Job searching can be a grueling process, but do you know how to actually locate job opportunities that are right for you? We don’t mean just browsing different job boards and networking. There are tools, tips, and techniques that you can use to find those opportunities that excite you. It’s about an approach that encompasses all of it.
We will cover Teal’s approach and philosophies of three main ways for how you go to market and how you think about it, while providing tools to track opportunities along the way. As we like to say, “What gets measured gets managed.” The more organized you can be about your search and the opportunities you’re pursuing, the better you’ll be able to manage it all and bring the process to an end. We will cover all of this using the following steps:
Approach
When looking for career opportunities, you should approach it with a specific mindset. Think of yourself as a salesperson, and your product is you. This is something we want you to repeat to yourself to remember your intention.
Some of us have a hard time with self advocacy and really promoting ourselves, but when we think about the products that we really love, and we tell everybody about them, it's because we're passionate about it. You have to be that same way about yourself.
A big part of the process and unlocking opportunities is convincing others that you are the right person, especially if you are trying to stretch and take a position that you haven’t done before. You have to really make the case for it.
You’re a salesperson, and your product is you. Your task is to attract and find customers, or companies, that need your services. Another framing is you are a company of one, and you are the CEO of that company. You need to go get customers, which you’re going to ultimately deliver services to and get money from.
How do you attract these customers? We have different strategies for attracting companies that fall into two buckets. There’s inbound and outbound approaches, both of equal importance.
Have you heard of inbound marketing? This is when you put out your professional brand and messaging to the world, and it brings people to you. They like what you’re putting out there, and they want to work with you.
The other strategy, outbound, is when you go find the opportunities, and you pursue and create them. The outbound is where you can get very strategic about the opportunities that you want. All three will be discussed in further detail, but there are various approaches to the outbound strategy:
We are really talking about a strategy here, and you want to do both inbound and outbound. You want to be building that brand and putting that narrative out there so opportunities start to come to you. If you put the work in to build your brand and identity, it will pay off in the long term, and the opportunities will build forever.
People
Let’s talk about people and how you leverage your network and networking to uncover job opportunities. Hands down, networking is by far the most effective way to land a job. 50% of people hear about and find a job through a reference or through a friend and through networking.
Networking is a lot of work, but it is the most effective in terms of certainty of success, and a lot of the work is on you. You need to go out there, digging and mining your network. You may be able to submit numerous applications just from looking at job boards, but a referral can get you to the top of the pile.
One thing that people get really hung up on with leveraging their network is that they think that it’s only the people that they know from one degree, but actually it’s the weak ties and the loose ties that get you the most results. Your friends might not directly have an opportunity for you, but they might know someone who knows someone who is looking for your experience and skill set.
Think about your network and your extended network, those second and third degree connections, and then think about places that you could make introductions. You have the Teal community, places like LinkedIn, and all the various social networks. Twitter is becoming incredibly effective for landing career opportunities. Think about those places where you can connect with people and have those discussions and get those introductions.
Now how are you going to go about doing that? You want to mine all your contacts, think about all the places that you have, and contact information for people. You’re going to want to be looking for ways to find who works where and who knows who. Think about who you know to leverage those connections:
- Close and extended family
- Friends and acquaintances
- Classmates, teachers, professors
- Fellow Teal members
The power of community is people helping each other. Think about all those contacts you have and start to think about who might be working and where and who you could reach out to. Look through your email, address book, phone, and social media accounts to keep track of these contacts.
Another channel that you have access to right within teal is the functional channel within Slack. These are driven by occupational categories. Whether you’re looking for an informational interview or looking for an introduction, you can look right within the Slack community.
There are hundreds of people in each of these channels that are willing to help that have been looking for opportunities as well. If there's a channel that doesn't exist yet for a function that you're excited about, let us know, and we can probably make it for you. We can also try to facilitate an introduction through the network.
There's also some really great tools out there. One that we've seen a ton of success with within the community is Lunchclub. They do a really good job of matching people and facilitating the connection. We actually have a great code that will connect you with other Teal members, but we highly recommend that you use it.
Another great way to connect with people is through informational interviews. If you’ve never heard the term before, it’s a meeting with a person to learn about an occupation, function, industry, or career path. By function, we mean a discipline, like design marketing in particular, or an industry like hospitality or retail. This isn’t an interview where you want an explicit thing. The purpose of the informational interview is to learn, so you need to come with a genuine curiosity and be ready to learn.
These interviews might occur with people you’ve never met before, but engage with them honestly and you might be surprised how many people will say yes. Many are willing to talk about their career path, how they got there, and the company. Informational interviews are going to be one of your biggest tools to landing that career growth opportunity that you’re looking for.
How do you identify people for an informational interview? Create a list of occupations and functions or industries that you’re interested in, and start to search for them on LinkedIn. See if there are any common connections. You might want to tweak this to put it in your own voice, but we have a Teal Informational Interview Request template.
The way that you can frame the discussion is in these three categories:
- Learn about the person and their career path
- How did they choose to be in that industry?
- Learn about the company or function
Here are some general best practices for informational interviews:
- Keep to 20 minutes or agreed upon time
- Share your goal/intent - advice or information
- Ask questions - listen more and talk less
- Thank them for their time and be appreciative about what you learned from them
- Remember: Do not ask for a job. Make it about them!
An important part of the informational interview process is the follow up. We recommend that you not only follow up right after the meeting, but stay in touch. You want to send something back of value that is in line with the context of your conversation. People want to know that their time and energy went towards doing something good in helping somebody grow.
