I help people find jobs.
Done well, a career advisor can help positively change someone’s career path, done poorly, the consequences can echo for decades. Appreciating this fact, I am inspired by my coworkers, the people I assist, and the employers and staff of each organization I work with to do the best I can for each person I engage. Knowing the unique challenges and barriers each job seeker faces, I try to make use of the following ten principles to assist them in finding the job and career that is the best fit for their wants and needs.
Deliver value in every meeting. A good career advisor does more than fill or hold a space for a job seeker. They provide individualized value to each job seeker every time they meet with them. Job seekers trust a career advisor’s skills, experience, and advice. This trust must be earned in every minute of every session.
Be prepared in advance for every meeting. Delivering value is not an accident; it results from learning about each job seeker, creating a collaborative plan, implementing it, and adjusting it as required. Meetings with job seekers are like building blocks; each block represents a step, and each step lays the framework and foundation for the next one.
A career advisor works for two clients: the job seeker and potential employers. A good career advisor evaluates each job seeker’s skills, experience, and behaviors and then listens to those in the market and each prospective employer to facilitate connections and expedite the process. Earning and maintaining trust while building connectivity and collaboration with both your job seekers and employers is the foundation of success.
Work at the job seeker’s pace using a collaborative plan. A cookie-cutter approach will not work with job seekers. Most people seeking new jobs for whatever reason are somewhat vulnerable often requiring confidence building and reassurance. Job seeking is a learned skill with a process and steps to follow and it is vital to help people at an inclusive pace so they can add the skills along with sufficient confidence to use those new skills.
Acknowledge, respect, and adapt to the job seekers’ barriers. Each job seeker has some sort of barrier. Barriers can range from minor to significant, but each must be overcome or mitigated. Barriers can range from transportation and/or daycare to significant mental health or physical disabilities language issues and cultural barriers. As a career advisor, job coach, or employment counselor, your knowledge of community resources can have a significant impact on how well your job seeker navigates their barriers.
Don’t assume people know about all of the resources available to help themselves. Navigating the patchwork of services provided in each community is difficult and varies from community to community. While focused on employment issues, it is not uncommon to be asked to help connect job seekers with barriers to mental health services, housing, food, and other support groups. Free financial or legal aid providers or respite services are a frequent connection as well.
While understanding your job isn’t about you, it’s about the people you serve, having the fortitude and ability to deal with bureaucracy, frustration, the lack of support, and the overwhelming scope of job seeker issues is important. Take care to look after yourself and recharging your health is easy to overlook.
Step 1 – Build rapport and make a connection. To really build trust with a job seeker, you need to be genuinely interested in them as a person and to learn what they want for their career, the major factors in their lives, how they make decisions, and what their ideas of success are. A great way to learn about your job seekers is to complete your organization’s intake process yourself.
Step 2 – Qualify your job seeker and ask questions. To really help someone, learn what they want for themselves, what have they already tried, what skills they have, what gaps need to be filled, and also to allay fears and anxiety. Always be learning and encouraging. Strike a balance between “magic wand dreams” and their contemporary reality. Discover their level of employment urgency, what is on fire in their lives, and what trade-offs might be necessary in their short-term and medium-term goals. Help them to define what their success looks like now, in the near term, and for their long-term goals.
Step 3 – Educating your job seekers and their support network. People’s ability to find new jobs or careers varies greatly, some people only require small amounts of assistance while others require significantly more. Some function individually, and others with large barriers may have one or more people who assist and support them. Identifying the gap between their current situation and where they want to be requires prioritizing, creating plans, and then successfully implementing those plans. Identifying, connecting, and utilizing the community resources for education, skills training, costs, mentorships, and employment steps are all key roles in your job.
Step 4 – Demonstration. At some point, every job seeker will need to be reassured that the plan that has been developed will get them to the job they want to achieve. Try to deliver value and victories, however small, early and often to build their confidence and encourage them to take larger and larger steps.
Appreciate failures will happen and be prepared to address anxiety and doubts. Preparation and hard work will make a difference but there are many variables outside your control and some will cause a job seeker to falter and even fail. Anticipate this will happen, coach your job seeker to be prepared, and how they can compensate by minimizing the impacts of setbacks.
Step 5 – Making the leap to the next step. We teach people how to help themselves. We help them to develop tools and strategies to overcome their barriers, we help them see positives where before they only saw negatives, we help with resumes and cover letters, we practice interview questions and role-play cold calls; but ultimately each job seeker takes a leap of faith and goes into an interview alone. We are there for support before and after but each job seeker eventually takes this important step.
“Lessons learned.” Every job seeker will experience failure, say the wrong thing, and despite all of the preparation will not be the person chosen. We ask job seekers when this happens, “What did you do right? What do you think you didn’t do well enough? And What would you do differently next time?” We debrief, rebuild confidence, encourage, and try again. We encourage job seekers not to rely on just one opportunity but to pursue multiple opportunities so that if one doesn’t result in a job offer, not only do they have a plan b, but a plan c, or d, or e.
Step 6 – Support and more support. Good career advisors continue to support their job seekers even after hiring. In my experience, a successful job seeker is most vulnerable to failing during orientation and onboarding. How a new hire’s first day, week, and even two weeks works out; if handled poorly by an employer can unravel everything. Make yourself available to listen, encourage, and continue to guide your job seeker until they are “fitting” in and getting the support they need from their leaders and co-workers is just as important as any of the other steps in their plan.
There will be times you will work for free. The career advisors I know are not 9-5 clock watchers, they know their job is more than the money, and their job is about making a difference in people’s lives, often responding to questions or needs outside of normal hours.
You will change people’s lives. Try not to be weighed down by this responsibility, but instead be invigorated by the opportunity to help people develop through building their skills and confidence, overcoming barriers, and achieving their goals, step by step.
Being a career advisor can be very frustrating.
Not only will your job seekers all come face to face with what will seem like impenetrable walls but you will as well. When this happens, take a breath and step back, regain your perspective, and remember, it’s not a wall, it’s just the next step in the process.
Being a career advisor ironically is a very precarious employment opportunity. The people I work with are all on short-term contracts. They are dedicated, driven to succeed, and usually work well away from the spotlight and when they help a job seeker find employment, they quickly turn their focus to the next person and begin working on the next step for that person. Currently, I am working with almost forty job seekers, all at a different place in their journeys. Doing this just might be the most challenging job I have ever had, but it is also one of the most rewarding.
To everyone who works with a career advisor, who benefits from working with a career advisor, or who is a career advisor.
Good luck and thank you.
Paul.