Job Search 2.0

There are plenty of self-help books, consultants and coaches to help you find your calling and pursue a career. There are many talked-about strategies to work on that, from staying current on the advances in your field, to continuous learning about your self and potential, to staying in control of your destiny and digging deeper for a desired breakthrough.

Two of the best self-directed resources I found as a marketer are Catherine Kaputa’s U Are a Brand! How Smart People Brand Themselves for Business Success, and Re-imagine! By Tom Peters, the creator of the Brand You concept.

I meet many free agents who for a reason or another are deciding to go back to being an employee. What often happens is that a client they did a great deal of work for and developed a strong relationship with over time proposes to hire them on a permanent basis.

This is also what happens in your best networking scenario. The people who have known you and of you either directly through your work, or from trusted friends and colleagues are open to having a conversation on business collaboration, often leading to a job where you write the description.

If this is not the case and you have invested no time on your network for various reasons: maybe you work long hours and are busy with family commitments, maybe you went back for a degree while working, or any other number of reasons. You may wonder how do you find a job these days?

You could go online. After all, that’s where it has become natural going for all the other searches, whether they be for a mate, an interest group, the definition of a word, research, the lyrics to your favorite song, or the translation of that tasty Italian recipe.

The traditional route

Chances are you know about Monster.com. You probably saw the Super Bowl ads. What’s that? Oh, so you heard about it from a friend of a friend. It would be interesting to see how Monster generates most of its leads. Martina at Adverblog writes about an online campaign in Italy during Christmas time that might generate some viral effects.

This route seems active, when in fact it is quite passive. The active piece is your entering the resume online and doing your best to tag it properly so it can be found by the companies on your list of desirables to work at. I see this environment as favorable to the employer who can go and search the enormous database to the heart’s content of the HR department and to headhunters who will find you if you have done your entering right.

The new way

Maybe there is a new way of taking care of your career so that when you look for a new job you are already talking with the marketplace. Or, in the best-case scenario, the marketplace can find you as you go about your business of doing great work. Now that would be quite desirable indeed.

Harry Joiner at Marketing Headhunter writes about the future of LinkedIn. For those of you who are not familiar with this online tool, LinkedIn is the place to go for business networking and apparently to find your next gig.

Harry’s riff about the growth and evolution of this tool/network along with its potential is quite intriguing. In fact, it reminds me a lot of what we continue to learn from Seth about marketing. His potential scenarios as well as what those may mean for you and your industry are worth pondering.

[For those of you who'd like to learn more about LinkedIn, Scott Allen blogs on LinkedIn Intelligence.]

Comments

[gianandrea facchini]

thruth is, valeria, that find a job in italy is a real painful process. if i was in the states, i have already find a job through linkedin. but it is definitely a powerful networking tool.

[Valeria Maltoni]

What you say is also true here. Finding a job is a process, sometimes a painful one if nobody knows you and your work. LinkedIn is a tool and it won't replace a system or process.

The reality of employment laws and regulations is very different in Europe, I know. Because employment is not at will there, companies started offering only temporary work with little or no benefits to get around the pesky issue of layoffs and compensation scales.

What intrigues me about Harry's inquiry is the possibilities of moving to a whole new model for those who seek employment. The economy has globalized, the world has flattened, virtual teams, and open source projects have become less of a novelty. Who knows? You may be able to work here from Rome one day soon.

[Steve Roesler]

Hi, Valeria,

"Career" may no longer be the best way to frame the idea of worklife.

I think a new way to begin to look at it is from the standpoint of "What kinds of projects do I want to be involved with?" If we look at what's really happening, there is little or no loyalty from or to employers. Everyone is beginning to move from project to project--some through employment, some through self-employment.

Careers are now being "chunked."

What would happen if we started to legitimately think of it that way?

[Valeria Maltoni]

My definition of career, as Wikipedia's [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Career] comprises all of the successive situations that make up a person's work life. We are very much in charge of our own career.

As Tom Peters said at least 7 years ago, the future of work is nonlinear, with people holding jobs in many different industries for various lengths of time.

[Scott Allen]

Thanks for the link, Valeria. I'd also like to offer that Chapter 24 of The Virtual Handshake is all about finding a job using online networks, including several action steps to help make your search more effective.

The book is currently downloadable for free -- the right price for job-seekers! :-)

http://TheVirtualHandshake.com/free-book-download