INTRODUCTION The real voyage of discovery consists, not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. --Marcel Proust Prepare to be taken aback. My students and career center colleagues at Duke's Fuqua School of Business know to expect this from me by now, but others may find my approaches . . . jarring. I happen to think that there's a best way to do everything in the job search. Not a general best way, but a specific best way--a recipe, in other words--that different people can follow to create similarly tasty results. This is a surprisingly uncommon perspective in the job search world. For example, think back to the last job search article you read. Did it give you actual instructions to follow? Or did it suggest general tips that you'd have to convert into a plan of action yourself? I see way too much of the latter and basically none of the former. Tips are job search junk food--satisfying in the moment but lacking any real nutrition, repackaging conventional wisdom you've heard before into a slightly different format, making it seem new but adding no real value. It doesn't have to be this way. Instructions for your job search are possible and frankly should be the norm. Aren't job search experts in a better position to curate all of their tips into a usable format than overwhelmed job seekers conducting their first, second, or even tenth search? So, I created such a set of instructions for job search networking in my first book, The 2-Hour Job Search (2HJS) and eight years later I'm finally able to share with you my sets of instructions for everything else in your job search. Now, some tasks are difficult even with exact instructions. Take assembling furniture from IKEA, for example. Could you imagine what would happen if IKEA replaced their assembly instructions with assembly tips ? "Consider attaching the largest pieces to one another first," or "Try to identify pieces that seem to naturally fit together"? There would be a revolt of literally global proportions, or at least a dramatic disruption in the Swedish meatball and lingonberry supply chains. Rest assured, I am not going to do that to you. Like you, I roll my eyes when I hear old career maxims such as these trotted out: * "The job search is a full-time job." (If it was, how would people with full-time jobs ever find other jobs?) * "Sell yourself!" (Few people enjoy selling themselves, and fewer still enjoy hearing others sell themselves , so basically everyone hates this.) * "Put yourself out there!" (If you're charming and extroverted, great advice! If not, terrible advice!) * "Job searching is an art, not a science." ("I was much better at art than science.") This book doesn't do tips, and it doesn't do conventional wisdom. It does frameworks--techniques you can immediately use to find the right job faster. A career center that fits in your pocket, if you will. Now, some of these frameworks may not work for you--some may even anger you--but if you're in a pinch, any of these frameworks will be better than no framework at all, and you'll find many of them are much more than just serviceable. They'd better be, as they are approaches I've refined over fifteen years as a career coach and literally thousands of attempts. To be fair, my goal here isn't to give you perfect solutions; it is to give you the best readily-available solutions. Don't think brain surgery; think the Heimlich maneuver. Simple techniques that you don't have to be a rocket scientist to grasp and that can be implemented on short notice even during incredibly stressful circumstances. In 2HJS , I purposely focused on the one part of the job search every other job search book insisted was an art rather than a science: networking for interviews. Amazingly, job seekers of all networking proficiencies found my specificity helpful, and I started getting requests for what frameworks I could offer for the other parts of the job search, from preparing a resume to interviewing well. I had thoughts on those, but no frameworks yet, so people asked me for book recommendations. I was stumped. I didn't like any books on those topics--especially back in 2012 when 2HJS first came out. Most books seemed to complicate every element of the job search rather than simplify. You don't really need a book on the top one hundred interview questions you need to master. As you'll soon learn, you really just need to know how to answer the first several well, and the rest is gravy. So I decided to again build my own frameworks, this time for answering interview questions, writing cover letters, and everything else, primarily as a way to get my students and 2HJS readers back to networking as quickly as possible due to its far greater importance. Students and readers alike seemed to know this was true, yet still the item they fretted over most was their resume, the least important element of their job search portfolio. (Did that last bit about the relative unimportance of resumes surprise you? If so, brace yourself. Resumes may still be necessary, but they have lost their crown jewel status.) Something had to give. The job search has gotten way more complex in the last thirty years, but job seekers didn't suddenly get more time! That means that the same amount of time that used to just go toward resumes, cover letters, and interview prep must now include LinkedIn, online job search engines, resume keyword optimization, social media, and other prep as well. Further complicating matters, each of those items has a different level of importance, so the solution is not merely spending an equal amount of time on each. Modern job seekers must figure out how to allocate their limited time and energy across all the various job search skills according to each one's relative importance. Most job seekers don't know how to do this however; they've never been taught. Even worse, most career coaches haven't been taught the importance of prioritization either. The net result is that we get inundated by articles and books that present every single mundane element of the job search as if it were a matter of life or death. However, when you focus on everything, you focus on nothing. Neither you nor I have time for that. Like my students, you probably want to know how little time you can spend on everything for it to be "good enough" rather than spending years trying to get it all to be perfect before embarking. That's where I come in. Just as the Heimlich maneuver provides a quick, good-enough solution to someone who's choking, this book provides you with quick, good-enough solutions for every element of the job search (minus networking, which I already address in 2HJS ). In other words, the goal of this book is not to help you create perfect resumes, cover letters, or anything else--because no such things exist. Nobody agrees on what a 100-percent-perfect resume or cover letter looks like. It breaks my heart when job seekers tell me about spending hundreds of dollars on a professional resume writer to get their resume just right , only to have a different resume writer tell them their resume is all wrong and that they need to start over and spend hundreds of dollars more to get it right for real this time. That's the nightmare of the modern job search. You will encounter a lot of conflicting advice; your challenge is to determine which information you find most credible. So why should you believe this particular book is credible? Because, like I said, I don't do tips--vague advice like "get organized" or "stay positive." I do instructions. Exclusively. That means that you can follow my recipe exactly and bake a cake that looks and tastes just the way it does when I follow the recipe. This approach opens itself to a lot of critique, and that is the point. It's hard to disagree with lists of tips, because there's nothing to test. Instructions, however, can be tested. This also means they can be improved: made simpler, faster, more effective, and so on. So prepare to be taken aback. Excerpted from The Job Closer: Time-Saving Techniques for Acing Resumes, Interviews, Negotiations, and More by Steve Dalton All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
