Welcome to fantasy job search?
In Career Brander’s version of fantasy job search…
You choose your next job.
For that matter, you choose your next company, you choose your next boss and to some degree you choose your next salary.
Impossible?
If you’ve spent the last few months monitoring job boards hoping that the “perfect” posting appears and you are still looking, please consider joining Career Brander’s fantasy job search league.
The league is free and here is how you play.
- Select a dozen companies you want to work for within 20 miles of your home. (Research)
- Go on LinkedIn, identify the most senior people in the department you wish to work at each company. (Best fit-targets)
- Now, still on LinkedIn, identify any 1st degree, 2nd degree and 3rd degree connections you have at each company. (Social Media connections visibility)
- Build a basic map to connect your 1st, 2nd and 3rd degree connections to the senior hiring managers. (Social Media connections visibility)
- Start emailing and calling your connections to identify a way to get a warm introduction meeting with the potential hiring managers. Obviously 1st and 2nd degree connections work best, but with work an individual should be able to turn 3rd degree connections into 2nd degree, and 2nd degree into first degree connections. (You need to invest time and sell/market yourself.)
- Leverage company information, which is readily available on the Internet, to create customized marketing messages. (Business Intelligence)
- Make sure your “marketing message” clearly describes the business problem you can solve for the potential hiring manager. (What value can you bring, not what have you done.)
So why do we believe this will work? The answer is two- fold.
1) We are confident that waiting for the perfect opportunity to appear on a job board or from a job site search engine is a fool’s game.
2) Effective job search has always been about networking and all we are suggesting is to find a way to get in front of “the right people at the right companies”. By leveraging relationships that already exist (Without LinkedIn you may not be fully aware of them) you will accelerate the likelihood of a successful job search campaign.
Phrased differently, look for people and relationships to people as opposed to simply looking for jobs. We are confident this career transition strategy will have better results than mining the Internet for job postings!
Career Branders’ Job Search Radar automates much of the “fantasy job search process”.
