Guerrilla Marking for Job Hunters 2.0 - Jay Conrad Levinson [35]
• Post your resume if the site allows and enroll for the online classifieds Job Alert program, which notifies you of matches with your background.
• Always check the classifieds. Display ads, or the “Career Section” as it is commonly referred to, are very expensive, as much as 100 times more costly than the classified “word ads.” Small- and medium-size companies use the classified section.
• Business journals are full of decision makers. To find the one in your city: www.bizjournalsdirectory.com or www.bizjournals.com.
• Review the “appointments” or “onward and upward” column for the names of recently promoted or appointed executives. Send them your resume.
• Find out where the recently hired people came from because their old company may now be in the middle of a search that is a perfect fit for you.
Most importantly, read the business and city sections to see what is going on in your town. Which companies are growing or announcing new products? They may be prime candidates for your skills. Years ago when I first got into the headhunting business, I was trained like every other recruiter in how to troll for leads. I read the classifieds every day and called the companies to see if I could help. My pitch was, “I have candidates who exactly fit your requirements,” along with a bunch of other lame openers, and then I tried to overcome their objections to paying me to replicate their efforts ... with disappointing but predictable results.
I soon realized that by the time an employer advertised a position, it was too late to try to sell my services. I would be competing with their newspaper ad and dozens of other recruiters to fill that slot, and frankly I wasn’t that good of a salesperson. I needed an alternative—fast! Sometimes you have to be careful what you wish for.
Quite accidentally, I read an article about a new office building being built. Still wet behind the ears and not realizing I was supposed to wait until they called us, I phoned the general manager and asked him if we could have coffee and talk about his project. The next day we spent most of the morning talking about the hurdles he faced in getting a team of construction guys together in time to complete the project. I volunteered to help and left with my first job order in hand. I knew nothing about construction, so I started calling my friends to see if any of them knew anyone in the construction business who would have coffee with me.
I found a guy who tutored me in the intricacies of hiring a construction manager: what to look for and where to look. I finished that project and was quickly hired to do 7 more. They put me on retainer, gave me a company credit card, and offered me access to the company jet.
All-in-all, I hired 37 people in 4 cities and never ran a newspaper ad—not once! Yet, I found the lead in the newspaper. So read between the lines of the business section and don’t hesitate to call the president of a company you read about; he or she may be facing the same challenge as my first client. To this day, I still find the bulk of my projects by reading the business section, and I have little competition from other recruiters who are still getting their leads the old-fashioned way.
➤ Job Boards
According to John Sumser, the president of Interbiz.com, a firm that monitors the comings-and-goings in the electronic recruiting industry, there are approximately 42,000 different job boards. So, where do you start looking? First, there is no master list. Nor is there any way to register at more than one board at a time. To make matters even more interesting, Monsterboard, which at the time of my