Transposing two of the commands in the ritual used by the execution
squads of old — "Ready! Aim! Fire!" — yields some guidelines for those
in the employment hunt.
"Ready!": Initial Research
"Where do I begin?" is the hapless cry of many a job seeker who has yet
to learn that the job search is a marketing effort: you are trying to
sell yourself. And marketing is fundamentally a communication process:
you want to bring your unique combination of talents and skills to the
attention of prospective employers so that they hire you at the desired
price.
But, before trying to frame the content of the message you will
deliver, consider some preliminary factors about communication. The
primitive saying, "If you throw enough mud on the wall, some of it will
stick," is too crude, expensive and lazy in practice. Start by trying
to define your target. Visualization is more than a New Age buzzword.
Attempt to see in your mind's eye the type of business and the kind of
person that you want as an employer and that would want to employ you.
Enrich your mental image until you can picture a real person to whom to
address your message.
Then imagine your prospect as heavily involved with other
activities; he is not even aware of your presence; you've got to get
his attention. Another element of effective communication now comes
into play: intention. You have to want to turn the prospect's head away
from the things that are distracting him (the thousand other
applicants, for example) and in your direction. Since you have defined
your prospective employer earlier, you will have guessed at the things
that attract him or repel her, what buttons to push, which to leave
alone. It is time for flare, imagination and daring, all done with
taste, of course. Like a professional showman, the job seeker pulls out
all stops to capture the undivided attention of the prospect.
Finally, turn to the message itself and its need for impact. Be
it via resume, cover letter or personal interview, you have only
seconds to day your piece. It must possess an excitement, an urgency,
that generates a similar emotion in the prospect. Personal intensity is
easily observed in the dynamic advertising found on radio and
television; we all know the difference between a vibrant and a boring
speaker. In printed form this factor is less apparent, but it must be
there, and any number of good books and articles exist on
devices—wording, graphics, placement, etc. — for creating effective and
dynamic resumes, cover letters and portfolios.
"Fire!" The Testing Stage
Face it, getting ready is done in creative isolation and the
assumptions you make about your prospect may be way off the mark.
Knowing this, the job seeker can err in two ways. The perfectionist
simply stalls in the "Ready!" stage; since nothing less than perfect is
acceptable, nothing is done at all. On the other side is the gambler
who blindly assumes all his assumptions are correct and launches a
complete campaign on untried suppositions. The first fails from too
little action and the latter from too much.
After getting ready as well as can be expected, the proper
thing to do is "Fire!" — but on a limited basis. It is not all out war;
it is experimenting with the weapon in a monitored situation on the
rifle range. If the phone lies dead on the hook for the two weeks after
you sent several test resumes, your assumptions are off somewhere—in
method, message or market. Time to revise.
Accurate testing requires meticulous record keeping so that
significant information is not lost or misinterpreted. Track where the
lead came from, what you sent, how you sent it (email or snail mail),
even the day of the week it was sent (people supposedly mind their mail
more in mid-week when there is less of it). When you get a response,
even if negative, try to determine what prompted the person to call
back. Capitalize on this aspect in future efforts. The few seconds
required for proper record keeping will save hours in further
prospecting. Without such tracking, you may assume that a certain
website's job listing are pulling responses when actually it is your
local newspaper.
"Aim!": Hitting The Target
Adequate testing and retesting during the "Fire!" stage not only
fine tunes your marketing weapons but further sharpen the profile of
the prospect formed during the "Ready!" stage. Broad-shoots can be
eliminated for a smaller but more qualified group of prospects. An
individualized approach can now replace the wasteful blanketing of
every website available. You can now "Aim!" for the bull's eye with a
steady hand.
It has been said that a company or committee never makes decisions or
hires anyone; it is a live person within the company that decides.
Prospecting is the process of finding these individuals. By proceeding
through the three stages—"Ready! Fire! Aim!" — a job seeker should soon
find a willing employer in his sights.
-Vic Smith
A Tucson resident, Vic is a member of Society of Southwestern
Authors, a published educational and technical writer as well as
novelist.
vicsmith0123@cs.com