An 11-Step Guide to Finding Your Next Employer

This is the first of a multi-part blog series that I hope will bring a bit of clarity to one of the most confusing times in a person’s career – that of finding that next job.

For the last several months, I have been researching the industry of employment, staffing, recruiting, career management and job change as I have worked to develop new solutions to help people find work. Within this time, I have learned a lot, spoken with countless industry icons, studied many hundreds of blogs, websites, job-matching and staffing companies, and studied almost all aspects of finding work in America and around the world.

I have collected blog posts from several people in the public domain that I believe to be extremely valuable. This series will be a combination of many people’s thoughts as well as some of my thoughts that I hope you will find valuable if not merely interesting. Please feel free to adapt any or all of these suggestions to fit your own job-search strategies and tactics.

What I have found is that everyone has his or her own method of finding work. Every one has suggestions to help speed job searches. Every one has specific recommendations and favorite resources including websites, people and companies.

For today, I’d like to share what I have found to be the most logical and systematic first sequential steps for attaining success in researching target companies for that next job. You may want to think of this methodology as a recipe for cooking up success. There are ingredients, assembly instructions and cooking times required prior to producing the desired result. Today is the Foundation phase, or we are gathering the ingredients for our recipe.

NOTE: All of the research in this segment should be performed before you apply to any position.

1. If you are not interested in relocating, get a map and a compass and draw out your geographically desirable area. Be sure to use a map that lists either zip codes or area codes for cross-referencing with corporate offices’ addresses or phone numbers. If you are interested in relocation or are open to it, think about what cities or geographical areas are either desirable or acceptable to you and have those areas clearly identified in your mind at this stage. You can do this with a real map, or electronically with a virtual map, but make a tangible and physical list of acceptable locations.

2. Use your computer and identify 50 to 75 companies located within your commutable radius from your home or desired living location. This may be 10 miles, it may be 60 miles from your residence. Depending on the density of corporate population nearby, you may have to extend beyond a 60 mile one-way commute in order to get enough companies to search. Try to avoid commuting distances of over one-hour each way. By doing this, you may avoid the expense of a divorce and child-support later on.

3. Use at least 10 different search resources for finding the companies within your target geography. These 10 sites, Google, Monster, Indeed.com, CareerBuilder, LinkedIn, online Yellow Pages, Ask.com, Manta.com, Yahoo, and Bing, all offer search parameters to help find companies within geography, zip code or area code. Some of them also offer searches by industry sector, country and business size. List all of these 50 to 75 searched companies onto your spreadsheet. Make a note of those companies that you find listed on more than one of these resource sites.

See full post at: An 11-Step Guide to Finding Your Next Employer – Part 1 | Booyango Blog.