Job Search Steps for Fun and Pleasure

This walk-about I'm on is what I was hoping it would be.  I knew I'd gotten stale.  I could smell myself.  As I've said, "When 'new' isn't new anymore, it's time to leap off a cliff."  So I've been taking classes, attending conventions, getting out and being social and I as I learn, and talk with others about their work, I feel the beginning of clarity.

Unfortunately, I was then interrupted.  Now I'm sitting back down and I'm going to try to recreate some of the steps I've learned about job searching & career hopping.

First, if you're bored with your work trying to figure out what you want to "do" next will be neither fast, nor easy.  When you've worked in the same culture / same company / same industry / same field / same / same / same for as long as I have you're not going to understand the language of the new job descriptions, or the way your interests might apply to other industries.  This means someone's gonna have to "go social" on your ass.  Hopefully, it will be you, but if not, it might be good to have a friend who's an extrovert who will push you to get out the door and meet people.

As silly as it sounds, I'm targeting 500+ LinkedIn connections as a measure of how I'm pushing myself outside of my comfort zone.  I had something like 150 in August of last year - and that was from "organic" growing, i.e., passively waiting someone's request to me.  That took since 2008.  I just passed 400 this week.  The growth has happened in spurts,  with the first "new" 100 happening the three months I wound down at AT&T and the last 150 taking place mostly in the past 30 days that I've been getting out.

The cool thing about the LinkedIn connections is to find people who know people who can talk to you about a company.  Again, the point is We Do Not Know About The Outside World.  We've been immersed in the wireless industry for so long that the world has changed.

Now if you want to stay in your job, but begin the job hunt a bit more actively, here are my suggestions.  And they're only suggestions, they're not a magic bullet.  I know someone who got a new job in a different industry, but with the same background as she already had on her first try.  If you're not "hopping," everything is easier.  The fewer hops you take on (industry, job title, field, city, country, grade), the easier it will be in this economy.

1. Get a picture on your LinkedIn account which looks more professional.  Not necessarily boring blue suit, but one without the blank boy head outline, or the other with your kids.  
2. Begin working on the summary section of your LinkedIn account.  Turn off (you should see this on the right side of your screen) "Notify Your Network" of your profile changes.  You're going to be tweaking your verbiage all the time.  So, just do yourself and your friends a favor, turn off the notifications.
3. Set up email feeds with searches.  The best I've found are glassdoors & Indeed.  That said, don't apply to the jobs on those sites.  They're web scrapers and some of the links point to other webscrapers and you end up in this horrible, endless cycle of submitting your feckin' resume data and user names and making up new passwords and...  Just go to the actual company's site if you find something for which you want to apply.  
4. LinkedIn < > Resume and Resume < > Cover Letter.  And this is one of the hardest lessons I've learned.  You really have to know what it is you want to do, specifically, with that company and that specific job when you write your cover letter.  Creating the cover letter will initially take massive amounts of time.  Again, you're going to tweak, recycle, and continuously augment, but the cover letter is the primary focus you want to give to the recruiters.
5. Apparently, in HR World, being in recruitment is a "first step," "junior" position with many companies.  Your resume hits the slush pile of their desk.  If you haven't focused on key words they care about, your submission will be treated like spam.
   
    Which means
6. You will not be able to apply for as many jobs a day as you think you can.  And you shouldn't.  The return rate on those are crap.  Right now, they plainly state they will NOT contact you UNLESS they're interested.  I'm looking at "closed" jobs without contact as no interest in me.  My initial flurry of trying to submit to 3 jobs a day was foiled because of the submission process as well as the cover letter.
7. Job scrapers will pull in dead jobs.  So let me repeat.  Go to the company website to apply.
8. If you're interested in the company, but a product if you can, download a demo.  Play with it.  Get a sense of what they're trying to do and how the job description you're interested in fits into their plans.
9. There are job hierarchies.  You can use sites like payscale.com or glassdoor.com to figure out salary ranges, but getting an informational interview with someone within the company is even more helpful.  Make that one of your informational interview questions you ask.
10. Don't hesitate to ask someone if you could do an informational interview with them.

More later.  I'm pooped.