If you want to know how the hiring authority thinks.........

I'll tell you

I've worked with hundreds of direct hiring authorities, many of whom were repeat clients - CEOs, VPs, COOs, Directors - and seen over 500,000 resumes (and climbing). 
You're getting 22 years of the hiring authority's viewpoint, not mine.

What else makes me different from other coaches?
Getting a job is a sales process.  I've been a top producer on straight commission for 22 years.  Not only do I know hiring authorities, but because of my background in sales,
I know the psychology of how people think, respond, and why they do what they do. 

Thinking "I need a job.....any job...." will lengthen your search, not shorten it

In 22 years of consulting to hiring authorities who made the actual hiring decisions, I found that 99% of all candidates - from C-level executives to entry-level candidates - have no idea what they're doing when it comes to finding a new job....and most don't even realize it.

But you know what?  That's okay!

 

Why should you know what you're doing?  Finding a job isn't your area of expertise!  If you've been employed with the same company for a long time, you're not very good at finding a new job.  And if you've had lots of jobs, you're still not very good at it, or you wouldn't have held so many.

Finding a job is frightening and tough to do.  If you're employed, you find yourself paralyzed..... growing unhappier every day.  If you're unemployed, you know hundreds of people are after the same position you are.

So you post your resume on job boards and hear from a few recruiters.  You scour the ads and attend networking meetings.  You put up your LinkedIn profile and join groups.  You submit your resume online (following all the directions)...but time passes and nothing.

No response to your resume submittals.  Recruiters don't call you back.  Or they send your resume to the client but don't produce.  Your networking contacts are unemployed, not much help, or nothing comes of the meetings.  Or it's the same people in the same networking groups.

Eventually you get a few interviews, but no offers.  Time drags on.

The longer you're unemployed, the more money goes out of your bank account....with no money coming in.  If you're employed, the longer you stay in your current job, the more your attitude and performance deteriorate, putting your stability in danger.

It can be paralyzing, especially with all the free advice out there.  Numerous clients of mine have, as they put it, been through the career coach mill with no results.  These coaches...where is thier expertise and knowledge coming from?  Maybe you even know someone who hired a career coach....and is still unemployed.

Lots of coaches without much knowledge or experience

 
Some career coaches have successfully transformed their own career - that's not enough.  Others were in management and have hired people throughout their career (50 people maybe?), but that doesn't make them an expert.  Plus you're getting only their opinion.

Consequently I discovered something very early on that very, very few recruiters know, and as far as I can tell, no other career coach - including two other recruiters turned career coach - does either.  And it's the difference between you finding something that makes you happy, and wandering around wondering why nothing is happening.

What you'll learn with me you won't find anywhere else - no other "experts" understand these points.  And they're not in my blog or in my public columns.  Here are just a few examples:

• why most job seekers work their job search backwards, and why that contributes to your lack of success
• why being overly optimistic is exactly what keeps you unemployed
• the single most important piece of looking for a new job, that very few do at all, much less well, and no other coach knows how to help you with (if they even bring it into play in the first place)
• why most advice - and your instincts - put you on the defensive.  The company should not have 100% of the control - but they do.  Know why?  You give it to them!
• other coaches will tell you what you should do and have to do.  I'll show you what you don't need to bother with - and why 

Many of the things you do to play by the rules aren't helping you at all.  Contrary to the way companies imply you should behave, you're not a 12 year old who is supposed to be sitting at the table eating all your vegetables in order to get dessert.

Which of these common job mistakes are you making?

Your cover letter is

• short, stark, and entirely generic
• medium generic with a few facts and the salutation customized
• long, with some attempt at customization
• resume regurgitation
• long - really, really long
• professionally done and misses the whole point of what a cover letter is for

99% of all cover letters are totally worthless.  That's because they're all about you.  A value proposition letter sounds great, but isn't effective.  A cover letter with multiple PS's won't be read or get you in the door either.

The debate about whether or not cover letters have value is specifically because virtually every cover letter doesn't have value - or there wouldn't be a debate about it.  Cover letters aren't worth reading....unless they're done right.  It takes a bit to get it, but once you do, you're writing effective custom letters in about 5 minutes flat.

 Your resume:

• is difficult to read - tiny lettering, things crammed together
• is an example of one-pagitis, because you were told it should never be longer
• is overly long because it's filled with unnecessary information and/or scads of white space from that Word template.  It may even be poorly formatted (although you probably don't know that or it wouldn't be) 
• doesn't show your uniqueness, the progress of your career, or what kind of a person you are
• is filled with bland and boring information that reads like a job description, and says what you did, but not how well you did it, what the results were, or who benefited

The point of your resume is to sell you, as well as to tell the story of your career and who you are as a person.  Every single one of the factors listed above - and others - reduce your resume's effectiveness.  The result?  You're screened out of consideration for any number of reasons.

Finding a new job is a sales process.  You're the product, the hiring company is the buyer, and your cover letter and resume are your brochure.  Your resume needs to satisfy multiple criteria all at once.  Your chances of getting past this point drop significantly with each component you miss.

Everyone knows to get a job you have to sell yourself.  But no one tells you how.  As the "How-To" Career Coach, I can and I will.  I've spent 22 years cold calling, have been a top producer, broken sales records, and been a member of Executive and President's clubs through out my career because I combined advanced sales techniques, listening skills, and relationship building. 

These sales techniques - along with my knowledge of how hiring authorities think and the psychology of people - are exactly what get my clients employed within 3 months and in what they consider to be their perfect job.

 Fixing one piece doesn't fix your problem

It's the process that contributes to the whole and determines the outcome.  It's like baking a cake.  If you want it to look like a cake at the end and be edible, you have to follow the directions.  Leave out an ingredient, take a shortcut, skip some steps, alter the baking time - you end up with a cake that's less than satisfying or doesn't even look like a cake!

In addition to a poor resume and cover letter, here are a few problems you might be causing yourself:

• getting stumped by a question, losing your composure, and then watching with dismay as the interview spirals downward from there
•  practicing with mock interviews and then finding you weren't asked all the questions you practiced (learning theory helps)
• not knowing how to sell, present, package and spin yourself, especially as the solution to a problem (the unfilled job)
• not realizing you can (and should!) tell the truth - about everything - but when and how makes all the difference
• failing to ask yourself the important questions so that you are able to ascertain the details about the job for which you're interviewing
• not knowing how to ask for the order and close the deal (it's a sales process, remember?)
• letting your head get in the way and not realizing what that causes, much less how to find and fix it
• completely forgetting an interview is a two-way street and you have a choice in each decision during the process, just as the company does.  It helps if you know how to find out what you're interviewing for and know what you're measuring that against
• not realizing you can control the outcome - which is not the same thing as controlling the interview - and how to make that happen so that you stay in control of your search

If the same thing keeps happening,
something needs to change

If you've been looking and not finding anything, the problem is that you don't know what to do, when, or why one way is effective and another isn't.  It's a good bet you are going in circles, and not cognizant that finding a job needs to be a structured, sequential plan with focus. So the longer you look with nothing happening, the more you add a head trip to the mix.

Interestingly enough, the more you feel like a failure and become depressed, anxious, and fearful - the more you'll experience the same results.  Whatever was intially wrong wasn't about you specifically, but as soon as you start thinking it is, then it becomes so.  Nothing happening perpetuates nothing happening.

And mixed all up in there is whether or not you're being as pro-active as you could be.  There are usually many more avenues to discovery than most seekers realize - and most seekers are waiting for the job to come to them instead of getting out there and making it happen, although they don't generally see it that way.

You don't realize what you don't know....until you learn it