How to Find a Job in a Bad Economy

I want to give you all some tips on finding a job in this bad economy. It has worked for me before so it should work for you.

Getting a any job is about your relationships with people. It is not about the number of submissions you have on the corporate website,craigslist or careerbuilder. A lot of people go into job searches thinking the more resumes they submit the better chance they have. This is true to a certain extent depending on who you are submitting your resume too.(explain) What people need to realize is that you need to build a relationship with people who are in positions to hire you.

These are some key steps to finding the job you want in a bad economy.

1. This is the most important. Build 'The List.' 'The List' is grouping the contact information from anyone you have ever met or had contact with. If you do not have contacts in your field of interest, be proactive and get them by any means necessary. Then, you can add them to 'The List'. People you know even in passing are more likely to be able to connect you with new job opportunities than complete strangers. I utilize my list by sending politically correct holiday cards each year. This year I emailed hundreds of people I have came into contact with a holiday card using americangreetings.com. It is free for the first 30 days. They will link the account to your email account so you can use your list. You would be surprised that people you even had limited contact with will respond. This will allow for a dialogue to take place that might have otherwise seemed out of place.

2. Know what you want. Many people go into their job searches not knowing exactly what they want to do. This will take some self reflection on your part to figure out where your heart truly lies. It is usually best to follow that gut feeling or your intuition in this case. A book that helped me to sort out what I wanted was 'Do What You Are" By Paul D. Tieger. If you know what exactly what you want and you play to your strengths, the rest of the job search process will be much easier.

3. Develop a cover letter. If you do a good job reflecting on knowing what you want, this step should be much easier. The job of the cover letter is to showcase your strengths and it fits into what the hiring manager needs. This letter is a marketing tool so you have to display how you can bridge the gap between what the employer needs and what you need. A strong cover letter will open a lot of doors for you. It is best if you make this up from scratch. Templates usually do not work with this. Just remember introduce yourself in the first paragraph(make sure you tell the person where you got their contact info), show/display how/why you fit in the second paragraph and save the last paragraph for you closing remarks/contact info.

4. Develop a resume. You should already have a resume but take the time to develop it. Please make sure there are no spelling mistakes or any other sort of errors. You can be weeded out very quickly with any grammatical or spelling errors. It is safer to follow resume templates so go for it here.

5. Disseminate. By the time you get to this point, you should be ready to utilize the list you built full of contacts. I would start out by just sending the cover letter you made earlier. This way you can feel people out to see if they would be interested in seeing you full resume. This strategy has worked very well for me. A lot of people were not hiring. However, they admired my level of pro-activity in my job search so they passed on my resume to others.

6. Travel. You should have enough money to be able to pick up and fly to a job interview if needed. It is a rough economy out there and you may not be able to find a job in your field in your geographic location. Be ready to take some flights or train rides to interviews. If you really want a job in a specific field, it may take doing this. I flew 3000 miles to get my current job. However, the hiring person did not pay for relocation and I made sure to have a local address listed on my resume and a place to stay. You might go in the hole in the short term doing this but the long term benefits of having a job you want will outweigh being broke for the job search process. You should note that you can get a tax write off for relocating for a job.

I hope this was helpful to someone out there. This was my first article. I would love feedback. Thanks!