Productive Job Hunting: Full Chapter Extract From My Book, Political Careers: Chapter 5
Job hunting can be a tedious and lengthy process. Ultimately when you get that offer letter and contract through the post or via email, it is very fulfilling.
In this chapter, we are going to talk about a range of different methods for making the most of your time, and how to make applications.
Daily Time Management
The first thing we're going to talk about is your time management process regarding structuring your day. Depending upon your age, career position and employment status, how you structure your day around job applications and job-hunting will be different.
There are some golden rules that anyone can follow...
Set aside a specific time each day or week to job hunt. Consistency really matters when it comes to job-hunting. If you are unemployed or a graduate looking for work set aside three 1-hour sessions each day with a short twenty-minute break in between. Do not job hunt hour, after hour in a binge fashion. This is not Netflix. Keeping it consistent, but brief will make it easier to start each day and will ensure that over the weeks and months you will make more applications than if you did a binge session every couple of days or once a week.
If you are currently in full-time work, then this may not be possible. What you have to decide is whether to have a more extended job-hunting session each Sunday or possibly one evening a week.
The key is finding time around your life that allows you to be consistent in your job-hunting and is sustainable long term. Working eight hours and then doing four hours job-hunting is not going to be helpful, if you do that every day. It must be sustainable.
Example time-management plan
0900-1000 - Make coffee and check emails 1000-1100 - Research and save jobs to apply for in a spreadsheet 1100-1120 - Another coffee break 1120-1220 - Make job applications to previously saved roles 1220-1300 - Have a nice sandwich for lunch 1300-1400 - Do research for the upcoming interview
Track your Performance
A person far smarter than me called Peter Drucker once said “What gets measured, gets managed” and when it comes to your job-hunting you need to have something to track and manage.
Having something to track will give you something to aim towards. There are a number of things to track when job-hunting. Here are three things to track:
- Jobs applied for.
- Interviews attended.
- Job application to interview ratio.
These three Key Performance Indicators are the only things that will track your path to success and hopefully a job.
When job-hunting, you can only control the number of jobs that you apply for. Interviews and job offers that flow from these interviews are only possible through job applications. Job applications are the only part of a job hunt you have real and total control over.
Depending on your situation, you need to set a certain number of applications each week and work toward this number either each day or each week. This number, if consistently applied and you hit your target week in, week out, will pay dividends further down the line.
Batch. Batch. Batch
When you are job-hunting, batch one type of task, at one time, and forget about the other tasks until the appropriate time. Why? Because it’s more efficient and effective.
When I discovered the beauty of batching in my own personal management, it was a real productivity boon and, more importantly, a great time-saving hack. It saves time due to the mental bandwidth that is lost when you change from one task to another task. This ‘switching cost’ as it is known is the time it takes for your brain to ‘get up to speed’ on the new job.
Work in short batches, not multitasking.
So what should you “batch” in your job hunt?
When batching, you should think about the tasks that you are doing daily or weekly. Break down the process into a range of different tasks. When applying for a job, you have to:
- Find a position to apply for.
- Log the job into a spreadsheet.
- Read the job advert and do pre-application research.
- Create and complete the job application.
- Log application in a spreadsheet as complete.
This has given us five steps, breaking it down like this gives us the essential components. Now we need to combine some of the elements to help our batch. It would be sensible on this occasion to batch 1 and two together and 3,4, and five together.
Although this is not the strictest of limits, it will do enough for our needs.
Use spreadsheets
My better half says I am obsessed with spreadsheets. I deny this charge; I am not obsessed with spreadsheets even, if I wrote this book via a spreadsheet and have a spreadsheet that tracks all my spreadsheets.
Anyway, back to the spreadsheets and not my excel-lent addiction.
A spreadsheet is a secret weapon during a job search. After much time wasted, I shall now explain why.
With a spreadsheet, you have the perfect tool to ensure that you are keeping on top of your applications, you can track those that are successful and those that are not. It will also help you to batch tasks, save applications for the future and will allow you to keep a place for all your jobs to do. It is a place to store information that you are likely to forget and keep your search organised.
So what do you need to include in your spreadsheet to help you in your job search?
Personally, I favour Google Sheets as it is free and is cloud-based so you will be able to access it on the go, across a number of different devices and is easily accessible.
When you create the spreadsheet, open up two tabs in the sheet. Call one “Job applications” and the others “Tasks to do.”
In the job application tab, you will store information about the jobs you have applied for and the jobs that you are going to apply for. In the ‘tasks to do’ section, this is the place that you will include specific tasks for the next day, or week.
Now that you have created the spreadsheet and the tabs, now you have to populate it with data. You need to record the following information on the job application sheet.
Date added - Job title - Employer - Link to job advert - Status - Notes.
In the date added section you include the date the information was added to the spreadsheet.
In the job title section, you include the information on the Job title of the role of the position.
In the employer section put the name of the employer, e.g. Joe Blogs MP or The Public Affairs Superstore.
In the link, column add the web address for the job you are applying for so you can easily visit it again.
In the status, the section includes either Awaiting application, Applied, Rejected, Interviewed. This will help you with the tracking and measurement of your job-hunting.
In the notes, this is a place to put any other information that you need to deal with, or might find useful.
In the task tab, you will not need much, just three columns.
The first column is the task, e.g. do research for Joanna Bloggs MP interview.
The section column includes notes, e.g. review the job description.
The third column adds the header status, and include Outstanding, Finished, In-progress.
Once you have done this, you can now start populating it with all the brilliant jobs you want to apply for.
However, just one more hint before we move on. Make sure on the top line that you add filters as it will help you to see the wood for the trees and only access what is needed, when you need it.
When looking for a job in politics, there are a variety of websites that are really useful, god-tier useful even, a few others that are helpful and a range of others that can be helpful but not very useful.
We will explore the best places to find political jobs in a subsequent chapter. Now back to my spreadsheets.taps on keyboard tap tap
This is a full chapter extract from my book Political Careers, which is available to read and buy here.
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