© 2024
Getting Started
Welcome to this modular programme, we hope that you find it both enjoyable and valuable in helping you to find your next job
You are invited to
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Allow plenty of time to take on board and apply the wealth of useful knowledge, tools and activities provided
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Recognise the benefits and enhancements the coaching has provided by making an online charitable donation with one of our charity partners by CLICKING HERE
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Pass the portal on to anyone who may find it helpful, we need to look after each other in these challenging times
Tackle the modules in bite size chunks, don’t feel the need to do everything in one go and allow plenty of time to digest and apply the information covered
The modules include helpful ‘Activities’ for you to complete, it is strongly recommended that you undertake them to get the most out of the content and the key learning points
Allow yourself time to reflect and take on board the advice, key messages and suggested tasks contained in the programme to enable you to move your job campaign forward
This first module will
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Identify the eight job hunting ingredients essential to success
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Explain why they are each so important for your job campaign
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Highlight the strong areas of your job campaign to enhance even further
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Spot your weaker campaign areas that need initiating or developing
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Undertake a coaching needs analysis of where you are and what you need to do
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Provide guidance on how to successfully coach yourself to be an effective job hunter
This programme provides a module for each of the eight above key job hunting ingredients
As our starting point, let's look at what they each mean and why they are so important
Knowledge
Self-awareness – if you are confused about what you have to offer, others will be too
In day to day life, you don’t talk about how good you are at your job, so its only natural to feel uncomfortable when you need to start doing so when job hunting, however, it is essential that you become more comfortable with doing so. Self-awareness is about your
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Comfort and ease managing change and transition – do you welcome and embrace change or do you dread and resist it? Either way, it is important that you know yourself and know how to manage your reactions and your personal transition
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Knowledge of your skills, strengths and achievements – being able to identify and recognise all of the valuable skills, strengths and achievements that you possess will be very important when job hunting
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Confidence in how employable and valuable you are – knowing your skills, strengths and achievements is crucial, but it is only half the job. You also need to truly value them. If you don’t value them then nobody else will either
CV writing – if you can’t express your worth, readers won’t value you.
Like the John Lewis tagline ‘Never Knowingly Undersold’, your CV should
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Provide a clear visual picture of what you have to offer – your CV needs to show the reader that ‘I did it for them, now I can do it for you'
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Stand out from other competing candidates – is your CV getting you on to the short list to the next selection stage, or with the large pile of applicants that are rejected?
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Generate interviews, meetings and conversations – if your CV isn’t regularly converting opportunities into interactions with decision makers then it’s not working
Interview technique – articulating your abilities isn’t easy, but has to be done
Being the best candidate isn’t enough, you need to be the best interviewee as well, it is about your
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Robustness preparing yourself and your evidence - fail to prepare, prepare to fail
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Performance at interviews and meetings – if you feel confident about your evidence, it will show
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Being ahead of competing interviewees – you don’t need to be a fast runner,
just faster than the other interviewees
Market presence – recruiters only know about you if you go out and find them
Recruiters are looking for credible candidates, it’s your job to get on their ‘radars’ and ‘sell yourself’ to ensure that you are one of the credible candidates they know about by
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Making full use of all the key routes to jobs – don’t rely on just one way to find job opportunities, spread your bets
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Optimising the strength and value of your networks – using your network is good for you and good for your network, a win-win for everybody
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Maximising social media capability and activity – managing your virtual image effectively and proactively using social media is vital and becoming even more important
Behaviour
Motivation – if you're not truly 'up for it', there are plenty of others who are
Most job hunters will have external motivators (e.g. dependents, mortgages, bills etc.), it’s the internal motivators that will get you ‘ahead of the pack’, so it's about your
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Energy, enthusiasm and engagement levels – does job hunting fill you with dread or present a challenge you want to tackle? Either way, you need to be as 'hungry' for a job as your competitors!
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Self starter drive and strength of imperatives – are you somebody who is able to quickly and easily motivate yourself or do you find it difficult to become enthusiastic and get yourself going?
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Emotional commitment to getting a job – are you feeling truly 'up for it' and passionate about job hunting or just doing it because you have to?
Courage – fear (e.g. of failure, rejection etc.) is a natural reaction
It is OK and perfectly normal to have fears and concerns, its not OK to let them drive your behaviour in the wrong direction, so you need to
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Ensure that your fears don’t drive your behaviour – as W. Clement Stone said ‘Thinking will not overcome fear but action will’
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Be prepared to be brave and to take control – it is often said in many different situations that the scariest moment is always just before you start doing something!
