How to hedge your job search risk and maximize your return?

The idea of this post came to me after reading  “what color is your parachute”  I found the book very useful and can be targeted to a wide range of audiences.   

Basically, your risk profile goes up dramatically when you put all your eggs in one job search strategy. Let me say it this way, say an online application- one method for finding a job- has 10% success rate (the numbers here are just to give you an idea, they are not 100% accurate) so 9 out of 10 people who used this method alone did not succeed in their job search. So why?? The simple answer is; there is no guaranteed strategy to land your dream job and you almost always have to take some risks but the questions is how to hedge your job search risk and get the most of it?

Since there are several ways to find job the sum of these methods must add to %100, and since it’s really hard to invest time and money in all of them you have to choose two or more, think about the ones that best fits both your personal characteristics and career goals. As you may noticed already an online search is the most common way for finding a job but yields the lowest rate of success, so how about taking some times which you already planned to invest in the online search and spend it somewhere else such as (finding a bridge person within a firm that interest you) this method has almost %50 success rate (wow looks really high but keep in mind that this method required more skills and some extra time) but think about this for a second ( how likely you will be able to land your dream job if you combined the online search (10%) plus the inside connection (50%) so your chance to land a job will rise to (60%) sounds pretty promising right? It’s a simple math and some hard work from your end.

Hope you found it useful, stay tuned for more.