Improve your job search and productivity with focus

One of the biggest mistakes job seekers make when looking for a new role is to spend their time randomly chasing down every lead they can find. They will spend hours scouring LinkedIn and other job boards for every opportunity that meshes with their experience and submit applications online into the black hole. They put forth significant time and effort, yet they reap minimal results. 

I recently worked with a client who was going through this. He was spending close to 40 hours per week actively engaged in job search activities. In this current hot job market, he was getting many requests for interviews. But, he wasn’t getting interviews for roles that aligned with his goals. He was applying to positions for which he was both overqualified and underqualified and positions within his industry and outside his field. He was operating without a plan, and the result was frustration. 

We revamped his entire approach to the job search. The first thing we did was think strategically about what he wanted out of his next role, both from an industry and a role-specific perspective. Previously, he had worked in the software field and most recently was with a pharma company. This unique combination of experiences made him a bit of an outlier in each of these sectors. However, he also had a skill set immediately transferrable to the many nascent and growing pharmtechs disrupting the traditional pharma industry.

He researched the top pharmtechs and made a list of 20 companies in which he was particularly interested. Then, he delved into each company’s solutions, researched their management teams, gained an understanding of their competition, and looked for open positions. Rather than searching for open positions, he identified the potential hiring manager at each company. He was in marketing, so he looked for VPs of marketing and CMOs. Then, he drafted targeted letters of interest and sent them directly to the executives he identified earlier. These letters briefly explained his background, but they focused on the business problems facing the company and the industry and how he could help. 

Six weeks after we began this project, my client had 2 offers from different companies. He accepted one and has been at his new job for about 3 weeks. He went from a shotgun approach job search to one that was hyper-focused in terms of both role and field, and the latter is what yielded the results. 

The lesson here is that it’s critical to approach your job search with a strategy. I know the word “strategy” gets tossed around all the time, and there may be some misunderstanding about its meaning. A strategy is a defined plan of action that brings you to a specific end goal. My client had previously been operating in the absence of a true strategy. He planned to chase down every possible relevant role. This was not moving him closer to his goal. To implement an effective strategy, you need to have focus. Once my client honed in on roles and a specific industry, his job search yielded results, and it became much easier for him. So, create a strategy, sharpen your focus, and advance toward your goal!