How to stay sane in your job search and interviews

How to stay sane in your job search and interviewsHow to stay sane in your job search and interviewsGood Monday morning,Last week, I shared the importance of qualifying jobs in your job search confirming that the pay, position, title, and role are right for your career, your skills, and your bank account.At the beginning of your search, managing your pipeline is about collecting as many potentially good opportunities as you can. At this point, you may leid yet know what will be a good opportunity for you, or a bad job opportunity for you. You havent had the time to explore the market in a while, youre not certain about the overall demand for your role or specialties, and the prices that employers are willing to pay may still be opaque.Follow Ladders on FlipboardFollow Ladders magazines on Flipboard covering Happiness, Productivity, Job Satisfaction, Neuroscience, and moreBut as you add leads to your pipeline, and qualify them, its helpful to have a concrete target for your process.W eve done a substantial amount of work at Ladders on optimizing the job search pipeline, and even written a paper on maximizing job search success with the Carlson School of Business. Weve found that the best predictor of future success is having six - at least six - live opportunities at all times.At the beginning of your search, this means pushing initial conversations to the interview stage.Interviewing is your weg to be persuaded to take an interest in a role, and it is your chance to explain, rationally and persuasively, how your background meets their needs. This mental model of a mutual exchange of information and probing questions is a more useful way to think about interviewing.Its counter-productive to think about interviews as the chance to sell yourself. If interviews relied on sales skills for success, wed never see the fifteen or so million professional hires per year we see in this country. Most of us are not salespeople, and it creates needless anxiety to expect you rself to perform well at a skill you dont have.Interviews, then, arent so much about developing your non-existent sales skills, as they are about professionally reviewing the interviewers needs and your track record, background and capabilities, and exploring whether or not your capabilities and desires make it likely that you can succeed in the job.Using interviews to qualify your leads, you can push the opportunities that make the most sense to you further along in your pipeline.And what weve found is that the successful job search is the one that can keep six opportunities into the interviewing stages, and maintain the discipline to not let up on any of them, or future prospects either. Keeping yourself focused, and preventing yourself from getting distracted by an overly rosy assessment of anyone job lead matter most.It is easy to get distracted, as jobs at different stages of the process will be competing for your time and attention. Some intriguing, but ultimately ill-suited, roles may devour a chunk of your interviewing week while other new job openings are just coming onto your radar screen. You may find the exhaustion and burden of the job search causing you to lose motivation to pursue new job leads, particularly when successes seems so near. While juggling opportunities, its all too easy to focus on the shiny ball that demands your attention and drop the others.But this distraction is a mistake that hurts your chances of maximizing your career.More bluntly, you may be tempted to drop everything as The One best opportunity approaches the offer stage. You may rationalize that its OK to ease up on the work for all other opportunities as the end seems near. Do not fall into this trap. As long as you are still on the search and havent signed a letter, you need to keep all of your opportunities moving forward.Failures in the job search most often occur when a professional gets over-excited about an opportunity that has progressed so far that they stop fol lowing up on the others in their pipeline. All the good signs are there, but theres no offer and no confirmation by letter.Until you are sitting in your seat on the first day at your new job, it is not a confirmed offer And until you are shaking hands with your new boss at your new desk, you must keep your pipeline active.Always keep six live opportunities in your pipeline and youll maximize the chances for your success.Im rooting for you,MarcCenedella,Founder