How to organize your job search to find the right job faster (Part III)

A step-by-step guide to set up Hubspot’s free CRM to ensure that you never lose track of a job opportunity again

So at this point you have an active Hubspot CRM with an updated pipeline and enabled email tracking. Now we’re going to get to the real meat of the issue and customize the specific information you’re tracking and what you have available to you at a glance.

Let’s get back at it…

Creating custom contact properties (about as exciting as it sounds but pretty important)

At this point more check marks are done than not. Reward yourself by pausing to watch this hilarious video (also, don’t act like that at job fairs)

Click on the next check mark, and then on the “Edit Custom Properties” button. This will bring you to the “Contacts” part of the Settings page, which will look just like this:

The tutorial is going to prompt you to click “Edit properties,” but I’m not here to waste your time so let’s skip to “Manage portal defaults.”

This section will let you select which data fields are shown to you throughout the CRM. You want to stay lean here. As an unrelated general rule of thumb, if you ever end up setting up other CRMs, do you best to only show your users data fields that are relevant to them.

Clicking on that will pull this up:

Go ahead and click into “Contact Information” and select the following fields to move them over to “Current Properties”:

• First Name
• Last Name
• Company Name
• Job Title
• Last Contacted — if you’re serious about any given job opportunity and the attached main contact, this will help you ensure that you’re keeping the conversation live.
• Email
• Mobile Phone Number
• Phone Number — typically this is their desk line but this is becoming more and more redundant as people are moving over to their all mobile lives.
• Street Address
• City
• Associated Deals — this will link up with what job opportunities this contact is related to (your contacts can, and ideally should, be a resource for multiple different job opportunities so don’t cast them away if you don’t get one of the jobs you were targeting).

Don’t forget to press save, and when you’re brought back to the settings page, click on Companies then click back into “Manage portal defaults” again. We aren’t done yet.

Now we’re going to set the relevant fields for the companies you will be interviewing with. Click on “Company Information” and select the following fields:

• Name
• Industry
• Description — you’ll be able to update this.
• Company Domain Name — here you can store their web address; I know there’s also a “Web Address Field.” I don’t know what to tell you. As far as I can tell it’s redundant. Sometimes the world doesn’t make sense.
• Street Address
• City
• Associated Contacts — this will help you keep track of who you’re in contact with at the company.
• Associated Deals — “Deals” is just our code word for “Job Opportunities,” a pretty important thing to keep an eye on.
• Last Activity Date — I’m a big fan of putting this everywhere. If you haven’t engaged with anyone at a company in over a week, sirens should be exploding in your head. This will help you determine when to panic.

Not done yet.

After you finish updating your “Company” default display settings, you’ll be brought back to the general Settings page. Click over to “Deals”.

Right now we’re going to set up how you track the job opportunities themselves. Click “Manage portal defaults,” and select the following fields:

• Deal Name — this will be the job title.
• Deal Stage — this will place your job opportunity in your pipeline that we set up earlier.
• Close Date — this is a guess as to when you think you could reasonably receive a job offer. This is especially helpful if you’re one of those weird people who rely on their job for money and would therefore prefer to have a rough idea as to when you might have one.
• Deal Description — it’s always good to have some bite sized notes on each of these potential opportunities.
• Amount — typically this is used to indicate how large of a deal you might be closing in a sale, but in this situation, I prefer to use it as a ranking of how excited I am about an opportunity on a scale of 1–10.
• Last Activity Date — I’m going to make you put this every single place I can, so help me God.
• Closed Lost Reason — when a sales person has a deal fall apart they tend to refer to it as “Closed Lost.” It’s important to take a second to learn from those moments. Odds are you’re not going to get every job you go after, but if you learn from the ones you don’t get, you can address your mistakes and find yourself in a better position to go after the next one.

Click save, and you’ll be taken back to your Settings page. There’s a probability that you’re going to have something unique about your job search. If there’s a special input field you would like to add to keep track of that unique thing, feel free to take a minute to do that now before clicking back up into the “Setup progress” bar.

Import Contacts?

You can do this if you have all your contacts in a CSV (which you can do by running an export on Gmail, Outlook, or wherever else you have information saved), but in all honesty, odds are this is just going to complicate your database. I’d recommend staying lean and importing contacts one at a time as they become relevant to your search.

So… What’s next?

Now you get to looking. Make sure to keep this system updated and you should shave weeks to months off your job search.

If you have any questions on how to do this or if you hit any walls, feel free to hit me up directly at darr.marshall(at)gmail.com. If not, good luck.

The job search can be rough, but if you get smart you can get through it a little faster.

Marshall Darr is currently wrapping up his tenure as Tradecraft Labs Entrepreneur in Residence where he launched the company Captivate Real Estate.

If you’d like to know a little bit more about him feel free to check out this snazzy landing page he just completed where he’s condensed his entire life into five minutes worth of reading.

Big thanks to Ariane Mohamadi ( @MoAriane) and McKenzie Darr for help editing this post. Both are top notch people. I highly recommend being friends with them if you can.