Today I have selected my number one idea for everyone including job hunters. I have listed it as number 5 in my article The Top 10 Priorities For Job Hunters. This article has been one of my best - I have had several requests from the media for interviews on it.

Read Your Goals Every Single Day.

Having clear goals in life gives you a significant advantage.

In fact most people think having dreams are goals. Dreams are not goals, goals are measurable, tangible, and have a date.

Saying “One day I will take the family to Disneyland” is not a clear goal. Saying “In August 2011, I am taking the family to Disneyland” is a clear goal.

In my Success Through Balance philosophy I promote having goals in in five different areas,

1. Health,
2. Relationships,
3. Financial Stability,
4. Giving Back and
5. Personal Growth.

Your written goals must be Personal, Positive, and in the Present.

There are different approaches to creating your goals. If you already have an approach - then use them.

Did you know all successful people have goals written down and they review them on a regular basis?

Here is an effective, but simple way to create goals:

1. For 30 days, each day, write down (without looking at the day before) at least 10 different goals.
2. At the end of the 30 days, your list of goals will be set.
3. Rewrite them once a month. In fact one of your goals should be, "I rewrite these goals at the beginning of every month".

I have actually about 50 goals I read each day. For goals that are far out - say 3 years away - I have some shorter goals.

Here is an example about my marathon running:

1. I am running the 2009 Toronto Marathon In Under 5 Hours.
2. I am running the 2011 Boston Marathon.

Here is a business example:

1. I am helping 10,000 people find jobs in 2009-2010
2. I am a regular on Oprah helping people find jobs starting in 2010

In both these cases - the first is a step to the second. But you will notice that the goals are Positive, Personal, and in the Present. The three "P"s of goals.

Read your goals out loud.

Reading them out loud does two things in your subconscious that will help your conscious mind.

1. Firstly it creates cognitive dissonance between the reality and the goal, and,
2. secondly it tells the reticular activating system to stop ignoring things that you need to help you.

Once you get hooked on goals, you will see successful people using them all the time.

You will wonder how you got anywhere at all.

Its one of the "Secrets of Success".

Create goals and read them everyday.

I am a little side tracked, but I loved the movie UP because I believe its all about setting goals, read what I wrote about UP in my Movie Review: Up – Forget The Story – Its About Setting Goals.

Take a job hunting action today - action is 1000 times better than thinking about an action.

Planning an action is great - if you take the action.

Zale

Today I have selected a thought from my The Top 10 Skills Needed By Job Hunters article.

(FYI - This is not David Perry, but Zale Tabakman providing guest posts for the week - see Monday's post for background on who I am.)

This article on job hunting is obvious especially if you read David's blog or his book or have purchased the Guerrilla Job Search System. I have tried to simplify several concepts down and generate some immediate actions items.

Continuous forward Action is the single thing that is guaranteed to get you a job.

Have multiple approaches to finding your  job.

Finding a job is not about a single activity and never ever is it “Click and Apply”.

When you start your job hunting efforts, you don’t know where you will get the job, you don’t know how they will hear about you, and you don’t know what skill is the one the employer needs.

Therefore you need to have many different approaches to job hunting, and many different tactics for each approach.

Its a simple thought, but practically its a big job and should consume you until you get the job you want.

Here are four different approaches to job hunting - you need to have a plan for each one of them.

1. Finding job openings - The standard include job fairs, another is online networking, face-to-face networking, job clubs, head hunters. The non-standard approaches are e-mail and direct marketing, and reading newspapers to name a few.
2. Being found. The standards are LinkedIn and Zoominfo. The best non-standard approaches include becoming known as an expert, creating a newsletter, creating a website, answering questions on LinkedIn and Google answers.
3. Direct contact of hiring authorities. In this approach you are looking to contact people before they actually are hiring. When they are wandering around the office asking - do you know somebody for this job? You want to be their at that time - so you are not competing with others.
4. Marketing Yourself - This is related to the previous one, but the focus is slightly different. Instead of waiting to be found - you actually go out and contact people for the express purpose of letting them know you exist. With this approach you are putting yourself out. This method takes some guts - you will get rejected and you will get insulted. On the other hand, the rewards are greater. You will be quoted in newspapers and on peoples blogs.

These four methods can all use the same basic content you have created for solving the 12 different problems. (see Monday's post).

For how to implement these four approaches take a look at 77 Guerrilla Job Hunting Tips I have created. They are based on ideas from David and Kevin with a Zale spin on them.

To your success!

Zale

In yesterday's post I introduced myself and I explained I was going to take one thought from my top 10s lists.

Today's article comes from my The Top 10 Ways A Job Hunter Must Think article and the topic I will write about is that The job hunter focuses on the opportunities.

In every economic cycle there are winners and their are losers.

Companies grow and companies fail. Even 100 year old companies fail. On the world stage we have seen GM and Chrysler bite the dust.

In Canada its Nortel.

A couple of years ago it was Eaton's and Simpsons.

Its sad and for the people who work at these companies its horrible.

But all these companies have been replaced.

People continue to buy products and services, they just change suppliers.

Its just like a forest. Old trees fall and new trees come up.

For years people thought forest fires were evil (its called the Bambi syndrome), but the latest forest management techniques allow forest fires to rage, the forest fire is healthy for the forest and for the environment.

