What Color Is Your Parachute? Part 9

Unfortunately, this is merely a historical note about this method. Many years ago I used to audit groups that used this method, plus similar job clubs in Michigan, Boston, San Diego and Northern California, and I can tell you job clubs worked as well as I have here described. But, the model died. For four reasons: changes in the use of the telephone; the rise of new technologies (the Internet, e-mail, texting, etc.); loss of federal funding for training job-seekers; and-most importantly of all-an increasing unwillingness in Western culture to work this hard. You won't find a single one of these left (so far as I know) anywhere on the face of the Earth. We (Nathan and I) have looked.

What you will find, instead (which is why I have listed job clubs here), is hundreds of job-hunting groups that call themselves "job clubs" but they are not. They are far from the Azrin model.1 They tend to meet only once a week, and then for only a couple of hours, and may more accurately be described as Job-Search Support Groups. Their job-hunting success rate is usually around 10%, if that.

But there are some rare exceptions, with a much higher success rate-50% in fact-particularly if they use this book as their guide.2

Still, even "dumbed down," and having a much lower success rate, job-search support groups have one sterling virtue, and that is, they provide community to the otherwise lonely job-hunter. This is very, very valuable. No one should ever have to job-hunt all by themselves, if they can possibly avoid it. We all need encouragement and support, along the way.

A nationwide directory of job-search support groups can be found on Susan Joyce's wonderful website, job-hunt.org, located at http://tinyurl.com/7a9xbb.

3. Using the Yellow Pages. This method works 65% of the time. It involves going through the Yellow Pages of your local phone book, or actually, the Index to those Yellow Pages, so you can identify subjects or fields of interest to you. Then you go from the Index to the actual Yellow Pages and look up names of organizations or companies in those fields, in that town or city where you want to work. You call them, set up an appointment, go visit them, and explore whether or not they are hiring for the kind of work you do, or the position you are looking for. Of course, in this post-2008 period, it's a lot harder to get employers to consent to see you-in large companies, anyway. Still, you will note that you have a nine times better chance of finding a job with this method, than if you had just depended on your resume.

4. Knocking on the door of any employer, office, or manufacturing plant. This method works 47% of the time. It works best with small employers (25 or fewer employees) as you might have guessed. Sometimes you blunder into a place where a vacancy has just developed. One job-hunter knocked on the door of an architectural office at 11 a.m. His predecessor (for he did get hired there) had just quit at 10 a.m. that morning. If you try this method and nothing turns up, you broaden your definition of small employer to those with 50 or fewer employees. With this method you have an almost seven times better chance of finding a job than if you had just depended on your resume.

5. Asking for job-leads. This method works 33% of the time. With this method you ask family members, friends, and people you know in the community (or on LinkedIn) if they know of any place where someone with your talents and background is being sought. It is a simple question: do you know of any job vacancies at the place where you work-or elsewhere? Using this method, you have an almost five times better chance of finding a job, than if you had just sent out your resume.

6. Going to private employment agencies or search firms for help. This method works 27.8% of the time (at best) on down to 5% (at worse). These agencies used to just place office workers; now it's hard to think of a category of jobs they don't try to place, especially in large metropolitan areas. A directory of these firms in your area can be found at www.yellowpages.com. Into their search engine put "Employment agencies" and the name of your local town or city, to get the relevant listings. The wide variation in success rate (5%27.8%) is due to the fact that these agencies vary greatly in their staffing (ranging from extremely competent on down to inept, or running a scam). Still, at their best, agencies are four times more effective than just depending on your resume.

7. Answering local newspaper ads. This method works 24% of the time (at best) on down to 5% (again). With this method, you answer "help wanted ads" in your local newspaper, especially the Sunday edition, a.s.suming your city or town still has a newspaper, online or in print, or both. See the website Job Search Steps found at http://tinyurl.com/d58l8z for how to use them. As for a directory of online newspapers from around the world, your best bet is Newslink, found at www.newslink.org (click on "Newspapers" in the top navigation bar).

The fluctuation between 5% and 24% is due to the level of salary that is being sought; those job-hunters looking for low-level salary jobs find this method works 24% of the time. Those looking for a high salary find it works only 5% of the time.

