In the National Business
Employment Weekly, the best single article I ever
read about finding a job began with a paragraph
containing 100 words.
The first 99 were “no” and
the 100th word
was “yes.”
The article went on
to explain that this paragraph is a model of the
job-hunting process. It also struck me as a model of the
selling process and of pursuing lots of other novel
things worth
achieving.
The article’s author
observed that most job-hunters mistakenly develop a
“conservative” strategy that they believe to be more
“efficient” and respectful of their limited time, their
limited energies, and their finite resource. But
if their goal is to minimize the elapsed time required
in their search process, then, paradoxically, their
strategy turns out to be exactly the opposite
of what they should be doing.
After a handful of
enthusiastic initial
“try-everything/respond-to-every-opportunity” efforts,
most job-hunters say to themselves something like “Hey,
this is nuts. If I focus my resources on
qualifying opportunities more thoroughly before
I present myself at the door, I should be able to
increase the probability of
being successful
and really ending up with something that represents a
good ‘fit’ for my skills and interests and the way
others are likely to see me as an asset.” Flawless
logic; lousy outcome.
Job-hunting involves
a process that satisfies all the criteria of being a
complex system (multi-variant, fluid interaction, not
all factors being knowable; most factors being well
beyond the control of the “central” player, i.e., the
job-seeker). It is axiomatic that complex systems
function counter-intuitively.
Given this insight
(taken here on faith), it follows that one does not want
to attempt to focus on a specific type of situation or
attempt to pre-qualify any particular opportunity
(what-the-hell are you really going to be able to find
out beforehand, anyway?) or even (dare one admit it to
oneself?) try to avoid being rejected once again.
Because you cannot,
by definition, have any meaningful information about
just how long the search process will take (absolutely
the only thing you can possibly know with any certainty
is that when you have found the right “fit” the process
will be over), it follows that your only
sound strategy is to attempt to get rejected as
frequently and as rapidly as possible. Your
“success rate” at being rejected constitutes the only
bona fide measure of your making true progress in the
search process.
To grasp what this
means, start filling out the chart on page 6 (99 “No"s
followed by that lovely “Yes”). If you use this as
a log of your activities and as a guide to your
strategy, it will also serve, automatically, as an index
(and as a concrete indicator to you) of
your actual progress. Trust me. It changes
your whole outlook... makes you think straight... turns
you into a
creative
strategist again. And if you hit a rough spot
along the way, as Miles observed to Joel in Risky
Business, sometimes you just gotta take a break and
say “Screw it! Ya know?"
This "model" of the
job hunting process applies to
"regular" selling as well
Your People Skills 360
Same Reality, Different Perceptions
Yin-Yang of Influencing People
