Fire Your Boss (15 page)

While still at the library, pick up the most recent issue of your local newspaper that has the most help wanted ads. In most cities, that’s the Sunday paper. In towns where there is no Sunday paper it’s usually the Saturday edition. If there are multiple newspapers in your community, consult them all. Include weeklies as well as dailies. Go through the help wanted section, looking to see where jobs pertaining to all your job paths are listed. Note the appropriate headings. Once again, look for any headhunters or employment agencies that stand out.

Before you leave the library, compile two lists: one, a reading list of all the trade magazines, Web sites, and newspapers you’ll be checking on a regular basis; the second, a contact list of headhunters and employment agencies.

Make it your business to telephone all the headhunters and employment agencies you’ve listed and inform them of your interest in other work. Set up personal meetings if you can, and certainly follow up with a package including a cover letter and your latest résumé. (See the box on page 120: Eliminating Résumé Red Flags.)

Next, set aside two hours a week to go over the magazines, Web sites, and newspapers on your reading list. You can subscribe rather than go to the library if it’s more convenient. You can probably get away with reading the trade magazines while at work, either on your lunch break or when you have downtime. I would not recommend reading the want ads or scanning the job sites at your desk, however. No amount of attention to meeting your boss’s needs will make that acceptable behavior: it’s far too confrontational and sends a signal that everyone, not just your boss, can pick up.

Obviously you’re looking for every relevant want ad in the magazines and newspapers. Answer all of them, since you’re casting a wide net for offers, not just jobs. But keep an eye out for interesting articles as well. Perhaps you’ll come across a story about a company looking to change its direction, or a firm looking to add new products or services. Maybe there will be a profile of a CEO who sounds interesting. Make note of any such story that piques your interest. Send an e-mail, or if you can’t find an e-mail address, a letter, to the individual mentioned in the story, noting where you read about him or her, and explaining how you think it might be mutually productive for the two of you to meet and speak. Do
not
attach or include a résumé. These notes won’t always yield a meeting. But when they do, it will be a productive one. And since you’re not in any rush — remember, you’re job fishing not job hunting — quality rather than quantity is your aim. You’re actually looking to create relationships rather than looking for jobs.

After working with Jared for a year we met to take stock. He and his wife were happy in their new home. While sales of the computerized educational system were good, there had been some recent shake-ups in the upper management of his company. Jared had been and still was fishing for offers. In fact, two had come along in the past three months, but neither paid as much as his current job. Still, they had given him some confidence. Meanwhile he had struck up an e-mail relationship with an inventor who lived in his territory. He had seen an article about the man in one of the trade magazines on his reading list and had sent him a note. A somewhat eccentric engineer who had been responsible for a major medical breakthrough some years earlier, the man had just started working on a new form of a superefficient home heating system. Jared told me that while it didn’t seem likely to yield a job offer right away, he was traveling to have lunch with the fellow the next week. I congratulated Jared, telling him he’d reached the next stage in developing a new workplace attitude.

That’s the same stage you’re about to reach. Jared had learned that cultivating personal relationships is more important today than cultivating business contacts. In the next chapter you’ll see that today, no one hires a stranger.

AGNES WICKFIELD CAN
hardly believe that getting active in her local chamber music group has led to a new job. For years, Agnes had been trying to move from her job as a paralegal with a midsize law firm into the corporate world, which she knew offered better pay and benefits. Agnes had networked religiously for two years, and had gone on so many informational interviews that she felt like a journalist. Yet nothing ever came of them. In fact, it was getting harder to line up those interviews. Then, early this year, Agnes took a different tack. She got more active in her church. She began volunteering at the local hospital. She even dusted off her cello and joined the chamber music group in town. At a joint Christmas concert with the local choral society, Agnes struck up a conversation with one of the volunteer ushers. He turned out to be vice president of an energy company headquartered in a nearby suburb. Three weeks later he arranged an interview for Agnes with his company. Two weeks after that she was offered a job as an in-house paralegal.

Agnes learned an important lesson, one I preach to all my clients as the fifth part of my workplace philosophy, and one which I’ll be urging you to realize: in today’s work world, no one hires a stranger.

