Skilled Workers

How to Pick the Best Career For You , Part 2

Let's face it. Searching for employment is a royal pain in the butt. Want to know the best way to get exposure to key company leaders and unpublicized opportunity with the least amount of stumbling?

Gain an audience by recognizing opportunity There's a sexier method to salsa into a great career with less tripping and more flair. Look for problems to solve and create a personalized solution. Find those challenges by spotting company movement of any kind, whether the change is good, bad or ugly. If you do this, you'll capitalize on an opportunity to be heard and get that coveted invitation to dance in the king's court.

Hot career tip: If you want to infiltrate an intended employer fortress, a feat that other job seekers assume impossible, remember that it's much easier if the inhabitants on the other side open the door for you.

Here are three things that you need to know to increase your chances of obtaining an insider's invite:

Resume blasting is as productive as sailing paper airplanes aimlessly into the wind

Traditional networking causes most job candidates to feel like hookers standing on a dimly-lit street corner soliciting interest from passersby. Online job searching, a passive mind-numbing activity, done without a target will suck the creative energy right out of you

You won't find that best job through traditional networking What happened to the prevailing idea that networking is the best career resource to find a new job? 'Networking is still one of the better methods to find employment but today it's used in a different way,' says Randy Stevens, President and CEO of R. L. Stevens & Associates Inc., a national career marketing firm based in Waltham, Massachusetts. 'In the fifth year of a negative economy, actually by the second year, networks get choked. Over the last few years these networks have been overused by people who had good networks.'

Traditional Networking has been replaced and redefined There's a better way to get doors open says Stevens. The concept of 'Greasing the Wheel,' has replaced the model of traditional networking. He explains, 'In this current employment cycle covering the past five years, traditional networking transitioned to becoming more meaningful for informational interviews to gather information, rather than directly finding a job. 'Greasing the Wheel' on the other hand, is a fresher approach because it ties or connects a personalized solution you've identified to an employer's need.' Your job search is then redefined from looking for employment openings to more proactively seeking a gateway to supply value and benefit as a solution provider.

Hunt for 'spot opportunities' to find the secret passageway to employers Increase your exposure to unpublicized job leads and customarily inaccessible decision makers by exploiting Spot Opportunities. These are indicators of movement within a company that can be triggers for hiring. They are the beginning of a hiring pattern and usually signal the development of a hiring initiative. Wisely and routinely using spot opportunities leaves your competition choking in the dust wondering how the heck you got inside.

Forget everything you've heard or know about finding a job Stop looking for a job and start proactively targeting employers who have problems or challenges you can solve. When you pick a job based on employer need rather than your own you immediately provide tangible value and benefit to busy decision makers and earn the right to be heard.

'Greasing the Wheel' is exposure-to-opportunity gone extreme The radical method of 'Greasing the Wheel' is rarely used by the job search masses because it involves taking considerable time to research industry and news sources and sniff out the possibilities and the players with a keen detective-like nose. However, if you keep doing things the way you're doing them now, you'll keep getting the same results. To see changes, in what you get, you need to change what you do. Go extreme.

A sneak peak into Part Three

About the author: Marta L. Driesslein, CECC is a senior management consultant for R.L. Stevens & Associates Inc., http://interviewing.com/ a career marketing firm and organization celebrating over 24 years of providing strategic marketing solutions for its clients' career transitioning needs