Best Practices in Job-Searching – What about the economic meltdown?

The last thing any job-seeker wants to hear is that the economy is getting _worse_.   While our government struggles with how to avert meltdown, job-seekers don’t have much of an option but to continue to search.

This impacts the job-seeker in three ways:

1) Companies will have access to less credit – so they will spend less.  If companies spend less, there will be less job-openings.  This will make the job-search more challenging.

2) With this crisis, companies are becoming more conservative, this will result in both less hiring (they may have the money but not want to risk the economy getting worse) and more firing (to cut costs).

3) There will be more unemployed people and less new jobs…..

What is the silver-lining here?  Unfortunatly, unless you can get the government to bail-out you, your job-search will be longer and more challenging.

With the search getting tougher, you, the searcher must get smarter.  You must use your time efficiently in your search.  Yes, you can spend more time on Monster, which may _seem_ like progress, but increasing the focus and efficiency of your search will help the most.

Increasing your focus is not a trivial task for most.  Think back to the past when you had to increase your focus (say to study better in school).  The first thing you do is to try to change your environment so that there are less distractions.  Now that you are in a better environment you look for other ‘tools’ to help you focus.  Chances are, if you are feeling lost, you will go back and re-read your objectives and/or start a to-do list.

We can also thing about tools that will help with organization and focus.  Some of the standard tools are:

to-do list

calendar

contact list

file organizer

email

But even keeping those tools organized is tough.  The fact is, that most of these applications were not made for the job-searcher but for a ‘generic’ office worker.   Therefore, fiding and using the _best_ tools will really help your focus and efficiency.

To sum it all up.  The meltdown will mean that your job search will be tougher.  To increase your chances in this worsening economy you should focus your search to be more efficient (so you are not wasting time).  Using the right tools greatly helps with efficiency (yes, I can mow my lawn with nail-trimmers, but it is a whole lot easier/more efficient with a lawn-mower…).  The most common tools are the ‘office’ type of applications, but there are tools that were made specifically to help focus your search.

This is why we created VirtualJobCoach.com – a website that was specifically created to help job-seekers maximize the focus and efficiency of their search.