Job Hunting: Look Beyond The Internet

Many job-seekers rely almost completely on the Internet, to the near-exclusion of other methods of finding a job. The Internet seems easy to people who don’t have connections and don’t know how to build them. Ripe for harvest are external customers, job fairs, former employers and networking.

Geologist Jon Trujillo is special projects manager at the Tucson office of War Eagle Mining Co., which specializes in recovering germanium, an advanced electronics material used, among others, by the military’s and General Motors’ products for night vision. He developed his own connection while working at a company that consulted to War Eagle. His current position, drawing on his computer modeling background, involves liaison with marketing, sales and the geology team.

“It fits my skill set a lot better,” he says. “There’s a large commitment to travel, domestically and internationally, and the rhythm isn’t predictable.”

He believes that if he hadn’t been willing to travel, he never would have been hired.

If current or former customers are dead ends, consider the story of Anthony Ingram, who was over 40 and out of work in Knoxville, Tenn., at the end of February. The Knoxville News Sentinel was sponsoring a job fair in mid-May, but none of the jobs listed appealed to him. He wasn’t going to go until he realized that he could obtain free copies of his resume. He had another motivation: the knowledge that job-seekers can’t predict where the best opportunity will crop up.

Dressed in a suit, unlike the misguidedly popular dirty T-shirt, “I made a sweep of the entire room and returned to those who might be a good fit,” Ingram says. “On my second walk-around, I approached two men, who turned out to be Boy Scouts.”

He’s an Eagle Scout with Palms. The fact that he communicates well was a plus, especially when he said, “If you get me, you get my family. If I’m going to work 45 to 50 hours, I want to bring my wife in so she’s fully on board.”

Asking that his wife be included made the connection. He holds the job of district executive in The Empowerment Zone in diverse inner-city Knoxville, which has a high poverty level.

Reviving ties with a previous boss may open still another avenue. Based in St. Louis, Bill Keaggy is knowledge and content manager at XPLANE Corp., headquartered in Portland, Ore. He’s on his second round with the company, which converts business information into compelling visual stories. Keaggy is creating a library that is both visual and written, and helping to develop a training system. He left the company for personal reasons in 2004 after a five-year stint. “I reconnected at the beginning of this year,” he says. “I had never lost touch.”

Keaggy credits the ease of the Internet to keeping current with a former company, then “reconnecting when it’s appropriate on their weblog or you see their company is hiring or changing in some way. I approached [the process] from the standpoint of wanting to learn more.” His low-key method put him to work.

Debbie Dettore of Freedom Organizing & Administrative Services in Phoenix clears administrative bottlenecks for companies to facilitate work flow. She demonstrated opportunity development acumen early. Illustrations in a college textbook on forms design caught her eye in the ’80s. She liked them enough to track down the illustrator, a small business owner in Cleveland. Dettore created a connection by making contact and was subsequently hired. “Since then,” she comments, “most of the jobs and clients I’ve had have come through networking.” One notable exception was a blind ad she responded to, which led to five happy years at a Fortune 500 company.

Job hunters with and without contacts can still make connections.

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