Employment​ Coaching
Recent College Graduates​

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You are now a college graduate. Congratulations! Now what? Since that marvelous day when you, with all your fellow graduates, threw your caps joyously in the air, several things have probably occurred to you:

     • The job search is much more difficult than you expected.
     • Your vision of that charming one bedroom apartment in Manhattan or Hoboken seems like a distant pipe dream.
     •  Living with mom and dad, although certainly enjoyable, is not what you envisioned after getting your degree

        and beginning to carve out your place in the world.
     • Your alma mater did a wonderful job teaching you such things as English Literature, History of European

       Civilization and maybe even that class you took in ceramics. However, they really sucked at preparing you for

       the job search.


It's discouraging, isn't it? As you are probably aware, you share this plight with many of your fellow graduates. Don't be too hard on yourself. It's rough out there right now. It's rough out there right now. It's probably worthwhile to get a more complete idea of the current employment situation.

 

To do so, click here:



For recent college graduates, the plight is even worse:



• The non-partisan Economic Policy Institute calls this labor market "grim", saying that unemployment and underemployment among college graduates younger than 25 has averaged a whopping 28.5%.

• A Rutgers University study last spring of 444 graduates who received bachelor's degrees from 2006 to 2011 found that only 51% were working full-time. The rest were in graduate school, unemployed, working part-time or no longer in the job market.

• Those who got jobs beginning in 2008, the height of the great recession, earned a starting salary, on average, 10% less than those graduates who entered the job market in 2006 and 2007.

Okay, are you depressed enough now? Well, there is also some pretty positive news. Despite all the “gloom and doom”, three out of four graduates eventually find work. However, if you're after a good job at a decent starting salary with good prospects for the future, you have to develop a skill set which you probably lack right now: the ability to construct and execute a professional, effective job search campaign. That's where I come in.​

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 As you probably already know if you reviewed my website, I present highly effective seminars in job search techniques. I get rave reviews from the students but here's a dirty little secret: I know the students are going to have a great deal of difficulty getting to the proficiency level they need to get hired if they don't employ me or someone else as a job-search coach. It's one thing to learn techniques that can make you effective. It's something altogether different to achieve the level of proficiency in these techniques necessary to get hired. There are 3 words that sum up what you have to do: PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE!!!



Let me give you an illustration of what I’m talking about. You are in a job interview and you are sitting across from a hiring manager. He is a middle-aged man with a very serious expression on his face. He looks you in the eye and says, “I have 40 resumes from people applying for this position. Why are you my best choice?" This isn’t a curveball or unfair question. How would you answer it? In my seminars when I pose questions like this, perhaps 1 out of 40 people have an adequate answer. Most self-destruct right in front of my eyes. How would you do?



This is important! Even if this question is never asked, you are going to be judged on one very basic criterion: WHAT VALUE CAN YOU BRING TO MY COMPANY? That’s it! They don’t care if you are good to your mother, donate your services to charities around the world, care deeply about the welfare of others and want to make the world a better place. All they are interested is the VALUE you will bring.



How do you go about learning how to answer this question? By doing your homework! It is vitally important that you first identify the qualities that you have and show where these qualities have brought results to companies or organizations with which you worked in the past. We do this using a technique called SARs. This is an acronym that stands for Situation, Activities, and Results. And, to go back to our analogy, it's like learning to hit a lob shot in tennis or mastering the art of chipping in golf. As a job-search coach, I spent countless hours with people helping them identify and fine tune their SARs.



Some of the other things we pay attention to:
• Resumes. Everyone has one but most are mediocre at best. They are bland, uninteresting documents that show more of the “time in grade” that you've had rather than the results that you were responsible for.
• Networking. Almost everyone I talk to tells me they have a contact plan. When I dig beneath covers, I find that it is ineffectual at best and self-destructive at worst. One of my clients was complaining because he was not getting any response from his contacts. I asked him to give me the names of his top 10 contacts and to send them an e-mail saying I would be contacting them to find out how the client was doing on the job search. We soon found the problem. Here were some of the things I was able to determine:

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     -The contacts really had no idea what the client did for a living.

     -They had a very poor idea of the value that the client had brought to his previous companies.
     -They were confused about exactly what the client wanted from them.
     -They were disappointed with the follow-up from the client.

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It was little wonder that the contacts had not responded. The job seeker failed in her obligation to make it easy for the contact to help her

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Below is a more extensive list of the type of things that we will work together on:

 

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In depth assessment of where you are.
 

This exercise will help you get clear on such items as:

• Are you “crystal clear” on your objective?
     -Do you know exactly the job you are seeking?
     -Will you be pursuing multiple different jobs at the same time?
     -Are you seeking something completely different from where your "experience base" is?
 

• Do you currently have a job search plan in place?

• Are you totally satisfied with it?

• Is it written, prioritized and dated?

• What results have you been getting:

• How many interviews with different companies?

• How many multiple interviews with one company?

• Are you satisfied with the number of interviews you are going on?

• What are the parts of your job search that are going well?

• What are the areas where you feel you need improvement?

• What parts of the job search make you feel most uncomfortable?

Development of a Job Search Plan.

This is a customized activity based on the results of your assessment. In some cases, the job search plan will have to be built “from scratch”. In other cases, all that will be needed are some minor modifications and help with the parts of the job search that are causing discomfort. Some of those things might be executing a contact plan, “tweaking” the resume to make sure your accomplishments come through or practice interviews. In all cases, however, it is important that all the key aspects of the job search are addressed. Some of the items to be addressed will be:

• An in-depth, results-oriented, prioritized, dated, written job search plan

Key Point about the Job Search Plan: This must be your plan. I will provide advice and counsel but, in the end, you have to “own” it. For this reason, discussion and disagreement will be encouraged – actually demanded! If you agree to something you don’t believe in and to which you are not completely committed, failure is assured.

• Continuous activities designed to help the job seeker get crystal clear on "you"
• Fine-tuning one – or several – resumes designed to have positive impact on the person to whom it is sent
• Development of a contact list of at least 80 pair of eyes and ears to help in the job search
• Development of a crisp professional phone presentation to give to each and everyone on your contact list
• Insuring that your resume incorporates on paper all the things you have reviewed with your contacts on the phone
• The "care and feeding" of your contacts
• Identifying and committing to at least 2 and no more than 4 methods of job hunting.
• Reviewing and fine-tuning your methods for researching a company prior to contact and prior to the interview
• Practice, practice, practice with me on both the job interview and the contact phone presentation, several of which will be videotaped.
• Anything else necessary to insure success – and I’m sure there will be plenty more

• Regularly scheduled one-on-one meetings.

In these meetings we will jointly review the plan, discuss obstacles encountered and ways to overcome these obstacles and, where necessary, revise and revamp your plan. We will also spend time finding ways to increase the effectiveness of the job search and do whatever is necessary to move steadily toward the objective – the “Job of your Dreams."

Major Point:
In addition to the above, I will provide two other services that I think are critically important in accelerating success in the job search:
• Motivator / Cheerleader - I consistently tell my students, "I have a much higher opinion of you than you have of yourself." I will strive to help you continually feel better about yourself both as a human being and as a resource for any company that is lucky enough to hire you.
• "Nudge!!!" - I call this the “Jiminy Cricket” factor. I will serve as your conscience, task master and general all around pain in the neck. Once you have committed to doing something, I will endeavor to use all my powers of persuasion, pleading and, yes, nagging to insure that you follow through.



If you are serious about the job search, we should talk.