What Color Is Your Parachute?

experience than they are on his or her potential, or skills, or knowledges. They prefer to hire someone who has had past experience in this or related fields, rather than a career-changer who is new to the field and to the job. (Good news: there are ways of getting around this, as we shall see later, in chapter 12.) Of course there are sterling exceptions to what I have just said, but you have to hunt harder, to find them.

JOB-HUNTING METHODS WERE NOT CREATED EQUAL

Now to our lists. But first a word about my methodology, such as it is. There is absolutely nothing scientific here. The statistics, the percentages, are guesses. My guesses.

That’s because, on the one hand, we don’t have much research comparing how well job-hunters’ methods work. Researchers tend to study employers’ behavior and preferences, but not job-hunters’.

On the other hand, if you are in this field for forty years, as I have been, and you keep your eyes open, you do run into a small study here, a small study there, that gives you a pretty good idea, over time, of what works, what doesn’t, and to what degree. I watch for these all the time, but I don’t keep records of what study, what year, who did it, and that kind of thing. Studies about job-hunters’ behavior are notoriously “squishy,” and not worth leaning too heavily on. So, I read this stuff, and then store just the basic statistics away in my head, so when it comes time to make guesses, I don’t make them out of thin air. They are educated guesses, based on research and observation.

Now, when all is said and done, what difference do these odds make? Just this. There are 18 alternative ways of looking for work, as we have seen; but unfortunately, these alternatives were not all created equal. Some methods of hunting for jobs have a pretty good track record, and therefore will repay you for time spent pursuing them. But other methods have a pretty poor track record, and you can waste a lot of time, and energy, on them, with no results, if you’re not careful. So, this is all about conservation of energy. Your energy. The lesson from all this is: don’t waste your time or energy on the least effective job- hunting methods, unless you’re one of these people who likes to bet against the odds, the bigger the better.

Here, then, are my educated guesses as to what percentage of job-hunters who use each method actually succeed thereby in finding a job.

You will notice that some of our country’s favorite job-hunting strategies are on the list of least effective. I was as surprised as you.

THE FIVE WORST WAYS TO LOOK FOR A JOB

Only a 4 to 10% Success Rate

1. Looking for employers’ job-postings on the Internet. Yeah, I know, you’re somewhere between surprised and shocked at this finding. I was too. For now, we are talking about the Internet in just one of its capacities: as a place where job-hunters can find jobs, whether through posting their resume, or looking for employers’ job postings, working through social media, websites, Twitter, or blogs. The question is, how helpful is this use of the Internet, and this use only?

The answer is: well, that depends.

You will hear stories of job-hunters who have successfully used the Internet to find a job. The stories are very impressive. Here are some examples.

A job-seeker, a systems administrator in Taos, New Mexico, who wanted to move to San Francisco posted his resume at 10 p.m. on a Monday night, on a San Francisco online bulletin board (Craigslist.org). By Wednesday morning he had over seventy responses from employers.

Again, a marketing professional developed her resume following guidance she found on the Internet, posted it to two advertised positions she found there, and within seventy-two hours of posting her electronic resume, both firms contacted her, and she is now working for one of them.

I get letters about this, too. “In May I was very unexpectedly laid off from a company I was with for five years. I did 100 percent of my job search and research via the Internet. I found all my leads online, sent all my resumes via e-mail, and had about a 25 percent response rate that actually led to a phone interview or a face-to- face interview. It was a software company that laid me off, and I am [now] going to work for a publishing company, a position I found online.”

And: “Thanks to the Internet, I found what I believe to be the ideal job in [just] eight weeks—a great job with a great company and great opportunities….”

So we see the Internet can do a marvelous job of making it possible for an employer and a job-hunter to get together, in a way that was rarely possible even fifteen years ago. Internet sites devoted to job-hunting—some experts say there are over 100,000 “job-boards” now—make it possible for job-hunter and employer to get together faster than ever before in history.

So, you’ll want to try it. Of course, it doesn’t always work. Aye, and there’s the rub! It turns out, despite all the hype, that it actually doesn’t work for a huge percentage of those who try it. Researchers have turned up the fact that out of every 100 job-hunters who use the Internet as their search method for finding jobs, 4 of them will get lucky and find a job thereby, while 96 job-hunters out of the 100 will not—if they use only the Internet to search for a job.

Disclaimer: If you are seeking a technical or computer-related job, an IT job, or a job in engineering, finances, or healthcare, the success rate rises, to somewhere around 10 percent. But for the other 20,000 job-titles that are out there in the job-market, the success rate reportedly remains at about 4 percent.

In better times, economically, it was common for job-hunters to believe that job-search on the Internet worked for most everybody, so when they found that it didn’t work for them, they obsessed over the question: “What’s wrong with me?” Result: lowered self-esteem, or even mammoth depression. Yuck!

In hard times, we expect that job-search on the Internet won’t work well for just about everybody. Why? Because we think there just are no jobs out there. Okay, and why do we think that? The answer: Mythology.

The common myth among job-hunters is that if an employer has a vacancy, they will post it on the Internet—on their own site, if nowhere else. Not true. Employers will only post their vacancies on the Internet, or anywhere else, if they are having trouble finding the kind of hire that they are looking for.

Otherwise, they fall back to their default position: filling it without advertising it. This creates what we might call an underground job-market, which historically has been called the “hidden job market.” Because of this mythology, job-hunters think that if there are no postings, there are no jobs available. Not true. The vacancies have just gone underground.

Only a 7% Success Rate

2. Posting or mailing out your resume to employers. This job-search method apparently has about a 7 percent success rate. That is, out of every 100 job-hunters who use only this search method, 7 will get lucky, and find a job thereby; 93 job-hunters out of 100 will not—if they use only resumes to search for those vacancies that are out there. This comes as a shock to most job-hunters. Everyone and his brother tell us: a good resume will get you a job. It’s virtually an article of faith among the unemployed. Why does everyone keep telling us this, if it’s not true? Oh, why did everyone entrust their money to Bernie Madoff? Or why did so many people buy those incredibly risky financial instruments that led to the Recession? You tell me.

Resumes make you feel like they’re out there, working for you. They make you feel as though you’re really doing something about your jobhunt. But in fact they may be moribund or comatose. That is, they may not be getting read, at all, even when posted on an employer’s own website. As for posting on general sites, well, they