The Job Search usually starts on impulse. And that impulse is like adrenaline, it fuels you to power through really hideous tasks like transposing your resume onto a prospective company’s user-unfriendly website. It powers you through resume wrangling and emailing people you know very tangentially (e.g., your mom’s friend’s babysitter’s husband?). Eventually you’re going to need a plan that organizes all your disparate forces. Here’s what you do to get organized and become a lean, mean job-finding machine.

The Spreadsheet.

Google Sheets are free to use and very handy. Keep a record of everywhere you’ve applied with important details like: company, contact name, role, date applied, source (how you discovered the opening), results and follow-up item. You’re going to be juggling a lot people and places, and you can’t afford to get any of the details wrong.

Links! Embed links in your spreadsheet. These links will be to the Want Ad if applicable (you have to really focus on their words when they describe what they’re looking for) as well as to the prospective company’s site and any social media you know of from the company or major stakeholders of that company. This way you have all the research in one spot and can be ready for the interview.

Action Items! Why not embrace the business speak of terms like “Action Items” and “Lunch and Learn.” If you need to make them a little ironic go for it. The big point here is that you don’t want your to-do list to become wrapped up in “filling out the spreadsheet”. This is fetish. Your spreadsheet needs to spur action, not be the action.

When you’re hunting for a job, you are your own boss and your own secretary and your own promoter and, well you get the point. It’s easy for lines to cross and if you’re not organized, you can embarrass yourself or even worse miss out on a great opportunity. You get the big prize by getting all the small things right, and that’s how the spreadsheet becomes your friend.

About NextGen

NextGen is the brainchild of longtime telecom professionals with nearly 50 years of experience and millions of dollars in Telecom Recruiting Services. We focus on establishing long term relationships with our clients and candidates so we can recruit the best and the brightest in the telecom industry. This ‘quality over quantity’ approach is at the heart of everything we do and has resulted in successful job placements at Fortune 1000 firms worldwide.