Job Searchers: Stop Kidding Yourself
July 20, 2010 Job Searching 1 CommentSo what did you do last week as part of your job search?
• Spent about 30 hours at my desk busily searching
• Tidied up my CV / resume
• Took part in an online forum
• Did research on some companies I’d like to target
• Emailed a few people
• Trawled through job sites looking for jobs
• Spent 5 hours on an application form
• Read some interesting articles about job searching
You sound like you’ve been working hard. Okay, let’s get specific:
1. How many real jobs did you apply for last week? How many CVs/resumes did you send out?
2. How many follow up calls did you make to chase up jobs or leads that you have already applied for?
3. How many real people (contacts, clients, colleagues etc) did you have a real conversation with on the phone in relation to your search?
4. How many informal one-to-one meetings (breakfast, coffee, lunch etc) did you book in the diary during last week with networking contacts?
5. How many informal one-to-one meetings did you attend last week with contacts?
6. How many face-to-face meetings did you have with recruiters last week?
7. How many interviews did you secure last week?
8. How many follow-up emails or notes did you send to contacts who you have met or spoken to in recent weeks?
Your answers to these 8 questions tell me what you accomplished last week instead of the paper shuffling and web surfing that that you did. These are the real performance indicators that give an accurate view of how effective you were last week.
If you’ve nothing significant in the pipeline, the activities at the top of the page are just fluff. Whilst some of them are relevant ways to spend your time, they are not the best way to spend your time – particularly if you haven’t many open opportunities.
If all you are doing is spending most weeks doing the things at the top of the page, then you are quite probably:
- Kidding yourself
- Wasting lots of time and energy
- Afraid to get of out the door and have real conversations
- Playing safe
- Missing lots of opportunities
If you’re like many people who think sitting in front of a laptop for 7 hours a day is job searching, please stop kidding yourself.
Start judging your effectiveness based on what you achieved (outputs) instead of how many hours you put in (inputs).
When you do that, you can easily spend just 10 hours a week job searching whilst spending the remaining time with your family and your hobbies without guilt. And still you’d be more effective than most people who spend 30 hours a week at their just desk shuffling paper and surfing randomly on the web.









