What Color Is Your Parachute? (13 page)

Okay, we’ve seen what doesn’t work, and what does. Now let’s go deeper.
Why
did it all turn out this way? The answer lies in one simple fact (see next page):

Click
here
to view a PDF version of The Way a Typical Employer or Job-Hunter Prefers to Fill a Vacancy.

With all the foregoing information in this chapter as background, let’s get down to some of the nitty-gritty questions that come up during the actual job-hunt.

Boy, do I know what a heartbreaking experience this is! It has happened to me. Now it’s happened to you. You were valued
there
for years and years, and often your father and grandfather before you, and suddenly the job-market is treating you like a disposable Coke can.

It would be nice if the system would fix itself—would find some way to honor all those years of yours, and make you feel valuable again. By “system” I mean the government or industry or education. Or
somebody
.

But it never will. Despite its grandiose promises, the “system” will never evolve programs that exactly recreate the kinds of jobs that have disappeared. For example, the last sardine packing plant in the U.S. closed forever in late April of 2010. Those jobs will never come back. When this type of thing happens, no one is going to come and rescue you.

Given this fact, there is but one solution: you have got to learn how to rescue yourself, with a little help from your friends.

Basically, you have to sit down and do some hard thinking. You begin by asking yourself what jobs would be
related to
what you used to do. Think about questions like these:

1. What
   supplies, equipment, or support services
   did you use at your last job? Would the suppliers or manufacturers of that equipment or those materials know of other places where their equipment or supplies are used? For example, if you worked at a digital photo place, would your suppliers of photo paper or digital
   equipment there, tell you where else their customers are? (Those other places that use their equipment or supplies don’t have to have a
   known
   vacancy. You can approach them anyway. Somebody may have quit just that morning. This happens all the time.)
   

2. What
   machinery or technologies
   did you learn, master, or improve upon, at your last job? What other places use such machinery or technology? Would any of them be interested in hiring you?
   

3. Who supplied
   training or development
   to you, at your last job? Would any of them be interested in hiring you?
   

4. What
   companies, organizations, or customers
   did you serve, in your last job? Would any of them be in a position to hire someone with your talents and experience?
   

5. What
   communities or service organizations
   were interested in, or participated in, your projects at your job? Would any of them be interested in hiring you?
   

6. Who might be interested in the
   skills and problem-solving abilities
   that you learned at your last job?
   

7. What
   temp agencies, outsourcing agencies, or subcontractors
   were used at your last job? Would any of them be interested in hiring you?
   

Okay, then take a hard look at your spare-time hobbies, over the years. Maybe you’ve spent quite a bit of time on these, and become something of an informal expert. So, start thinking: is there any kind of work you could look for, related to those hobbies? Put your
hobby words
into a search engine on the Internet—my own personal favorite is Google (
www.google.com
), which gets about 64.4 percent of all searches on the Internet, currently (Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing are taking some of Google’s share, lately).
²

If you want additional search engines, go to
the
expert, Danny Sullivan, whose lists
at this writing
can be found at
http://searchenginewatch.com/links
.

Alternative sources of information: go to libraries or stores with large magazine sections. Browse. See if there’s a magazine that covers your favorite hobby; buy it, read it from cover to cover for ideas.

Oh, almost anything, but just for example: antiques, bicycling, birding, boating, books, camping, cars, collecting, computers, cooking, dance, electronics, exercising, flowers, gardening, genealogy, horses, hunting, martial arts, math, models, motorcycles, oceanography, pets, photography, scrapbooking, sewing, skiing, transportation, volunteer work, and woodworking.

Much more complete lists can be found on the Internet at
www.buzzle.com/articles/list-of-hobbies-interests.html
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Hobbies
.

Your
passion
, as we saw in the
previous chapter
, can be difficult to identify, depending on whether you live your life depending on luck, or intuition, or step-by-step planning. You’ll want to consider doing the Flower Exercise in
Part II
of this book. But if you’re impatient, and you want to know
now
, here are some clues.

Sit down with a notepad, or at your computer, and write down anything, and I mean
anything
, that occurs to you about the following questions:

Well, first of all, go back and think harder. And longer. About the questions above. It’s amazing how many job-hunters think
thinking
is a speed-contest. “
Okay, I gave it ten minutes. Now I’m done
.” No, no, no. Thinking takes time. Give it more time. Hours. Days. Even weeks, if necessary.

You will profit by thinking out, ahead of time, what employers might be looking for, once you get face to face with them. It will vary from individual to individual, of course, but generally speaking, here are some possibilities.

Employers are looking for any or all of the following:

They are looking for
talent
—
transferable
skills, usually described as verbs.

They are looking for
experience
—so they don’t have to spend a lot of time getting you “up to speed” at the job.

They are looking for
self-management skills
—do you come in on time, or even ahead of time; do you stay until closing, or even beyond closing, if necessary; do you just try to “get by” or do you go the extra mile?

They are looking for
persistence
—do you keep at a problem, do you keep at a task, until you’ve solved it, until it is done?

They are looking for
people-skills
—do you get along well with co-workers; do you deal with customers caringly and thoroughly?

They are looking for
responsibility
—every successful worker makes mistakes, but do you try to make mistakes that derive from taking manageable risks—“excellent mistakes” as the author Dan Pink calls them,
rather than mistakes resulting from carelessness or stupidity? And do you readily “own up” when the mistake is yours? Do you admit “I” rather than claiming “we.” Incidentally, responsibility also means knowing when and how to delegate it. Employers are often looking for that kind of wisdom.

Finally, employers are trying to avoid mistakes also—in the hiring process. They are looking for retention. They want you to stay, if you’re any good and they can afford you. They want to avoid “musical chairs” in the organization. Hiring, and turnover, costs an employer a great deal of money. And time. The best way to reassure them you will stay is to reveal, in the interview, that you’ve done a good deal of research about this organization before you ever approached it. The reason most employees quit, is they typically do their research of the organization
after
they’re hired.

Most often it will be
the way you go about doing a task
or tasks, something we call your
traits
, or your
style
of doing things.