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Show openness and not be defensive – recognising, accepting and learning from mistakes can be incredibly valuable and liberating, not doing so will mean you keep making the same mistakes
Resilience – job hunting can involve being knocked back
The best sales people know and accept that they have to get through the ‘No’ responses to get to the ‘Yes’ buyers, so to bounce back you need to
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Learn and grow from challenges and adversity – when things aren't going your way and you feel 'knocked back', is your reaction to feel down and demotivated or does it galvanise you to do something about it?
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Build your capacity to bounce back and recover – Dieter F. Uchtdorfe said ‘It's your reaction to adversity, not adversity itself that determines how your life’s story will develop’
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Be realistic, positive and practical – resilience isn’t about blind optimism, quite the opposite, it is about being realistic and recognising what needs to be done
Structure – it is a campaign, so be organised, build momentum and keep going
Having an organised plan consisting of a series of ‘bite size’ tasks will make the campaign manageable and also make it look much less scary and can be achieved by
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Having and implementing a clear job campaign – goals without an implementation plan are just a wish list
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Time and effort prioritised with activity being effective – the opportunity cost of doing something is what else you are not doing
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Ensuring self-discipline to keep the campaign on track – you will need tenacity and grit to keep yourself going
Somewhere out there is your next job
At the moment, you don’t know about it and it doesn’t know about you
We need to get those two bits of information together and close the deal
To do so, you need to get ready for a journey to find and land your next job
If possible, share the output from any of the activities undertaken in this and the other modules with others for helpful feedback and as a useful sounding board
Coaching needs analysis
Now that you have started considering your knowledge and behaviour readiness, let’s delve a little further from a coaching perspective
Being entirely honest with yourself (nobody else will ever know!), where would you currently place yourself on the matrix below
Let’s look at each area and what they might mean for you in successfully coaching yourself
Trapped flounderer
This is a tough place to be, with the overriding emotion likely to be a feeling of being overwhelmed and not knowing quite where to start
The main coaching task is to turn what may look insurmountable into lots of smaller, achievable tasks so that you gradually build up your job hunting abilities and readiness
Informed struggler
This may feel like a frustrating place to be, knowing what needs doing, yet failing to make it happen and possibly not being sure why it is so
The key coaching task is to focus on behaviour skills and understand and resolve what’s stopping you from getting on with having an effective job campaign
Naïve striver
Here, you may feel very energised and ‘up for it’, but feel lost as to what needs doing, how to undertake the tasks and what order to do them in
The key coaching task is spend time redirecting your energy to acquiring the knowledge and information you need to use your time and energy effectively
Mediocre plodder
Lots of your competing job hunters will be here, so if you are too, you will be just one more in the crowd and probably finding it difficult to stand out from other job hunters
The key coaching task here is for you to not accept that ‘OK is OK’, you need to measurably up your game to 'get ahead of the pack'
Star performer
This is the ideal area you need to either be in or get to as soon as possible for a fast, effective and successful job hunting campaign
The key coaching task is to keep doing everything positive you have already put in place with persistence and determination and to minimise or eliminate any negative distractions
A famous quote, often attributed to Albert Einstein, says ‘The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results’
Coaching is about getting yourself to do things differently to achieve different and more successful outcomes
To coach yourself to have a successful job hunting campaign, you will need five key attributes to make the necessary changes happen, namely, you need to be
Hopefully, you now have more of a sense of where you currently are in job hunting readiness terms and what the challenges are in coaching yourself
Now, let’s start to get cracking and make it all happen to secure your next job with the rest of the modules in this programme
This module has
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Identified the eight key ingredients of effective job hunting
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Explained why they’re so crucial and valuable to successful job hunting
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Provided a framework to learn and use key tools and techniques
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Enabled you to recognise the areas that need to be enhanced
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Provided a coaching route forward to have a successful job hunting campaign
Well done on completing this first module
The remaining modules will enable you to improve your job hunting readiness and get your job campaign really motoring to find your next job – it's out there somewhere
The next module looks at one of the foundation stones of effective job hunting - raising and building your self-awareness
Go to the next module by CLICKING HERE
Go back to the Job Hunting main menu by CLICKING HERE