Carol is really excited about 2010.  She has been SMART in the past month in preparing to find a new job and she knows that after months of frustration she's closer than ever to getting hired.

Early in December, Carol read about setting goals for herself and realized she wasn't really helping herself as she was blindly sending out resumes with no real process behind it.  If she was to find a new job she had to go about it better and the results have paid off with interviews. 

What makes Carol feel even better isn't that she has interviews, but she's not going to be upset if she doesn't get the interview as she now understands the numbers of the job search and if she follows her formula she can't not be successful.

What did Carol do differently in December?  She followed a SMART approach to job searching:

1.  First, she got SPECIFIC about what she wanted.  Initially she wrote her resume with a header that said "I am a confident, leadership oriented Project Manager with a history of completing jobs on time and on budget".    After speaking to a Recruiter that writes a specific blog she realized that her objective was not going to help her.  She needed to change it so she focused on what she knows and really enjoys best so she changed her objective to "Experienced eMarketing Project Manager with over 18 web sites deployed". 

Carol realized that she enjoys the creation of websites and loves the internet based projects over internal projects.  Carol set her sights on companies that had web based initiatives.

2.  Second, she learned she had to be MEASURABLE in her search.   She learned she was now in sales and that in sales there is formula for success and activity breeds success.  She arrived at  a formula for # of responses versus number of resumes sent and a # of interviews based on responses and so on to offer.   This really helped her emotionally as she couldn't understand why she was getting responses.

Carol set numbers in her formula that translated to she would get a 5% response to resumes sent out.  She learned that marketing uses a 2-4% rule, but now that she was SPECIFIC her numbers would be better.   She also set a 25% number that for every response, 25% of those could lead to an interview. She used the same 25% (1 out of 4) to get an offer from an interview.  So now she could measure for every 100 resumes sent out, she would get 5 responses.  Out of that 5 she would get 1 or 2 interviews.  Given that wasn't enough to get an offer she knew she had to send out at least 200 resumes. 

3.  Third, Carol set ACHIEVABLE or REALISTIC daily goals for herself.  She knew to send out that many resumes  tailored to her target market and be able to follow up with each of those, she would need help.  She enlisted friends to research 500 companies that fit her SPECIFIC skillset and they volunteered to help her send out 25 daily resumes so in the course of 2 weeks she would have over 200 resumes sent out and over 20 days they are all sent out.

4.  A key part of her enjoyment is that her search is truly RELEVANT to her passion about web creation and internet projects.  Work won't be drudgery but exciting.  She'll have real passion with her work where before she just wanted a job.

5.  Finally, she was able to wrap TIMEFRAMES to her search.  Since she knew her numbers, had an idea of the response rate (and that she knew would be better defined as the month went on), she knew it would be up to 3 months before she was in her new seat.  Given that knowledge, she was less afraid of the unknown so she planned financially on it taking twice that amount of time in case she was off on her numbers.

Carol has more peace of mind.  She has gotten 3 job opportunities over the course of December and she will continue to stick to her numbers until she accepts an offer.  She is less afraid and extremely excited about her career as she will now do what she is most passionate about.

Carol will tell everyone now that if people are SMART  (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely) about any goal, they can be much more excited. 

The best thing… Carol wanted to lose 10 pounds and she realized that if she was SMART about her weight loss there was no doubt by the time she started her new job she would be 10 pounds lighter.

William G Morgan, the Job Swami, is the Regional Manager and is an Executive IT & Sales Recruiter with Segula Technologies, Inc.   He can be reached at (610)579-3216 if you are looking for great people or are looking for next employment