At the beginning of this week, I had a challenge. Find 10 leads on possible jobs in the field I’m interested in.
If you’ve followed my blog for any length of time, you know that I am currently looking at going towards a sales role. However, this exercise wasn’t to get me a job. Instead, this was training in how to find a job. There’s a difference.
I was given many different resources concerning job boards and how to find opportunities, but besides that, I was pretty much sent out to find whatever I could. To experiment and find out what works best for me in searching.
My goal was very simple. Come back with 10 job leads at the end of the week. Someone might look at that and say “that’s all?” But that’s why the process in how I got those leads is such an important thing. This exercise was all about experimenting and learning how to use the resources to their full potential.
I didn’t just go to Indeed.com and pick the first 10 jobs I saw. I wanted to gain skills in this area of searching and prospecting, so I looked at over 10 different websites featuring job postings and made probably over 100 customizations in refining search results. Once again, the goal wasn’t to find the one job that I am in love with, but as part of experimenting and understanding how this prospecting worked, I needed to try and narrow to the best of my ability.
The trick in job searching is to narrow down your search results to exclude uninteresting jobs without getting rid of the relevant ones.
What did you search?
I started with very simple searching. Just “sales,” or “sales development.” As you can imagine, there were a lot of jobs that popped up. There were, of course, some that matched what I was looking for, but it was much harder to find those since they were mixed in with so many garbage jobs I wasn’t interested in.
Thus began my “refine results rampage”
I took full advantage of every site’s advanced search. I added other keywords like “startup” and “representative,” I narrowed it to jobs posted within the last 7 days (sometimes even 1 or 2 days), I selected only full-time positions, I checked the box for “entry level,” I checked in specific geographic locations, I selected companies with less than 50 employees, etc.
Indeed is amazing because not only can you narrow your search results by keywords of what you want, you can choose words you don’t want to see on the job listing.
For me, I saw a pattern pretty quickly on Indeed that I knew I had to get rid of. Probably 30% of the postings were car sales jobs or automotive related. I had absolutely 0 interest in these jobs, so there was no reason to let them take up space in my window. I got rid of words like “automotive” and “mechanic.”
Then there were a lot of management positions coming up so I got rid of words like “executive” and “manager.” I’m entry level, so I knew these kinds of jobs wouldn’t be for me.
After going through this kind of process on all of the websites, I was able to start narrowing down what kind of searches work well in finding the kind of jobs that usually interest me. Some of the sites didn’t have as much customization in the search field as others, but there was always a little bit of advanced search that can help take away the jobs you don’t care about.
What I learned
Since the Purpose of this exercise was more to learn about how these systems work rather than land a job, I kept my eyes open for patterns and similarities in job postings. What do a lot of companies want when hiring an entry level sales rep?
Here are three of the biggest things that stood out to me:
Most of them don’t actually care about a college degree
Almost all of the listings I found said something like “college degree preferred,” or “college degree in sales is a plus.” But even ones that said “college degree required” were so blunt and unspecific that it felt like it meant nothing.
After learning a lot more about the other side of this employment wall, I’ve realized that these are just filters. Just like I’m putting filters on to find jobs, employers make filters like “college degree required,” to filter out what they think aren’t good fits. However, I all but guarantee if Mark Zuckerberg came and applied for one of these roles they wouldn’t say, “sorry, you’re not qualified because you don’t have a college degree.”
If you have a proven track record and show them the value you can create, almost any company wanting to grow will hire you.
I was given some great advice from a sales mentor of mine when looking at these “college required” qualifications. He said the less specific the degree requirement, the less it matters. If you have a job that says “must have a masters degree or higher in electrical engineering,” that probably means you need to have that. It may even be required by law that you have it. But if all the listing says is “college degree required,” it means nothing.
All jobs are sugar and spice and everything nice
We forget sometimes that these job listings are made to look as pretty as possible. If I got a penny for all of the listings that said “we are one of the fastest growing companies in the world,” I would be a rich man. At the rate of all these “fastest growing companies” I’m guessing we can expect a million more billion-dollar companies in the next year.
A good way for me to read through all of these listings with “cutting edge technology, most innovative company, etc” is to go directly to the website. You can tell a lot about a company from in the first 10 seconds after looking at their website.
Here’s one, in particular, that had a really cool looking job description but after I went to the website, I almost threw up. It was so bad. I immediately knew I could never work for a company with that website.
CRM and software knowledge is important
Almost every single listing I saw said something about knowing how to use Salesforce and either the Microsoft suite or the G Suite.
When you start to see something popping up on every single listing, those are the things you want to focus on learning. Especially when you get into actually approaching these companies. If they have something that says “knowledgeable in using MailChimp,” you better be a MailChimp pro by the time you talk to them.
Overall Takeaways
I’ve become familiar now with a bunch of different sites for searching for jobs. I know how to use them, I know how to look for patterns, I know how to get rid of jobs I’m not interested in. In general, I know how to find what I want. So, what’s the next step? Apply to all of these jobs and hope for the best?
That’s for beginners. This week I’m going to be going into the next stage of narrowing and submitting. If you want to be the 213th person with the exact same resume applying for a role, by all means, start applying. But if you want to stand out to a company and increase your odds by an insane margin, check back next week for the update.
If you’re going to stand out, you gotta break the mold a bit. This week, I’m going to be taking the next step in doing that.