Located within Teal’s Job Application Tracker are communication templates for different stages of interviewing. Copy the template, tweak it to match the situation, and send it off to the appropriate contacts.
If you connect with this person, you can maintain this relationship by sending another follow up at every three, six, or nine month mark. Let them know any career decisions you have made, as well as the impact they had on those decisions. People feel good about that, and that is a great way to build that network and career collateral.
Companies
Let’s talk about companies and how to identify companies that you’re really excited about. Once those are identified, you can start to track down either the people or the jobs that will create opportunities for you.
Let’s start with company sizes:
The company size is going to inform what their hiring process might be like and who you need to reach out to. In a small company, you’re probably talking to the owner directly, as they will be making the hiring decisions. Your first contact for companies with a range of 250-1,000 employees will be a recruiter. At enterprise companies with over 1,000 employees, the recruiting process probably has multiple people in it. Your first contact for these companies will probably be sourcers who are out there looking for talent or doing that initial screening.
There are other company attributes to think about when trying to find the right fit for you:
A company that has been around for a long time is probably pretty consistent in the way they do things. If you’re looking in the startup space, how is it funded? Does the company mission and values align with your own? Are you excited about the products and services the company offers? Think about the geography and what kind of work environment you want. These attributes can help you filter companies.
One of the ways to research companies is a great site called Crunchbase. It’s a database, and a lot of similar platforms are for investors, but this is what you want to do when you’re looking at this company approach. You want to put on your investor hat. If I was an investor, where would I find these really great companies?
Another great resource is LinkedIn. All the companies have company pages. You can search companies directly and filter by company size, number of employees, and number of offices. That could be a good way to find the kind of companies that you want to be at.
In addition to Crunchbase and LinkedIn, here are some other platforms that you can use to research companies and organizations:
Job Application Tracker
Before we jump into the jobs section, let’s dive into the Teal Job Application Tracker. It consists of two major components, the Google Chrome extension and the Job Application Tracker itself. It could be one of the most powerful and efficient tools that you use in managing all the opportunities that you’re excited about.
As you're searching for jobs on LinkedIn, Indeed, and other job sites, you can bookmark and save jobs you’re interested in directly to your Teal Job Application Tracker using the Chrome extension. You can also add a new job by clicking the “Add a New Job” button in the top right corner and typing in the job title, the URL for original posting, the company name, the location, and the job description. This way works relatively quickly, but really the fast way to do it is with the Chrome extension.
The more jobs you save, the more robust your tracker becomes. You can easily track and update the status of each saved job by using the drop down and choosing the current stage of the job. The stage options are:
- Bookmarked
- Applying
- Applied
- Interviewing
- Negotiating
- Accepted
- Declined
- Rejected
- Archived
With the job description in the tracker, it automatically highlights the keywords for you. That is a huge time saver for you, especially when you start to apply for those jobs and want to call out those keywords to tailor your resume. The Job Application Tracker helps you stay on top of your entire search.
You can enter any kind of notes that you might have and people you might know. You are also provided with a checklist to help track your job by phase and status, as well as communication templates for all stages of the job search process. Since following up is so important, you can add the date you applied to the job and set the date for when you intend to follow up.
If you plan on starting your job hunt after leaving your current job, manage your job search with Teal, a free job tracking software that lets you track and store important job hunting details.
We highly recommend that you use the Job Application Tracker. You can get all your data in one place, start to manage it, start to look at these companies, continue to check back in on them, and then track your process. There are many benefits to using this tool, compared to using a spreadsheet aa a job search tracker.
Jobs
Where do you go to find job opportunities? There are many places where you can find jobs. When companies are hiring and looking to fill roles, they broadcast it everywhere. There are so many job boards out there, and some are industry specific. Alumni networks will oftentimes publish jobs.
There are all the social platforms, career pages on companies directly, and we really love investor websites. We highly recommend that you go to the websites of venture capitalists, and they will aggregate the jobs from their portfolio.
Here are some other job boards that we really like and think are super effective:
Part of your job search process is to pick 4-6 job boards that you like and look at them regularly because time is of the essence. If you apply for a job that has been posted for three weeks, they probably have the bulk of the applicants in the first week, which would put you at the bottom of the pile. You want to keep it fresh and be looking at these job boards on a regular basis.
One thing to keep in mind is that there are no standard job titles. Companies change the job titles as a way to stand out, and they may think about the role differently. The work is on you to think about all the different permutations of a job title and all the synonyms for a job title. Keep track of the different versions because a lot of the job sites do not do the matching for you.
Using Teal’s tools will help you hack the job search and save you time!
Wrap Up
The main thing we want you to walk away with about locating job opportunities is that there are these three main ways to look for opportunities, and you want to do all of them.
You want to identify the people in your network that could potentially expose you to opportunities or connect you with people. You want to identify those companies that you’re excited about that align with what you want to do and that you think there’s a lot of potential for your growth. Of course, you want to look at the jobs themselves.
With the combination of all three, that’s how you will land the jobs that really excite you and move your career forward. We’re rooting for you!
Related Articles:
- Informational Interview Guide
- 5 Job Boards for Mothers
- An Always Up-to-Date List of the Job Boards Teal Supports
- 10 Job Boards That Empower Women
- The Best Companies for Jobs in Sales
- How Many Jobs Should I Apply to?
- What Does “Top Applicant” Mean on LinkedIn?
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