get a job Archives - Interview Doctor

A couple of interesting streams of thought crashed together loudly recently. I had a coaching client could not identify his target company. His job search marketing plan until this point consisted exclusively of responding to job ads. Needless to say, not much was happening.

At the same time I participated in a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) sponsored by my alma mater, Northwestern University, on creating strategic online social media content. Odd to think these two concepts collided but they did. Let me explain.

The first step in any social media campaign is to identify your target audience. You can’t just say “everyone can use my product”. Usually it is not true because each individual audience member requires a slightly different approach. This is called “niche marketing”.

When I started The Interview Doctor business in 2005 my coach, Sherry, kept asking me, “Who is your audience?” I kept responding, “anyone can use this service”. My logic was that everyone knows someone who is out of work or trying to change careers or even someone who wants to advance their career. Any of those people could use my services. Sherry knew that was just not true. But I did not understand. I put out information in a broad peanut butter spread hoping that my material would magically fall into the hands of someone who could use it.

Wrong. This is not the correct approach. Or rather, this approach is less effective. This approach makes you a small fish in a huge pond. You will get overlooked.

The better approach, according to the smart marketing folks at Northwestern University, is to think long and hard about your audience. What do they look like? What do they do? Who are they exactly? Then you can tailor your message to the specific people who will value what you have to offer.

It might be counterintuitive that by tailoring to a specific audience your outreach will be more likely to reach the intended audience than a peanut butter spread message across the masses. It is easy to think that hitting as many people as possible will increase your chances for success.

But actually niches are riches. Being more specific makes you a bigger fish in a smaller pond.

This absolutely applies directly to the job search. My client was directing his message (his marketing) to a huge audience. He received no response. When he more specifically identified his niche (specific jobs, people and companies) marketing became easier. Social networking became easier to do. The people and companies he needed to target became more obvious to him and he became more appealing to his focused audience. He made himself more visible when he was not a small fish in a big pond.

Niche marketing allows you to focus your job search and your message to the intended audience that can actually respond to your message. This saves you time and increases the leverage you get from your effort.

You can earn riches from very targeted niches. Just very specifically understand your audience then market directly to them through the various social networking methods out there. Why waste time and energy?

Finding a job is tough work. Finding the right job is even harder.

Tom has been looking for months now. He can document sending hundreds of resumes to openings he found online or through job postings. Nothing. Nada. No response at all. He is very frustrated.

Tom can’t help but think there is something wrong with him. Otherwise he would get some sort of positive response, right?

Actually the real explanation has more to do with the method Tom is using to find his next assignment.

Job ads just don’t work anymore. At least this method does not work very often for the candidate.

Let’s look at the numbers.

What if a company places an ad and receives 100 responses. If the company has an applicant tracking system (ATS), probably one third of the applications will get through the screening process and have all the requirements. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that your resume gets through the ATS.

It is quite probably that someone in the company will review enough of the remaining resumes to find 10 or 15 applications that look promising. There is no guarantee that your application was in the first group to get reviewed. If not, then you are out of the running. If you are in that group, then the hiring manager will look at the applications and trim the list down again. Perhaps only five or six will get a telephone screen.

The odds are not good that your application gets through all those screens to even get seen by someone in authority at the company. In the meantime you are sitting by the phone waiting for that call. When the call never comes (and it probably will not come) you wonder why not. You start filling in all sorts of reasons why not – mostly negative thoughts about ways you and your experience come up lacking. Again you are wasting your time because the reason has nothing at all to do with you. You are a victim of poor job search techniques.

In my opinion and in the opinion of a lot of job search experts, you should not devote too much time to submitting applications. Spend your time networking. Meet people at your target companies. Get referrals. Referrals go to the top of the list above all the anonymous applications that came in over the transom.

Bottom line: Ads are not frauds. Someone will likely get a job offer. But submitting applications is not a successful job search technique. Your odds improve significantly when you network. Make new friends. Build relationships. Use those relationships to get referrals to decision makers.