No matter how diligently you scour ads, no matter how extensive your network, and no matter how many informational interviews you go on, those traditional techniques alone won’t get you a job…not unless you’re able first to develop a relationship with the person who does the hiring.

Volunteering each week at a local soup kitchen will today lead to better job offers than going to a trade show.

Being an active member of the PTA is today a more effective job-search technique than being an active member of your professional association.

And singing in the annual community Christmas concert will generate more positive job leads than all the informational interviews in the world.

Incredible as it may sound, pursuing your personal interests isn’t just good for your heart and soul, it’s good for your wallet too.

Fred Peters learned the hard way that the world of job searching has changed. If you remember from chapter 1, Fred is the director of publications of a major Ivy League university and an avid golfer. Staff cuts and consolidations have taken what was always a stressful position and turned it into a nightmare. Fred decided to be proactive and start getting back in touch with the people in his network and start testing the waters. Based on his study of trade magazines and professional journals, it doesn’t seem there are many job openings in higher education. A visit to a meeting of a press group he belonged to resulted in his being overwhelmed with résumés. Apparently, everyone there was already out of work. Telephone calls to other business contacts asking for help in lining up informational interviews have been fruitless. Some people don’t even return his calls or e-mails. His mentor, a former manager, admitted to him that he hasn’t been able to get interviews for himself, let alone for Fred. To make matters worse, there are rumors that the new president of the university is looking to cut even more staff.

For years, most job openings were announced simply by putting a Help Wanted or Now Hiring sign in a store, office, or factory window. Even in today’s high-tech, sophisticated world it’s interesting to see how many businesses still use this traditional technique to find employees. Walk through all but the most economically depressed communities today and you’ll see a number of such simple requests for applications.

However, most jobs today are advertised in newspapers and/or magazines. One reason is that only a handful of businesses now have sufficient physical exposure to enough human traffic for those simple window signs to be effective. And, of course, by advertising in publications, businesses can pull from a much larger pool of potential candidates. That’s essential if you’re looking for people with particular skills and experiences. A beverage-distribution firm looking to hire an experienced wine salesperson fluent in Italian can’t count on many such folks walking by their office complex in a suburban industrial park. The fewer people who possess the desired combination of skills and experience, the more mass market the publications need to be for the ads to be effective.

Existing open positions are almost always advertised in one way or another. Even if the job is likely to be filled through an in-house promotion, the position may be advertised if for no other reason than meeting legal obligations. The great advantage of applying for jobs advertised in newspapers and magazines is that you know there’s a definite and immediate opening. Someone desperate to generate a stream of income as soon as possible can look to ads for immediate leads. That’s something I’ll get back to in a later chapter when I discuss what to do if you’re currently unemployed. Still, in recent years most of my clients, and I’ll wager a great many of you reading this book, have all but ignored help wanted ads. That’s because in the past twenty or thirty years it has become accepted wisdom that the best jobs aren’t advertised.

I think it was in the 1970s that people began to believe help wanted ads weren’t for elite job searchers. There
was
a great deal of truth to this belief. Many times, companies didn’t post wanted ads for positions, because they hadn’t yet fired the person holding the position. Rather than terminating someone the company felt was underperforming, there would be a discrete private job search. Only after a replacement was found would the current employee be let go. By keeping the potential job opening private a company could also, in effect, test the waters. If it didn’t find any candidates more attractive than its current employee, it would bite the bullet and keep him or her…at least for the moment. Because filling lower-level jobs is always easier — there are simply more candidates — this backdoor job filling was reserved for positions that were tougher to fill and, which, therefore, paid more. In fact, the harder the job was to fill, and the more it paid, the more likely the whole process would take place privately.

Sometimes a private job opening was created, not by the company’s disappointment, but by a candidate coming forward and offering him- or herself to the company. Let’s say a superb graphic artist privately went to an advertising agency and offered her services. The agency, blown away by the individual, decided to make a place for her even if one didn’t exist, either by terminating someone it felt was less competent than the new person, or by creating an entirely new position. In the 1970s and 1980s I saw this happen a great deal in very competitive businesses. For example, that graphic designer who approached the ad agency might have been working for a competing ad agency. By hiring her the agency not only helped itself, it hurt a competitor.