The job hunt is picking up. I’ve posted my resume and am getting responses from Excell data and a few other recruiters. These are positions primarily at Microsoft.
I also started reading Kei’s book “The Unwritten Rules of the Highly Effective Job Search” a book by Orville Pierson, a career services professional, and his methods for identifying work you want to do, then finding it. The book is crammed with good advice, and fits my mindset of offering a complete solution to figuring this stuff out (not just a book on cover letters, or resumes, or
networking).
I’ve sort of skimmed the chapters on identifying the job you really want. There are some activities in there I’ve started, like listing out all the experiences paid and unpaid you’ve had and writing down what you like and don’t like about those experiences. This is a way to identify your interests, which Pierson explains are the best way to identify what you’re next job should be. People do well at what they are interested in doing. I am going to hold off on this for the moment, and focus on looking for work similar to what I do now so I can make this transition seemless.
My next task then, according to the Pierson method, is to create a target list of companies I’d like to work for. There are a couple that pop straight into my head, Google, Amazon, SolutionsIQ, but the point here is to come up with a “Rolling 40”, a prioritized list of companies that you would love to work for in your area, industry and size. I think I’m going to check out Hoovers for lists of businesses, the Internet, and asking my old .com contacts if they know of any startups.
An interesting twist on this is that the Rolling 40 is not a list of companies offering jobs, but companies you’d like to work for. This is a big difference, apparently, as 75% of jobs are unadvertised. My goal here is to find people I know who work for these companies and see if they like working there.