With a job interview in the offing, you need to think about how you can best equip yourself for a crucial hiring meeting that’s likely to decide your immediate future. If you do things the right way, and then go on to succeed in getting the job you’re after, you can look forward to some celebrations. If you do things the wrong way you’ll probably fail, and it’s back to the drawing board. So, how can you load the odds of being successful in your favour?

Preparation is the key, so you have to think about what you’re going to say and do. You also have to consider the way you’ll say and do everything. Your words and your actions are the two elements of a flawless pitch, but they must be constructed properly and delivered impeccably. In today’s Vocation Cast I’m going to give you some guidelines about developing your content and honing your delivery as well as possible.  

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The sharp end of a work search arrives when you attend a final job interview. You get just one shot at convincing a hiring manager to offer you an employment contract so you need an action plan that’s sure to deliver the maximum chance of success. The one I’ve designed reflects the behaviours of the most exceptional interviewees, the sort of top-flight job candidates who make an immediate and compelling impression at interview and shoot straight to the head of any employer’s want list.

Over the next two weeks of this Vocation Cast series I’m going to tell you what they do to succeed, and how you can join this small group of elite job searchers if you follow the interview template I give you. In today’s episode, I’ll begin by explaining why taking control of crunch meetings is such an effective strategy, and the reason this lays the groundwork for the rest of your pitch.

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Your aim during the second stage of the proactive job-search strategy is to obtain a direct and personal introduction to the hiring decision maker. The perfect situation is for this to be done by way of a known intermediary, usually someone in a position of influence who’s already employed by the company you want to join, and preferably by a person who works alongside the decision maker you’ll make your eventual pitch to.

In today’s Vocation Cast I’ll be introducing the way you engineer this introduction, if everything goes the way you’d want. I’ll also outline a fall-back procedure if there’s a problem that crops up during the introduction phase of your job search. This is when you decide to make a self-referral to the person with the authority to employ you, whether that’s from choice or by necessity.      

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A successful job hunt will include contact with a wide range of people who can give you information about potential employers and work opportunities, make personal introductions on your behalf and connect you to key influencers and decision makers. This is a profoundly important element of my work-search strategy and you shouldn’t underestimate its power to transport you directly to the door of the person with the ability to hire you.

All of the people you meet might contribute to the positive outcome of your work search in ways that aren’t immediately obvious so you must nurture your team of contacts diligently in order to get the most out of them. This is the essence of getting your team to play for you in the most effective way.

In today’s Vocation Cast I’d like to give you some guide lines which should help you tread the fine line between exploiting the knowledge and networks of this group of people for your own specific purposes, whilst treating them with appropriate care and attention so that they don’t feel as if their generosity is being abused. 

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Making high-quality contacts is a crucial part of your job search. Compliant company insiders who become a valuable part of your network will help, advise and guide you in ways that will astonish you, but you have to cultivate them properly in order for this happy situation to occur. The first challenge you face is to successfully touch base with these people before any privileged conversations can take place.

The best and most reliable way of meeting inside contacts is to be personally introduced to them by a known connection, but how do you go about doing this? That’s the subject of today’s job-search tutorial. 

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An essential part of any job hunt is finding lucrative work opportunities to go after, and with high-quality employers who really need you on their team. Last week I covered the first part of identifying suitable work possibilities by doing some essential planning. To recap, you need to know what you want in your new job, understand the reasons an employer will hire you, narrow your potential employment options and so on. You can do all of this at your leisure and from the comfort of your desk at home.

The second stage now begins as you make direct contact with well-connected people who can help fill in the gaps in your research file. This is a hands-on process when you arrange meetings, get out and about and speak with people who work inside the companies you want to join, or have direct connections with them in some way. Today’s episode explains why advisors, influencers and advocates are such a vital part of your job search.   

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When you’re job hunting, you need an opening to go after before anything else happens. Without a raw work opportunity in front of you, your job search is going nowhere fast, so finding the right one as quickly and effectively as possible is critically important. The conventional way of doing this is to wait until an employer has posted a job vacancy and to submit your application through the usual channels. The trouble is that this procedure is riddled with problems.

But there’s a solution which I’m going to tell you about right now, and one that eliminates all of the difficulties that ordinary job hunters endure. In this episode I’ll introduce you to the mechanics of locating the organisation that will become your principal employment target.

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My work-search strategy features three core stages, the first of which identifies lucrative openings with high-quality employers before anyone else has got to them. This is simpler to do than most job hunters might imagine and if you can answer two basic questions you’ll go a long way towards achieving this. Once you understand the importance of these questions and their corresponding answers, you’ll be in prime position to move on to the second and third stages of the process.

In today’s episode I want to talk about the reasons that this pair of questions is crucial to finding work opportunities, how you should go about asking them, and why the answers form the foundation of everything that subsequently happens in your job-search project. 

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You’re looking for a better job so that means you’ve got some big choices to make, and there’s one that comes head and shoulders above any other. The choice I’m thinking about concerns the height you decide to set your bar. How high do you want to fly and, conversely, how low are you prepared to go?

This decision is profoundly important and represents a core aspect of finding the best-possible work opportunity. Most job hunters scoot over this activity without giving it due consideration so I want to explain why I think it’s the single most crucial choice you’ll ever make and why you need to be clear about its effects on your future, right from the start.

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Imagine that you’ve come across a hidden treasure chest that contains a rare and glittering prize. Or perhaps you’ve stumbled across a path of tempting riches, one that leads you towards the land of your dreams. You’d probably feel thrilled with your discovery and excited about the possibilities that were suddenly opening up in front of you.

In a similar way, you’re about to learn how to uncover a vein of unique work opportunities that will make you marvel. This is the first of the Vocation Cast episodes that introduce one of the most important parts of my job-search system which is finding exciting and lucrative job openings with high-quality employers before anyone else gets to them.

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