Commanding officers and enlisted service people in every branch of our military often strategize and live by an interesting and sound concept whose adage advises, “If you want to eat an elephant, eat it one bite at a time.”  Unless stranded on the African veldt or the jungles of India with the barest of supplies, our armed forces are not advocating initiating a giant barbeque featuring a pachyderm as the main menu item.  Rather, the United States military recommends that, when confronted with an enormous task, one should break it down logically and methodically into manageable parts and then tackle each portion one step at a time.

Thrust into this plummeting economy, job seekers can derive genuine benefit as well as emotional relief from this military strategy.  The task of job-hunting, when viewed in its entirety, appears overwhelming and even insurmountable.  When it becomes patently clear that the search for a new position is itself a full time job, many applicants press the panic button.  They immobilize themselves with fear, making little progress toward their goal or worse, running on an ever-spinning hamster wheel by approaching their search via tried and no longer always true methods.  If you number among the swelling ranks of the unemployed or soon to be unemployed, consider that these counterproductive methods include leaping directly into the job market the way that a person who cannot swim may jump into the deep end of the pool.

Viewed systemically and logically, the proper steps that you will wish to take in your job search include the following:

• A genuine, unbiased evaluation of one’s background and skills
• Understanding that your career has been marked with accomplishments, even if you were a member of a large team striving toward common objectives
• A true understanding of the state of the industry in which you may have maneuvered for many years
• Creatively assessing how and where your existing overall skills and strengths can dovetail and have true value via a new job title or a different industry
• Deciding upon the direction or directions of your search; meaning, knowing where you would like to see yourself
• Resolving what you will and will not do in order to achieve placement in a new job.  Will you pull up stakes and move to another State?  Will you accept a position that you may have held prior to your latest promotion(s )? Will you perform the same or similar functions of your last job for a notably lower rate of pay if the salary is bolstered by the provision of benefits, which you may have lost when your former job went away?
• Designing and preparing the strongest resume, cover letter, and follow up letter that you can either craft yourself or contract a well-established professional resume writing service to generate
• Networking, networking, and networking through every viable source, even the ones that you may feel uncomfortable, at first, accessing.  Networking opportunities include the following -
  - Internet job boards both massive (highly generalized) and niche (industry-specific or company-specific)
  - Business networking sites such as LinkedIn
  - Independent, recruitment-oriented sites
  - Social networking sites, including Twitter, Facebook, and Myspace
  - Expanding the scope of all potential leads by joining a charitable organization, connecting with former schoolmates and faculty at alumni events and whenever possible, employment-oriented meetings, and becoming a member of pertinent industry associations.
  - Alerting virtually everyone you know that you are seeking a new position. This includes vendors to whom you give regular business, as well as your priest, deacon, minister, or rabbi, your neighbors, and the parents of your children’s friends, to name a few.

Approaching your job search by way of this manageable, step by step approach, you will not only ingest the elephant more easily, you will see better results, and more of them, faster than you would have if you view the pachyderm as “biting off more than you can chew.”

The English poet John Donne expressed this sentiment almost four hundred years ago.  Yet, it seems particularly appropriate today.  Bad economic news abounds across the globe.  And, since domestic business in every nation is dependent upon global markets for significant portions of their revenues, the American sub-prime mortgage crisis has spawned a worldwide economic meltdown of epic proportions.

Recently, in the U.S., CitiBank announced plans to lay off more than 50,000 employees nationwide while senior executives of the three major domestic automobile manufacturers pleaded their cases before Federal legislators, desperate to obtain funding that would enable their corporations to stay afloat.  Added to the unprecedented federal bailouts of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Goldman Sachs, and AIG, these more recent developments indicate that as the “bell tolls” signaling layoffs and unemployment for millions of Americans, it also “tolls” an alarm for the rest of us who are still employed.

As the value of stocks plummet and consumers curtail all but the most vital spending, the axe continues to fall on the American workforce.  How solid is the company in which you are employed?   How safe is your job?

Like the early bird that catches the worm, the proactive job seeker stands a greater chance of securing employment than those who adopt a “wait and see” approach.   Armed for a targeted job search, a current resume and persuasive cover letter will enable you to get a head start on your competition.

As the economy spirals downward, don’t despair, act!  Develop a resume and cover letter that will maximize your strengths and entice potential employers to grant you interviews.  In that way, if the “bell tolls” for you, you will be prepared.

At one time, an effective job search entailed simply checking the employment classified section of the area’s Sunday newspapers and responding to advertised openings.  Today, such an approach seems parochial at best and patently ineffective at worst.

