It is easy to be distressed when the papers are full of news about plant closings, foreclosures, and stock market losses. The economy in 2009 is not what it was two or three years ago. The housing crisis, tight credit, and uncertainty about the direction that the politicians in Washington will take all have made many small business owners reluctant to expand and hire.
Nearly every American knows someone out of work or looking for work.
CNN reported this morning on one California woman’s clever approach to getting her husband hired. She purchased the domain (http://www.myhusbandneedsajob.com) and posted his resume and their story. The CNN publicity will likely get her husband, Mike Stearns, a job offer or two.
I hope so and I applaud her for doing something different. Getting career counseling, having a resume professionally created, and mailing it out in response to adds are great first steps in this economy. But they won’t be enough to get hired for the vast majority of people who do them.
This traditional job searching technique only puts the resume in a stack of many others to be considered. Networking in person and online, developing relationships and trust are important keys to tapping the hidden job market — the market of decision makers that know they have a need but have not invited the world to apply.
Where do you think the chances are better to get hired? When you are proactively soliciting a business owner who you have a good reason to know has a need for those with your skill set? Or when you are responding to an advertisement and adding your resume to a pile that will be culled by an HR person and only a few resumes will reach the decision maker.
Mrs. Stearns’ approach may have been unorthodox, but her success selling CNN on publicizing her job search method certainly will get Mr. Stearns’ resume a look see by lots of people. I hope one of them will hire him and I applaud her initiative and cleverness.
Her program to find her husband a job reminds me that the first step to doing something better is to do it differently.
One of my favorite business books, The Max Strategy, is a parable that teaches the same lesson.
Small business owners facing this economy will need to do things differently if they are to thrive in an economy where customers are difficult to find.
Fort Worth entrepreneur Ron Sturgeon is offering small business owners an opportunity to tap the accumulated knowledge of peers in their industry to solve their most difficult challenges. These peer benchmarking review groups will be industry specific and will include only one members from a geographic area.
“Many entrepreneurs belong to CEO round tables and other peer mentoring groups and those are all excellent,” says Sturgeon. “However, they are rarely composed of members of the same industry and so much of what is learned does not apply to the business that the attendee is running,” said Sturgeon.
Sturgeon attributes much of his success in the auto salvage industry to membership in an industry specific peer benchmarking review group. “Over the ten years our group of salvage yard owners met no one dropped out,” said Sturgeon. They stayed because of the benefit they received from the ideas exchanged among owners of similar businesses facing similar issues.
If you are ready to do something different as an owner of a small business, you may wish to join a peer benchmarking review group. Ron Sturgeon will be facilitating such groups for a number of types of small businesses in the coming months.
In the meantime, bravo Mrs. Stearns and good luck Mike!
This article written by freelance SEO web writer Eric Anderson. Eric’s recent content writing projects have included content for a vintage designer jewelry website and a Tampa, FL mortgage broker website.
