Personal Branding Blog – Dan Schawbel

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Are you sick and tired of applying for jobs? Did you know that 80% of jobs are never even advertised? How about if I told you that only 10% of jobs come from sending a blind resume? Most jobs are filled before you even interview for them. What HR doesn’t tell you is that they already have a list of recommended candidates from other employees or recruiters. You need to spend your time wisely when you are searching for a job. The more time you allocate to submitting your resume and cover letter to corporate websites and job boards on major sites, the less time you are spending actually meeting the hiring managers who are recruiting for those spots.

Is job searching dead?

As I type this, you are probably applying for a job the typical way. Realistically, job searching is far from dead, but the smartest seekers are the ones that build relationships with companies they are genuinely interested in. We all need to stop wasting time to find “stepping stone” jobs and more time targeting places we know we would be happily employed at. Aside from the statistics shown above, that have been passed around for the past few years, the main issue with job searching is time investment.

The process of getting hired is search, submission, contact, interview (could be multiple rounds), offer and acceptance. By searching for jobs, you will be going through this process and it might stop at the last interview, without an offer. When this happens, all you receive in return is practice for the next cycle. We don’t receive proper feedback during the corporate interview process, therefore we aren’t more prepared for next time (but mentally we think we are). It’s time to invest less in searching for jobs.

The rise of people search

We’ve already gone over using Google to search for your brand and other people’s. Technorati is also a great search engine to locate people by blog topic. What we haven’t looked at is people-specific search engines and there are quite a few now. My two favorites are Twello, which just came out, and Wink. Twello is a personal brand locater for Twitter. It works much better than Twitters search interface and is much cleaner looking. I enjoy Wink because it’s the most accurate of all the people search engines, which isn’t saying too much. It locates your LinkedIn and Facebook account as well and displays your avatar.

Also, there is ZabaSearch, PeekYou, Pipl, ZoomInfo, and Spoke. There isn’t much differentiation between these services, but you can give them all a try and tell me which you prefer. The next question you will ask is “what if I don’t know the recruiters name?” I tend to use Facebook and blogs to find people before I do some research. I also think that word-of-mouth is critical to uncovering personal brands that are in hiding.

Subscribe to blogs that mention people and you’re bound to connect with who you are looking for at some point. Don’t be afraid of reaching out to someone by contacting them through their preference. You have nothing to lose. The worst that can happen is not receiving a response and the best case scenario is a new friend. Contact at least 5 people a day and your life will change. I know mine has.