Unemployment has the same potential, unemployment is traumatic, its painful, and its massively difficult in the short term, but unemployment has the potential to be exceedingly healthy in the long term.

Think about your role in the current economic forest fire, are you going to see it as opportunity to grow or a situation where you are going down in flames?

Ok, so how does this help you in your job hunt?

With the right mindset you can and will see opportunities everywhere.

Let me show you a few:

• Identify companies that are losing market share. These companies are looking for ways to stop their loss of market share. If you have one or two proven ideas that grow market share - don't you think they are willing to listen? Use some of the ideas from yesterday to apply to get the doors open.
• Identify companies taking market share. This of course is the opposite of the previous opportunity - these companies are growing, therefore they are expanding, therefore they need you to help them keep their gains. Again, use some of the ideas from yesterday to get on track.
• Identify the low cost players - This is the easiet solution. These are probably going to be the next leaders in the industry. When times get tough - people want to save money. The low cost providers are the ones that grow. Usually they are smaller companies with less overheads, or they are companies that have figured out how to save money. In any event - the low costs guys are the ones that are going to grow.
• Identify Changing Technologies - This is two opportunities for an expert in a field. Take a long hard look at what new technologies are taking a shot at the established old guys. These new companies already understand how the technology is going to wipe out the old guys - but they probably are so excited about their ideas that they don't understand why people keep buying from the old guys. The second is the old guys - you can help them fight the new technology. Not but down playing it - but by absorbing it, creating it, or buying it. In any event - you can be the savior of the old guy. This is all about using your knowledge about the early and late majority. If "early majority" and "late majority" was babbly-gook check out the technlogy adoption curve. I highly recommend Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm for more on it.
• Consider Alternatives To Job Hunting. Maybe its time for you to consider starting your own business. Maybe you can take advantage of some of these opportunities.

I hope this was helpful and gives you some things to think about.

You can read more of my ideas at http://www.ZaleTabakman.ca

Zale

I am so pleased to be asked to guest Blog on David's site.

This is an honour and a pleasure.

Since, you probably don't know me - I thought I would be best to introduce myself and explain why you should keep reading, and then I will give you a couple of great ideas about how to help you can get a job.

The short and sweet is I am Speaker, Writer, and Entreprenour. I provide practical help for people wanting to acheive their goals.

My passions (that are relevant to job hunters) include the following:

• Teach a 12 week course of YMCA for young entrepreneurs called The Magic Profit Formula where I go through all the core thinking skills entrepreneurs need.
• I write a blog at http://www.ZaleTabakman.ca with 100's of job hunting tactics and beyond.
• I own a Curves franchise.
• I am a back of the back Marathoner runner.
• I am big on LinkedIn, connecting to me adds 2,700,000 to your network, I run 12 different Groups - you can find me at http://www.LinkedIn.com/in/ZaleTabakman

I write my articles in themes - all the articles are related to one another through constant.
I have been writing for a couple of years, so I have lots of themes.

My most popular article themes for job hunters is My Top 10's - each article lists the top 10 things a job Hunter needs to do. For this week, I am going to choose, the Top 1 Thing from each of the top 10 items to discuss.

The article is about today selects number 2 is from the My Top Ten Job Hunting Tactics.

Its tactic #2 and is Know 12 problems that you can solve in your 20 companies that increases sales or saves the company money.

This tactic integrates several concepts and will provide you with material and content you can use over and over again in multiple ways.

First we will break down the tactics into its components, secondly we will give you some ideas about how to use the results of the tactic.

12 Problems - Remember no matter what you do - you are being hired to solve a problem, unless you are a model, you are not hired for your good looks. A job is about solving problems such as low sales, bad customer service. the list is endless.

• If you are a CEO of a public company the twelve topics could include (1) Raising the stock price, (2) Introducing new products, (3) Improving manufacturing processes, (4) Hiring the best and the brightest, (4) Acquiring new companies
• If you are a sales person, some of the twelve include  (1) Identifying prospects (2) Contacting prospects, (3) Presenting to prospects, (4) Overcoming objections, (5) Closing the sale, (6) Getting payment, (7) Up selling to new products, and the list goes on.
• What ever you do, you know that when you do the job - you are expected to solve problems. But the problems need to be specific for your industry and the kind of companies you work for. Identifying prospects for a hovercraft manufacturer is quiet different than for a Mary Kay consultant. Understand the difference.

20 Companies - David and Kevin over and over again talk about the 20 companies. You must have that list. The list will help you focus. Its not the only companies you will accept a job from, but it makes you an expert on these companies and their problems. Actually having 20 companies is the first on the list.

Now you know what you need to do. Let's talk about just some of the things you can use these 12 problems.

• You can create 12 resumes and cover letter that focus on the problem. This gives you a template to select when looking at a particular job. (Using a Guerrilla Job Resume of course.)
• You can create pages on your blog dealing with the problem.
  (Creating a blog is whole other way of marketing yourself)
• You can list the problems on your LinkedIn profile.
• You can write a white paper for each of the problems - going into depth about it. (Using white papers as a marketing approach is a whole other topic)
• You can create a seminar on each of the topics - and give it for free
  (This is about becoming known as an expert on a topic)
• You can create a little booklet - different than the white paper that just includes all the solutions - to give away at networking events.
• You can self publish the 12 white papers a book and leave it during the interview process - Big Thud Value.

This is just a short sample of some of the ways to use the 12 problems to get you a job.