Author: Tim Jack
A few months ago, I wrote about my job search under the title Becoming a Better Candidate During the Journey. I can now add the ending I was hoping for. I recently accepted a new position that’s an unusually good match for my experience.
After 27 years in federal service and a much longer job search than I ever expected, I’m doing senior financial leadership work again, for an organization whose mission I care about, using most of what I spent 27 years learning how to do.
It didn’t start that way. For the first six months, I was invisible. I was working hard, applying, networking, doing everything I thought I was supposed to do, and nothing was landing. No callbacks, no traction, nothing.
Career-Confidence is a village, and I mean that as a compliment. Walk down Career-Confidence’s main street and you’ll find a different specialist for every part of the search: someone who knows resumes inside and out, someone who knows LinkedIn, someone who knows networking, someone who knows interviewing. Each person does something well, and that’s what makes the whole street work. I used all of them.
When I first arrived at Career-Confidence, I felt like the new village idiot. Not because I lack intelligence, but because I didn’t know how to search for a job the right way. They rebuilt my resume with me, rebuilt my LinkedIn presence with me, and helped me find and shape the stories I’d eventually tell in interviews.
Looking back, a few things made a real difference:
- Build and use your network. Networking is not collecting LinkedIn connections or asking people for jobs. It is developing genuine professional relationships. I expanded my network considerably during the search, but I also learned to make much better use of the network I already had.
- Make sure your resume and LinkedIn profile tell the right story. Having strong experience is not enough if employers cannot quickly understand what you have done, the scale at which you have done it, and the problems you can solve for them. I completely rethought how I presented 27 years of experience.
- Develop your stories before you need them. I built a library of specific examples from my career and practiced telling them clearly: the problem, what I did, why I did it, and what happened. By the time the right interview came along, I wasn’t trying to remember examples under pressure. I knew my stories.
- The first interview question matters. “Tell me about yourself” sounds simple, but it establishes how the interviewers see you. I learned to use that opening to connect the major pieces of my career directly to the position rather than simply walking through my resume.
Perhaps the biggest lesson, though, is the same one I was beginning to understand when I wrote the original article: a job search can make you a better candidate if you let it. Not by grinding harder, but by actually paying attention to what each rejection and each interview is telling you.
There were disappointments along the way. Some opportunities I thought were excellent fits went nowhere. But every conversation, interview, networking meeting, resume revision and Career-Confidence session gave me another opportunity to get a little better.
Eventually, preparation met the right opportunity.
To everyone at Career-Confidence who offered advice, encouragement, introductions, criticism, and the occasional needed push, thank you for building that village and letting me walk down every street in it.
And to those who are still searching: keep working on the candidate while you are looking for the job. You may be much closer than you think.