Lose the Resume, Land the Job

Chapter FourTargeting Your Next Opportunity

1. It's All About Your Effort
2. To Get a Job You Need a Plan
3. Geography: Where You Want to Live and Work
4. Your Company Wish List
5. Getting Feedback on Where You Belong
6. Targeting Industries and Sectors
7. The Job-Search Spiral: Roles and Responsibilities
8. The Pivot Point

You could excuse Jed for thinking that he was above all this effort—this “job-hunting stuff,” as he liked to say. Jed was a college friend who had spent most of his career at one of the big-name companies that always seem to make the cover of Fortune. As senior vice president, he wasn't quite in the C-suite, but he'd had enough one-on-one lunches with current and future company leaders and had worn tuxedoes to enough company-sponsored events to know he had a place in the firm for life.

The problem was that over the two decades he was at his Fortune-cover company, its life span was shortening, in a very gradual, painful way. Competition, globalization, technology—you name it—had left his job half the size it used to be. Along with Jed's job, something else was receding: his hairline. Nervous that the jig soon would be up, he started quietly crafting his LinkedIn profile with an absurd obsession about the merits of one phrase over another, such as “headed up a department” versus ...