Preparing to Job Search: Getting Clear About Your Target

By Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter

I discuss the importance of understanding what your target is when you are job hunting.

Mastering the Mental Game: Emotional Preparation for Job Interviews

If you are driving from New York to Boston or maybe Paris to Rome or Brasília to Caracas and you didn’t have a GPS or roadmap, how would you get there are how would you even know you are driving in the right direction?  The same is true in your career, isn’t it?  How do you get from junior staff to a director position?  How do you from manager to C suite?  How to go about doing it?

Most people have magical thinking and believe that if they wish it and hope it and do a good job, that will be their eventual destination.  You can also do with smart people do and start interviewing people who have already gotten to where you want to get to that how they got there.  This is a form of informational interview where, basically, you meet with someone, not to ask for job, but to ask for information and advice.  Some people make the mistake of meeting with one person and believing that they have all the information that they need to know in order to get to their goals.  You know, 1 Person Has Their Particular Way.  But, instead, I want you to meet with multiple people and look for common threads to their stories and unusual suggestions.

For example, if I people tell you that you need a Masters degree or particular training and one person says that you can get by with an Associates degree, which opinion do you think you should discard?  Seriously?  The probability is it is going to be the Associates, right?  What you have that information, once you’ve had your questions answered, act on the information.  That’s the most important thing that people don’t do.  Don’t treat the revised like just another weight loss book or another self-help book to be read and ignored.  Act on the advice that you receive.

When I attended school in New York to become a psychotherapist, I remember the teacher at the Institute say that is important to charge a good fee for therapy services.  His reasoning was that by paying a good fee, you could afford to be there to help them to receive treatment and continue to help them. 

He also said that is important for people to pay because, at the end of the day, the patient is more willing to act on the advice, the insights that they receive in the session.  Simply put, free advice is often ignored.  Advice that people paper for is likely to get them to take action.  That’s going to be true of you, too.  It’s 1 of the reasons that I do coaching is in order to help people take action and do it in a way that my unique skill set (and I do have a very unique skill set, having done recruiting) will go a long way toward helping them breakthrough.

By treating the advice that you receive is being valuable because you paid for it, and telling the person or people they gave it to you what you are doing with their advice, it helps them feel as though you have value their opinion and that they did not just wasting time by speaking with you.  A lot of people do that because they get free advice.  They don’t act on. 

So, I’ll simply say, if you meet with someone stay in touch with them.  Hire a coach because coaching will be something that you will pay for in the good coach will help you move faster than just a friend give you the advice.

The Big Career Management Lessons from The Shawshank Redemption

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Photo by Gene Gallin on Unsplash