The JobSync Blog
Are You Looking Too Hard for a Job?
November 2, 2011
Want to land a job? Stop looking so hard.
That is the advice consultant Peter Bregman is offering in an interesting blog for the Harvard Business Review. His thesis is a simple one: When you spend excessive amounts of time job seeking, the many hours of frustration, irritation, and exasperation begin to show, and no one wants to hire someone who appears desperate.
Instead of spending all that time hunting for a job, Bregman recommends you engage in activities that keep you intellectually and emotionally engaged. The benefits of immersing yourself in such activities is twofold. First, doing things you enjoy will energize you and make your demeanor more passionate and attractive to potential employers. In addition, employers who become aware of the work you are doing as part of those activities (e.g., performing marketing work as a board member of a not-for-profit) may also find you to be a desirable candidate.
So what’s Bregman’s recipe for managing your time? First, he encourages unemployed jobseekers to devote only one to two hours a day looking for a job. As for dividing the rest of your time, it’s simple:
1. Make a list of all the things you love doing or things that intrigue you that you’d like to try doing.
2. Separate the activities you do with people from the activities you do alone. For example, gardening, reading, meditating, and writing are alone activities. Volunteering to run a fundraiser is with people.
3. Look at the activities you do alone and figure out if you can (and want to) do them in a way that includes other people. For example, join a garden club. Or write something that other people read, including a blog. If you can (and want to) make them activities that include other people, keep them on the list. If not, then cross them off the list.
4. Spend 90% of your time doing things you love or have always wanted to try with other people who also love doing those things. If possible, take a leadership role.
Bregman makes several compelling points. However, he also advocates that one should not use online job sites, arguing that most companies will not hire someone they don’t already know. This may be true when job sites dump all candidates into a large pile and make them look the same. Networks like JobSync, however, are created to focus on an individual’s unique personality and allow companies to see candidates who truly fit their job opportunities.
In the present climate, working smarter on your job search can often be more productive than working harder on your job search. Ultimately, it is always wise to take a little time off to refresh, reevaluate, and regroup. In the end, there’s nothing wrong with looking hard for a job – just never look like you’re looking hard for a job.
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