He or she who gets hired is not necessarily the one who can do that job best; but, the one who knows the most about how to get hired.

-Richard Lathrop, Who’s Hiring Who?

Know then thyself,

Do not the Market scan

Until you’ve surveyed all You are,

Then you will have your plan.

-Alexander Pope (as paraphrased by Richard Nelson Bolles in the incredible What Color is Your Parachute?)

3 reasons the list below is not helpful.

Compared to actually reading the book.

1. It doesn’t focus on the really, really, really valuable part of What Color is Your Parachute? – The Flower Exercise. Know thyself, someone said. But how? Believe it or not, Richard Nelson Bolles explains, in a way that is completely accessible and not at all condescending, how we can know ourselves better. Nearly half of the book consists of simple exercises or questions to ask oneself.  My experience with the book allowed me to realize, or at the very least define, my skills, values, and preferences. Even further, it helped me communicate them to others.
2. It isn’t nearly as gentle and encouraging as What Color is Your Parachute? I really, really love Mr. Bolles. If you buy his book, you will too.
3. It is too gentle and encouraging. You won’t find a job by reading 25 tips. It might help, but it also might prolong bad habits and prevent you from doing the life-changing work of introspection and goal-setting. Bolles advises you to treat job-hunting as a full-time job. Me, I give you a list.

