1. Do your homework before you go on interviews. Be prepared to spend at least a day finding out whatever you can about the company you’ll be interviewing with. Be ready to talk about what the company does and connect your skills, qualifications, and attributes to the job requirements and the challenges the company is facing.

2. Be specific (and upfront) with the people you’re asking for help. You will almost always get more from the people you approach for help if you (1) come to them with specific requests; (2) know ahead of time that they’re capable of fulfilling that request; and (3) always show gratitude.

3. Look into contractor temporary employment. Working on temporary assignments does more than give you a way to earn money while you’re searching for a full-time job. It can help you develop new skills and get a taste for different types of companies and work environments. It may also lead to full-time work (38 percent of temporary workers today have been offered full-time jobs at companies where they were on assignments, according to industrial studies).

4. Answer your wake-up calls. Very few of us get through a job search without getting bruised. Being unemployed means being challenged, sometimes painfully so. How we handle these scraps and downright disasters (often referred to as wake-up calls) is a measure of our personal growth, the yardstick by which we determine what kind of individuals we really are. Wake-up calls deliver the lessons that need to be learned; they teach us to understand the truly important things in our lives.

During a job search, thinking about other components of your life such as family, friends, and hobbies can help you feel less hopeless after a job loss. To remind candidates that they still have full lives, I perform this exercise with them: I draw a diagram of a pie and ask them to sketch the slice that represents the space work used to take up in their lives. I then ask them to divide the pie into the other pieces of their lives. This often helps the majority of candidates to place job loss in the proper perspective.

5. Recreate some structure in your life. People with jobs have a structure, and as soon as you take away the job, the framework falls apart. Instead of agonizing over why this happened or worrying about how long it will take to find another job, get started on the process of establishing a new daily job search structure. Get up at the same time every day, work eight-hour days on your job search, and conduct a set amount of phone calls within those eight hours.

6. Hit your numbers. As a job seeker, you’re trying to make a sale, and to do that you must hit your numbers. Commit to making a certain number of phone calls and sending a certain number of resumes to prospective employers each day. Making 15 calls and mailing 25 resumes daily is a suggested minimum. Doing this is hard, but as all marketers know, you can’t make a sale unless you ask for it.

7. Take time and reflect on what you truly want. Most people try to get re-employed quickly, in the same line of work that they’re used to. Instead, take time to find the one idea or one profession that’s so great and perfect for you that you would like to do it for the rest of your life.

Unfortunately, most people are like locomotives, pulling their ideas and profession along behind them like a little string of toy boxcars. The most fortunate person on earth is the one who has found a profession or an idea so great, so challenging and exciting, that for the rest of his/her life, the idea pulls him/her along behind it.

8. Bankruptcy reform update. On April 20th, 2005, President Bush signed into law the most dramatic overhaul of bankruptcy rules in nearly thirty years, which will significantly impact cash-strapped job seekers’ ability to start over if they accumulate insurmountable debt because of their jobless situation. Designed to curb last year’s record high 1.6 million personal bankruptcies, the new law sets more stringent limits on bankruptcy options and stiffens repayment requirements for those who do file.

The most notable provisions in the new law affect Chapter 7 bankruptcy procedures. Chapter 7 bankruptcies are often said to offer a “fresh start” to individuals because they wipe out unsecured debts, protect all future earnings from debt repayment, and allow states to offer generous exemption limits for protecting household assets. Previously, Chapter 7s were open to nearly everyone and last year more than two-thirds, or 1.1 million, of individuals declaring personal bankruptcies took advantage of the fresh start.

The new law, however, introduces a “means test” for Chapter 7. Anyone earning more than their state’s median income and with at least $100 in excess monthly income will no longer be eligible to file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. Instead, they will now have to undergo a Chapter 13 bankruptcy procedure where filers will be required to use any future earnings above a not-very-generous Internal Revenue Service formula to make debt payments. That obligation would continue either for five years or until one quarter of the unsecured debt was paid off, whichever is shorter.

Joe Hodowanes, a career strategy adviser in Tampa, Florida, offers a free resume and career analysis. Fax your resume to (813) 936-0201 or email it to jmwanes@jmwanes.com For questions, call Joe at (813) 936-0091 or visit www.jmwanes.com on the Web. All Job Search Advisor articles on this website are the property of www.jmwanes.com (J.M. Wanes & Associates). You may download
a copy for personal use. Redistribution without permission is strictly prohibited.
© 2005 J.M. Wanes & Associates.