How To Use A Job Search Scorecard
Leadership Development | Mar 18, 2019
Job searching is stressful and frustrating. I remember when my family and I first moved here, I applied for 50 jobs between April and August. Eventually, I landed a job in senior living that was a bad fit.
After about 6-months there, I left and applied to another 40 jobs. This time I landed an HR job that was a good fit. But after these experiences, I never want to experience that again.
In my coaching practice, I’m working with several people to help them find career direction. For them, it’s a matter of finding a career that fits their passions and talents. Not just any career path will do (I had to learn that the hard way).
You CAN Make Career Searching Easier
Remembering that I applied to 90 jobs over the course of less than a year, I vowed that I would not let my clients go through that experience.
So, while working with clients to narrow down the career (or job) searching process I created a simple process to make the experience much less painful.
With my clients I help them in three steps: Self-Awareness, Set Your Categories, then Search and Score.
Knowing Yourself Is Key To Career Satisfaction
One of the first steps I take with every client I work with is to have them take a DISC/Motivators assessment. There’s a free DISC assessment on my home page if you want to take one (but I’ve got a bonus at the end you may be more interested in).
Self-Awareness is the first step. After my clients take this assessment, we look at their key strengths, stressors, best working environments, and motivations. It’s powerful stuff!
This step generally eliminates a vast swath of career or job options. Next, you Set Your Categories.
Determine The Key Categories You Are Looking For In A Job/Career
In this phase, you are working up a set of categories that you would like to do a job comparison on. It’s not a pros and cons list. It’s a scorecard of sorts for your jobs.
The scorecard I share with my clients has 7 categories and two “other” options.
Suggested
- Job Duties and Responsibilities – You need to know what these are to make sure your knowledge, skills, and abilities fit.
- Salary & Benefits – Not everyone desires a 6-figure job. Others don’t need benefits, but this needs to be looked at regardless.
- Education Required – Are you qualified? Do you need
a certification or additional training? - Work-Life Balance – How many hours do you really work? Can you telecommute? What’s the stress levels of current employees?
- Culture – What kind of culture does the organization have? Does it fit your personality?
- Approach – What is the organization’s goal? Quality, quantity, creativity, innovation, something else?
- Organization Size – What size organization do you want to work in? And everything that comes with a taco stand to Amazon.
- Others – Two categories you want to add (if any).
Once the additional categories are determined, you can move to the third phase of Search and Score.
Search For Jobs Like You’re A Candidate
None of this is rocket science, but it is work. Especially this phase. But it’s worth it, I promise!
In the first phase, you become more aware of what motivates you at work, what environments are not good for you, your pace of work, detail level, etc.
In the second phase, you are determining your top categories or job criteria.
In the third phase, you are doing the hard work of searching out answers to the categories and filling out your scorecard. When you begin working on this phase, you are an investigator, an interviewer, and a reviewer.
Have you heard of social media stocking? Of course, you have! We’ve all done it. What’s great about social media and jobs is you can look up organizations, it’s employees, and of course their website too. Some of the Job Scorecard categories like culture and work-life balance can be found here.
Once you’ve done some investigation, begin interviewing. Go to Indeed, Monster, ZipRecruiter or something like these and start searching out the job descriptions. You can get a lot of your answers to the categories on the Job Scorecard this way. You’re interviewing for the job before you even apply.
Interview PeopleYou may also find you know someone that works at the organization or someone who
Each Job Gets A Scorecard Total
In the last part of this phase, use your notes on each of the categories and then give the category a score. Once you’re done, add up the scores so you get a total job score.
Do this for as many career/jobs you want and then compare scores. You’ll find some jobs are woefully unfit for your criteria while others are so close it’s hard to decide what to pursue.
Now that you know which job/career path you want to follow, the rest is up to you.
Here are some side benefits of this process.
- You will have new networking connections.
- You know exactly what knowledge, skills, and abilities the career/job requires.
- Your self-awareness is way up.
- You’ve said no to a bunch of jobs that would make you miserable!!
Let’s Land Your Ideal Job or Career
This process is a bit simplified, but it is the nuts and bots of what works for my clients. I’d love to help you land an ideal job or career. You can download for FREE the Job Scorecard here and start working on Phase 2 and 3 of the process. But to really make this successful, you need to do Phase 1 too.
I have a some questions for you.
- Are you frustrated by your lack of growth at work?
- Is your work environment a bit toxic?
- Are you in school and still unsure about your major (or have a son or daughter that is)?
- Is a change needed but it’s a bit scary to start looking?
If you can say yes to any of these questions, this process WILL help you. But I want to help you too. First, click below to download the simple Job Scorecard below.
And if you want to take this to the next level and are serious about making some career/job changes, let’s chat. If you have 15-minutes, I’d love to learn more about your situation and see if we can help you make some changes.
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