Measuring Career ROI: Key Indicators for Job Search Success

Description

• Career as a Business: Treat your career like a small business with a defined product (your resume), a target market (your preferred job sectors), and effective marketing strategies.
• Product Definition: Your resume is your product. Invest time in perfecting it by seeking resources like webinars and books focusing on resume improvement.
• Identify Your Market: Understand your preferred practice areas and the specific market you want to target, whether it's large firms, small companies, or specific locations.
• Effective Marketing Strategies: Avoid being part of the noise by refraining from generic job postings on platforms like Indeed or LinkedIn. Focus on marketing yourself in areas where there's less competition and demand.
• Innovative Job Search: Look beyond conventional methods. Seek out opportunities in unadvertised positions or places with minimal competition. Utilize resources like LawCrossing to find hidden job openings.
• Less Advertised, More Opportunity: Apply where there's less visibility, as these places might not receive many applications, increasing your chances of standing out and getting hired.
• Marketing Wisdom: Understand the importance of effective marketing. Target places where others aren't applying to increase your chances of success.
• Personal Experience: The analogy of buying trucks highlights the power of targeting less advertised opportunities, showing how less competition leads to better negotiation and value.

Transcript:

Okay. Let me just see. I'm intrigued by the idea of treating my career as a small business. How can I measure my return on investment in terms of time, effort, and resources, best my job search, and what key performance indicators should I be mindful of? Okay. This sounds like the person who's an MBA. I love this question.

Okay. So, a small business has an excellent small business. Small business has. A product, it's defined, has a market that they go to market they're going after, then they have a market, and then they have ways of marketing, so ways of marketing themselves. So all these things, and I guess I can give you more, are the most significant things a business needs to do.

So, in terms of return on effort, invest in your job search, which is the smartest thing you can do. And I, you could. If I were you, I would go back and watch webinars that I've done reviewing people's resumes. I would also go back and watch and read books I've written about resumes. Cause that your product is how you define yourself on your resume.

And then the market, once you have a product, you have a market. So what does your product need to practice area, et cetera, you need to do? Then, it would help you decide what market you're interested in. Are you interested in large firms? You need to understand small firms, locations, and all these things.

And then you understand how to market yourself. There's effective, there's ineffective marketing, and then there's effective marketing. And so ineffective is if you try to do what everyone else does. That's like that in business. If 25, when you see a local magazine or something in the community, maybe 50 restaurants will be advertising themselves with ads.

That's, you're just kind of part of the noise. That's not good. So if you want to be part of the noise, that won't help. So what are an example? So if you go on Indeed, which is, or Indeed or LinkedIn, where there's a job posting, that could be better. Why isn't that good? Because everything's very specific.

Everyone. With a fricking internet connection, everyone who matches is applying. So that's hundreds of, could be hundreds of applications. You're part of the noise. It doesn't mean you won't get a job there, but you're part of the noise. That's one thing you could, I don't know. You could; what are other ways of doing things?

I don't know. You get the idea that ineffective marketing is doing that. Sitting or only applying for jobs is another way of applying for openings and marketing yourself in areas without much demand. So marketing and areas where there's little demand, there's only a little demand, so all these things are what everyone does that you, you having a bad resume, et cetera.

This is an effective, what is effective marketing. I'm just telling you again: I've been doing this for 25 years. I get people jobs pretty much several times a day. So, what do I think is effective? Effectiveness, and again, I'm not bragging; I'm just a lot of people helping me. I'm not doing anything special.

I'm doing something. I will tell you how to do it yourself. So I'm not in any sense of the imagination bragging, and I'm not trying to, but what is that? It's applying to places without openings that look like matches or suitable matches. Attachments mean you use Google to find firms that match your business.

That's an intelligent thing to do. Dropping your resume off in person, resume person, sending. Resume through the mail and that email that's on their desk. I will use, talk about one of my own companies right now, but I'll tell you why I like it. LawCrossing it, it finds jobs. And so this is, these are all paid advertising.

So, these companies are paying firms to have their jobs posted. LawCrossing and my company, so full disclosure, but it finds every job I can on a company I can not advertise. And some are on the site, and people apply, and there's no competition, less competition. Sometimes, the job says a lot.

Competition is when jobs are simply advertised. So these are some practical things. And then it's finding new places. That's effective marketing. So you can do ineffective, which everyone does, or effective marketing. I think I would not. Most of the people I knew, if I did ineffective marketing, I would also do effective marketing, enabling me to place many people.

