Never Apply for a Job Again!: Break the Rules, Cut the Line, Beat the Rest (25 page)

CareerGuy Tip: To stay abreast of all that relevant info that your contacts hear about after you leave them, just never really leave them.

So, you seed and nurture them with an ongoing awareness of you. Like clockwork. They then contact you about the information and opportunities that can help you. It’s just the way human beings are built: They become alert and triggers go off in their brain when information that has been planted as being important—to them or to someone else—comes up.

Notice in the Holiday Letter, a few months into the relationship, you take it outside of the office to further establish an ongoing feeling of collegiality with them. My clients have said that when they reconnect face to face with contacts a few months later in a more casual setting, they generally get
even more referrals
than they did during the first stealth interview. It makes sense, because your targets now feel more connected with you and, therefore, begin opening up their lifetime of connections even wider. You’ve carved out a greater residence within their conscious minds.

Besides establishing immediate relationships that will help you land your next position, an ongoing, well-managed career tribe with antennae out in the marketplace can assist you in securing your subsequent position, and the next one, and the next one. Don’t get so submerged in your new job that you let your career tribe fall apart. The worst mistake you can make is to cut off your connection with the network you’ve developed.

Though giving fully to your new employer or situation, always keep 10 percent or more of
you
reserved for
your
long-term security by maintaining your career tribe. Keep it alive and vital and it will ensure that you never get caught again with your career pants down. Through your vibrant career tribe, you will often hear about your next great career opportunity long before you’re finished with the current one!

CareerGuy Tip: Fight the urge to submerge when you land your new role.

Here are the pipelines necessary to initiate, run, manage, and maintain an effective stealth campaign for career tribe development. You want to fill up each of them sequentially and then keep the flow going through all. Never stop the first one, as it initiates all the rest.

1. Approach Letters going out:
Never stop researching potential contacts in your areas of passionate interest, even after you’ve landed in a position. There’s always more information and knowledge to gain through research projects, and additional contacts only add to your lifetime career tribe security.

2. Follow-ups on letters sent:
This is simply part of the process of moving toward the face-to-face meeting, which is your ultimate objective. Your follow-ups must be timely and, as described earlier, will become increasingly effective in netting you meetings when you practice, practice, practice.

3. Conduct your stealth interviews:
Following The 5 Stages of a Stealth Interview, hold your meetings, gain valuable information, receive helpful referrals, and establish wonderful ongoing connection, with your targeted experts.

4. Thank-you and Holiday Letters:
Send immediate thanks for the valuable information and referrals gained from your meetings, and follow up every 30 days with a Holiday Letter updating your career tribe member with your progress, the information you’ve gained, the advice you’ve followed, and your ongoing status of openness for
additional information and connections. After you land a job, these Holiday Letters are sent every three to four months with an update on your career in general, the paths you’re pursuing, the projects you’re involved with, and your open willingness to support your career tribe member in any way.

5. Repeat, repeat, repeat:
Take every referral obtained and every new target discovered through these same steps. Keep the process going…and watch your world of opportunities expand beyond your imagination.

NOTE:
Resources for managing your contacts as well as your overall stealth campaign are available at
www.careerguy.com/campaign
.

Principle # 10: Treat Yourself Like a Business to Stay in Business

Learning effective relationship development and management is critical when you need a job immediately. But mastering these techniques and utilizing them as a lifetime career management practice during the course of your entire career is a whole different matter.

A mindset shift to step into is that of being a business owner, even if you’ve only ever considered yourself an employee. Consider that you have always had your own business and that you’ve merely chosen to lease your employable assets out to particular companies. Yes, those lease arrangements may have been for years at a time, but they were lease arrangements, nonetheless.

If you had a 20-foot trailer in your backyard and you made a side income from renting it to folks to haul things, you’d want to rent it to those who would pay you the most, correct? Even if it were leased out on a month-to-month agreement for a few years to one particular user, if you found
out that another user would pay you double the rental rate, you’d rent it to the new person, right?

