Job Search Mastery in 9 Steps

Originally posted at http://lightwork.ai/index.php/2019/01/31/job-search-mastery-in-9-steps/

What’s the right way to approach a job search?

While it’s different for everyone, there are some universal truths we’ve learned from helping hundreds of people find new jobs.

This is our guide to the essentials. We hope it helps you lock down your next position!

1. Define your process

A haphazard approach can produce good results but won’t do so reliably. Start your job search by defining a process for yourself.

The details of your process aren’t important as long as it accomplishes the following:

• Offers personal accountability — “I need to talk with one more company this week to hit my goal”
• Serves as a “bad cop” in negotiations — “I told myself I’d finish my process before accepting an offer.”
• Gives you guidelines for time-frames — “Can we do the onsite the week after? I’m taking the week off and scheduling all my interviews then.”

2. Prepare your quick pitch

Your pitch has two jobs: explain what you’re looking for and why you’re qualified to do it.

Continue to refine your pitch until someone else can deliver it on your behalf.

Why is this important?

At some point, someone will have to convince someone else that you’re good (e.g. prospective hiring manager and their boss) without your being there to deliver the message yourself. Make this job easy on them!

Example pitch:

“I want to help a mid-stage company build a world-class, data-driven PeopleOps function by leveraging my experience in Twitter’s PeopleOps team as the company IPO’ed.”

3. Update your materials

Update your public-facing materials (LinkedIn, Twitter, GitHub, resume, personal site, whatever) and make sure they tell the same story.

It’s weird to see on someone’s LinkedIn profile that they’re really into something — say, a new industry they want a job in — but no mention of it anywhere else.

4. Make your leads list

Your leads list is a list of companies with which you want to interview.

Set an uncomfortably aggressive target here — probably 2–3x whatever your gut was telling you before you read this sentence. Remember, these are just leads; it’s likely that you won’t be able to generate conversations with some portion of this list.

More leads → more options → better outcomes

This is not a recommendation to spread yourself too thin. You’ll want to bucket all companies into three categories:

• High priority
• Exploring
• Low priority

Approach a few low priority companies first to get into rhythm, but beware — the companies you’re least interested in may be most interested in you!

You can always politely decline a company’s advances by making your process bad cop:

“I’ve drummed up more activity than I was prepared for and I need to let my process run its course before I schedule more meetings. I’ll be in touch as soon as things shake out!”

5. Get introductions

Now that you’ve got the basics together, you’re ready to enlist help and get others involved.

Try this approach to generating introductions:

• Ask an existing connection to meet
• Before meeting, review their LinkedIn connections and pick desired intros
• At meeting, give your quick pitch and list each desired intro
• After meeting, write your connection a separate email for each person they said they’d introduce
• In each intro request, reiterate your quick pitch and write a sentence about how it may apply to this new connection

Example intro request:

“Hey Rachel, thanks for offering to introduce me to Rob. I’m really excited about what his team is doing and would love to talk with him about open roles.

I’m looking to help build a world-class, data-driven PeopleOps function in the mold of what we did at Twitter in preparing the company for IPO.”

In addition to leveraging your existing network, work with a good recruiter who can tell you about companies that are doing well, have talented teams, and are working on problems that may be of interest to you.

6. Do outreach

Cold messaging people can feel really awkward, so remember this: if your quick pitch is good (concisely explains what you want and why you’re qualified), someone hiring for your desired position is going to be really excited to hear from you.

Hiring is the biggest problem for most managers. You’re the solution!

Connect with people on LinkedIn who work at companies on your leads list. Include your quick pitch in the “add note” field and ask to buy them coffee near their office in exchange for your being able to ask them a few questions about working there.

This can be uncomfortable at first, but it is incredibly effective.

7. Apply

After you’ve tried everything else, it’s finally time to surrender to the the application process.

A dirty secret in the recruiting world is how often inbound applications are ignored, hence this being the last resort.

Keep track of where you’ve applied and when, and follow-up with non-responders (especially hiring managers) via email and LinkedIn.

8. Execute interviews

It’s preferable to keep timing aligned through the different phases of your process, so try to schedule all of your phone interviews and on-sites in separate week-long (or multi-week) blocks.

This puts you in a position to receive multiple offers at the same time, thereby dramatically improving your leverage in compensation negotiations.

For interview prep, besides brushing up on your field’s technical skills, focus on generating two lists of great questions: a list about the role and a list about the company.

Strong questions are those that require insight to generate and internal company knowledge to answer. Or, in other words, strong questions show off your understanding just by asking them and their answers give you information you can’t get elsewhere.

Generic, broad questions show a lack of creativity, interest, or both. Take advantage of the opportunity to shape the conversation and demonstrate understanding through high-quality questions.

9. Follow-up

Follow-ups can help if the company has concerns about your interest level, but you don’t want to sound like you’re putting all of your eggs in one basket:

Good:

“I’m really excited about the work you’re doing — especially the focus on X — and am looking forward to hearing about next steps.”

Bad:

“This is my dream job and I don’t want to work anywhere else!”

Both convey a high level of excitement, but the bad example reduces your negotiating leverage.

Note! You can use follow-ups to overcome potential objections. Let’s pull back the curtain:

After your onsite, the interview panel will likely sit down and compare notes about how the interview went. These “debriefs” generally happen within 24–48 hours of your interview.

If you walk out of an interview realizing you blanked on a question you knew the answer to, immediately email your interview and explain your mistake and the correct answer. You have the ability to change the mind of an interviewer up until the point that they report back to their team; after that, it’s as good as written in stone.

Conclusion

That’s it! Repeat these steps as needed and watch the offers roll in. Once you have an offer (or offers), it’s time to grab your negotiation hat and get to work. This post is long enough already though — the Lightwork Guide to Job Negotiations is coming soon.

Looking for top-tier opportunities in Product and Engineering in San Francisco? Reach out to us directly (hello@lightwork.ai) and we’ll get in touch!