So, I want to tell you a quick story to show you how powerful this is. When I was, until I learned a lot of this. So, when I was in college and law school, I got out of law school; I was an asphalt contractor, and what would I do as an asphalt contractor? It's very messy work. It's so messy that your trucks and things get tarred, and everything over them, including seats, is pretty much ruined every summer.

So, I would buy new trucks every summer. And in Detroit, where I was working, you had Detroit, newspapers like the Free Press. You had the news, two significant papers, and then you had auto trader. And things like this are where to buy trucks and use trucks. So I would buy these crappy trucks and use them once they were in it.

Use, they use trucks. And this is just what I did back. This is before the internet, all that kind of stuff, Detroit free press. And there's an auto trader. And then you had some little publications in different cities. So there was one, for example, St. Clair shores and Mount Clemens. I'll just, I'm just giving you their shores, Mount Clemens.

But we're free, and these require a lot of pictures and take pictures and stuff. And then these expense large distribution. And I'm just, this is just believe me, this, even though it seems like a lot of information, I'll explain it to you in a list publication, Clemens pick up in grocery stores, free to advertise.

I don't know, places like grocery stores and that sort of thing. So what I would do is I would always look for trucks, Detroit free press, and auto traders, and they would all be costly, more than they would be expensive. There would be a lot of competition for them because. They were well advertised since they've been in many people, and then there would always be these little publications.

And so there might be one, I don't know, they'll call it a penny saver or something, but there might be one. And so I would call these people the significant papers and auto trader and stuff, and everyone would have prices and get inflexible, have a lot of interest and things, but then there were all these little publications, like in some of these areas.

That had a limited amount of distribution. So they'd be like in St. Clair Shores, Mont Clemens, Warren, or different places. And the people could advertise there for free. What would happen when I would call these people is they would be incredibly flexible on the pricing. They would think they had something only worth a little money.

They had yet to receive a lot of calls. They were very eager to get one. They were very eager to negotiate. And I would always buy trucks and things there if I tried to buy the truck at one of these places. And again, I wasn't spending a lot of money. A decent truck would be like 1,500 to 3,000. When I would go to these places, I could often get the same thing for 500 to 1,000.

What I wanted to explain to you and why this is important is because these people, and this, if you understand this lesson, will change the whole course of your job search. These people weren't being marketed. They weren't; no one was buying their product. No one seemed interested.

The reason was that if you have a little publication distributed throughout the city, only 300 people are ever picking it up. And that most of them are looking at ads while you're, but you've advertised there for free, thinking they're doing something innovative. You're not going to get a lot of applications.

It's the same thing with employers. So if an employer is like this big-time employer where everyone knows who they are and sends in tons of applications, they can charge. More discriminating against who they're going to hire. They're going to be able to have all these standards and things.

But if someone is off the map and off the map, what does off the map mean? It means, let's see, a local corporate law firm or what's an excellent real estate law firm in Tallahassee right here. So you're going to get all these places that none of these people, all these people, are just off the map.

These are the advertised ones. I'm sorry, but no one; they're all off the map. So, no one is looking for these people. And if you apply to these places, you'll get jobs. Because no one's, they're not getting any interest because they need to advertise there and out there. So my point to you is, if you understand this point, I know I'm not being as direct as I should be, but you have to market your services to people who are more likely to be receptive.

To what you're offering, then go and follow everything else. So, everyone's applying to LinkedIn and Indeed. Why is LawCrossing better? It's because these are not advertised jobs. And so they're not getting a lot of applications. LawCrossing is also on a paywall. Most people are applying to openings.

Suppose you apply to places with openings. They look like suitable matches. These people will never, you might be the only application they've received in years. Seriously. I had a law firm in Malibu, California, and I don't have it anymore. And it wasn't because I was practicing law. It was because I wanted a law firm to help me with all the corporate things and little cases.

For the business, the entire time, I had this law firm. I never once received a letter saying I'd like to work with you, even though it was on decent qualifications and the law firm had a website. I received two people over ten years with this law firm who walked in with their resumes.

And I still reckon one of them I hired and the other, remember, because I've never even opened. So, the point is you market yourself effectively. You do things others aren't doing, and you will get jobs. And so everyone, that should be how you think about your business. You try to find a market where other people need to do that.

And I hope that answers your question. Cause I think this information is essential. Thanks to everyone who's asking questions. I will answer all of your questions. I'll try to; I should be able to. There are a lot of questions there, which I appreciate, but understanding the stuff about marketing yourself will change your career if you just have to think about it.

Wow. And how did I learn this? I learned this because this is how I make a living. So you only make money if people get jobs. So I have to do effective marketing.