Similarly, you want to keep attuned to your ROI (Return on Individuality) or ROE (Return on Effort) of the employable assets that you lease out to employers. They are only “employers” because they employ
your
assets for
their
use. But, they are
your
assets.

Think like a business owner: you want to make sure you are always getting the most return for those employable assets. It may be the amount of salary you receive, it could be the type of work you engage in, or it might be the particular environment you become a part of…but there are various ways in which you receive a return on your assets.

CareerGuy Tip: Your own business’s viability measures: ROI = Return on Individuality, ROE = Return on Effort.

It’s smart business to always know about your other investment options so that you steward your assets for the highest return. If this book is the first time you’ve really considered the value of effective career relationship development, good for you. The time is now to begin building those muscles.

When you begin going to the gym, those muscles, skills, and abilities will grow through exertion and expansion in time…
if
you regularly practice. Whether you’re new to the gym of career networking or not, realize that it is simply good business to always have your finger on the pulse of the
market and the cornucopia of investment options available. So get and stay connected!

Use the principles outlined in this book to both build your career tribe and maintain it for the rest of your working life. Lifetime career management is smart business. Again, “You can pay me now, or you can pay me later.” Find the time in your schedule, utilize all the social networking tools available today, but most importantly, employ the personalized follow-up methods to keep vital connections in place. That way, you don’t have to start over in building contacts every time a job change hits you unawares. The small effort and time you invest regularly in maintaining your career tribe relationships can pay big dividends when you least expect it.

Conclusion

In the Preface, I asked you to provide the little bit extra that makes a world of difference by putting something at stake for yourself in fully engaging in this book. Did you fully engage? Did you complete the exercises? Did you launch and begin working your stealth campaign? If so, I would love to hear from you and learn about the results you’ve produced. Do you see the possibility of fulfilling what you put at stake as you continue along this path of relationship development?

What is possible here, as has been demonstrated by the many stories of stealth breakthroughs throughout this book, is a breakthrough for you, too. It does take some initial understanding, development, and practice. But it gets easier with time and becomes just another part of life. And the results of
even one powerful new relationship that opens up a new possibility for you
is completely worth it, because your whole career can shift due to one new contact.

If you choose to review this book and its method from the beginning, take a moment to go back right now and review Miracle Moves #1 and #2 in
Chapter 2
and note, again, the six major points to pull from those stories.

Remember that both Eileen and Jim not only utilized the stealth method of networking, but both had the advantage of having built up their self-esteem by a thorough
career-inventory process
…which then led to a
unique and distinguishing “personal brand
.” For some folks, those initial steps can provide the renewed inspiration and sense of self-worth and individuality that make what may seem a bold process of developing a career tribe through a stealth campaign more conceivable. You can do
everything right
and “by the book” as outlined here, but if your
inner
game isn’t as up to speed with your
outer
game, your results may be less fruitful. You always attract opportunities more by what you feel and believe than what you “do.” Be sure to find ways to gain an awareness of how exceptionally unique and awesome you are. That awareness, along with this method, will make you very attractive.

For more resources to support your career growth and development, including that
inner game
, visit
www.careerguy.com
. You’ll find free tools to assist you in many of the exercises and processes outlined in this book, along with audios, eBooks, and transformational programs to support your career efforts.

Also, as a ritual full of pomp and circumstance to acknowledge the completion of your project to engage in and employ this new method, please download your free “Relationships Well Drilling Rights” certificate from
www.careerguy.com
right away.

In alignment with the principle of Harvey Mackay’s bestselling book title,
Dig Your Well Before You’re Thirsty
, you have now graduated into a never-ending lifetime career management practice of finding and digging your wells to ensure your most fulfilling career.

Appendix A: The Stealth Method in Action

In order to provide some inspiration and motivation for the task of establishing your own stealth campaign and career management process, as well as to demonstrate what arises from this approach compared to traditional, overt methods, I’ve included just a few stories from the many folks utilizing these techniques. More stories and experiences can be obtained at
www.careerguy.com/darrell-gurney-reviews/reviews
.

S
TEALTH
C
AREER 2.0