Who Gets You a Job?
Posted Sunday, March 1st, 2015
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Who Gets You a Job?

by Bert Sadtler

 

If you are a member of the volatile business community, what do you do when you find yourself seeking employment? The volatile economy impacts the senior level leaders as will as the mid tier and less tenured. How do you navigate through the confusing employment market place? Can you be your own agent of change? With the constant changes in the marketplace, who gets you a job today?

When your car is in need of repairs, you call a mechanic. When your home needs improvement, you search for a contractor. When you have a dental issue, you go to your dentist.

We live a culture of business specialists and have at our disposable the worldwide web of content. With so much access to information and resources, WHO gets you a job?

Let’s consider this question from a historical perspective.

In the past, job seekers would place multiple calls to staffing companies and recruiting firms with the expectation that the recruiting community would get the job seeker a job. What’s changed and why doesn’t this really work?

In the past, searching for a new job was a more passive experience. A professional seeking to change their employment could essentially dangle their resume in hopes that someone wanting to hire them would walk by. During the life and times of that job market, there was much less turnover, less urgency and more patience in general.

As the expression goes, that was then this is now. Today’s job market sees the average employment span in the 3-5 year range with employers needing newly hired talent to arrive on day one and make a difference immediately. Today’s volatile and cluttered employment market has morphed into an unlimited number of job boards offering misleading advice and antiquated perceptions. Online job boards represent the earlier version of the passive approach. A job seeker submits their resume to a “black hole” and waits for a phone call that many times never happens. Then, the job seeker throws up their hands in frustration, only to spend countless hours in front of a computer screen submitting to even more digital black holes in hopes of getting a call back. Sometimes they do, many times they do not.

Another current misconception is to rely on recruiters to get them a new job because they know where all the great jobs are. The stark reality is that there are numerous versions of recruiters and numerous recruiting business models. In common, all recruiting resources are paid by the employer, not the job seeker. I am unaware of any legitimate recruiting business model where the job seeker pays a professional to get them a job. To be clear – recruiters are not job agents; they are hired by businesses to solve a business problem by acquiring the right talent.

There are career coaches who mentor and guide job seekers. But, they don’t get them a job. There are companies who will blast out a job seeker’s information for them. But, they don’t get them a job.

At its core, isn’t the success of a great hire the result of the combination of:

  • The candidate meeting the required functional qualifications
  • While also fitting with the employer’s culture

Don’t you have to have direct human interaction in order to determine chemistry and cultural fit?

Is it really a surprise that the outdated passive job seeking approach no longer works today?

Business changes every day. The employment marketplace is rapidly changing. Job seekers need to recognize that business is about change and what worked 5-10 years ago to get a job does not necessarily work today.

Today’s marketplace is about accountability, agility and nimbleness

No one exists to find you a job, except you the job-seeker. Many options — including networking, learning about the culture at target companies and how you fit in, understanding a prospective employer’s business problem and how you can help solve it, etc. — exist within the employment marketplace. Some of these options are a sound and logical path forward in a process oriented approach. Others appear to be a short cut or a quick fix. Usually, they are too good to be true and a waste of time.

So, who gets you a job? You do.

The employer is hiring you for your talents and especially for your cultural fit. Recruiting resources and other members within the job market may have valuable insight and may be skilled at conducting the recruitment process, but they do not exist to get you a job.

  • Do you have a plan?
  • A process oriented approach?
  • Accountability?
  • Can you be agile and nimble enough to change your approach if what you are doing isn’t working?
  • Can you filter out the ideas that sound too good to be true, because they are?

It’s your job to get a job, not anyone else’s.

“Who Gets You a Job?” has to start and end with YOU.

You have everything to gain. You have to get it right. You have to fit the culture.

You are the one and only one who gets you a job.

 

Good hunting?