Best way to find a job? Make it top priority
Michael Flores says it’s one thing to look for a job but it’s something else entirely to look for a job.
“I was definitely one of those people who was looking but I wasn’t really looking, at least not hard,” says the 28-year-old Chicagoan, an IT specialist who was laid off in June after his company relocated to San Antonio, Texas. “I had two months of severance and at least six months of unemployment so I got lulled into this fake sense of security.”
But that security came to a quick end in November when Flores learned his landlord wouldn’t let him renew his lease if he didn’t have a job. “I didn’t really think about the whole proof of employment section on the lease so I kind of freaked out,” Flores says. “The last thing in the world a guy in his 20s wants to do is move back home.”
But that’s what he did. And on Day One of his new living arrangement, Flores started looking for a job. “Really looking,” he says.
Setting patterns
Up until the move back to his childhood home in Chicago’s Portage Park neighborhood, Flores had been glancing at job sites on the Internet and checking his LinkedIn pages on occasion, applying for jobs that piqued his interest. “I took a pretty casual approach to my search the first week after I was laid off and I just stuck with that approach,” he says. “But that first day, after my mom made a ton of noise on her way to work to make sure I woke up and my dad left me a list of 20 things to do around the house, I had a whole new attitude.”
Flores says his desire to move out was fueled by embarrassment. “Don’t get me wrong, I love my parents, but I don’t want to be there and they don’t want me there,” he says. “And my mom hates telling people I moved back home but when I’m with her, she tells every person she sees.”
Instead of picking up where he left off, Flores started at the beginning, creating a new resume from scratch and updating his profile on LinkedIn and various other sites across the web. “Those pictures of me on Facebook carrying around Old Styles from about five years ago – gone,” he says.
Most importantly, Flores set a new pattern and began treating each day like a work day, leaving with his mother in the morning to head to the AustinIrving Library to do research or a nearby Starbucks to make phone calls. “I had to get out of the house,” he says. “Too much temptation to eat, sleep and watch TV in the house.”
Flores says he comes home for lunch most days and stays home, but he works in the basement to keep distractions to a minimum. “I’m surprised at how much I do each day, whether it’s scan for jobs or contribute to online discussions,” he says. “I do a lot of reading and a lot of learning.”
Time well spent
Erin Perkins, a career coach in New York, says she is a big believer setting patterns. In fact, it’s a key element of what she calls the NOD approach to finding a job. “It’s not necessarily a method, it’s more like a philosophy,” Perkins says.
NOD, Perkins tells clients, stands for Not One Day and the phrase itself has two implications. First, Not One Day stands for not letting one day go by without taking an active role in your job search. “Whether you like it or not, jobs are not going to come to you. And the longer you sit at home building a cocoon around yourself thinking that one day you’ll magically reappear as this butterfly is just magical thinking,” Perkins says. “What you need to do is get out of bed every morning, take a shower, grab your laptop and get to work finding work. There is no passive path. You have to take an active role.”
In addition, Perkins suggests Not One Day accounts for the fact that it will take job seekers longer then one day to find a better job. “For years, we have subscribed to this philosophy that one day we will just get lucky and the job will just come to our doorstep. That’s not the way it works,” she says. “Job searches are methodical. You don’t take one giant stride and find a job. If anything, you take a series of small steps, tiny steps, even, before you increase your stride. That’s how you find the work.”
You begin tweaking your resume to use the right keywords. When you send out that resume the next week, those keywords will get picked up by a company’s applicant selector and passed on to HR department.