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By Debra Feldman

In real estate, the mantra is "Location! Location! Location!" In job searching, the rule for a swift, successful landing is: "Follow up! Follow up! Follow up!" In today's highly sophisticated recruiting environment, where keen competition is the norm, more favorable and faster outcomes are reported by those who make the extra effort to demonstrate unequivocally to employers that they are outstanding individuals with initiative, dependability and character.

Distinguish yourself from the throng of supremely qualified and eager candidates by showing employers that you are even more than they expect to find. Don't rely on your resume alone to convince the target company's decision maker that you are superior. Right from the get-go show your future boss -- don't just tell him or her -- that you are:

• Remarkable.
• Determined.
• Persistent.
• Able to overcome tough challenges.
• Successful! (and will succeed for them in the future!)

How? By transforming your offering to the target company from "just" an impressive set of skills and background information to a memorable personality and potentially valuable resource. Make the target company feel you are a seemingly perfect fit for their needs, organizational culture and requirements.

If you wait passively for a target employer to contact you with the hiring decision, you are definitely not demonstrating your initiative, responsibility, reliability and leadership. Hanging out for the job to find you rarely produces a job offer that you even want. To land a fantastic new opportunity, take a proactive, assertive approach. Effectively planning and aggressively executing a campaign strategy to attract and impress employers is the key to driving your search to a swift, successful landing.

In today's environment, getting ahead in the job market demands more active participation in the search process and a multi-faceted approach to tap all possible leads. Networking with colleagues is essential to unearthing unadvertised or hidden jobs. To get the most out of all your efforts, it is important to follow up, to stay in touch and be clear that you are still interested. Be sensitive to the message the employer gives and follow their recommendation on their preferred schedule for keeping in touch. If they are not specific, then contact them every few weeks if you think that something will break soon. Vary the medium -- some phone messages, occasional email notes, forward a link or relevant article, etc. If you call more often trying to "catch them live," only leave a voice mail every ten days to two weeks so as not to be a pest as you aggressively seek to connect in person. Don't drop the ball. No matter how tempting it is to be passive and hope to get lucky, you can't afford to let potential connections slip through your fingers. To make sure this doesn't happen, you must follow up and stay on the inside contact's radar. If you don't follow up on leads, someone else will likely get the job offer first.

Conquering barriers to your ascent

What can you do to change the course of your campaign? How can you conquer barriers to your ascent? Be proactive: contact the appropriate hiring manager and show him or her that you are seriously interested in a particular opportunity at their company and that you are not just sending out generic resumes and waiting for your turn to come. Make it clear that you are extraordinary by your initiative and follow up. Don't wait silently hoping to be selected. Prove that you want to present personally your qualifications and solutions to the prospective employer's challenges. Do your homework, prepare and then get in touch. Be polite. Maintain contact. Be patient. Don't give up until it's really over! Keep these connections alive as part of your network and they become career insurance for future transitions.

Here's how to ratchet up your campaign's velocity

1. Invest the time and effort to customize your resume for each position you apply for. Use the terminology that the employer wrote in their job description. Be sure to provide relevant experience and highlight accomplishments that make it simple for the employer to relate to their own situation. Present yourself as the perfect match and leave out irrelevant information. You want to get in the door. Then you can deliver all the bells and whistles over and above the basic credentials to meet the employer's specifications.

2. Find out the correct spelling of the hiring manager's name and title and use it on the cover letter. Find out from the hiring manager's assistant or a co-worker if they go by a nickname. Using a given name incorrectly is a dead giveaway that you don't really know whom you are addressing! Putting the correct name shows you are thorough and careful, may have some incredible research skills and that you have good business etiquette.

3. When sending a personal e-mail or letter, alter your standard cover letter/resume language to make it sound fresh. Use phrasing that personalizes the tone and sounds more like one person talking to another, not a boiler plate regurgitation of glorified achievements and credentials. Avoid resume-speak. That's a snooze inducer for most seasoned recruiters who can quickly scan a document for relevance. You want to write in a way that is memorable and communicates your message authentically, one that keeps people reading and wanting to learn more about you. Writing a resume to trigger a computer match is definitely different than writing a meaningful, clear, concise document that is going to be actually read, understood and appreciated by a thinking human mind. If your cover letter/resume has been developed to meet search engine or automated screening systems, revise it for human readers. Humanize it. Make it more fluent. Eliminate redundancy: you don't have to repeat key words but can use synonyms or rephrase a concept.

4. For positions that really capture your interests, follow submission instructions using your scannable format resume as specified in the advertised listing AND then also snail mail or hand deliver a copy of your "readable" or humanized materials to the hiring manager. Better yet, don't fold your documents and send them in a large envelope or express delivery package that draws attention and provides you with a receipt for delivery-and a signature/name to follow up with.

5. Take on the admittedly tough challenge to identify and then make contact by e-mail or phone with the hiring authority for the job you want. Continue to make courteous inquiries until you are told that you are no longer a candidate. Mark your calendar to follow up and stay in touch if you had a good rapport and can see networking with this individual in the future.

6. Find out the name of the hiring manager's assistant and call to introduce yourself. Let the assistant know that you will be sending your resume and ask if it would be OK to check in with them to find out if it is received. Ask if you should address the correspondence to them directly. Start a dialog with this person and let them feel personally responsible for helping you. Thank them for their extra efforts on your behalf. Ask if it would be okay with them to email them a copy of your materials to share with their boss to expedite the process.

7. Use your networking contacts to identify an individual associated with a company you are targeting. After making a connection and establishing a level of trust with this contact, ask them to introduce you to the hiring manager or if they would deliver your resume personally and put in a good word for you.

8. If you get referred to HR when attempting to connect with a hiring manager, be polite, follow their instructions and continue to attempt to connect directly with a decision maker. Don't necessarily depend on the HR contact to champion your candidacy because in many organizations HR does little more than screen out ineligible applicants rather than influence hiring managers about who they should acquire for their team. If you want to be on a decision maker's team, you have to win over the manager in charge of hiring which means you have to get to impress them directly.

9. Don't worry if you end up with more than one inside contact. Hopefully both will endorse you and help you get exposure to the right decision maker. Plus, you will have expanded your networking contacts inside your target company!

A job search demands that you play an active role in defining and performing campaign tasks. Don't be a passive candidate at the mercy of employers. Set a focus for your campaign, strategize to be the first for openings and stay alive on decision makers' radar screens. It's the old story of being the early bird and proactively seeking out positions you want. It's the tortoise who hangs in there, plugging along faithfully, that wins the race.

Debra Feldman is the JobWhiz™, a nationally-recognized expert who designs and personally implements swift, strategic, and customized senior level executive job search campaigns by arranging interactions between candidates and decision makers at their target employers for a warm welcome. She can be reached at www.JobWhiz.com.

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