25 Hours Per Week Job-Search Schedule

Dear Liz,

I graduated from college five years and have been lucky not to have
job-hunted since then. I am job-searching now and struggling with the
question of how to spend my time. Do you have a simple schedule to
share with me?

Thanks,

Deniece

______ LIZ REPLIES:_______________

Dear Deniece,

This is a big hurdle for newly unemployed job-seekers: how do I spend
my day? Here's a roadmap to get your job search and your new (just-
for-the-duration) schedule going:

1) Make a plan.
You can't apply for everything. You'll want to zero in on a certain
job-search geography, the types of companies you'll be targeting, and
of course the job titles/families that are closest to your experience
and interests. You'll need the plan first so that your resume,
LinkedIn profile and job-search business card (those are in Step Two,
below) can 'point' in the direction you've identified.

2) Get your materials together.
Your sharp, human-voiced resume is the very first priority where your
job-search toolkit is concerned. Your LinkedIn profile is next.
Third, you'll want a set of dedicated job-search business cards. A
grownup email address (not luvcats@gmail.com) and outgoing voicemail
message round out the list.

3) How much time have you got?
You'll need to know how much time you're willing to spend on your job-
search every day (M-F) in order to create a schedule. Let's say five
hours per day is your target. (I like it!). That means you've got 25
hours/week available for job-searching; that's equivalent to a full-
time job search, because job-hunt work is Very Taxing.

4) Build your schedule.
Here's my recommended daily breakdown:

One hour/day of jobs-site research. Target: Apply for five new jobs
every day M-F. Once you find a few jobs sites that seem to turn up
the best opportunities (I like Indeed.com, SimplyHired.com, and
CareerBuilder.com, but if you tell us your area of specialty we can
recommend others) set up email alerts to send new job opps to your
inbox.

One hour/day of company research. You don't want to apply for those
five jobs until you've researched the companies that are advertising
them. One hour/day gives you twelve minutes on each employer's
website and on LinkedIn to gather fodder for your pithy, customized
cover letter. You're looking for a specific person to write to, and a
topical 'hook' for the first paragraph of your cover letter.

One hour/day writing cover letters: You'll use the previous hour's
research to construct a customized cover letter for each opportunity.
Read more about customized cover letters at
www.practicaljobsearchadvice.blogspot.com.

One hour/day assembling and sending out your five packets via snail
mail. You can also use some of this time to write a second great
cover letter per opportunity, in case you decide to double up your
direct-outreach efforts by sending a resume and cover letter into the
Black Hole (the employer's website or its ad on Monster,
CareerBuilder, et al). (It can't hurt.)

One hour/day networking - that's lunch, coffee, a walk around the
block or some other face-to-face contact with a human being who can
give you leads, ideas, and/or moral support for your job search. If
you have a friend who's game for a weekly get-together, sign up, even
if s/he has no ideas and no leads - the moral support is the most
important element! Job-searching is hard, solitary, often
discouraging work.

There's your schedule. If you get a burst of energy in the evening
there's "pure" employer research -- that is, writing to companies who
haven't posted jobs -- and there's online networking, which isn't
included in your daytime schedule, above. No space left in this
message to write about those two job-search prongs, but we'll get to
it down the road....cheers, Liz

www.asklizryan.com/details
liz@asklizryan.com