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Organizing your job search

Quick note: Many readers want to skip this chapter to get to applying for jobs right away, and most people that skipped this end up regretting it. I’d encourage you to take the 20-30 minutes you need to read this chapter and start organizing first, rather than make big preventable mistakes later.

Why to organize now instead of later

When you chose to find a new job or change careers, you didn't do that because it'll make your life easier in the short run. Job searching is hard work, and you'll have to learn a lot and prove yourself when you start at your new employer, so you are working harder in the short term. But by improving your career, you're aiming to be happier and more successful in the long term.

Similarly, in terms of short-term pain and long-term gain, it’s very important to have a system to organize your job search, especially as you start talking to multiple companies and interviewing with multiple people at each of those companies.

The reason that organizing now seems like a short-term pain is that an organizational system won’t benefit you much at the moment you start tracking--most people can send three emails and remember to follow up on them. But organizing today is important to experience the long-term gain is a few weeks from now. When you have dozens of companies in play, and you’re trying to remember why you thought a particular company was worth applying to, or which of your friends introduced you to the interviewer who you have a phone call with in three minutes, you’ll be glad you have a system.

Making organization a habit

Some systems are self-correcting and easy to follow, like making sure your alarm is set for when you want to wake up. When you get that wrong and accidentally sleep until 10AM, the negative experience of running around getting ready for an interview or showing up late helps train you to do a better job next time.

But for following up with people in a job search, there’s often no external stimuli that forces you to improve. You just won’t see what you’re missing: the email that a key connection would have responded to, the bit of information that would have convinced you never to apply to a company in the first place, or the invitation to interview you could have received all simply don’t happen. Because you’ll never see what you’re missing without a system, it’s important that you build good habits early on.

We’ll look at two habits to develop: organizing job search information as you collect it in a set of folders, and setting times to follow up with jobs and people.

Setting up your folders

To organize your job search information, I suggest you set up some folders. We’ll go over the overall structure, and then get into details.

Suggested folder structure:

The “Reflection” folder is for ways you’ll repeatedly refine your preferences in your job search, like how in future chapters you’ll define what you want in your next job and guess the target qualities for each role you’re looking for. Those are going to be living documents, meaning that you’ll change them over and over as you learn more.

The “Resumes and cover letters” folder is for your master copies of those documents. You’ll store the resumes and cover letters targeted at specific companies in the folder with that company name, so you know exactly what you sent to which company.

The “Master tracker” folder will have your followup tracking system, which we cover about a page from now.

The “Company-specific information” folder will have a subfolder for each company you put effort into applying to. This will contain:

This isn’t complicated, and you should be able to set it up within a few minutes. If you take notes best by hand, you can make these physical folders; if you want the ease of editing and referencing on the go, I find Google Docs a great way to keep track of things.

To build good habits, every time you send a new job application or a thank you note for an informational interview, you should update your folders. If you can learn to do those actions together, the same way some people link brushing their teeth and flossing, you’ll be able to create a habit.

A master tracker for your search

Here’s a link to the master tracker. Please check it out now.

Most of the work I did for this chapter was setting that up and explaining each field (you can mouse over the header in Google Docs or Excel), so I’ll mostly let that speak for itself since it’s easiest to understand in the context of the spreadsheet.

There are three main things I want to cover, however. First, please note there’s both a “Companies” and a “People” tab. I suggest you use both once you have more than one person you’re talking to at a company, since you’ll often be informationally interviewing multiple people at one company, and it’s hard to keep track of your next actions with multiple people in the one row you have for their company.

Second, building a habit around this document is very important. I suggest you never send a job search-related email without either marking the next action in your sheet or sending yourself a note/email if that’s not possible (if you’re responding while standing on a bus, for example). You want to make sure you’re setting followup steps for if they don’t reply every time you reach out, or you’ll end up dropping the ball with contacts who would be happy to help you but aren’t fully on top of their email.

Finally, all of these great next actions and dates aren’t useful if you never look at them, so make sure to set a time on your calendar once or twice a week to revisit your next actions and move them forward! It would be best if this is a good time to send email - early Tuesday morning would be great, while Friday afternoon would be bad, since your follow up email will go in the giant pile of weekend email buildup that gets glanced at Monday morning. You can create a recurring calendar invite right now.

Help this system improve!

I’ve developed this organizational system from seeing what I and my clients naturally did when left to our own devices, and then taking the best pieces from those systems. But there are better or clearer ways to set things up, so if you make a change to the system that works well for you, please let me know at firstroundinterviews@unusuallydifficult.com. I’ll consider adding that change to the next version of the book, and you’ll be able to help others job search more smoothly.

Now that we’ve got a nice organizational system set up, it’s time to get a basic resume in place, which brings us to the next chapter.

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