If you can't pitch yourself on paper or in person, you’re already losing
Resume. Marketing. Interviews. Learn it or lose out.
This newsletter will focus on the need for Job Search skills to achieve Employment Security. Previous newsletters covered job skills, job performance, and business networks. As a reminder, this is what the five levels of the Employment Security Hierarchy look like:
Job Search Skills are critical to your Employment Security
Your Job Search Skills consist of three skill sets: Building a resume of your employment results, marketing yourself to find a job that meets your needs, and interviewing skills to land the next job.
You will note that companies don’t teach job search skills. They only care about your job skills and performance, which will help the company reach business goals. Resumes, marketing yourself, and interview skills? Not so much.
Plus, until the Great Recession, workers didn’t think too much about resumes, marketing themselves, or interviewing. Besides, how often did you have to do a job search anyway? Once every five to ten years?
However, all job search skills are necessary for Employment Security. Companies are constantly reorganizing departments and interviewing people for their jobs because job skills have changed. Even today, while the job market is still holding strong, I’ve seen strong candidates in my network—people I would hire in a minute if I could—still looking for a position after five or six months.
Today’s economy is uncertain.
And, who knows the effects of tariffs on employment? Today, the Dallas Fed reported the largest drop in manufacturing new orders since 2020 (the pandemic) and higher prices. Meanwhile, port traffic at the largest seaport in Los Angeles is dropping by 40%.
Learning how to market yourself and present your business results- even knowing how to get in the door by writing a killer resume- is now a baseline career skill that is not usually addressed until disaster happens.
You can have great job skills. You can have excellent job performance. Your business network can present opportunity after opportunity to you. And you can utterly fail at doing a successful job search because your resume doesn’t cut it, you don’t know how to market your skills or your interviewing skills suck.
I consulted with a company -- on career stuff -- and part of the work of the managing partner was interviewing people for the role of a job coach. The complaints from the managing partner from the interviews were non-stop: failure of the job candidate to show up for the appointment, failure to follow up, failure to explain what the business contribution was on the job, inability to relate to the job description, and on and on and on. And on and on some more.
We are not very good at job search skills
As a group, we are terrible at our job search skills. Part of it is that we never really had to do it before because the economy was okay, and there was not as much competition for individual jobs. Part of it is that companies are unwilling to teach you about resumes and interviewing skills—why should they?
The world has changed. Not only are we fighting for jobs within our city, state, and country—a company where I previously consulted had serious candidates from ten states away beating out “local” candidates—but now we are fighting for our jobs with people all over the planet for the work.
Explaining our value to others has always been difficult, but overlooked. Now, if you can’t explain the value you bring to the work to others memorably and engagingly -- and better than the rest of your competition for the job -- you’ll get passed over in favor of someone who can.
You need to:
Know how to build a killer resume (or CV)
Know how to market yourself to find work through your business network and on your own
Know how to do outstanding phone, face-to-face, and panel interviews
Know how to negotiate the job offer
Do you think you are ready?
Pundits discuss tips and tricks for interviews and resumes all the time (and I have my share), but no one discusses the job search as a basic, fundamental skill needed in today’s workplace to gain employment security.
It is.
Be a Cubicle Warrior,
Scot
This newsletter focuses on helping knowledge workers navigate corporate America, from searching for jobs to working in the role, having employment security, and helping you become a Cubicle Warrior.
Navigating Corporate is a reader-supported publication. There are no investors. No sugar daddies. Just me. And the cats.
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