I had so many incredibly generous and helpful people offer their time and connections in my recent job search; it was both shocking and inspiring. I don’t have all the same resources to offer others, but I think a detailed review of how I went about my job search could prove helpful to those who find themselves looking for new work opportunities. Not all readers are in the same industry as me and therefore not all of these tips will apply, but I hope all can find something to try and this guide can be my way of paying it forward.
I’ve broken this down into a few categories:
The idea being that your mindset will form your strategy and networking will enable interviews. I’ll be really curious to hear if others find this breakdown useful.
On May 31, 2022 I stood by a hospital bed and witnessed my wife deliver our first child, a beautiful baby girl, into the world. It was a magical and surreal moment that I will never forget. No more than 48 hours later I got a call from my boss congratulating me on our baby’s birth and also sharing some less awesome news: layoffs were taking place and I was being let go. Our little family was minutes away from being discharged from the hospital and it felt like I was living a scene from a movie. I couldn’t believe the timing. It would’ve been really easy for me to wallow in this terrible news for a while and even bring the victim mentality into my job search. But I decided, pretty much immediately, that I wanted to have a different attitude.
I wanted to take this opportunity to look at life different — especially since we had just welcomed a new soul into the world. I wanted to be open-minded towards all those who presented opportunities to me, because I wanted to take a chance to be exposed to jobs or industries that I normally wouldn’t consider. I found taking this mindset into my job hunt allowed me to hear about far more positions and companies than the last time I was looking. Even though I didn’t find every opportunity interesting, I ended up with a much more diverse pool of potential jobs sooner.
My open-minded mindset helped me form my job hunting strategy: dive heavily into networking and follow through with everyone I could. I firmly believe that networking is the absolutely best way to find a new place to work. At first I was a bit nervous to get referrals through friends and family: I felt an obligation for it to go well or for me to like it because it was essentially a gift from that friend or family member. And before I follow that up, I should emphasize, referrals or contacts ARE gifts and you should keep track of them and follow through on every single one. But that does not mean you need to feel obligated to be interested in every opportunity. You will have to decide how picky you want to be based on your situation. Sometimes you will get contacts or opportunities that don’t quite fit what you are looking for and it’s perfectly okay to say, “ I really appreciate the time you’ve given me, but I don’t think this is quite what I am looking for”. I will also discuss a way to get better quality contacts in the Networking section.
Also, part of my strategy was setting up some spreadsheets to track my progress with different companies and referrals. I knew it would be hard to keep track of all of this in my head and having some notes to refer to when following up on referrals would really help.
For tracking my contacts and referrals I went with this structure (Fig. 1). The idea being that I could keep track of who my first degree connections referred me to, where they worked and any follow up that I needed to perform. This saved me from missing out on talking to some really cool people multiple times.
Referral and Contact Tracking Spreadsheet (Fig. 1)