Finding a Job Means Using Your Common Sense

I often hear people say that they can’t find a job for a whole various reasons, the economy, or their age or that they just don’t have any luck. In many cases it usually boils down to the fact that they haven’t been using their common sense. Finding a new job is like most challenges in life, it’s not rocket science, but it takes hard work and determination (amongst other things) and a plan to succeed.Let me share two examples of people who couldn’t find jobs for no other reason than a failure to use their common sense.Candidate 1: He called me out of the blue having not been in contact for over a year. When we had met then we had discussed various strategies for finding a new job. Now he complained that the market had turned against him and no-one was hiring anymore.

What transpired once we had started to talk was that he had actually only applied for one job in the last 12 months. He had been referred to someone at a company who was recruiting, had been told his experience was interesting and that they would get back to him. A year later and he had heard nothing and he interpreted this as being the fault of the ‘market’.Candidate 2:He applied for a job that I had advertised and although he wasn’t right for this position I met with him as he had such an impressive list of qualifications and experience, but inspite the fact that his CV was terrible (long, vague and lacking structure). He went on at length about how backward this country is how no-one recognised his value and expressed frustration at his inability to find a job.After some discussion it turned out that this highly qualified and intelligent man was using the following job finding strategy – he was writing to (not e-mailing) companies he thought might be able to use him and asking for a job. Occasionally he would follow up with a phone call. Given that his CV was practically unreadable, I told him I wasn’t too surprised he hadn’t had much success. It doesn’t take a genius to work out why both candidates were having problems. If you are serious about finding a new job use your common sense.

Work out what you want to do, research the market, find out what is needed and then develop a plan that gets you to where you want to be. Applying for one job a year, or writing letters to companies that don’t know who you are (with a CV that is hard to read) just isn’t going to be a successful strategy.