John Keller - Seek It, Find It, Get It: How to Discover the Best Job Opportunities and Get Them

One thing is the way things seem; another quite different thing is the way things really are. You need to make an effort to discover the true nature of the changing reality around you. Fully understanding this reality and knowing how to use it to your advantage will give you a hidden advantage that will make you indispensable in any position and allow you to reach the top in your career.

Hello, my name is John Keller. Im an executive and manager with over 25 years experience in a wide range of companies.

Over the course of my career, Ive gradually put into practice and improved a unique system for getting ahead and reaching the kind of positions Ive set my sights on. This systembased on the reality Ive come to understand over the course of two decades working in the business worldwill allow you to use everything Ive learned to your own advantage.

The reality Im talking about has nothing to do with what I learned at college. But if you dont want to spend your whole professional life feeling like youre flying blindwithout understanding why you cant get the job youre really interested in, why opportunities keep slipping through your fingersyou need to know whats really going on.

As you read this book, youll find out what happens behind the scenes in selection processes, what factors come into play in the hiring process, and how firms really go about looking for candidates when they need to fill a position.

This last point is especially important. If youre not in the places where theyre looking, youre not going to be one of the selected candidates, and youll never be the one hired.

The system youll learn in this book will boost your chances of being a candidate, even for job openings that are never published (which are usually the best ones). As you put it into practice, youll gradually make yourself a better match for the kind of positions youre trying to land, which is ultimately what its all about.

Like so many others, I began my working life at the bottom. In my case this meant working at engineering firms, where I started out as an unpaid student intern and was later taken on as an employee on minimum wage. In other words, I started out in exactly the same situation so many people find themselves in today. And things would have stayed that way for yearsmy only goal to fight for a series of pay increases and struggle to climb the corporate ladder (as my coworkers were doing)if I hadnt taken a personal decision that radically altered the course of my professional life.

Thanks to this change of direction, I was able to get hired for a series of positions of responsibility at different companies. Every time I made a move, it was to a larger, more established firm, and after a number of years I came to hold senior executive positions at large publicly traded multinational corporations.

I achieved all this by putting into practice the system Im going to tell you about in this bookan approach that has allowed me to move into progressively better jobs, climb the corporate ladder in the companies Ive worked at, and stay in the positions Ive held.

The system Ive developed also played a crucial role when I had to find a good position again after being laid off. And of course its always a lot harder to get hired when youre out of work, especially when youre looking for a position of responsibility.

Like so many other good professionals, I was unfortunate enough to lose my job as a result of the economic meltdown weve seen in recent years, which led to massive, indiscriminate layoffs. To make matters worse, when all this happened I was at an age when it can be really hard to find a new position, especially when countless other professionals find themselves in the same situation.

It was distressing to see how we were all constantly knocking on the doors of the companies still standing, along with all the new job seekers just joining the labor market and looking for a break. Meanwhile, companies were only opening their doors to send more employees on their way.

When youre driven to act, when everything around you is falling apart, its more important than ever to stop and think through what youre going to do rather than rushing towards any place that looks like somewhere you can take shelter. And in any situation, if you head in the same direction as everyone else and do the same thing theyre doing, youll be one among manyinvisible in the eyes of anyone who actually is hiring.

Everyone has talents and skills (advantages) they often cant even see themselves (as if they were hidden) valuable assets that can help them achieve the life goals they set themselves.