The Passive Job Seekers' Guide
CAREER MANAGEMENT DEFICIENCY: A Passive Job Seeker Must Be An Active Career Manager

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By Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler http://www.careerxroads.com/news/050101.html

No one can afford to be a truly "passive" job seeker. The price you will pay for a unhealthy career is just too high. Last week, while speaking to a room full of employment professionals, my partner, Mark Mehler, and I asked for a "show of hands" from all those who had registered with their association's job "agent", a weekly email listing the job titles and locations posted to their association's web site. We expected to see most of the audience reach for the sky because the "agent" had been around for several years and, we knew that nearly 60,000 members had registered to receive it. Not one of the three hundred people in the room raised their hand. Mark and I looked at each other in shock. We thought (hoped) that maybe they were all lying, simply too embarrassed to admit they checked out the market place in front of their peers. Apparently not. They all were suffering from a deadly disease, CMD (Career Management Deficiency).

A passive job seeker is someone who is not looking for a job but "passive" isn't a synonym for "ignorant" about the market for your chosen profession. Imagine keeping your head down for a year or two. You work hard, perform well and ignore the cacophony of failures, mergers, acquisitions and reorganizations. Too confusing. You turn off all advances from corporate and 3rd party recruiters- until they go away. Too distracting. You read technical journals from cover to cover skipping the ads and concentrating on the skills and knowledge that you'll need in your current job. Keep your eye on the ball. You wake up one day and find what? Your company is preparing for a downsizing, your job description has changed to include skills you don't have, the skills you do have are now obsolete and your network is essentially reduced to people just like you. That feeling in the pit of your stomach? CMD. Shifting to "active" job seeker status is likely to be a painful process requiring a Career Doctor and a long recovery period.

There are simple solutions to preventing CMD. Here are three:

1.NATURAL JOB AGENTS Make a list and examine the web sites of the trade, professional and academic associations and publications involved in your profession. See if any will promise to send you an email of the openings posted by employers that match your interests. Scan the titles and text once a week for the following:

Are the jobs similar? If not, do they require skills more advanced than you are able to demonstrate in your current job? Are the job titles different?

Are there fewer opportunities where you live and more being created where you might not like to locate?

Are your competitors growing compared to you?

Note: Weaker (placebo) Agents can be found at major job sites because they are unlikely to send you all the information you need. Instead they make you go back to their site to scramble around for the information or send jobs that don't match your interests. Complain or avoid them until they learn how to communicate.

Look for Supplementary Agents that might be found at the corporate web sites of companies that are leading your industry or simply embedded in the text of side discussions on professional email discussion groups.

2.UNNATURAL JOB AGENTS Headhunters come in all sizes, shapes and flavors these days. Contingency, Search, and Corporate are three of the most popular. Believe it or not, some of them really know something about you, your capabilities, the market, the competitors and more. They are likely to begin their conversation by asking if you "know someone whoS".

Don't hang up. It's an opportunity to learn what you might be worth in the marketplace.

Thank them and say no. Also, and this is very important, if this is a person who really does work in your field, tell them you will contact someone you know is looking (if you don't know someone is looking, you have a bad case of CMD already). Then do it. Helping an active job seeker find a position is the single best way to help yourself. You never know when you might need the favor returned.

Call the headhunter back and make the connection or, call them back and tell them you were not able to make the connection. This ensures you will be called again- and remembered.

Make absolutely sure that you take down their email address and put it in a group email entitled "Emergency CMD Medicine". Add one or more emails each month.

3.GENERAL AGENTS You may already be getting dozens of emails that you've "opted in" to receive. Typically, these cover sports, stocks, games, great buys and more. OK, it is getting overwhelming.

Don't confuse "interesting" or even "important" with urgent. Do you really need baseball scores for every game sent wireless to your PDA?

Do opt-in for general news feeds that keep you apprised of key articles related to professional interests, the competition and your own corporation. You'll find these at professional sites like ITCareers.com as well as specialty sites like individual.com where you can pick from among hundreds of topics, list the competitors or issues you want to track and quickly scan the results. Keep it simple.

Managing your career is a process that needs constant attention. The marketplace you work in is a critical component of that process. Technology allows you to automate the flow of information, scan the results and prepare more efficiently for the likelihood that change will affect what you do next. A passive job seeker still involved in an active career cannot afford to get CMD.