Laura's Winning Ideas

My brother is wondering whether he’ll have to launch a job search after 20 years with his employer. Then yesterday, I met another fellow looking for work who is looking for tips.

As a consultant, I look for work constantly. Here’s my advice for the first few hours after you realize you might leave your current employment.

BUSINESS CARDS - 10-20 minutes and $15.00

Get business cards printed right away so you can start handing them out both to folks you know at work, and to others you meet along the way. Start handing them out at work ASAP. When you leave, you won’t have the same access to folks, and will regret not getting your contact information out before you lose touch.

Move fast on getting the business cards handed out. i.e. take them with you always, and give one to EVERYONE you see. You can’t predict the next layoff, and you want your card in the hands of folks who may leave before you. They’ll get the idea and soon there will be many of you exchanging cards. If an executive questions you, explain you don’t want to miss the chance to be on everyone’s Christmas Card list.

Don’t stuggle to come up with some pithy marketing phrase, nor claim to be a consultant. That’s silly, and everyone sees through it. Just keep it basic so you can hand it out liberally without wondering whether you want to expose your job search to each individual.

Have the cards printed with your name and contact information (Mailing address (for fedex), phone, email) and LinkedIn URL (see below). Cheesy “pitches” on a business card look desperate.  Don’t use a job title. Every firm has their own vernacular, and you don’t want to be typecast because you put a title on your card.

Leave the back of the card blank so folks can make notes on it about their meeting with you.

Don’t buy microperf paper and print your own business cards. They are expensive (you’ll be needing many cards) and everyone recognizes them as home-made. You need to look professional in your search.

VistaPrint.com is the printer I use. For $10 (to remove the VistaPrint imprint on the back of the business cards) you can get professional business cards that look great. If layoffs are already announced, walk to a local printer and get cards printed immediately. If you don’t have time to get your LinkedIn profile up, order 250 cards immediately and re-print when you have your LinkedIn profile available.

My brother is wondering whether he’ll have to launch a job search after 20 years with his employer. Then yesterday, I met another fellow looking for work who is looking for tips.

As a consultant, I look for work constantly. Here’s my advice for the first few hours after you realize you might leave your current employment.

RESUME MASTER FILE - 2 hours plus many hours over time

Here are several of my own resumes, using a template I especially like as a hiring manager, and my own master resume. Download these files and look at the differences:

1. Master Resume
2. Sample Resume
3. Electronic Resume
4. Another Sample Resume

You’ll see there are differences in each resume, tailored for the specific opportunity for which I was proposing. I would recommend that you begin by creating a “master resume” from which you can pull paragraphs for each job you seek. This way, you have one place where you put all the things you remember along the way, so they are available the next time you write a resume.

I’m a consultant, so I have to send a new resume with each new proposal for work. If you find work quickly, your master resume will be tucked away and waiting for your next job search. If this job search takes longer than you would like, having a master resume file will save you lots of time as you respond to opportunities.

As you go along, you’ll remember tidbits that help qualify you for a specific opportunity and which should be added FIRST to your master resume, and second to the resume which triggered the memory. Your master resume grows over time. The guideline I use is that you should have almost one page for every year of your career in your master resume.

A few months ago, I lost an opportunity because I was on deadline for a client and couldn’t respond with a proposal within 24 hours. Another person answered with a full proposal and got the contract.  If I’d been more hungry, I could have sent a resume right away, with the promise of sending a proposal the following week. The market is swift, and you need to make preparations that allow you to send a tailored resume out within a very short period of time.

No one prints a stack of resumes anymore.

LINKED IN – 20 minutes

Recruiters hang out at LinkedIn. You and your colleagues will scatter to the winds over time and LinkedIn is a good place to find them again. So, create a profile on LinkedIn.com. Get the free account.

Keep it basic at first. You’ll be able to enhance it and change it as you perfect your offering. For now, just get it on-line. You will receive a URL for your own page. Put this on your business cards (see above).

GET THIS BOOK – 5 minutes and $12.00

Damn Good Resume Guide by Yana Parker

There is an industry specializing in books on job searching. You can look through those later. For now, you need this slim volume so you can get help writing your best resume.

LINKED IN Stage 2 -  2 hours plus occasionally  over time

Start acquiring connections. Search for your current firm, and other firms for which you’ve worked. Invite people you know to link to you. DON’T invite folks who won’t recognize your name. Anyone you invite can click a button to say they don’t know you, and LinkedIn will ban you with just a few of these.

Then search your alma maters (you can search by the years you were there) to find classmates.

Send me an invitation to link.

I always write a personal note when I send an invitation. I don’t want to take chances that my name isn’t an immediate trigger for them. Just a sentence about finding them on LinkedIn and remember when you worked together on the widget project, or commiserated over the term project in Econ class.

For the time being, accept all invitations to link. There are some folks who work LinkedIn very hard to acquire links. Having a few of these folks in your network will be helpful when you start using LinkedIn for your job search.

Later, you’ll be more selective. I tend to reject invitations from recruiters, but then, I’m not using LinkedIn for a job search. Your experience may vary. Needless to say, meaningful links are more valuable than strangers. You will have difficulty using a recruiter to get your job inquiry forwarded to someone, which is the purpose of having a link. (more on this later)