The List

1. There are at least a million job-openings each month, even in times like these. Bolles bases this calculation on statistics from a 2004 speech by Ben Bernanke that talks about the “churn” of the labor market. Everyday, Bolles reminds us, people get promoted, people retire, people quit, people move, people get injured or sick, people die, and people get fired or laid off – creating vacancies for you to fill.
2. Employer’s look for job-hunters in the opposite way that job-hunters look for employees. At the top of employer’s preferences: hiring from within. At the bottom: using a resume. Obviously, you can’t do anything about the fact that you are not yet within.  But you can do everything you can to network and become known to the people who are looking to fill a position, instead of thinking that your resume is out there performing some kind of job-getting function. And you can do premliminary work to ensure that you are within the employer’s head when she decides to start hiring.
3. The First Thing You Should Do When You Find Yourself Unemployed. Sleep. Exercise. Drink plenty of water. No joke. And get unemployment. (I would also add, enjoy yourself. Discover yourself. My four months of unemployment, ironically, were some of the most productive months of my life.)
4. 7 Most Important Truths to Remember While You’re Unemployed.
   1. Job- hunting is an activity that repeats itself over and over again in most people’s lives.
   2. Job- hunting is an art, not a science.
   3. Job- hunting is always mysterious.
   4. There is no always wrong way to hunt for a job.
   5. There is no always right way to hunt for a job.
   6. Mastering the job hunt is a lot of hard work and takes some hard thinking. (Bolles also reminds us that we do the job hunt the same way we do Life. Your slacker methods might not work this time.)
   7. Job- hunting always takes some luck.
5. Keep hope alive. If what you’re doing isn’t working, change your tactics. Try a new strategy.
6. Everybody is handicapped. We all have a finite number of skills. We all lack something. The trick is to focus on the skills you do have.
7. Shyness can be overcome by informational interviews. Informational interviews are the bee’s knees. There’s nothing at stake, and they usually create valuable connections.
8. The purpose of a resume is to get an interview. The first of many reasons why you shouldn’t rely on your resume.
9. Employers use resumes primarily to eliminate candidates. It takes an HR person 8-30 seconds to scan a resume and one more second to toss it in the round file.
10. A resume is more a business card than a biography.
11. A resume presents itself to the fingers before the eyes.
12. E-mail resumes kinda suck. If you must e-mail your resume, accompany it with a hard copy, on nice paper.
13. 3 Reasons not to depend on resumes:
    1. They are depressing. If you believe in your resume then you’ll believe that those who reject it are rejecting you.
    2. Resumes make you feel like you’re doing something. Even if employers like resumes, yours is just one molecule in a vast ocean of paper.
    3. They might cause you to give up early. If you send out or post 1,000 resumes without a nibble, you may falsely conclude there are no jobs out there. There are (see #1).
14. A resume is something you should never send ahead of you, but always leave behind you. Usually.
15. Different resumes appeal to different employees. If someone claims to have the one-size-fits-all solution, do not believe them.
16. Use the EASY method of talking about your qualifications. Connect your….
    • Experience to your…
    • Achievements, which illustrate your
    • Skills, which
    • You link to the relevant aspects of the job you’re going after.
17. USE YOUR CONTACTS! This means:
    • Reach out everyone you know, anyone you met at a party in the past two years, every gas station attendant, every co-worker from the last five jobs…you get the picture: EVERYONE!
    • Make it your mission to find out who, at the company you want to work for, has the power to hire you. Bolles has a lot of tips for how to approach your contacts, which I won’t enumerate here.
    • Once you find someone who know the person with the power to hire, ask the following questions:
      1. Do you know the person who has the power to hire me at Company X?
      2. What can you tell me about them?
      3. Given the type of job I am looking for, do you think it would be worth going to see them?
      4. Do you have their contact info?
      5. May I tell them that it was you who recommended that I talk with them?
      6. Would you be willing to call ahead, to set up an appointment for me, and tell them who I am?
18. Top 10 biggest mistakes made in job interviews.
    1. Going after only large organizations
    2. Hunting all by yourself for places to visit, using ads and resumes.
    3. Doing no homework on an organization before going there.
    4. Allowing the Personnel or Human Resources Department to interview you. Bolles reminds us: their primary purpose is to screen you OUT.
    5. Setting no time limit when you make the appointment.
    6. Letting your resume be used as the agenda for the interview.
    7. Talking too much about yourself and how the job will benefit you.
    8. Talking for over two minutes at a time.
    9. Approaching them as if you were a “job beggar.”
    10. Not sending a thank you note as soon as you get home.
19. 10 Commandments for job interviews.
    1. Go after small organizations.
    2. Hunt for interviews using the aid of friends and acquaintances.
    3. Do thorough homework on an organization before applying
    4. Identify who has the position to hire you.
    5. Ask for twenty minutes of their time. Take twenty minutes of their time, no more, no less.
    6. Go to the interview with your own agenda – questions, curiosities, and whether or not this job fits you.
    7. Talk about yourself only if what you say offers them something.
    8. Answer each question in less than two minutes (and more than 20 seconds).
    9. Approach them as if you are a resource, able to produce better work than any predecessor.
    10. Always write a thank you note and mail it that day or the next morning.
20. 6 questions you should always ask at the end of an interview.
    1. Given my skills and experience, is there work here that you would consider me for?
    2. Can you offer me this job?
    3. Do you want me to come back for another interview, perhaps with some of the other decision-makers here?
    4. When may I expect to hear from you?”
    5. Might I ask when would be the latest I can expect to hear from you?
    6. May I contact you after that date if I don’t hear from you?
21. 7 secrets of salary negotiation. For me, the biggest “secret” was simply that I should negotiate. I’ve had only about a dozen jobs, and I had never negotiated my salary. As for the seven secrets, they are secret. Buy the book.
22. 7 rules for choosing or changing careers
    1. Talk to people who are already doing the work. Choose anything, but talk to people before jumping in.
    2. Preserve both constancy and change. Don’t change everything at once. If you have a field and a job title, say Advertising and Executive Assistant, and what you really want to be is a Writer for a Newspaper, you might consider becoming a Writer in Advertising, or an Executive Assistant at a Newspaper, before making the full leap.
    3. Start with yourself. Not “what’s hot” in the job market.
    4. Choose a career that uses your favorite skills, in your favorite subjects, in fields that fascinate you, and puts you in your preferred environments and working conditions, working towards your preferred goals or values. I had no idea what my preferences, fascinations, or favorites were before using the exercises in Parachute, so if that last sentence means nothing to you, buy the book!
    5. The more time you give it, the better your choice will be.
    6. You don’t have to get it right the first time.
    7. The more fun you are having, the more likely you are doing it right.
23. Don’t get a degree to get a job. Degrees don’t guarantee jobs. They cost a lot of money, and time. Get a degree if you want to learn about that field and you can afford it, not for job security.
24. Job-hunters don’t fail to find their dream job because they lack information about the job-market, but because they lack information about themselves. I worked for 3 or 4 hours a day, for a week, doing the exercises that collectively form what Bolles calls the flower diagram. In the end, I not only knew more about myself, but I was able to articulate what I knew and look at it in this really cool diagram.
25. If you read What Color is Your Parachute? and follow its advice, you will find a job. I did.

These days a lot of people are asking themselves, “How do I find a job?”

Simple:
Get a copy of What Color is Your Parachute?.
Buy it. Take it out from your library.

Richard Nelson Bolles has been writing and rewriting this perennially best -selling career and job hunting guide since 1970.

Last August, after an expected promotion became an unexpected (and indefinite) vacation, I decided to accept this sudden influx of free time (and unemployment checks) and use it to seek out my dream job.

