Tag: Job Search

Where is the Job Market Going?

With the current financial crisis, there is tremendous uncertainty in our economy. This is most obvious in the financial markets after Monday’s decline.  The markets are worried and investors react to increasing risk by selling.

Now the decline in stocks doesn’t directly affect the job market. In some respects, it’s more of a symptom than a driving force. Unfortunately, because it is a symptom of the risk in our economy, we have to recognize the risk to the job market.

The Credit Crisis

For most people, the credit crisis has had no direct impact on them. The people are feeling this are the people that need to borrow money, and in reality, these people are not individuals, but corporations. The auto industry just received $25 billion in loan guarantees from the government. In a normal economic climate, it’s unlikely this would have been necessary. They could have borrowed from private entities, but today, that money isn’t available.  Banks are very reluctant to loan money.

The biggest problem with the credit crisis is how it is stopping the expansion that should be occurring. With the decline in the dollar, manufacturing firms are finding it much easier to export, and much easier to replace imports. We continue to see the job market in manufacturing hold steady (outside of areas with heavy auto industry concentrations). What we’re not seeing is a boom in expansion. Manufacturing has been at capacity for a while, but new plants are not being built on a wide scale.

The cause of this is two-fold. First, companies can’t borrow because of the credit crisis. Second, there’s a fear that the economy will get worse and an expansion won’t be needed. The effect of these factors is to limit the growth in the parts of our economy that are doing well.

The Job Market

The New York Times had an article Monday about how the job market could be affected in a significantly different way as compared to past downturns. The article, “Does the Financial Crisis Threaten Your Job,” discusses how in past recessions, companies cut back unskilled positions most. Skilled positions tended to be retained as highly skilled workers were too valuable in the long term and too difficult to replace.

The article predicts that this downturn will be exactly the opposite. Individuals with Bachelor’s degrees and more advanced degrees will be hurt much more than the lower levels of our economy. This poses a significant challenge for college seniors, as the job market in December and May could be bleak.

How to Adapt

Dealing with a tight job market requires a lot more work. Start by networking very aggressively. Try to find a contact in the companies you are targeting that will refer you for a position. This can greatly improve your chances.

One of the most important aspects of your search is to have a strong positioning statement. This is the core statement of value that you bring to the table. Many job seekers state that they are good at a particular job or skill. In a tight job market, being qualified and capable aren’t enough. Companies focus on hiring the best talent. This requires standing out from your competition.

With our interview coaching, we focus on uncovering the accomplishments and experiences that demonstrate how an individual has been successful and has added unique value to their employers. If you’re having trouble doing this, get help.

In interviews, you need to expand upon your positioning statement. You can do this in the answer to the Tell Me About Yourself Question. You should also reinforce the value you offer throughout the interview. Job seekers that can’t do this well often interview once and have the process stall. They don’t get another interview and they don’t get an outright rejection. The process just grinds to a halt.

The reason for this is that the hiring manager doesn’t have a great reason to hire or reject the candidate. They can see the individual could do the job, but they can’t get excited about hiring them. Instead, they say they will think about the person more but nothing changes. Eventually, the company finds someone that gives a compelling reason to be hired – and they get the job.

Bottom Line: Work on developing your positioning statement with a compelling reason why you should be hired, focused on the value you will provide the company.

When to Follow Up After an Interview

One question I’ve been asked a lot is when should a job seeker follow up with an employer. The answer depends on how far into the process you are.

If you sent a resume to a hiring manager that doesn’t know you, it’s likely you will hear back within a week or two if they have an interest. If you haven’t heard anything after a couple weeks, you can try a follow up email or a phone call. (Emailing a resume is ok, but if you can get referred into the company by someone, or if you cold call the hiring manager, your more likely to get a close look.)

If you have interviewed with the company, either a phone screen or face-to-face, the hiring manager may have provided you with an estimate of when you will hear back from them. This isn’t always the case. If you don’t know their process, it can be very tough to guess. Some companies move fast and will get in touch after a day or two. Others will let weeks pass after an interview before they move to the next step.

If they have given you a time frame, wait until a couple days after they said they would be in touch. At that point, a phone call won’t be out of line. If they haven’t given a time frame, I would generally recommend waiting a couple weeks.

What you don’t want to do is call before they consider it reasonable. For example, I worked on a search where the division president was out the country for an extended time. The company specifically instructed the candidate that they would not be in touch for more than 3 weeks, and they were very interested in moving forward to a final interview after that. At the two week mark, the candidate was very worried about why he hadn’t heard anything. Calling at that point would just demonstrate impatience, an inability to follow instructions and a level of desperation that would hurt the candidate’s chances.

So, what do you do if the company said they are going to make an offer? Depending on the company, putting together an offer could take some time. With a slow economy, many businesses have put procedures in place to slow the amount of hiring they are doing. They are still hiring, but are trying to make sure they only fill the most critical positions. This often means that a position needs to be approved by a much higher level executive than usual, and this can take time.

