This is a short piece I wrote in April 2003 for a friend in a university careers agency which deals with alumni as well as current students: it's all true. A number of people have told me that they found it helpful, so I thought I'd make it available more widely. I'd be interested to hear any comments. For non-UK readers, "Jobseeker's Allowance" is a weekly grant of money (currently around 60 pounds) to help people who are looking for a new job. National Insurance is a tax taken out of the wages of all people employed in the UK.
Don't put this article down straight away, even if you have a job. At the very least, read this paragraph, because anyone can be made redundant. So, do two things right now, while you can. First, get income protection on your mortgage: it really is worth it, and I wish we'd had it. Change your mortgage if that's the only way to get it. Second, think about your professional network, and how you'd go about using it to find a new job if you had to (there's more about this below). OK: if you think you're sorted, you can go on your way. But if you think that maybe, just maybe, there might be a time when... Well, read on.
Being made redundant, frankly, sucks - even if you're expecting it. I was working for a company who decided to make 12% of their European staff redundant, and it was almost immediately clear to me that anyone in their right mind would target me. I was doing a technical job in a marketing department, I had only been there for 14 months, the role of the subdepartment was being changed, the local director was weak, and they'd found little use for my (many and varied, obviously) talents.
This last bit was particularly galling, given that I'd finished an MBA (with the company's support - financial and moral) just three months before. I'd tried to broaden my reach and involvement into other areas, I'd met with directors, vice presidents and even senior vice presidents, but little had come of it, whether due to me, the company, or the people in it. There's almost certainly the opportunity for a "how to" guide here, but I'm afraid that I'm not in a great position to write it. So, when they announced that they were going to get rid of 12% of us, I was prepared for it. My boss' boss brought me into a little room and found the meeting more difficult than I did. The redundancy package was adequate (it's never generous!), and they were happy for me to spend my last few weeks looking for a new job from home, whilst dealing with hand-over issues as required.
In fact, since I wasn't enjoying the job anyway, I was already vaguely looking for a new one, but "vaguely" isn't enough. Not in "the current market", anyway. Everyone talks about "the current market", but don't expect it to make you feel any better. It won't - really it won't. Unluckily, "the current market" is all you've got, so you need to make the most of it. My first problem, I discovered, was that I didn't have much of a starting point. Somewhat ironically for someone who'd previously written a "how to network" article for jobhunters, I looked around me, and found that I didn't have much of a network. Although I'd been out of university in the workplace for over eight years, my professional network wasn't that well-formed. There's some sociological research that suggests that "loose ties" are better than "strong ties" when you're looking for a new job. In other words, it's not your close friends who can help you find a job, because they move in the same circles that you do, and know the same people, give or take a few: it's your wider circle of acquaintances. I had a good group of very close friends, but hadn't spent the time growing acquaintances outside that. An MBA is supposed to help, but the people I'd got to know didn't generally work in my sector, and weren't going to be much help - I've heard the same from some other MBA's, too. So, I had to find another way - and try to think about growing a network when I got the chance.
I made one good decision very early on: to treat finding a job as a job in itself. For me, this meant getting into a routine, and persevering with it. I have a computer at home and an office I could use, and I was firm right from the beginning: I would shave every day, and I would get dressed every day (it's very, very easy to spend the morning in front of the computer in a dressing gown!), and every morning would be devoted to finding a job. If the job-hunting rolled over into the afternoon, fine, but the morning didn't end until I'd exhausted all lines of enquiry for that day. For some people, it won't be shaving: it might be putting on a smart shirt, or tights and lipstick. However, my wife had made it clear that a career change of that magnitude was out of the question, so no make-up for me.
I also came up with a number of rules about the process. I can't pretend that they worked immediately, but I got good feedback concerning each of them at different points, so good luck with them.
Given "the current market" and my lack of networking opportunities, I basically spent my time looking for jobs on the Internet. This, in turn, meant talking to recruitment consultants. Recruitment consultants have a job to do, and that job is attracting lots of CVs via email, going through those CVs to find maybe five which match as closely as possible the job specification they've got from their client, presenting those CVs, and waiting for their candidates to be shortlisted. This is the easy way of doing it, and given the number of CVs that the agents are receiving at the moment for each job they advertise, I can understand why that's how it works. But unless your CV is a perfect match for a job - and if you've got a broad range of experience, like me, rather than an obvious career path, then that's unlikely - your CV will get scanned, and then filed (read "forgotten").
I heartily recommend talking to people. It may be enough to have a couple of minutes, giving them a few "hits" on major words gleaned from the job advert - "international experience", "project management", "EJB", "telecoms market", "cabaret performing", you get the idea - but be careful to tune your spiel, as you'll only get one chance. If you can, spend more time, but if you tell them your name, give them something which they'll remember about you, and then send them your CV in the next few minutes, you've got a much better chance of being considered than sending it "blind". You can then make a follow-up call to discuss the job in more detail, and to find out what they think of your CV.
