JOB-HUNTING IN 2008 AND BEYOND

July 28th,2008

Author: Rowan Manahan
Final Year: 1982
Biography: Rowan Manahan (1982) is the founder of Fortify Services, a Dublin-based consulting and career management firm. Author of Where's My Oasis? Speaker, trainer, husband, father, storyteller and dancing bear.
URL: http://www.fortifyservices.com

Career Clinic

The newspapers and news broadcasts are full of doom and gloom about the state of the economy, we’ve seen the highest rate of job losses and the highest number of people signing onto the live register for many a long year here in Ireland. If you find yourself wanting to move job – or having to move job due to difficult trading conditions or a redundancy – what should you do? How do you go about hunting for a job in 2008? Is it the same as it has always been, or has the advent of the internet forever changed the way in which organisations hire people?

There are three keys to success in any job-hunt. They are essential when times are good, but if you are lacking in any one of them when times are bad, your job-hunt will be over before it begins.


1. Attitude
Someone once said that “attitude determines altitude” and just because it’s an ancient old clichÈ, doesn’t mean that it’s untrue. For the job-hunt, your attitude is the foundation; it’s the first thing about you that a potential employer will pick up on and if it’s in any way ‘off’ that employer will be drawing a line through your name.

When I lecture on this topic, I always ask this question - “Who counts in the job-hunt process? Who is the process all about?” Allow me to break the answer to you as gently as I do to those audiences:

                                        NOT YOU!

This process is all about the employer – their needs, their worries, their issues, their timeframe. And in the midst of that, no-one, no-one,  cares about you. Build your attitude and approach to your job-hunt from that certainty and you won’t go far wrong. I say this because when I am interviewing, an amazing number of job-hunters come across as self-centred, whiny and petulant. You must not fall into this trap.

The other part of the Attitude strand is that it can be very difficult to maintain your equilibrium through the rollercoaster of anticipation, expectation and rejection that a job-hunt can involve. It’s a very topsy-turvy process, conducted by a very cold and unfeeling market. Keeping a positive mental attitude in the face of all of this can be very difficult. But. You. Have. To!

2. Knowledge
So, the job-hunt is all about them, therefore it stands to reason that you need to know all about them – the sector, company, competitors, big issues, the opportunities, the problems, the disposition of the interviewer(s). Knowledge is power in the job-hunt and that includes self-knowledge, market knowledge and even insider knowledge.

You have to do a lot of research and you need a network that is feeding in information to you. Your fundamental approach as a job-hunter is to present yourself saying, “I am the answer to your problems.” If the interviewer asks, “Well, what exactly are our problems?” you’d better have some concise and coherent answers. The company you are applying to lives, sleeps, eats and breathes this business – you have to as well. You need to understand what causes the CEO of the company to wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. You need to know the context behind that, the specific causes of it, and be ready to talk about your ideas to solve that problem, so that the CEO can sleep soundly in his/her bed at night. Anything less and you’re not a contender. Why? Because at least one other applicant (and maybe more) for the job will be this clued-in, so you have to be as well.

3. Preparation
The most common error employers see among job-hunters is underpreparedness. Once again, it’s not about you – it’s about you in the context of all the other applicants they are going to see. There will be a spectrum of preparedness among those candidates and you have to be up at the top of that spectrum.

Put simply, you need to be more clued-in and better prepared than the other candidates. There are no short cuts here – this is a simple matter of perspiration. For so many jobs now, there’s little or nothing to tell between candidates when it comes to qualifications, training or experience, so they are judging on the intangibles. One key thing that interviewers will be scoring you on is your team fit – you can’t fiddle with that, nor should you. You are who you are, don’t wear a mask in the interview, be who you are and let them make their decision on that basis. But the other big intangible factor that they use as a decider is your professionalism – now that you can control.

I see numerous candidates come into the interview room flustered, badly-presented and with a few half-formed ideas that they have never articulated before. Job interviews are largely predictable, so it really is inexcusable for you to demonstrate ill-preparedness in answer to one of the old chestnut questions. Likewise, if you are trying to position yourself as any sort of player in your arena, it is equally inexcusable for you to demonstrate ill-preparedness in response to issue-based questions.

In his Art of War, Sun Tzu wrote that in order to enter battle unafraid, you need to know three things:
Yourself
Your opponent
The terrain

I meet very few candidates who display all three. The good thing is, this isn’t rocket science, it’s donkey work. You need to be able to cogently and concisely tell me who you are, what you have to offer, what contributions you have made in previous employments and why you are the best person for this job. Along the way, you can expect to have to field questions on the state of my organisation, the issues that are affecting it now and the problems and opportunities that are coming down the pike. Not rocket science as I say – so it’s simple, it’s just not easy.

Rowan is a Consultant, Author, Trainer, Speaker, Blogger  and MD of Fortify Services. www.fortifyservices.blogspot.com