8. Going to places where employers pick up workers. If you're a union member, particularly in the trades or construction, and you have access to a union hiring hall, this method will find you work, up to 22% of the time. What is not stated, however, is how long it may take to get a job at the hall, and how short-lived such a job may be. In the trades, it's often just a few days. Moreover, this is not a job-hunting method that is open to a very large percentage of job-hunters, at all. Only 6.6% of private sector employees are union members these days. (The public sector's comparable figure is 35.9%, and the overall figure for the American worker is 11.3%, the lowest level since 1916.)3

If you're not a union member, but you like this method (or you're desperate), employers tend to pick up workers (called day-laborers) early in the morning, on well-known street corners in your town (ask around). It's called pick-up work, it's usually short-term, usually yard work, or work that requires you to use your hands, usually paid to you in cash that day, and definitely temp work. But no job should be "beneath you" when you're nearly flat-broke. All work like this is honorable. And while such jobs usually don't last long, occasionally they do, or-if the employer is impressed with the quality of your work-they can lead to more permanent employment. Sometimes.

9. Going to the state or federal employment office. This method works 14% of the time. You go to your local federal/state unemployment service office (www.dol.gov/dol/location.htm) or to their CareerOneStop business centers (www.careeronestop.org), now called American Job Centers (www.jobcenter.usa.gov), to get instructions on how to better job-hunt, and find job-leads. (Note: They have a special section for returning veterans.) 10. Answering ads in professional or trade journals, appropriate to your field. This method works 7% of the time. The method consists in looking at professional journals in your profession or field, and answering any ads there that intrigue you (a directory of these a.s.sociations and their journals is at Susan Joyce's comprehensive site, job-hunt.org (or as she likes to say, "job dash hunt dot org"), found at http://tinyurl.com/d9vxnv4).

11. Posting or mailing out your resume to employers. As you've probably figured out by now, this works at getting you a job (or, more accurately, at getting you an interview that leads to a job) 7% of the time. And I'm being generous with this estimate.

This comes as a shock to most job-hunters.

When you're unemployed, and job-hunting, or trying to change careers, everyone will tell you: a good resume will get you a job. It's virtually an article of faith among the unemployed (and their helpers).

Why does everyone keep telling us this, when it has such a miserable success record? Oh, you tell me. Why did everyone entrust their money to Bernie Madoff? Or why did so many people buy those incredibly risky financial instruments or mortgages that led to the Great Recession back in 2008? I don't know. I guess if you hear something often enough, and from enough different sources, you start to think it must be true.

Anyway, there it stands. Indisputable. The success rate of resumes is only 7%. And actually I'm being generous with that estimate. One study suggested that only 1 out of 1,470 resumes actually resulted in a job. Another study found the figure to be even worse: 1 job offer for every 1,700 resumes floating around out there.

By the way, once you post your resume on the Internet, it gets copied quickly by "spiders" from other sites, and you can never remove it completely from the Internet. There are reportedly now at least 40,000,000 resumes floating around out there in the ether, like lost s.h.i.+ps on the Sarga.s.so Sea. Yours, among them. That can come back to haunt you if you ever fibbed (lied?) about anything, once a would-be employer Googles you, even years later.

And now, last but not least: 12. Looking for employers' job-postings on the Internet. This method works on average 4% of the time. Yeah, I know, you're somewhere between surprised and shocked at this finding. I was too.

It is strange. If you have access to the Internet, and you're out of work, everyone will tell you to look for employers' job-postings (vacancies)-either on the employer's own website (if you have a particular company or organization in mind), or on specific job-boards such as CareerBuilder, Yahoo/Hot Jobs, Monster, LinkUp, Hound, or on niche sites4 for particular industries, such as Dice; or on non-job sites such as Craigslist, or even on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites.

The question is, how helpful is the Internet when you're out of work?

The answer is: well, that depends.