If an offer is forthcoming, I wouldn’t follow up for at least a week. Ten days is good rule of thumb. Of course, if they say it will take two weeks to put an offer together, wait at least 2 ½ weeks to call.

One final thing to remember… if the hiring process is going well and the company is staying in touch every week or so, don’t push the issue. When they tell you they are going to make an offer, there is very little you can do to improve the situation. What can happen is the additional contacts can give the company a reason to not make the offer.

Wall Street Job Search

In New York this year, there have been over 49,000 layoffs in the financial sector. Lehman contributed a lot of those and other firms had their share. The job market on Wall Street is going to be tough for the foreseeable future. So what do you do if you’re a finance professional in NY?

Although the economic situation on Wall Street has many unique aspects, the challenges facing the job seekers there are common in other sectors and regions. Many job seekers are in markets with more competition than available jobs.

To get hired in a highly competitive job market, it is essential to demonstrate how you will provide more value to a company than other job seekers. It’s not good enough to be capable of doing a job. There are a lot of capable people available. When an industry has some big companies downsize, a lot of good people end up on the market. The firms that are hiring have the ability to pick and choose the best available.

Talent and Potential

The key to getting hired in this type of environment is to demonstrate a higher talent level and greater potential than everyone else. This doesn’t require having the most experience or the best education. It requires the ability to show a track record of accomplishment, growth and success, demonstrating the value you will provide.

In every job, there are qualities that differentiate success from failure. The first step is identifying those qualities. I’m always surprised when I speak with someone they can’t explain what success looks like in the jobs they have held. This is much more common than it should be. Review the positions you have had and the position you are seeking to identify the three to five most important results that the position should deliver. These should be tangible results directly related to the success of the company.

The second step is to review your performance against each measure. Identify where you were successful and where you weren’t. Ideally, you will be able to describe how your successes contributed to the overall goals and success of the company.  To be most effective, develop specific examples of how you contributed value to the company. 

Finally, determine how your past successes would benefit a current employer. Will you generate sales and increase revenues? Will you cut costs and boost net income? Will you improve quality or customer service?

The key is to show three things on your resume and in your interviews:

  • Will you do the job successfully

  • Will you add value beyond the core responsibilities of the position

  • Will you develop and grow to contribute in new ways in the future

If you demonstrate you can do these three things, you will have a leg up on the vast majority of your competition. Most people focus on demonstrating just the ability to do the job successfully.  In a tight labor market, when companies are desperate to hire, that’s fine.  In a weak labor market, there’s to much competition and the job seekers that show they will add the most value beyond just doing their job will get hired. 

Companies are still hiring. The challenge for many job seekers is showing their true potential. Work on demonstrating your record of achievement and potential for success and you will achieve better results in your search.

Where Is The Hidden Job Market?

There is currently a discussion on LinkedIn Answers about whether a hidden job market exists and the common belief that the majority of jobs are never posted.  I posted an answer, but a much better answer was posted a little while later by Gerry Crispin of CareerXroads.  CareerXroads does some great research of the job market and Gerry’s answer provides some excellent insight. 

The original question on LinkedIn was:

Does anyone have a statistic to back up the old 80/20 rule on networking? i.e. 80% of jobs are never posted

Here’s Gerry’s answer: 

The statement is not true. It never was but it arose as a legacy of the print classified culture pre-internet. In those days the Sunday classifieds section of newspapers defined "a published lead" and clearly they represented no more than 20% of the actual positions open. Today, more than 95% of all positions are published – primarily on the websites of the various firms that have approved them. The "hidden job market" has nothing to do with the opening being hidden – it is now all about the transparency of what the job really requires, the firm, the hiring manager, etc.

Networking is absolutely not about uncovering the "hidden market" as leads – that’s just a sadly misleading image that still sends job seekers down blind alleys.

For a job seeker:

  • Networking can be about sharing leads with others in a disciplined way so as to leverage the research of many.
  • Networking can be about obtaining unpublished information about the published leads to gain a competitive edge when interviewed.
  • Networking can be about identifying and reaching out to individuals in target firms where you have seen published leads or have reason to anticipate that a new opening will be approved…for one reason…to obtain permission for that person to be your "employee referral."

The real story about referrals is not that nearly 1/3 of positions are reported as being filled from employee referrals. Instead it’s that fact that so many positions are filled from so few referrals that is important. Nearly 1 of every 4 referrals results in a hire!

By my calculation [and I do have data] job seekers applying for a position with an employee referral are 70 times more likely to be hired than w/o one. (Even a third party recruiter putting forth several candidates is more likely to get his/her candidate past finalist to new hire if the candidate has an internal referral.)

It is better to say: The 20% of jobseekers who managed to find a job without networking probably took 80% longer than their colleagues who did. I would also suggest that they also 80% more likely to perform below average than their colleagues who network….and 80% less likely to know it.

The conclusion is pretty clear.  Make sure you’re networking to improve the information you have and utilize relationships to get referred into a company.  According to Jerry’s stats… getting a referral into a company improves your chances by 70 times!