Dare to think differently and discover job chances

Job-hunting doesn’t have to be pure drudgery. Go against the pack to open doors with less resistance. Look inside yourself for direction and, when you network, use smart methods.

INTERNAL SEARCHING

Many job-hunters think that the perfect job lies outside of them, so they rush into searches without deciding what they truly want to do. Tracy O’Brien, CEO of the family business O’Brien Prosperity System Inc. in Manitoba, Canada, says she guides people to “tap what would give them life, energy and joy and develop that.” She modeled the process on her own experience managing businesses, which severely compromised her health, then finding her way.

O’Brien identified three activities she loves doing but couldn’t imagine how to recast into a career. Then a more important realization surfaced.

“I was open to a shift,” she says. “Two weeks later I received an email inviting me to a teleseminar about discovering your dreams and making them a reality, the science of success.”

She integrated the spirit of that transforming teleseminar into a new business helping others job hunt internally to identify what they love to do rather than focus on the best compensation they can find.

RELATIONSHIPS

New forms of networking crop up when some people discover they need to do something different. Janeesa Hollingshead, newly appointed content marketing specialist at Astute Solutions Inc. in Columbus, Ohio, saw many contemporaries moving back home. She started meeting people with established careers in marketing. Scouring the city, she explains that she “took them for coffee and built relationships, really.”

The method worked for two job searches, the first securing an unsolicited job offer after only a month.

“Out of the blue I got an email from a CEO who’d seen me on cbusr.com, a community of Columbus people of all ages and professions,” she says. “He looked me up on LinkedIn and messaged me from there.”

About two months ago she submitted her resume to a field outside hers — to HR at Astute. HR forwarded it to the director of marketing who looked her up on LinkedIn.

“The interviewer saw that I was connected to him on LinkedIn through a vice president at Astute Solution’s digital agency,” she says. “I’d met with the executive for coffee.”

After the interviewer contacted him, the vice president suggested she apply at Astute. Hollingshead glows with a new job advancing her career and the opportunity to freelance after hours.

Another job-seeker, John Muscarello, founder of Start Networking Today Inc. of Long Island, N.Y., didn’t enjoy job boards or resume blasts, which were ineffective. After developing his own method on LinkedIn, he watched results materialize more quickly.

Muscarello wrote a brief pitch for his LinkedIn alumni group asking for a 10- to 15-minute conversation discussing their job and industry.

“I was trying to find my way,” he says. “I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do.”

Many people volunteered to forward his resume to HR.

“Then it really clicked that this would be great way to find a job,” he says.

He did and now also runs a free website capitalizing on this experience with students and young professionals who need to learn networking and the use of LinkedIn to build relationships.

Follow the advice of these job-hunters who did something different. Contact people, hiring or not, without “making them feel taken advantage of or disposable,” Hollingshead said. Keep your LinkedIn profile strong and up-to-date “with the right key words and a good headline, because that’s where employers are going to look first,” Muscarello says.

These job-seekers found their way by not doing what everyone else was doing. Will you?