Treat Your Job Search Like A Campaign

Until you get your next job, consider yourself a full-time marketer. Your product is you, the most important product in the world at this point. Finding a new job requires a major effort on your part—an effort large enough to call it a campaign, such as a military, sales, or political campaign.

Every campaign involves many day-to-day decisions. Many decisions are made under pressure and can have important consequences. Often there is no truly objective way to tell if decisions are correct. There is one criterion, however, that is always available: Is the decision consistent with a well-conceived plan? Without that plan, you run a high risk of just wandering around the marketplace, spending your time and other resources on targets of opportunity.

Plans come in many forms and everyone must have their own. Borrowing a plan from someone else can be as dangerous as operating with no plan at all.

Let’s see what goes into a job campaign plan.

1. Define your market. Job markets have three dimensions:
   a. Geographic
   b. Functional
   c. Industry

2. Define your strategy (strategy is what you do before you take action to uncover leads within your market). Generally, there are three strategies for uncovering leads:
   a. Job postings
   b. Search firms
   c. Personal contacts

3. Define your tactics (tactics are what you do when you are face-to-face with the situation). Most of your job campaign concerns tactics. For example, “When making personal contacts, I will follow a certain format that will defuse a potentially awkward situation and produce helpful information” (e.g., the dknx Focus Meeting module).

4. Define objectives. Objectives must be quantified. For example, “I will conduct 10 Focus Meetings a week.”

5. Define your goal: “What are the characteristics of the position I am seeking?”

Decisions that lead to the development of a job campaign should be based on:

1. Review of employment history

2. Time and money available until a job must be found

3. Research concerning the economy and the employment market

Contingency plans should be given thought: “What will I do if…?”

Our experience shows that in most job campaigns, leads must be uncovered and turned into job interviews, which must then be turned into job offers. Rarely does someone in the opening stages of a job campaign make an outreach and receive a job offer.

If you are unsure of how to conduct a productive conversation about your job search with your contacts, we’d love to help make it easier. Learn the dknx Focus Meeting approach for productive and effective meetings.