The One Thing to Do All The Time to Begin Managing Your Career

By Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter

Before I began my career in recruiting and, now, coaching, I was someone who sent resume after resume to ads in the newspaper and waited for the phone to ring. Sometimes, the ad included a phone number and I would call, writing my initial words out on a piece of paper to read as a way of overcoming my phone fear.

As time passed, applying to jobs changed with the technology of the times. We went from mailing resumes on parchment paper that matched the envelop it was mailed in, to faxing resumes to companies and having no concern about papers and envelops, to emailing resumes.

Recruiters evolved with the times, too.

Finding candidates used to consist of waiting for a resume to arrive in response to an ad (any ad that included the words, “10% travel” would out draw any other ad by 20:1), to sourcing people by rusing (“Hi! I’m calling from the Personnel Department to update the directory. Who accepts calls on extension 3741?), to buying directories from purveyors of directories that often contained outdated information, to online…