This is “Troubleshooting Your Search: Three Areas Your Job Search Can Break Down”, section 9.5 from the book Job Searching in Six Steps (v. 1.0). For details on it (including licensing), click here.

For more information on the source of this book, or why it is available for free, please see the project's home page. You can browse or download additional books there. To download a .zip file containing this book to use offline, simply click here.

Has this book helped you? Consider passing it on:
Creative Commons supports free culture from music to education. Their licenses helped make this book available to you.
DonorsChoose.org helps people like you help teachers fund their classroom projects, from art supplies to books to calculators.

9.5 Troubleshooting Your Search: Three Areas Your Job Search Can Break Down

Learning Objectives

  1. Learn the importance of troubleshooting in your job search.
  2. Learn the three stages of the hiring process where your job search can get stuck.
  3. Become aware of how you can measure your own job search to identify your problem areas.

If you’ve made it this far, you have accomplished a lot toward your job search. You have a sense of what you want in your job targets, you are positioning yourself well with your marketing, you are arming yourself with research to make you a knowledgeable candidate, and you are putting yourself out there by networking and interviewing. You are doing a lot, but are you being effective? Troubleshooting is about looking at your search results to date and figuring out where your job search needs work and how to fix it.

At the networking and interviewing stage, you are getting market feedback. Even if you are getting no response from your networking inquiries, no response is still feedback (it’s negative feedback because what you are doing is not eliciting a response). There are many reasons behind the feedback you may be getting. You need to use the feedback you are getting (or lack of feedback) to troubleshoot your search. There are three stages of the hiring process where your job search can get stuck:

  1. The candidate identification stage
  2. The general interview stage
  3. The closing stage

In the most general description of the hiring process, a candidate is identified, interviewed, and hired. A job search can break down at any one of these three stages. From the job seeker’s perspective, you must be identified as a candidate—that is, you must be invited to an interview. You must be interviewed and get called back for more interviews or for a hiring decision. You must be on the positive end of a hiring decision. So, the three categories of potential job search problems are (1) you are not getting enough interviews, (2) you are not moving forward in the interview process; or (3) you are not getting offers.

The Identification Stage Problem: You Are Not Getting Enough Interviews

If you have been submitting résumés or asking people for exploratory interviews for more than thirty days, look back and see how many people have asked you to meet with them. You want to meet with several people per week (five to ten if you are working on your search full time or one to four if you are working on your search part time). Are you not getting invited to meetings or interviews?

The Interview Stage Problem: You Are Not Moving Forward in the Process

If you have been getting meetings or interviews, congratulations! Clearly, your marketing is paying off. Now, your focus should be getting more meetings and interviews:

  • More networking meetings that can lead to job interviews
  • More first-round job interviews with additional companies
  • More second-, third-, and fourth-round interviews with your existing targets

Look over your latest thirty days and note the types of meetings you’ve been getting and the steps that follow. Are you getting lots of first-round interviews, but are not getting asked to return for more interviews? Are you getting referrals from your introductory networking meetings to actual jobs or additional possible networking leads?

The Hiring Stage Problem: You Are Not Getting Offers

If you have been getting interviews and getting called back, then clearly you are doing something right because prospective employers are interested. But if there have already been several companies where you have been the bridesmaid but never the bride, then there could be a problem during the later stages of interviewing that is hindering your ability to close. Hiring is subjective, so if you lose one or two offers, that is to be expected and may be through no fault of your own. But three or more lost offers, especially if you went far along the process for all of them, could signal a problem.

Key Takeaways

  • The hiring process includes candidate identification, interviewing, and hiring. At any of these stages, there can be problems for the job seeker.
  • You should measure the results of your networking and interviewing on a regular basis to see how you are doing at the identification, interviewing, and hiring stages.

Exercises

  1. At what stage are you stuck in the job search process? If you haven’t started your job search yet, put reminders on your calendar during the time you intend to do your job search to troubleshoot according to the three stages.
  2. As you have been reviewing your data capture so far, what data, if any, is missing that you should add to your search going forward?