The #1 Strategy to Find Your Job Faster

The one thing that I want to show you is what I call the marketing funnel, and conceptually, I know a lot of you know what this is, and some of you even have coffee mugs with this on it, because yes, I got a coffee mug with this on it, so that you never forget Andy's concepts of how to actually bring yourself to market. I'm going to explain what that funnel is, and you're going to hear more about it in the teaching package. However, most job seekers that I see, not only do they struggle with how to market themselves, but the actual mechanics of bringing themselves to market and trying to attain job interviews, the resume, your brand, your professional brand, or personal brand, or network itself, all of that is designed to get you a job interview. Then you get into the job interview, you sell yourself to attain the job offer. The problem in the searching aspect is that there are multiple grave mistakes that people make, and there are a lot of time wasters that they introduce into the process. Without going into all of them in this little executive summary here I'm giving you, I want to mention to you that one of the biggest time wasters that you could possibly do for your job search is applying for jobs. Meaning, if you are taking your time to package up your resume and put it into the applicant trashing system, which is the ATS, which is the corporate portal, or career site, or place where you upload your resume that's LinkedIn included, that's Indeed, that's Monster, it's Hot Jobs, it's companyxyz.com's personal site. It's any of that stuff. If you are submitting your resume, I count that as zero minutes spent on your job search. It literally does not count. It is the biggest waster, and one of the worst ways to actually get a job. Yes, I know some of you will attain your job that way, but from a statistical standpoint, from a statistical standpoint, it is one of the least effective ways to get a job, nay trying to chase executive recruiters. Okay, so that's the first thing. The second thing is, once people are reaching out to individuals, or even if they're applying online and they get a bite from an employer, or a hiring official, or a recruiter, or talent acquisition director, or an HR person, they spend a lot of time chasing them. Meaning, hey, I'm just following up. I thought we were going to get together. I thought you were going to get back to me this week. It's been two weeks. A lot of that stuff, what I call the exchanges, and you do a lot of chasing. Those are huge time wasters. Six years ago, before one of my live office hour shows, at the end of the year, I was trying to illustrate yet another way of what a well-designed job search looks like. If you take a look at this, everything in your life, everything in business, everything in marketing, everything in sales, everything in building a widget is like a funnel. At the top, you try a lot of things. What I tried to illustrate here with this funnel is that up at the top, there is a wide grouping of opportunities. If you are spending time in your job search, 90%, so I'm talking nine out of every 10 job searching hours, effort of hours, should be spent in this top section, which I called resume sendouts. That is not resume applications in the career portals or the applicant trashing system. Those count as zero. Resume sendouts and activities that are associated with it entail everything from you targeting a company, you researching companies, you researching people, you creating your resume, you creating a cover letter. When I say cover letter, I mean a cover message. It could be an email. It could be an actual letter. It can be a LinkedIn in-mail. It could be any medium you're using to communicate the fact that you are reaching out to someone, whether you know them, don't know them, or getting an introduction to them, cold targets. I don't care how it is, but you are actually taking your time to thoughtfully get them your resume or to take an act of some sort with the intention of communicating with them about either getting a job with them, facilitating an introduction, or some form thereof. That's 90%. Nine out of every 10 minutes should be spent in one of those activities. Then what's going to happen is some of those people are going to get back to you. Of all of your minutes, you should be spending 1% emailing them back and forth, where do I meet you? Where's the coffee shop? What time are we going to do that? Give me the Zoom link. Hey, thank you so much for the interview. I really enjoyed meeting you. That's what I'm talking about when I say exchanges, but what a lot of you do is you spend no time up here. You spend 100% of your time stuffing your resume into an applicant trashing system. Then you spend an inordinate amount of time, not just physical, actual time, but emotional energy, worrying about people who are not getting back to you, and you spend a ton of time in these exchanges emailing back and forth. It's a waste. Waste. You shouldn't be emailing anything other than logistics. Then you go into interviews. Yeah, you're going to get some interviews. Yes, you're going to need to prep. One hour of the 10 hours should be spent prepping for your interviews, negotiating your salary, and so on, and then, boop, out pops multiple offers in one job. That's about 10%, let's call it nine. If you do this, you're going to get your job faster. If you don't do this, you might get your job fast, but it will be blind luck and randomness. I want you to recognize this. When I say feed the funnel, so I'm going to answer some of you today, you're going to hear about boss hunting, and you're going to hear about a bunch of stuff. When I say feed the funnel, this is what I mean. It doesn't mean spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to get your beautifully crafted resume to fit into an applicant trashing system or an online application that you have very, very little time or little chance of being seen. Who loves the marketing funnel? I know I got a lot of mainstayers here that come visit me every week. I might get a tattoo of this somewhere on my body. Although I'm reserving this untattooed skin, I have some ideas of what my first tattoo is going to be, but I think this has got to be somewhere on the body before I croak. Are we loving it?