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THE UNWRITTEN RULES OF THE HIGHLY EFFECTIVE JOB SEARCH

The Proven Program Used by the World's Leading Career Services Company

The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Excerpt

Orville, Jessie, Ben, and the Pierson Method

My name is Orville Pierson. People who hear my name before they meet me often imagine that I'll turn out to be smart. Or nerdy, like that Orville who wears a bow tie and horn-rimmed glasses while he sells popcorn. Some people think of Orville and Wilbur Wright, but so far, no one has expected me to be a pilot.

Actually, I'm not a popcorn man or a pilot. I'm an expert in careers and job hunting. I've spent most of my adult life coaching people on finding jobs and teaching professional career consultants how to do the same.

For the last 14 years I have been the Senior Vice President and Corporate Director of Program Design and Service Delivery for the leading global career services company. The title is so long that it barely fits on my business card, but it's a great job and I love it.

Some people see the title and think I'm a business executive, but I've never seen myself that way. I've always seen myself more as a teacher. And I guess you could say that I'm a guide. I guide people through the job search jungle to better jobs and better careers.

When I first started in this field in the 1970s, I began by working with individuals one at a time to coach and counsel them on their careers and how to find good new jobs. I worked with factory workers, business executives, and everyone in between. Most of my clients were unemployed, so it was important to them to get back to work as quickly as possible. By doing this, I learned a lot about what people need to do—and not do—to find jobs more quickly.

After I'd worked individually with hundreds of people for many years, I started teaching classes on how to find a job. I saw thousands of people in groups of 15 or 20. Again, I did this for many years.

HELPING 100,000 PEOPLE A YEAR FIND NEW JOBS

Now I work for Lee Hecht Harrison (LHH), which has over 200 locations around the world where people come for help with their careers. We have hundreds of career consultants helping up to 100,000 people a year find new jobs. My job is to create career books, training programs, and coaching services for our unemployed clients and to teach our career consultants, who are already very good, how to be even better at what they do.

Lee Hecht Harrison works mostly with people caught in those big downsizings you read about in the newspaper. Most of the country's largest and best employers provide career services for people they lay off. The unemployed people do not pay for the services. Their former employers pay the bill. Which is a good thing, since services can cost $5,000 to $10,000 per person, and even more for red carpet programs for executives.

I wasn't always a job search expert. When I was in kindergarten, I wanted to be a cowboy or a firefighter, not a career consultant. Later, I wanted to be a doctor. I actually did become a sculptor, a New York City cab driver, a clerk in a health food store, a carpenter, a construction site manager, an attendant in a mental hospital, and a group therapy leader—among other things.

Then one day I found myself newly married to a woman I loved dearly (and still do). She was nine months pregnant with the child we had both prayed for, and I was unemployed. We had a house, but not enough money to make the next mortgage payment. That's when I found my first job as a career consultant, which was interesting because I had never done career work before.

But some of my past experience was helpful and—much to my surprise—the fact that I had worked in a lot of different jobs suddenly became a plus. For someone with no prior experience in the job, I did very well at the start. In two or three years, I was well established in my new profession.

I liked career and job search assistance work from the very beginning and haven't gotten tired of it in 30 years. I've always felt that it was more like a calling than just a job. I love seeing unemployed people getting reemployed and seeing employed people make moves that make them happier in their work. Job search assistance is my hobby as well as my job. I sometimes volunteer to teach job hunting classes. And, of course, since people know what I do, they often ask me to help them find jobs.

WHAT I TELL MY FRIENDS AND RELATIVES ABOUT FINDING JOBS

When I'm volunteering to help people, I usually can't spend the time with them that Lee Hecht Harrison spends with a $10,000 client. So over the years, I've boiled everything I know down to a shorter version—including only the essentials, the things that people most need to know and most need to do (and not do) to find a good job. And I made a system out of it, a method. That's what I've put in the book you are holding: the condensed version, what I tell my friends and relatives, the Pierson Method.

In this book, I'll guide you all the way through your job search. I'll teach you to use the Pierson Method to be your own career consultant. I'll tell you how it all works, so you can write or improve your own resumé and answer many of your own questions. You may still need to use a book on resumé writing or salary negotiations, and if you do, come to my Web site, highlyeffectivejobsearch.com, and I'll suggest some. You won't get everything you would from having your own professional career consultant. But you won't get a bill for $10,000 either.

In the following chapters, I have explained the entire Pierson Method for you: what you need to do to find a great new job, and how you will know if you are on the right track. I expect you to learn some things from reading this book. But I also expect that you already know some of it and won't be surprised by what you read. After all, like most proven methods, this one includes a lot of good old common sense.

When they see what the Pierson Method is, some people are very relieved that they finally have a system to use in job hunting. If you like a more systematic approach than most job search books provide, you'll like the Pierson Method.

On the other hand, some people feel a little overwhelmed by such a complete system. If you're one of those people, don't worry. You don't have to do everything in this book to get a great new job. Many people use only parts of the Pierson Method and still succeed very nicely. So add some pieces of the method to whatever you're already doing. Or plan on doing 51 percent of the Pierson Method. Always remember: you only need one good job offer to succeed in search.

Just one.

All of the Important Points Are in a Large Font, Like This

To save you time and effort, I put the main points in this book in a large font. If you know exactly what I'm talking about in that big headline, you can probably skip the paragraphs after it and move on to the next big headline. I also summarized the entire Pierson Method in Chapter 12, so you can easily review it if you want to.

Since I know quite a lot about finding jobs, you might think that I have always found them easily. The truth is, like many people, I don't enjoy looking for a new job. Sometimes I've moved easily from one job to the next. Other times, like when I was first married, it was a struggle to find something.

I really didn't know what to do at all then. There was no Internet. With a baby on the way, I needed a better, career-track job. Most of the better jobs in the paper asked for experience I didn't have. I asked a friend of mine for advice. He knew an executive recruiter. After staring at the telephone for an hour or so, I called the recruiter, who actually returned my phone call!

I thought I had it all solved, u
(Continues...)

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Excerpted from THE UNWRITTEN RULES OF THE HIGHLY EFFECTIVE JOB SEARCH by Orville Pierson. Copyright © 2006 by McGraw-Hill, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc..
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