The anectdotal evidence is sometimes impressive. You will often hear stories of job-hunters who have been tremendously successful in using the Internet to find a job. Examples:

A job-seeker, a systems administrator in Taos, New Mexico, who wanted to move to San Francisco posted his resume at 10 p.m. on a Monday night, on a San Francisco online site (it happened to be Craigslist.org). By Wednesday morning he had over seventy responses from employers.

Again, a marketing professional developed her resume following guidance she found on the Internet, posted it to two advertised positions she found there, and within seventy-two hours of posting her electronic resume, both firms contacted her, and she is now working for one of them.

Again, this time from job-hunters' letters: "In May I was very unexpectedly laid off from a company I was with for five years. I did 100% of my job-search and research via the Internet. I found all my leads online, sent all my resumes via e-mail, and had about a 25% response rate that actually led to a phone interview or a face-to-face interview. It was a software company that laid me off, and I am [now] going to work for a publis.h.i.+ng company, a position I found online."

And again: "Thanks to the Internet, I found what I believe to be the ideal job in [just] eight weeks-a great job with a great company and great opportunities."

The question is, are these stories just flukes, or is this a universal experience?

Sadly it turns out that this job-search method actually doesn't work for very many who try it. Exception to this: if you are seeking a technical or computer-related job, an IT job, or a job in engineering, finances, or health care, the success rate rises, to somewhere around 10%. But for the other 12,741 job-t.i.tles that are out there in the job-market, the success rate reportedly remains at around 4%.

Job-Hunting Methods Were Not Created Equal So, there you have it. There are twelve job-hunting methods currently, and you can see not only what they are, but what their comparative success rate is.5 These are alternatives for you to pick and choose between; and they were not all created equal. Some methods of hunting for work have a pretty good track record, and therefore will repay you well for time spent pursuing them. But other methods have a really terrible track record, and you can waste a lot of time, and energy, on them, with no results.

So, to discuss job-hunting methods is to discuss conservation of energy. Your energy. If your job-hunt just hasn't worked so far, look at that list to see if you've been using one of the worst methods to look for work. See if you've been using a method that used to work, but is now more and more ineffective.

If you're feeling stuck, if you've been out of work for months or even years, what you need to do is change job-hunting methods. You need to change tools. The dinner fork will no longer do, to dig there in the job-market. You need the shovel.

That would mean choosing the most effective method and tool: The Creative Approach. The one with the 86% success rate.

It begins by your doing a self-inventory, in order to understand more fully who you are.

Next chapter.

1. His detailed manual describing his method, as he used it successfully with exmental patients, has been out of print for years; but the desperate, really, really desperate, could find it for $150 on up to $600 on the Alibris website and elsewhere online. Its exact t.i.tle is The Job Club Counselor's Manual: A Behavioral Approach to Vocational Counseling. To be frank, it's not worth anywhere near these prices, inasmuch as Azrin's model would need some thoughtful revision and adaptation to work well in today's world. By the way, the book's price is so high because my friend Nathan died this year (2013), and doubtless people are searching for mementos of him and his ideas.

2. A report of a 50% success rate, from a Job Search Support Group in Cupertino, California: "The Cupertino Rotary Job Search Support Group is going strong again this year. Last year we had 154 people come through the Group and exactly 50% found jobs-77 people found the work they were seeking! The 50%' figure has been the Rule of Thumb' for the Job Search Support Group.... EVERY year (all 11 years except the first year, which was 43%) the success rate has been 50%! And every year, we use d.i.c.k's book as a central resource' for encouragement and a practical job-searching guide. Every single person that comes to our Group receives a copy of What Color Is Your Parachute? along with a Cupertino Rotary Job Search Support Group binder-and with these resources, it helps people tremendously!"

3. These statistics are from a January 25, 2013, report on the WSWS website by Jerry White, found at http://tinyurl.com/czq75rg.

4. An impressive directory of niche sites can be found at VetJobs (http://tinyurl.com/28rplc7).

5. The statistics I quoted throughout this chapter do fluctuate somewhat, from year to year, from geographical region to region, from one field to another, from one city, town, or rural area to another. Their best value is how they compare to other job-hunting methods. That tends to remain fairly constant, and predictable, year by year.

You do get to a certain point in life.

Where you have to realistically, I think, Understand that the days are getting shorter.