Sunday, January 6, 2013

Are you sick of tips on graduates job search that seem to never work?

Job search tips and tricks on do-s and don’t-s have been flooding us all. Fundamentally, though, most of them you may say are just listings of “what” should be done. Moreover, you might say the tips are not really relevant to your unique case, but rather too generic to move you to action. Let’s explore together!
Simply looking at this there might be 2 reasons- the articles are really useless or you struggle to see the meaning and how to capitalize.



The tips are useless
Naturally not every article out there you may find useful. However do you stop just at closing the browser window?
As a customer of this information service you have the great power of influencing what you read next. Moreover, you have the opportunity to influence not only what you read, but what others read too. I personally see this as both opportunity and accountability- don’t miss out to post a comment.
Where is the trick here though? You can poor your negativity and frustrations and potentially get the author change his/her approach. However, your comment is out there for all recruiters to read too. Thus it actually is a pure evidence of how you deal with problems, how you influence. So before you write think on would you hire yourself if you were a recruiter reading your comment?
Struggling to see the meaning and capitalize
Everywhere you will read that the successful job search starts with a well-thought strategy. Demystifying what “strategy” means and how it relates to grasping career opportunities might be your “key” to start finding more meaning for you.
It was a few years ago when I found my best suiting explanation. I worked on a project to organize a big conference on Strategies in Innovation. The key note speaker Jill Hellman delivered a workshop with more than 100 senior executives helping them break the boundaries of their own perception of strategy. Basically she didn’t say anything I didn’t know from my bachelor degree such as that strategy actually is how you get from point A to point B, BUT what struck me was her point that success in our dynamic environment is more and more dependent on how many moves you have in your playbook. In simple words success is hidden in enlarging your lists of moves, the various ways you can move from point A to point B, from looking for a job to finding a job.
So today when I read tips and tricks articles, I look for the moves, I look for subtle nuances of the repeating moves enlarging my own job search playbook to pick the best ones for my case.
How useful was this post to you? Would love to hear your thoughts the good, the bad and the ugly J
The herein thoughts and ideas shared are solely opinions of the author.

1 comment:

  1. Tips & Tricks articles are useful only if you know how to adapt each piece of advice to you own situation or goal. There is no universal recipe for success, but any information we come across may become THAT info that we needed at a certain point in our lives. Bottom line, it's not only what we read, but HOW we read it!

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