What Color is Your Parachute?, even the 1990′s version at my local library, changed my life. And I haven’t even read the whole thing.

Giving Thanks

One of the things that really appealed to me about Parachute was the caring and compassionate tone. Bolles ends the preface to the 2009 edition with this sentence:

I am a deeply grateful man.

This is profound to me because I’ve found that gratitude is an emotion of the wise. We get pleasure from anything we receive, but gratification describes a deeper feeling that can only come when we have the wisdom to recognize the value of the gift. You can’t get this wisdom without giving. Dr. Martin E. P. Seligman says it well:

The exercise of kindness is a gratification, in contrast to a pleasure. As a gratification it calls on your strengths to rise to an occasion and meet a challenge. Kindness is not accompanied by a separable stream of positive emotion like joy; rather, it consists in total engagement and in loss of self-consciousness. Time-stops.

- from Authentic Happiness, pg. 9

Once you know that giving is gratifying, the universe is yours.

It may seem that I am going off on a tangent here, but the idea of service as a path to well-being is central to Bolles’s book and talks about success in a different tone than a self-help book like, say, The 4-hour Workweek, by Timothy Ferriss.

Digression: Freedom vs Satisfaction – What color is your 4 hour workweek?

There was something bothering me about Ferriss and it wasn’t the extra “S” in his name. His book got me excited and encouraged me to move out of my comfort zone. I wrote about one of Ferriss’s great ideas a few weeks ago and wrote this post bemoaning the fact that someone else wrote about Ferriss in a way that was funnier and more engaging than I would have. So, it is obvious that I admire the ideas I’ve found in The 4-hour Workweek.

But Ferriss’s book, and the approach to happiness it proscribes, lacks something that completely imbues Parachute…gratitude.

Where The 4-hour Workweek offers ways to manipulate the System so that it serves you, What Color is Your Parachute? asks precise questions to help you determine how you can happily be of service within the System. Ferriss encourages my sense of entitlement. He talks less about the spiritual satisfaction you can get out of being of service in a good job, and more about the spiritual malaise that you can escape by getting out of your comfort zone and the grip of employers.

In order to live well, I think it is important to be able to break free from the things that are holding you back, but if that is not accompanied by acts of kindness, the feeling that you are of service to a greater good, then all the freedom in the world will not bring you the happiness that feeling purposeful can.

Before reading What Color is Your Parachute? I did not think I could find happiness in the work-a-day world. Now I know better. There are thousands of places where I could happily serve.

My Top 7  Gleanings from What Color is Your Parachute?

1. Informational interviews – Employers hire people they know first. Be known.
2. Thank you cards – Especially if you are authentically thankful, a thank you note will make you stick in an employers head. If your card is attractive and sits on their desk for a week, then it is likely that they never forget you. When an opening comes up, your more likely to get a call.
3. Know thyself – As a pretty introspective guy, I was shocked that a simple exercise in a book could clarify my skills, values, and desires to a degree that 32 years of thinking hadn’t.  In less than a long weekend, I had created a “flower diagram” that reveals a ton of information about who I am and where I will be happy.
4. There are always jobs – Even with unemployment rates higher than a horse’s eye, the “constant churning of human activity” creates millions of job-openings a month. You may have to settle for a temporary job for now, but if you continue to approach organizations that interest you, your butt will be poised above the seat in the giant game of musical chairs known as the job market.
5. Doing a reflective, “life-changing” job hunt has an 86% success rate, while looking for employers’ job-postings on the Internet has a 4-10% success rate. – Sending resumes out at random works 7% of the time. Answering local want ads – 5-24%. In other words, the methods that seem most obvious are often the least effective.
6. Show up in person – This goes along with #1 and #5. If you have more than a virtual presence in your employer’s field of perception, you are more likely to be remembered.
7. Prepare for interviews - Parachute offers tons of tips for maximizing your chances of having a successful interview. Just a few:
   • The 50-50 Rule – Half the time, you should be listening. This one is a tough one for me because I tend to ramble
   • Give 20-second to 2-minute replies
   • There are only five questions that matter - You don’t need to memorize a list of dozens of possible questions because you can answer them all by knowing the answers to these five questions: Why are you here? What can you do for us? What kind of person are you? What distinguishes you from nineteen other people who can do the same task as you? Can I afford you?
   • Research – Not just the mission statement of the company and the job description, but the personality of the person who makes the hiring decisions.

This list barely scratches the surface.

What Color is Your Parachute? is truly a manual for life.