Interesting Statistics

Recently one of our investors posted a very interesting article from his blog. He owns several companies and this one should remove any doubt that this is no ordinary recession.

More on job boards and traditional job searches

I've been reading all the advice of the so called "experts" in job hunting. In general, they offer good solid advice for a traditional job search. The one thing they all ignore is what do to when there are no job openings. The only advice I saw was "send your resume to companies who have no openings listed." This is, I suppose, the what-the-heck theory. It's not much of a strategy though.

Since they all recommend sending your resume to the big job boards as a major part of a job search, I thought, dear reader, that you might find this data interesting. Depending on the nature of the job board, you have between a 1% and 12% chance of being "contacted" through a job board. Getting a call from a recruiter is considered a contact. What are the odds of actually getting a job through a job board? Since the numbers skew to the downside, I would take an educated guess and say 2 to 3 per cent.

Why would you use a tool that has a failure rate of greater than 95%? As you know, I am not at all a fan of job boards, particularly as an employer.

I think all the job hunting experts are all assuming this a reasonably normal job market and you should do all the traditional things but just do them a little better, like answering ads, writing great cover letters, write a really great resume, keep track of every company you've sent your resume to, write thank you letter to everyone who contacts you and so forth. They say that generals are always preparing for the last war. The same seems to be true of all these job hunting "gurus." They are giving you advice for the last recession, not this recession. This is The Great Recession of 2008!

Let me give you my perspective as the owner of several successful companies. If you are applying for a job at any one of my companies and you send a really great cover letter and very well written resume, you will not be hired. Unlike most companies, my companies are hiring, but we are doing so very selectively. In our corporate culture, we value initiative, creativity and risk taking among other things. That comes directly from me and all the leaders in my companies.

If you want to work at one of my companies, you had better demonstrate all three of those characteristics before we will even consider you for a job. So, how would you do that? It goes without saying that you have very carefully read our website(s) and thoroughly understand exactly what we do. I also expect you to know the names and backgrounds of my executive team(s). Their bio's are on the website. I will also expect that you have spoken to people at my company. Specifically, I will expect that you have spoken to several people in the department that you are interested in working in. By the way, everyone in my company gets a really nice bonus if they refer a candidate and we hire them. So you will find that all the people at my company will be more than happy to talk to you. Although they will do so on their personal time, not company time

Then I expect you to demonstrate initiative. Call one of my leaders and convince them that you have thoroughly researched my company and that you can make a valuable contribution in your area of expertise. Again, we value creativity, so we like to see candidates present to us exactly how they will make a contribution. The more creative your presentation, the more we like it. Ideally, you can quantify your contribution or at least show us show us that you have real experience in either driving revenue or creating operational efficiency (i.e. saving us money). By the way, we still don't want to see your resume yet. We'll get to that after you've convinced us that you really can make a significant contribution.

I love to get calls from my CEO's that start with "Mark, you're going to love this, I know we don't have an opening for a fill-in-the-blank, but this guy or gal is someone we HAVE to hire! This is what he or she did to convince us." Now they don't need my approval to create an opening, they know I just like to hear how creative a particular candidate has been.

So if you are exceptionally good at what you do, don't send me your resume. If you're that good, prove it to me! Talk to me, show me that you know what we do and exactly how you are going to make us a better company through your contributions and skills.

That's the best job hunting advice I can give you for The Great Recession of 2008.

You can see his blog here, he's got more very interesting articles.

http://oldschoolheadhunters.blogspot.com/

From a job hunters perspective, this is the worst job market anyone has ever seen. The federal government is reporting that unemployment is hovering around 9%. The real number is closer to 14 or 15%, because the federal government doesn’t count people who have either given up looking or their unemployment benefits have run out. It also doesn’t count people who are working at jobs that aren’t their profession, but they took the job just to have SOME income. My Dad’s business career spans something like 45 years and even he says he’s never seen a job market like this in his career. I certainly haven’t.

The other way to look at the situation is that 85% of people ARE working and, believe it or not, some companies are doing pretty well. Some are even growing. Unfortunately, most companies are either downsizing or they are just not hiring. So the idea of “creating a job” is something pretty radical. However, every company is trying to be more cost efficient. And therein lies the secret. If you can help a company be more cost efficient, you can create a job.