Today’s job search, if one is seeking the right position, is akin to a marketing campaign.  If you were planning a product marketing campaign, you would establish a budget and determine the allocation and mix of media you would employ to transmit your marketing message.  The exact nature and content of your message aside, you would consider all the media channels – print, broadcast, Web, outdoor, etc. – and determine how to structure your campaign to optimize its effectiveness within your budgetary constraints.

Planning a job search is similar.  You need to consider how much time and effort you have to devote to it.  If you are unemployed, seeking employment perhaps should be your full-time occupation.  If, however, you are working, you need to determine the time that you will allot to your search on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

Having established a time-budget, you can now proceed to determine how you will tackle maximizing your exposure within the job market.  If this is beginning to sound like an involved process, consider that the quality of your plan and job search will, in most cases, define the quality of your results.

And so, you will need to establish a plan to uncover as many relevant job opportunities as possible.  This plan should take into account the fact that, in the typical calendar year, job openings are relatively evenly split between those that are posted or advertised and those that are not.

If you consider published openings, your resources include newspapers, trade publications, recruiters who advertise openings, and of course, Internet job boards.  Therefore, you will want to designate some of your time and efforts to uncovering openings via each of these sources.  You will need to plan to check newspaper employment classifieds as well as opportunities listed in applicable trade publications.  You can research and identify contingent fee recruiters who specialize in your employment category and contact them.  Ultimately, you will want to post your resume on major and specialty job boards and set up those email alerts that will notify you of new job listings that meet criteria that you will establish.

Now, consider those opportunities that are neither posted nor advertised.  These opportunities will be more difficult to uncover, but more potentially rewarding if identified since these opportunities will have far fewer applicants.  One way to find such opportunities is through networking.  You will need to contact people whom you know that may be of assistance in your job search, as well as establish contacts with others whom you may not know but with whom you may have some commonality (alumni of the college from which you graduated, membership in an organization, etc.).

Another way to identify unadvertised opportunities is via keeping abreast with business news.  Any business event, positive or negative, may result in the need for new personnel.  In such instances, you can research the company’s organization and select appropriate management personnel to whom you will draft and send a letter acknowledging the business event and suggesting your relevant qualifications and prospective benefits to their organization. 

A third approach to reaching the unadvertised job market is blasting or mass mailing your resume.  While this approach usually generates a very low return rate, it only takes one employer contact for you to secure rewarding employment.

Lastly, contingent fee recruiters – the true headhunters – may be researched and contacted in the hope that they may be currently seeking a candidate like yourself.  As in the case of resume blasting or mass mailing, expect a low rate of return for your efforts in this area.

As you can see, developing and conducting an effective job campaign in today’s market is both complicated and time-consuming.  If you utilize these techniques, however, you may be pleasantly surprised by the result.

You may be asking yourself, “what does this have to do with my job search?”  At first blush, one might discern no connection between the respective subject matter of the story and that of your job search.  The surprising answer, however, is “more than you can possibly imagine.”

Consider for a moment the purpose of your job search.  If you are thinking “to find a job,” then you are only partially correct.  The purpose of a job search for the vast majority of seekers is not simply to find a job, but to find the right job – the job fulfilling a litany of different job-seeker requirements in areas including compensation, challenge, advancement, and geography to name just a few.

If your purpose is to find the right job, then you need to begin by developing or securing materials that will define and describe you to a prospective employer.  These materials may include a resume, cover letter, letters of recommendation, a portfolio, certifications, licenses, and a host of other such materials specific to the particular employment search.  Of course, the quality of these materials will be critical to your potential job-hunting success.

Assuming that these materials are of impeccable quality, however, what should be the next step in your process?  Quite obviously, the answer is to commence a job search.  Given that your goal is to find the right job, the underlying, more significant question is “how will you conduct an effective job search?”

The information and other resources available to today’s job-seeker are staggering in their volume and scale.  How will you efficiently employ the resources available to optimize the success of your efforts?

In a sense, you – as a job-seeker – are very much like a political candidate or a product or brand seeking recognition in a crowded marketplace.  How will you capture the attention of those who might might be searching for a candidate like you or who may be of benefit to you in your search?

To gain optimal exposure and recognition within your market, you need to develop a plan, an organized course of action enabling you to systematically utilize all available job-seeking resources to your maximum benefit.  Too many job candidates employ a haphazard approach in their job searches; thereby, leaving their job-hunting success, careers, and futures to chance.   Even if these candidates find jobs (as most all will ultimately do), it is unlikely that they will find the right opportunities.  And, since one job influences the next job and so on, one can only speculate on the damage done to such careers.

Without a plan, its execution, and effective materials promoting a candidate, the job-hunting process is very much like that of Griffin, the mad scientist.  Your efforts will produce relative “invisibility” in the employment market, make it difficult for you to return to the right career track, and utlimately become a source of concern and vexation in your life.