There are plenty of self-help books, consultants and coaches to help you find your calling and pursue a career. There are many talked-about strategies to work on that, from staying current on the advances in your field, to continuous learning about your self and potential, to staying in control of your destiny and digging deeper for a desired breakthrough.
Two of the best self-directed resources I found as a marketer are Catherine Kaputa’s U Are a Brand! How Smart People Brand Themselves for Business Success, and Re-imagine! By Tom Peters, the creator of the Brand You concept.
I meet many free agents who for a reason or another are deciding to go back to being an employee. What often happens is that a client they did a great deal of work for and developed a strong relationship with over time proposes to hire them on a permanent basis.
This is also what happens in your best networking scenario. The people who have known you and of you either directly through your work, or from trusted friends and colleagues are open to having a conversation on business collaboration, often leading to a job where you write the description.
If this is not the case and you have invested no time on your network for various reasons: maybe you work long hours and are busy with family commitments, maybe you went back for a degree while working, or any other number of reasons. You may wonder how do you find a job these days?
You could go online. After all, that’s where it has become natural going for all the other searches, whether they be for a mate, an interest group, the definition of a word, research, the lyrics to your favorite song, or the translation of that tasty Italian recipe.
The traditional route
Chances are you know about Monster.com. You probably saw the Super Bowl ads. What’s that? Oh, so you heard about it from a friend of a friend. It would be interesting to see how Monster generates most of its leads. Martina at Adverblog writes about an online campaign in Italy during Christmas time that might generate some viral effects.
This route seems active, when in fact it is quite passive. The active piece is your entering the resume online and doing your best to tag it properly so it can be found by the companies on your list of desirables to work at. I see this environment as favorable to the employer who can go and search the enormous database to the heart’s content of the HR department and to headhunters who will find you if you have done your entering right.
The new way
Maybe there is a new way of taking care of your career so that when you look for a new job you are already talking with the marketplace. Or, in the best-case scenario, the marketplace can find you as you go about your business of doing great work. Now that would be quite desirable indeed.
Harry Joiner at Marketing Headhunter writes about the future of LinkedIn. For those of you who are not familiar with this online tool, LinkedIn is the place to go for business networking and apparently to find your next gig.
Harry’s riff about the growth and evolution of this tool/network along with its potential is quite intriguing. In fact, it reminds me a lot of what we continue to learn from Seth about marketing. His potential scenarios as well as what those may mean for you and your industry are worth pondering.
[For those of you who'd like to learn more about LinkedIn, Scott Allen blogs on LinkedIn Intelligence.]