How I turned my unemployment frustration into a massive learning opportunity.

My first attempt at building a job pipeline

But I wasn’t quite ready to give up just yet. Taking breaks from studying for my last MBA exams, I started making a list of the most interesting high-tech companies in the country.

I specifically started searching on the following channels:

• their website
• LinkedIn job page
• university career portal
• insider recommenders who could possibly provide me truthful insights about the company/role and recommend me to the relevant Director.

As a result, within some days, my résumé started appearing in the mailbox of a significant number of well connected friends from my network, who kindly forwarded it as they heard about interesting opportunities. Another resource was the assistance of high-tech industry head hunters, who were referred by satisfied customers with whom I had worked with.

Soon enough I was contacted by HR/Sales Directors from a number of companies, some bigger and more prestigious than others. In some cases I was invited for on-site interviews and others I never heard back from them.

Overall though, my job search was not going well.

I felt that I was running after companies instead of them running after me.

I had excellent academic education, great and relevant B2B sales experience but I couldn’t make these companies want me the way I wanted them. Plus, I was running out of time. I had just made the biggest purchase of my life and took out a mortgage to finance it, which certainly added to my being in mode A) more and more. I kept getting rejections and after some weeks I felt that my approach was not working.

I didn’t know how many companies still had my CV lying around or whether they were actually thinking about hiring me. Whenever I asked, they’d defer the decision by another week or more and I would just accept that as an answer.

The turning point: managing my job search like I manage my leads

One day I shared my situation with a brilliant entrepreneur and good friend of mine, who got excited to join this ‘job search’ project by consulting me along the process. His first question was “May I see your job positions pipeline?”.

The question intrigued me, as ‘pipeline’ is a lead/opportunity management tool I used when managing customer prospects, but for ‘job leads’ I would have never considered a CRM tool.

Instead I thought that a mere spreadsheet with fields like company name/website/LinkedIn page/role description/date submitted was already more than I had seen with other friends from college. My friend observed it and asked: “Can you see the different stages and key advantages of each of your opportunities?”.

On that same day another brilliant friend asked me about a job interview I had had that day. Specifically, he asked whether I “had pushed hard to close the deal on the spot or at least moved the opportunity to the next stage, which is on-site interview”. At this point their message was getting clearer and I realized that I was missing something: I was not strongly applying my 3+ years of salesmanship mindset on the job search.

I felt embarrassed. Why wasn’t I selling myself with the same attitude as the software solutions I had sold?

This was the moment when I switched from mode A) to mode B). I could feel how I was visualizing an awesome (and maybe obvious) idea clicking on my mind and felt compelled to take action.

My second attempt at building a job pipeline: the real deal

After dinner I stayed awake carrying on with the job search, so I hunted for a CRM solution that offered a free trial, Gmail integration and would be quick to set up. This implies that any CRM that requires importing a CSV and entering leads manually would not be relevant. I tried one of the top CRM brands but it definitely exceeded my requirements, so reading forums here and there I came across Streak, which exactly matched my needs:

To design a CRM pipeline within Gmail that allows tagging of selected e-mails into categories (companies), creating fields like stages, contact person, check boxes, submission/last follow up date, etc — with everything being customizable.

When setting it up I picked the HR Hiring template and slightly renamed the stages. Within 20 minutes I managed to set up my entire ‘Jobs pipeline’. Reenergized, I started applying to more and more jobs that would then be added to the CRM. This is how it looked some days ago, I blurred the details but you will understand the concept:

Let me explain the details of this system:

1. Overall methodology: As opposed to a customer pipeline in which my goal is to move the highest number of relevant opportunities to the ‘won’ stage; my ‘jobs pipeline’ main goal is to bring the highest number of relevant opportunities into the ‘offer negotiation’ stage, so that I can mark the best option as ‘won’, which means ‘hired’ while rejecting all the others.
2. Deal stages: It is true that the stages created are not 100% sequential and sometimes I have to skip or delay a stage, according to the company’s recruiting process.
3. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): In any sales job, I get measured by certain metrics. The number one metric is always how much sales I brought. The second metric is usually what my pipeline looks like, so the amount of future sales I’m highly likely to bring. Then there’s many more metrics, how many days I take to close a lead (the less the better), the average deal size and so on. Applying this to my job search, my number one metric became the quantity of deals in my pipeline (count 26 in the above pic). The number two metric was the stage of any deal, trying to get to move all deals to as many offers as I can. So over the last few weeks, I’ve worked hard on increasing that number and moving deals down the funnel.
4. Benchmarking myself: By confronting the submission date versus last follow up date and not allowing it to be more than some days, I force myself to constantly push all opportunities to the next stage. My methodology is the following: if I applied to a small/medium size company, I’ll give it 3 business days to receive a response before moving its probability from ‘high’ to ‘medium’ or from ‘medium’ to ‘low’, until I end up closing the opportunity as ‘closed lost’, or in this case ‘rejected’.
5. Creating a manageable pipeline: Of course, I could have scored my company’s preference by a combination of different factors: product growth potential, company environment, office proximity to my home, salary/commission structure and working hours. However, as with my sales experience, I didn’t want to spend more time managing my pipeline than actually selling. So while this ‘scoring’ parameter would be nice, it would also be too time consuming and I can still do it for the offers in the last stage.
6. Pipeline review with my “VP of Sales”: Twice a week, I sit down with that first friend and he constantly challenges me and my pipeline. Is the amount of current open opportunities significantly higher than in our last meeting? What’s the status of each deal? Are there patterns in the kinds of rejections we’re getting? I would need to the same in a prospect opportunity pipeline, as it’s risky to count on a pipeline that relies on 2–3 hot opportunities, since they can fall through for a variety of reasons. Likewise I have to keep the pipeline forecast growing and evolving all the time.

That’s the CRM, if you’re currently looking for a job or about to start looking for one, I’d recommend being as analytical as you can be and managing your pipeline actively.

What does the future hold for me?

Over the last few weeks, I’ve turned a slightly desperate situation into one that I am fairly comfortable with. Heck, sometimes I’m even excited when I get to move a deal from one stage to the next. I’d be lying if I said that I have everything figured out or that my mortgage is not stressing me out a bit. But I feel like I’ve got a grip on things, more deals are coming in and I’m moving them from stage to stage. Suddenly it does feel like companies are running after me.

This is my message to you: If you want a great job, make sure you act like you care. Companies want employees that make a conscious decision to join their cause not because they’re the only company around but because the applicant honestly believes that this represents the best use of their time. They want self starters who turn challenges into opportunities.

As a sales person, I’m turning my challenge of finding employment into an opportunity to learn selling in the unchartered territory of job search.

I wrote this post to help fellow job searchers apply some of the skills of us sales people to situations they also encounter in real life. At the end of the day, we’re all selling. Let’s make job searching less lonely and share best practices so we all find the job of our dreams.