Task: Self-Discovery & Self-Reflections

The challenge is not yet over. You have more coming your way. As I stated in the beginning, this was a 30 day Challenge and converting that to 7 days was a challenge for me 🙂

As I said on Day 0, you will have a different organized approach toward your job search and discovery your strengths, skills and create a clear thinking to focus on right jobs.

You haven’t applied for any jobs as of today. That’s for a reason. You can start building a 10 story building from floor 10 right?

We need a foundation! That’s what we are building up here in this Challenge.


Task Title: Mindset About Job Application Process

Action Items: Now, you have gone through several Days of Challenge. We covered the following: visualization, Ideal Jobs, List of Top Skills, How to Organize the Job Search, How to Network and Why Networking, Fixed Resume, LinkedIn, Created templates for your job search Repo.

Now you realized, why Employers are not responding to your applications. Job you applied is already filled by a referral, even before you saw the posting. Trust me, that’s how things work. When managers get approval to hire someone, employees in the team get email about the positions asking for referrals. Some, employees are active in helping their contacts, others not so much. Your job is to find that “action person”.

In this task, I want to, you get more clarity about the Process you learned and how you can move forward.

Submit the Following Questions on the Forums Thread (your thread):

  1. Did you have an organized job search before? If no, why not?
  2. How will your job search change after this Challenge?
  3. What was 3 top things did you learn about the job search in the USA from this Challenge?
  4. What specific task (or tasks) from this challenge made you think  have the most impact on your job search process?
  5. Would you recommend your friends to take up this challenge? If so, why?
  6. What would it take for you to stick to the Process you learned in 7 days?
  7. Is there anything you’d like to add?

You haven’t applied for a single job yet. That’s alright.

When you are applying for a job, I can’t stress the importance of following approach:

Connect > Build Relationship > Let Them Apply Jobs for you

If you follow the traditional route (Brute Force and Random applications), your SUCCESS RATE will be really low.

What do you want? Spend hours and hours of your time to get 10% return?

What we are doing is spending 80% of your time in Passive Phase Activities

Which is what?

Building Relationship and Finding Contacts. Till date, you have done the work to find contacts.

This is what differentiates Boys and Girls from Men and Woman.

It’s extremely hard to talk to someone for an Information Interview, unless you have a framework.

I discuss in detail on how to prepare for Information Interview. Then how do you build relationships after Cold Contact responds to your email. I get is this: “I got a reply for an email I sent. Should I ask for a job right away? Is it ok to ask for a job?”

More on Active, Passive Phase, Building Relationship, Building your brand (Show and Tell approach) and tactics for the Career Fair is discussed via Video lessons in the Career Lab Course. I designed this challenge by not just giving tasks, but also with reasons and why we are doing it in certain ways. But, 7 days is really short to cover an entire spectrum.

What is our goal?

Target Employer > Find 2 to 3 Contacts Who can Refer You > Talk to Them > Keep Talking to Them > Ask them to Refer

Let me focus on this part “Ask them to Refer to Jobs”

When you are sending Information Interview Request Email, if there is a opening, then you can ask them like this in the last sentence of Information Interview.

“Your insights would be appreciated, as I’m about to apply for Software Engineer position here.”

That’s it for today.