. Hmmm, how did this happen? Before Ralphie could answer himself, the phone rang and it was a recruiter wanting him to come in for the interview. He was so excited, and studied his resume for hours that night because he wanted to make sure he talked about every bullet point on his resume and explain his job responsibilities to the interviewer so that he would know what he had done at his previous ungrateful employer. He even planned how he was going to prove to the Hiring Manager that he was unjustly downsized, and how the company is a loser without him.

So if this little fairy tale sounds realistic and you weren't able to identify the 8 mistakes that Ralphie made during this little story, then I would suggest you take a different route than you have been traveling and step out of your comfort zone and try some new techniques that are much more productive than the old way of finding a job. If you want more specifics, come to my CTS Networking Club on Wednesday, April 6, 2011. For more details, click on this link: http://ctsnetworkclub.eventbrite.com/