Senior Management
The C-Suite is focused on setting strategic direction, along with establishing waypoints and measuring success. Your search will be more effective if you have clear employment goals, a road map to get you there and are consistently evaluating progress.

Operations
This is the actual job search and applying for positions, along with collecting resources or documentation required for applications. Look for ways that you can increase productivity through email alerts, RSS feeds and other tools so you can spend more time on the things that generate a better return on investment.

Marketing
Covers everything from promotional materials (resumes & cover letters), interactive campaigns (social media) to events (networking). You’ve got to raise your brand awareness to be successful in a crowded labour market and its very crowded these days.

Sales
Needed for closing deals at networking events to land informational and employment interviews. In interviews, you’ll want to identify your prospect’s concerns and counter them effectively. Remember to focus on benefits (what’s in it for the employer) and not the features (no company thinks simply adding more MBAs will grow the bottom line). You’ll also need to embrace your inner-salesperson to help pick up that phone, deal with rejection and be diligent with follow up.

R&D
Skills a little out of date? Workshops, short-term courses, (re)certifications and self-directed learnings can add value to your product, which is you. In some cases — declining industries or personal desire — a more radical investment may be required, such as another diploma or degree.

Finance
Evaluating your financial position is important, as  you want to make informed decisions about your options. Do you have enough savings to look for a job you want or are bills piling up and you need to find a survival job immediately? Reviewing your expenses, can you reduce your burn rate to give yourself more options? If you need to take some training or look at buying new tools, software or other items for a new job, do you have the savings necessary or have ideas to access funding through credit or perhaps training grants?

Human Resources
Searching for work, especially in a recessed economy, can get discouraging at times, so make sure you’re keeping up morale.  Small rewards for hitting milestones, relationship building with your personal network and talking with a career coach or mentor can be helpful in developing a career plan. It’s also important to maintain a strong (looking for) work/life balance with friends and family, as relationships can become strained or ignored due to financial hardships or negative feelings around loss of employment.

I currently have two mentors that pull double duty, as I knew them personally before I worked for them professionally. The relationship that developed was quite organic and moved through several phases before it’s current state. Recently though, I gained a new mentor through the Business Mentoring for the Arts program and have attempted to build the relationship in a much more structured and self-aware manner.

Having someone that wants to help with your development but isn’t already personally invested is a great opportunity. Working with my mentor, I’ve been a lot more effective at carrying out my career exploration as I have someone to be accountable to for the tasks I set for myself. She’s also been helpful in managing my own expectations, especially vital when you have so many competing priorities for attention and an overwhelming desire to deliver outstanding work in all areas.

My current month’s mentorship goal is to identify potential candidates for informational interviews for four self-selected careers: policy analyst, public relations, local government, and career development. Through taking with people doing things that interest me, I’ll hopefully get a better idea where I’m going to be the most successful and happy. Coming out of our last session, we identified the need to be challenged and have an opportunity to grow as being the most important aspects of a job for me, so I’ll have to tailor my questions around answering that.

Once I’ve made contact and set up interviews, I’m going to be keeping some of Penelope Trunk advice at hand. I’ve really benefited from her article, “How I Got My Current Favorite Mentor“, which has already helped give me some ideas about the role of a mentee and will I think add another component to the informational interviews — the chance to interview for new potential mentors.

All this studying of mentorship roles should really come in handy when I become a mentor for the next BMA group. Delivering a workshop on my area of expertise, I think it’s clear I’ll be able to help out a mentee with making the transition from school life to career life. And if I need to, I can always ask a mentor for advice.

Having worked in employment services for a number of years, I see a lot of clients that really dislike the job search process. They simply throw a few broad skills and recent employment history on a resume and think that’s going to cut it.  A year ago when just being a healthy body and having a willingness to show up was enough to get you a job, that might have been fine. But in today’s climate it shows up for what it is — you’re hoping the employer will do your job search for you.

If you’re looking for work in kind of related fields, say automotive repair and general handyman, as well as anything that will pay the bills, then you should have three resumes.  While a mechanical aptitude may be a skill that you list on all three, knowing how to fix a transmission is probably not important to an employer who’s looking for someone to do small plumbing repair jobs in an apartment complex. Knowing how to do maintenance on various landscaping equipment probably doesn’t help the employer desperate for a new brake technician.

What’s worse are those resumes that make things really general, like listing a skill as a vague “Automotive Repair”. The thinking behind this is “I can do it all and if I put something specific, it might limit me.” But that’s not what this tells employers, it actually says, “I’m not sure how I can help you but I need a job.” Employers aren’t looking to give you a job, even if they’ve posted a job ad. They’re looking for someone to help solve their problem, whether this is to sell more dental equipment to dentists, quickly ring through customers at the supermarket or handle the overflow of repairs coming in as customers decide their old jalopy can last another year. You need to be telling employers how you can solve those problems and do it well.

Finally, some job seekers say, “I don’t want to write three resumes. I don’t like computers and it takes me forever to do just one. Besides, when I get an interview than I can tell them all that stuff.” But, of course, getting that interview becomes less likely if when looking at a resume an employer doesn’t know how you’ll best help them.

And not wanting to spend the admittedly hours it takes to write a good resume means, “My time is more important than yours and you should just give me a job.” The average employee costs about $150,000 to hire, once you count wages, training, overhead and lost productivity.

That bare bones resume that you feel is “good enough” has got to compete against a whole lot more candidates in this economic climate. I’m not saying you won’t get hired with it and there’s no guarantee that an excellent resume will land you the position. But if you’ve sent out a ton of resumes and you’re not getting the response you want, try taking a look at the message you’re sending.