No two jobs are really the same. Each job spec. will put emphasis on different areas, and key words will be what recruitment agents (and their clients, if you get that far) are looking for: a quick match (even after you've convinced them to look at your CV in the first place). So, having talked to the recruitment agent to find out what in particular their client needs, tune your CV accordingly. Even having done that, I put a couple of sentences in along the lines of "I know my CV is a little generic, which reflects the broad range of experience that I've gained over the past few years. However, if you think it would be worth tuning it to highlight areas which are particularly relevant, I'm very happy to do some more work on it." Hopefully, this doesn't sound like you're ready to lie (you shouldn't be!), but that you're ready to admit that the recruitment agent knows their client well - and a bit of flattery's usually a good thing. On a related topic, it became very clear after a lot of discussion that, for someone who's been out in the real world for a while, two pages is too little for the information you need to put across. I fitted mine to three pages, but added more for a few specific applications, on the advice of the recruitment agent. I'm no expert on CV's, and they seem to vary significantly across sectors, but it seems to be good practice to highlight, right at the top, the major "core competences" that you have which are particularly relevant to the role. After that, I'd take advice from colleagues (ex-colleagues!), friends, and the recruitment agents themselves: they're the ones who are going to be reading it.
I kept a spreadsheet of all the people I'd talked to, the company they were from, the stage I'd got to with the position, the position itself, its reference number (some agents have lots of jobs with the same title), when I'd sent the CV, the last time I'd talked to them, and when (if!) they'd submitted my CV. Every time I spoke to them (and I'd try to make sure that I spoke to agents on "live" opportunities at least once a week), I'd make some extra notes. This sounds like a drag, but was very useful. I could say "Oh, I spoke to you a couple of months ago about job X", or "I was talking to a colleague of yours about the job at Y", or "where are we with job Z? I tried to get hold of you on Thursday, but was told you were out". Most people won't just get back to you otherwise - they'll have forgotten how interesting you sounded on the phone, or have mislaid your CV, or their email system's down, or they'll go on holiday and not get round to contacting you on their return, so pester them. In the seven or so months I was looking for a job, I got to 243 lines on the spreadsheet, with around 150 specific jobs for which I'd submitted a CV. This is somewhat depressing in retrospect, but gives an idea of the amount of work you may need to put in.
The Jobseeker's Allowance isn't a huge amount of money a week, particularly if you don't qualify for income support, but it's not nothing, and you'll be grateful for it if you are out of work for a while. You'll probably find that it really makes you apply yourself to the job-finding process knowing that if you get a job you won't have to go to that fortnightly appointment. It's also nothing to be ashamed of: if you've worked during your adult life, then you've paid your National Insurance, and you've earned the right to it. And, believe me, when you get to go in and say "here's the booklet filled in: I'm not going to be claiming any more", it's a good feeling.
This is important. However hard you look, you're unlikely to be able to fill eight hours a day with job-hunting. If you don't find something else to do, you'll go mad (or at least a little potty), and this isn't going to help anyone. There's only so much Richard and Judy, daytime quizzes and house improvement programming you can watch in a week and still focus on that next job (well, that's my experience), so find something else to do. For me, it was researching and starting the reading for a part-time PhD. Maybe for you it will be a gardening project or new kitchen, but try not to make it something that you'd prefer to be doing exclusively, rather than having a job.
You can't assume that you'll get a job in the next couple of weeks. You really need to look at your finances and work out what you need, and what you don't. New CDs, books and eating out went out of the window for us, but on the other hand, we tried spending two pounds less per bottle of wine, and decided we'd just prefer to drink less of the better stuff! If we'd had income protection on our mortgage, life would have been easier, as well, but we'd never got it when we started out of university, as we thought we couldn't afford it, and when we could afford, we didn't bother. This is a mistake we could have avoided.
Even if you don't have much of a professional network, use the friends and family you've got, and not just for jobs. Being out of work is hard, and when people offer support, take it if you can. Talking about each job advert and the highs and the lows of the process may be too painful - there were times when I wished people would shut up about it, certainly - but offers of a meal or a cup of tea or just a chat helped keep me balanced (well, no more unbalanced than usual). Like the Jobseeker's Allowance, don't feel guilty about accepting help - friends wouldn't be offering it if you hadn't earned their friendship, and you can pay them back when you have a job.
You may be lucky and get a job the day after you lose your old one: I hope you do. But you may find that it takes a while. For me, it was nearly seven months from the date I was made redundant to the day I accepted an offer for a new job. In the end, it came from a recruitment agent with whom I'd not had contact before, but whose colleague I'd talked to about a couple of interesting roles in some detail, and at some length and on several occasions. Time spent on the phone letting him get to know me had meant that he'd recommended me to someone else in the office. I tuned the CV three times until we were happy with it, it went out, and they asked me in for an interview the day after they received it. Two and a half hours of interview later, and a few nerve-racking days of knowing I was on the shortlist, and they offered it to me without a second interview.
So, here are my top ten tips - good luck!