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So let’s take a break from my attempts to blog regularly during the Dumb Apocalypse of the coronavirus, and get back to my Why I wrote It’s.
Let’s talk Quest for Employment, a book I’m actually kinda proud of and have done a second edition of.
The idea of this book came about from looking at job search advice. A lot of job search advice was 101-type stuff about resumes, etc. In fact, a lot of the advice felt cut and pasted over and over again, and there wasn’t a lot of “next step stuff.”
At the same time, not everyone was interested in manic personal branding and other advice that was basically “career all the time no life” type stuff.
Finally, I also had been through a lot of annoying job searches – layoffs, contracts ending, etc. I had gotten good at the job search purely from a need to survive, at times from my unwise choice to try and keep up a contracting and freelance life. I had a lot of lessons that weren’t 101, but also weren’t about dedicating your life to your career.
These were advanced job search lessons that were about leveraging the system to do better and I had used them.
For instance, I had learned that when you need a job or are close to the end of a contract, you needed a shameless blitz of resumes, and I had a system for it. This was like an investment, where you spammed the heck out of any relevant, and reaped benefits days, weeks, or months later.
Or another example was to empathize with recruiters. After all, you talked to them once, but they talked to a hundred of you. Empathy made you memorable, helped you understand the market, and was the right thing to do.
So I pretty much wrote up all my tips after a job search and made a book. Then I rewrote it. Strike while the iron is hot, but form it a bit better with greater knowledge.
Sometimes, I think it bears a third rewrite but I’m not sure what’s relevant these days, irrelevant, etc. Maybe I’ll review it with a co-author to bring new insights.
But it all came out of me wanting to do better, and having plenty of hard-earned lessons.
Steven Savage