BatFlattery

Damian has a long rumination on the vexed business of getting people to pay you money to do something. (I’m also glad to link to a voice in favour of respecting books!)
I realised whilst studying for my BA that I was probably not setting myself up for maximum financial return in my career, but I unfortunately then became a bit too focused on it, first becoming a lawyer, and then a chartered accountant when my accountant friends seemed to have it easier finding high-paying jobs.

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In this post I wrote about something that Simon Broomer of CareerBalance had told me. Although I didn’t make it clear in that post, the context of his comment was a career counselling session that I was undertaking with him, and I want to talk a bit about that experience.

After a fairly unsatisfactory stint of working on my own from home, I decided, before making yet another random career move, that the time had come to properly look at what I wanted to do with my life. So I commenced a series of counselling sessions with Simon about a month ago.

So far I have completed four sessions, and the results have already been pretty amazing. I now have a much better idea of the things that really drive me, career-wise, and my career history now makes much more sense when I look back with the new understanding that I have. I can see why I made the choices that I did, and the recurring themes come through again and again.

In arriving at this point, I have done a lot of looking back through my career to pick up the achievements that meant the most to me and that I enjoyed the most. Not only has this given the valuable clues to what gives most meaning to my working life, it has also put me back in touch with the excitement, and by reminding me of times when I did achieve things that I was proud of, it has renewed my confidence in my own abilities.

I had been interviewing for temporary positions during most of this time, and the work that we have done has had an immediate impact on my interviewing. Naturally I could easily give examples of previous achievements, but my confidence, and excitement for the opportunities on offer, were vastly improved as well – so much so that I have been offered a new position, and start work tomorrow.

I will still continue with my sessions, not least because the new position is dynamic and subject to change, but also because career counselling is not just about getting a job: it’s about doing the work that you were meant to do, that gives the most meaning to your life, and creating your dream job, whether you do it where you are currently working, or whether you find it somewhere else.

My friend Simon, who runs the CareerBalance careers consultancy, said something interesting the other day. In his experience, only about 20% of the available jobs at any one time are in the hands of recruitment agencies, like Robert Walters and Martin Ward Anderson. Far more jobs are found through networking, direct application to companies, graduate recruitment, and headhunting.

This means that those job-hunters who simply sign up with the agencies and do nothing more, are focusing their efforts into a relatively small bit of the market, and the most competitive bit as well. Plus, many are under the misapprehension that the agents work for them. Of course, the agents work for the companies, and so put their interests before those of the candidates.

The reasons are not hard to see though. In the first place, the agencies, being businesses, put a lot of effort into promoting themselves, whereas the other methods are not the subject of such promotion. Headhunters, for example, are not interested in being approached by candidates; they do the approaching.

Secondly, the most effective method by far, networking, is poorly understood by most people. It’s either seen as something that only works for some well-connected elite, who have gone to the right schools etc, or as pretty desperate job-begging of hapless friends and relatives.

In fact networking is simply about relationships, and the fact that people trust people they know, or who are known by people they know, more than complete strangers. It’s usually best to take a slightly more systematic approach to your networking if you want to use it to find a job, but the principle remains the same, and it is most definitely not about phoning up everyone you know and asking for a job.

But it is about staying in touch, and making sure your network of friends, family, ex-colleagues, business associates, suppliers, customers, etc, are aware of your situation, so that if they should hear of an opportunity, they will have you in mind. That’s it.

One way to think about it is this: if you knew a friend of yours was looking for a job, you would want to help. If another friend mentioned he was looking for someone, or a vacancy was posted at work, you would be sure to pass it on. All that’s required is that you know your friend is looking. If he just went to an agency and didn’t tell you or any of his friends what he was doing, you wouldn’t be able to help him.

I just put up a quick holding page for a friend who’s set up shop on his own after working for a career consultancy for a number of years; the site is Career Balance. We’ll be putting up a proper site in due course.

Simon is a really top-notch professional with some great ideas on how to go out and get that job you’ve always wanted. His speciality is career change, which he has personal experience of, as he used to be a lawyer. So if you’d like to change employers (the job market is pretty hot right now) or even change careers completely, give Simon a call.