Guerrilla Marketing for Job Hunters 2.0 - Why You Need to Become a Guerrilla Job Hunter

P1: OTA/XYZ P2: ABC c01 JWBT105-Levinson April 22, 2009 13:19 Printer Name: Courier Westford, Westford, MA Chapter 1 Why You Need to Become AL a Guerrilla Job Hunter RI TE The New Global America MA ED It’s not the strongest of the species, nor the most intelligent, that survive; it’s the one most responsive to change. —CHARLES DARWIN HT Under siege from layoffs, outsourcing, offshoring, rightsizing, down- IG sizing, and bankruptcies, America is in the midst of a profound business transformation. It is the result of developments in infor- mation and communications technologies, changing human values, R and the rise of the global knowledge-based economy. The sheer com- PY plexity and technical sophistication of business has transformed the job market. Business is becoming knowledge based and technology intensive. CO Knowledge workers are the backbone of the United States. They are employed in all sectors of the economy, most prominently in the information technology and communications sectors, but also to a growing extent in health care, manufacturing, education, finance, nat- ural resources, defense, and government—in any field that requires in- novation to sustain competitiveness. Competitive advantage is rooted in the new ideas of these skilled workers. Twenty to forty million Americans change jobs every year. Al- ready reeling from the struggling economy, competition for the re- maining jobs is tougher than ever, the rules for getting jobs have changed, and global competition ensures that the rules will change 1 P1: OTA/XYZ P2: ABC c01 JWBT105-Levinson April 22, 2009 13:19 Printer Name: Courier Westford, Westford, MA ➤ 2 GUERRILLA MARKETING FOR JOB HUNTERS 2.0 again tomorrow. Many people needlessly drift in and out of dead-end jobs because they don’t know which industries have a future or how to present their value in the right terms to the people who have the authority to hire them. To succeed in this new job market, you must have a plan. Your plan must be clear and detailed in every way. It must also be: ➤ Clever ➤ Results driven ➤ Marketing oriented ➤ Inexpensive to execute ➤ Realistic ➤ Achievable No government agency, educational institution, or think tank has a genuine crystal ball to make a call on the future; there are simply too many unknown factors when it comes to industry and job cre- ation. One thing is certain, whether you are employed but unhappy, or unemployed and in need of a new opportunity, as a job hunter you are at a strategic fork in the road. ■ THE NEW GLOBAL THEATER The United States is again at a major crossroads in history. The current “jobless” recovery is a consequence of the economy’s rapid evolution from a natural resources- and manufacturing-based economy to a knowledge-based one. We are witnessing the first economic recovery in what has become a full information economy. For most of the twentieth century, a recession was a cyclical de- cline in demand—the result of excess inventory that needed to be sold off. People were temporarily laid off, inventory backlogs were reduced, and demand would snap back quickly. As product demand increased, workers returned to their preexisting positions in factories, or they found an equivalent job with another company. Over the past few years, dramatic advances in information tech- nology have allowed companies to establish tightly integrated de- mand and supply chains, and to outsource manufacturing and low- end service jobs to save money. Rightly or wrongly, many of the jobs that have entirely disappeared from North America have reappeared in India, China, and Latin America. Rather than furloughs, many people were let go, forcing them to switch industries, sectors, loca- tions, or re-skill to find a new job. P1: OTA/XYZ P2: ABC c01 JWBT105-Levinson April 22, 2009 13:19 Printer Name: Courier Westford, Westford, MA Why You Need to Become a Guerrilla Job Hunter ➤ 3 If job growth now depends on the creation of new positions, you should expect a long lag before employment rebounds. Employers incur risks in creating new jobs and require additional time to es- tablish and fill positions. Investment in new capital equipment is no longer a pendulum swinging from recession to recovery and back again. Instead of resources or land, today capital means human capital. It doesn’t take a shoe factory to go into the shoe business these days. Nor do you need raw materials or fleets of trucks. Nike became a shoe industry leader by concentrating on the value-producing capacity of its employees for design, marketing, and distribution know-how. The real capital is intangible: a person’s knowledge level, combined with an aptitude for application. ■ WHY YOU NEED TO BE A GUERRILLA With a radically smaller pool of skilled workers and the increased demand for profits, the original War for Talent of the late 1990s has morphed from a quantitative to a qualitative one, best described as the War for the Best Talent by author Peter Weddle in Generalship: HR Leadership in a Time of War (Stamford, CT: Weddle’s, 2004). The old “bums-on-seats” mentality of many employers is quickly being replaced by “brains-on-seats.” Faced with stiffer competition and tougher hiring requirements, companies of every sort are becoming single-minded about productiv- ity and bottom-line performance. Consequently, competition for jobs is increasing as management seeks and hires only those persons who appear to have the most potential for helping to boost the company’s profits. For many companies, employees are now viewed as a variable cost—hence the term human capital—to remain “on the books” only as long as they continue to produce. Looking for an old-fashioned job like the one Dad used to have is a waste of your time—jobs are tempo- rary in the new economy—henceforth you always need to be looking for the next opportunity. The people who market their talent the best will win! ■ OFFSHORING AND AMERICA’S FUTURE AS A GLOBAL INNOVATOR During the 2008 presidential election, both President Bush and Demo- cratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama had a lot to say P1: OTA/XYZ P2: ABC c01 JWBT105-Levinson April 22, 2009 13:19 Printer Name: Courier Westford, Westford, MA ➤ 4 GUERRILLA MARKETING FOR JOB HUNTERS 2.0 about the future of offshoring and what the practice of shipping jobs overseas means for the U.S. economy. Even after the election, Repub- licans and Democrats disagreed on this subject. The macroeconomics will be argued for some time to come. As a guerrilla job hunter, you need interest yourself only in the microeco- nomic impact of offshoring and how it affects your career—in short, which jobs are likely to disappear over time and what industries are likely to benefit. If you think “By America” legislation will save your job—don’t bet on it. There are many issues that will take time for President Barack Hussein Obama II to work through Congress, though personally I’m confident he will. Your job is at risk to offshoring if: ➤ It can be broken down into many smaller tasks that can be redistributed to lower skilled, lower paid workers. ➤ Your company’s profits are under constant assault by low-cost competitors.