We’re not advised to tell the truth when we’re job-hunting — just the opposite. We’re coached to contort ourselves into pretzel shapes, to be whoever we think the employer wants us to be. We’re encouraged to play a role on a job search, to fawn and grovel and hope the hiring manager falls in love with us. What horrible advice! If you wanted to go into the theatre, you’d be in Hollywood by now.
We say that if people don’t get you, they don’t deserve you. Better to let them see who you really are at the earliest opportunity, right? Job-seekers are often surprised that more honesty doesn’t hurt them on a job search. If the people they’re interviewing with have any self-esteem and confidence at all, your human honesty helps you.
And if managers are so fearful that they can’t handle a dose of honesty, do you really want to work for them?
Here are ten traditional job search rules to start breaking on your job search.
Ten Job Search Rules to Break
1. Follow the defined process.
The defined recruiting process is broken. Black Holes are great in space, and horrible on a job search. Many job-seekers have trouble stepping out of the Good Little Rule-Following Job Seeker persona. If they can do that, they’ll be unstoppable!
We’ve been trained since childhood to do what we’re told to do. The Black Hole will eat your resume and shred its atoms, but people keep pitching resumes into gaping recruiting portals anyway. Don’t do it! Reach your hiring manager directly.
2. If you know someone in the company, give that person your resume and tell them to give it to the hiring manager.
A job search, like any marketing campaign, makes use of channels. Your friend inside the company might be a tremendous channel for your job search, or a horrible one. The question is “How well does your friend know the hiring manager?” If your friend does know him or her, you’re in great shape. Otherwise, your friend carrying your resume in the door is just a side entrance to the same Black Hole you were trying to avoid.
Choose the strongest channel for your job search: an intermediary friend, the direct approach, or a third-party recruiter. Don’t assume that your in-house friend is your best job-search conduit.
3. Use a traditional zombie-style resume and cover letter.
You’re not a zombie. You’re a human, switched-on and ready for action, so don’t brand yourself using zombie language like “Results-oriented professional with a bottom line orientation!” (Ropwablo for short.)
You can write a resume that sounds like you, and you’ll make a stronger impression if you do. Forget the old-fashioned cover letter and write a compelling letter instead.
4. In your overture to employers, emphasize the way your background matches the job spec.
You know that a written job spec has as much in common with the actual job as I have in common with Genghis Khan. Forget the tedious and delusional job-spec bullets and focus on the pain behind the job ad.
5. Spend most of your energy applying for posted jobs, and do so online.
If you want to destroy your mojo in the first two weeks of your job search, spend all your time online hunting for positions to apply to. Then, toss resumes into Black Holes and pretend that someone is going to get back to you. You’d be better off putting a stack of paper resumes on the passenger seat in your car and driving down the freeway with the window open. In that case, one of your resumes might land on a hiring manager’s desk by chance.
If you want a job rather than a boring daytime activity, step away from the Black Hole and take a more active role in your job search.
Split your job-search time three ways into three equal parts: one-third of your available time and energy will go to responding to posted job ads, one-third of it will be spent reaching out to target employers whether or not they have jobs posted, and the final one-third of your time and energy will go to networking.
6. Use your networking time and energy letting people know about your job search, your specific skills and how each friend can help you.
Your job-search networking is not a hunt for jobs to apply to. It’s a mojo-building, introduction-generating exercise instead. Use your networking to coach your friends on the issues they’re dealing with (nothing grows mojo better than coaching someone else) and to get their moral support in return.
When people get unadvertised jobs through networking – and people do that every day – it’s because they focused on the relationship, not the transaction.
7. If you’re asked to report your salary history, share every detail going back as far as the employer asks you to.
Are you ready to go work for people who don’t trust you? If the employer asks you to verify every salary you’ve ever earned, the relationship is not off to an auspicious start. Keep your salary history to yourself.
8. When the employer asks you to jump, do it.
No employer is ever going to love you more than they do just before they make you a job offer. Don’t be a doormat on your job search. A new job is essentially an extended consulting gig, so manage the process the same way you would if you were proposing a consulting assignment to a new client. Don’t climb over every pile of broken glass they put in front of you. If you show up as the most compliant, docile candidate in the bunch, don’t expect to be able to argue for your strategic value later in the process.
9. Don’t bring up the topic of salary – let the employer bring it up.
It is suspicious to me that the awful, conventional wisdom “Don’t mention salary – let the employer bring it up first. Whoever speaks first, loses” fits so nicely with many job-seekers’ natural aversion to broaching sticky topics like money.
That advice is repeated everywhere, and it couldn’t be more mistaken. In a job search, you have to price yourself like a house. You have to let employers know what it will take you get you on board. If you wait for the job offer to finally learn what an organization is planning to pay you, you’re in the world’s worst negotiating position.
After all, it was your obligation to show (not tell) these folks what you’re worth, during the interview process. If you’ve been through two or three interviews with a gang of people and they subsequently decide collectively — maybe delusionally as well, but that’s a different topic — that you are worth $X, then in their eyes you are worth $X, and you’ve already missed your prime opportunity to show them differently.
10. Do whatever you need to do and say whatever you need to say to get the job.
When you agree to play a part to get a job, you’ve made a deal with the devil. As tempted as you may be to bite your lip when you’re frustrated with a hiring process, don’t do it. If you have to take a survival job to pay the bills, take it! Don’t swap your integrity for a paycheck from people who don’t even see, much less value, the real you.
Remember that only the people who get you deserve you. The faster you say “No thanks” to the wrong opportunities, the faster the right ones will roll in.
