The job search silver bullet

There is a bias towards simplicity in our job search. We want to find that job using the one tool that is better than all others — the silver bullet. The one that will nail our new job, the tool where one size fits all to help us in our career.

Consequently, pundits will compare Monster versus Aliens (er, Career Builder…), job boards to Twitter, Facebook to Monster and on and on and on all searching for the silver bullet of what’s best. Others analyze sites that help you find and track your job like UpMo and, my favorite, Jibber Jobber. People write about being on LinkedIn and Facebook and how it can help you in your job search. There are social networks and business networks that will tell you the best way to find a job.

There are silver bullets out there everywhere.

After a while, it all ends up as noise. There is so much information, we get overloaded and we stop doing anything because of the abundance of choices. Every tool and job search approach is a silver bullet. And every tool and job search approach is not.

How do we know the best tools for our job search?

If you wanted to research all of the tools and come up with one tool that fits all, you will fail. The truth of the matter is that diverse search tools must be used to find your new job. Just as there are no longer three television networks, but hundreds, one can’t just look at the newspaper want ads and find your new job. The world has changed.

What has not changed is our needs for what a job offers. What is more stable is our job skills and the reasons we like doing the work we have chosen to do.

So to find the right tools for our job search, the very first step is knowing what it is we want to do, why we want to do it, and the type of group we like working with to bring out our best work.

Once we know ourselves, no easy matter, it is easier to find the right tools for the job search. The big job boards become less relevant to our job search than smaller ones that focus, say, on our green job wishes. The vast array of recruiters now narrows in focus to the ones that recruit in our work space that is best for us.

Now we can ask our business network for help in finding us our best work because we can clearly answer the “what type of work are you looking for?” question. Now we can use tools like Jibber Jobber to target the companies that best fit the corporate culture that works best for us.

So the silver bullet of job search is this: we need to know our job skills, why we like the work, and the best corporate culture fit. Only then can we find job search tools that support the way we work best.