For most people, job searching is not a fun activity, especially if a person is between jobs. It is full of ups and downs, often feeling like more of the latter, and getting to the desired result – a job offer you want to accept – can feel like the heaviest lift imaginable. In light of this, it’s always tempting to simply accept the first offer you get, no questions asked, even if the job would not work well for you or the pay would not be fully to your liking. The circumstances behind this – almost never good ones – only add to it, because it can feel even more urgent than it is.
There are many books on the subject, so Melissa McClung is far from the first to try tackling this subject. She does that in her new book, Mind Your Career: Job Search Like an Entrepreneur Without Becoming One, which goes through a game plan for a job search that can lead to the job and career you want.
The title may lead you to believe something about the book and entrepreneurship, and there is something to that. Part of it is that the jobs of the future are entrepreneurial in nature, and this doesn’t mean we will all be running businesses – that’s not for everyone, something McClung talks about. What it means is that the jobs of the future require having some business sense, something I know as an individual contributor software engineer. Having expertise in what you do is great, but to make the most of your career, you have to think not like an employee, but a business owner – as an employee, you are the CEO of a one-person company named You, Inc.
Where this connects with the job search is that finding a job is likely to be a long haul and will require you to play the long game. Sure, you might get lucky and get hired by applying for a job via a company’s web site or Monster, Dice, Indeed or another prominent jobs web site, but that is increasingly rare these days. You may even luck into having a recruiter contact you via LinkedIn with the right job, but that, too, is a low-percentage play.
Put another way, these are the exceptions that prove the rule. Applying the earlier analogy, a new business might start right off with a lot of success, but that is very rarely the case. The reality is, as a saying goes, every overnight success is ten years in the making.
A job search needs to be done in something better than a seat-of-the-pants fashion, and this book takes you through that. For someone who was just laid off and needs a job as soon as possible to pay the bills, this is challenging mentally given the urgency, but going through the steps in this book is a must. The book has a number of action steps that follow from recommendations in the book, and they cover a wide range: journaling your three-year goals, identifying times in a week where you lose track of time, identifying areas of passion, committing to rest (yes, job seekers need to rest along the way), creating intentional thoughts, connecting skills to quadrants to align your skills and interests (based on something Michael Hyatt talks about in his book Free to Focus), and networking-related activities among many others.
While this is not a networking book per se, an undeniable recurring theme of the book is the importance of building relationships. There are many citations in job/career search articles of what percentage of jobs are found through networking, but one thing is clear: your best bet to find your next job – and hopefully your dream job – is networking. This is especially the case if you are currently employed but looking for a better situation, but it is also the case generally. Included is a chapter entirely on LinkedIn, where McClung is a consistent presence and has a good deal of knowledge. Since LinkedIn is constantly changing, the book points you to part of her web site where you can find updated information on it.
But she doesn’t stop at just using LinkedIn – Chapter 10, right after the one on LinkedIn, talks about doing more than just connecting with people there, and later chapters expand on it further. Those connections need to be turned into something more by connecting with everyone in real life. This is where the book spends a lot of time on networking, and it is well-done. In Chapter 11, she takes you through one way to keep up your relationships using Trello, which is interesting because this is undoubtedly not the first usage most would have for it (one can use a lot of other programs for this; Trello is simply her choice).
Part of why the subtitle of the book makes a lot of sense becomes clear as you read it. While going through this might not sound good for someone who needs a new job in the worst way, it sets you up for the rest of your career beyond the current search. This is approaching it as if you own a one-person company and have to start it up, then manage it once it gets going and has success. We have to manage our careers intentionally, including the relationships we form, and an entrepreneurial mindset goes a long way towards doing this.
There are many articles and books on job search and networking. Many of them are very good and worth your time, though none is a magic bullet that will make this experience any less stressful, especially for someone in a transition they didn’t plan on. McClung’s entry into this very crowded field is one that is worthy of your time, and there’s a reasonable chance you will find her to be worth connecting with on LinkedIn as well as part of your journey.