I am told that the all-time best selling book on finding a job (more than 8 million copies sold) was written 37 years ago by an Episcopalian clergyman who lost his job as a pastor in San Francisco in what we today call a downsizing. Richard Nelson Bolles’s experience in losing his job, successfully finding another, & his subsequent book, What Color is Your Parachute?, changed the way people looked at the job market & transition in their lives & , I’m told by my friends at Big Ben Bookstore here in Prague, that the book has been published in Czech.What is so compelling about Bolles’s work is its common sense. Recently, I was going through some papers & came across an interview that Daniel Pink did with Bolles in 1999 for Fast Company magazine in which he offers a powerful insight into the mechanics of looking for a job. For years I have advised people to employ a technique I call the “List of 10”, which can be found on-line in the Hospodarske noviny archives, in my May 9th, 2006 column titled “How to Find the Job You Really Want”. It wasn’t until I read this interview, though, that I gained a new perspective on the vast difference between how employers look for people to hire & how people who want to be hired go about finding each other, & I want to share it with you in the hopes that it will change the way you go about looking for a job & that it will increase the likelihood of your success.’
In the interview, Bolles describes a pyramidal diagram showing the progressive steps companies typically take when looking for people they want to hire. His diagram is called “Our Neanderthal Job-Hunting System”. At the base of the pyramid, which is where companies begin the process, is “internal resources”-looking within the companies for someone to promote & also to leverage these internal resources for names of individuals known to current employees. Then they begin to move up the pyramid to other methods such as general networking, employment agencies, unsolicited résumés, & want ads. This is the way most companies go about looking for new people to hire. It just makes good sense to do it that way-start with people who know the company & its culture to see if they know of someone who might be a fit.Now, how do you think most of us as individuals go about looking for a job? Just the opposite! That’s why Bolles calls this a Neanderthal system–nothing about it has evolved or changed since the invention of want ads. Want ads are useful, to be sure. But if reading them is your only strategy for finding a job you need to consider the benefits of evolution & change your behavior.Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/5444864
