Putting Effort into Your Job Search

By Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter

In an article I wrote a few months back called, “The 3 Keys to Being a Champion,” I wrote about three important factors that went into being a champion in sports and in life and applied that to job hunting.

I missed a very important one, a fourth key, that I was reminded of when reading “Bloomberg Businessweek,” in particular an article about a retail chain called Forever 21. Personally, it was not a store I have heard of but the more I read about it, the more I could see how I had erred in my earlier article.

You see, the founder and his family were immigrants who worked extremely hard to build this chain from nothing to 475 stores in a short time. They made mistakes (who hasn’t) but he and his wife arrived in the US in 1981, opened their first store while working menial jobs (he pumped gas and worked as a janitor when they opened their first store), but worked long hours and made and created a family structure geared to what was important to them — making a success of their business,

The fact is few people put in anywhere near the effort in their job search as this family did starting their business. Most do nothing to change their economics, do not work as hard on finding work as they think they do, do not network or practice for interviews, do not seek advice or help…