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30-06-03, 03:43
Use Intelligence in Your Job Hunt, Counselor Says
Sun June 29, 2003 05:42 PM ET
By David Gregorio
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Job hunters with fingers sore from phoning contacts and heartburn from fruitless networking breakfasts are often relieved when career counselor Robert Pannone suggests a more relaxing strategy for finding work.

His advice: Spend some time in the local library.

"Networking is great for extroverts, but not everybody is like that," Pannone, who has counseled hundreds of job seekers, said in an interview. "Myself, I'd rather spend a few hours in a library than go to a networking meeting, and I have a lot of clients who feel the same way."

Every job hunter should "nurture a working relationship with your reference librarian," says Pannone in his book "Using Competitive Intelligence to Advance Your Career (AmErica House Book Publishers, $19.95). "He or she will then show you which databases are available and most suitable for your use."

Cold-calls to contacts and firing off cover letters and resumes may have worked when unemployment was low and headhunters were on the prowl. But "with the number of people out of work nowadays, there's less tolerance for networking," said Pannone, a career counselor for New York-based ReadyMinds.com. "Employers are tired of answering phones and talking to people who just want them to help them find jobs."

"COMPETITIVE INTELLIGENCE"

Instead, Pannone suggests that job seekers use the same "competitive intelligence" techniques that companies use to scout customers or rivals.

Pannone shows in his book how clients used journals, reference books and data bases to profile target companies and learn about their problems and needs. It then shows how they wrote proposals for employment, and contains some of the letters that produced job offers.

Using competitive intelligence has enabled clients to get jobs that did not even exist, said Pannone, who lives in Stratford, Connecticut.

"You're not looking for job openings," he explained, "but for opportunities for growth at a company, or problems. ... Ideally you want to find an opportunity or a problem before it gets to the stage where it's so evident that there's an opening and they're actively looking for someone."

The book details how a medical doctor convinced a consulting company he could help generate more revenue using the Internet, and how a woman who had worked in computers and academia sold a cable television provider on her ability to develop services combining education and entertainment.

LAWYERS AND HOCKEY COACHES

Pannone said competitive intelligence has helped clients -- from lawyers and accountants to professionals in the fields of fashion, retail, health care and media.

Several burned-out lawyers counseled by Pannone in the '90s switched careers and became human resource directors.

"Their research showed that companies were having trouble with lawsuits when they laid off people," he said. "They were able to show how they could run the human resource department to cut down on litigation."

Another attorney Pannone counseled wanted a job that would engage his passion for U.S. history. He convinced a museum to hire him as an assistant curator. "It took him six weeks to get together a portfolio showing different artifacts he'd appraised and his experience as a volunteer at a museum."

Competitive intelligence, Pannone said, has always been marketed by career counselors as "kind of an elite, sophisticated process." But it boils down to being curious about your chosen field and looking for ways to be helpful.

One client, a child welfare worker, convinced a college to hire him as its hockey coach, Pannone said. The client had played hockey all his life but never coached, so he targeted a college with a small hockey program and no full-time coach.

"He did a great job of showing his own personal development as a hockey player, and convinced them a training program and full-time coach could move their team up to another level," Pannone said. "As an example, he used their cross-town rival, which had moved up a division. He showed how he would accomplish the same thing with their team. They hired him."

WHO NEEDS A RESUME?

Pannone also encourages workers to use competitive intelligence to win promotions with their current employers.

He says in his book that the "most internal candidates don't go after promotions in the most effective manner. They usually take one of two paths: speaking with their immediate supervisor or waiting for a promotion to just happen."

Instead, the book suggests six steps to formulate a proposal that "offers your employer something he or she is not currently getting" with specific data that shows how the job seeker would provide a needed product or service.

The thing many clients like best about competitive intelligence, Pannone said, is that it eliminates hours of worrying over how to prepare a resume.

"When you use these techniques, you don't worry about a resume," he said. "The last five clients I've worked with got jobs, and I don't think they even asked any of them for a resume. It's normally the human resources department that wants the resume after you get the job, for their records."

Dat ik het mezelf nu zo moeilijk moet maken ach. Komt nog wel goed. :knipoog: