Steve Dalton - The Job Closer: Time-Saving Techniques for Acing Resumes, Interviews, Negotiations, and More

The real voyage of discovery consists, not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

Marcel Proust

Prepare to be taken aback.

My students and career center colleagues at Dukes Fuqua School of Business know to expect this from me by now, but others may find my approachesjarring.

I happen to think that theres a best way to do everything in the job search. Not a general best way, but a specific best waya recipe, in other wordsthat different people can follow to create similarly tasty results.

This is a surprisingly uncommon perspective in the job search world. For example, think back to the last job search article you read. Did it give you actual instructions to follow? Or did it suggest general tips that youd have to convert into a plan of action yourself? I see way too much of the latter and basically none of the former. Tips are job search junk foodsatisfying in the moment but lacking any real nutrition, repackaging conventional wisdom youve heard before into a slightly different format, making it seem new but adding no real value.

It doesnt have to be this way.

Instructions for your job search are possible and frankly should be the norm. Arent job search experts in a better position to curate all of their tips into a usable format than overwhelmed job seekers conducting their first, second, or even tenth search?

So, I created such a set of instructions for job search networking in my first book, The 2-Hour Job Search (2HJS) and eight years later Im finally able to share with you my sets of instructions for everything else in your job search.

Now, some tasks are difficult even with exact instructions. Take assembling furniture from IKEA, for example. Could you imagine what would happen if IKEA replaced their assembly instructions with assembly tips? Consider attaching the largest pieces to one another first, or Try to identify pieces that seem to naturally fit together? There would be a revolt of literally global proportions, or at least a dramatic disruption in the Swedish meatball and lingonberry supply chains.

Rest assured, I am not going to do that to you. Like you, I roll my eyes when I hear old career maxims such as these trotted out:

• The job search is a full-time job. (If it was, how would people with full-time jobs ever find other jobs?)

• Sell yourself! (Few people enjoy selling themselves, and fewer still enjoy hearing others sell themselves, so basically everyone hates this.)

• Put yourself out there! (If youre charming and extroverted, great advice! If not, terrible advice!)

• Job searching is an art, not a science. (I was much better at art than science.)

This book doesnt do tips, and it doesnt do conventional wisdom. It does frameworkstechniques you can immediately use to find the right job faster. A career center that fits in your pocket, if you will.

Now, some of these frameworks may not work for yousome may even anger youbut if youre in a pinch, any of these frameworks will be better than no framework at all, and youll find many of them are much more than just serviceable. Theyd better be, as they are approaches Ive refined over fifteen years as a career coach and literally thousands of attempts.

To be fair, my goal here isnt to give you perfect solutions; it is to give you the best readily-available solutions. Dont think brain surgery; think the Heimlich maneuver. Simple techniques that you dont have to be a rocket scientist to grasp and that can be implemented on short notice even during incredibly stressful circumstances.

In 2HJS, I purposely focused on the one part of the job search every other job search book insisted was an art rather than a science: networking for interviews. Amazingly, job seekers of all networking proficiencies found my specificity helpful, and I started getting requests for what frameworks I could offer for the other parts of the job search, from preparing a resume to interviewing well. I had thoughts on those, but no frameworks yet, so people asked me for book recommendations.

I was stumped. I didnt like any books on those topicsespecially back in 2012 when 2HJS first came out. Most books seemed to complicate every element of the job search rather than simplify. You dont really need a book on the top one hundred interview questions you need to master. As youll soon learn, you really just need to know how to answer the first several well, and the rest is gravy.

So I decided to again build my own frameworks, this time for answering interview questions, writing cover letters, and everything else, primarily as a way to get my students and 2HJS readers back to networking as quickly as possible due to its far greater importance. Students and readers alike seemed to know this was true, yet still the item they fretted over most was their resume, the least important element of their job search portfolio.

(Did that last bit about the relative unimportance of resumes surprise you? If so, brace yourself. Resumes may still be necessary, but they have lost their crown jewel status.)

Something had to give. The job search has gotten way more complex in the last thirty years, but job seekers didnt suddenly get more time! That means that the same amount of time that used to just go toward resumes, cover letters, and interview prep must now include LinkedIn, online job search engines, resume keyword optimization, social media, and other prep as well. Further complicating matters, each of those items has a different level of importance, so the solution is not merely spending an equal amount of time on each. Modern job seekers must figure out how to allocate their limited time and energy across all the various job search skills according to each ones relative importance.