New York Lawyer
July 7, 2001

Q:
I want to move from litigation into the training and development field. I keep answering ads, online and in the papers, and I get no response. I�ve sent my resume to recruiters, and I get no response. My educational credentials are solid and my firm is well-respected. What am I, chopped liver?

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A:
Nope, not chopped liver, but potentially an even harder sell: you are an unconventional product. A conventional, or linear, career path is one where there is a steady and logical progression from one job to the next, often within the same sector, segment or industry. Linear career paths make it easy for a potential employer (or his agent) to infer both what you did and why you did it, because each step leads logically to the next and the overall path is cast in terms of the rational boxes that appear on somebody�s organizational chart: Assistant Cashier, Cashier, Assistant Vice President, Vice President, Senior Vice President, etc. In conventional career paths, people tend to have conventional job titles and �product identities.� Clean, simple, impersonal.

Ads and recruiters lie at the heart of the conventional job market: they look for highly-qualified and safe candidates who will fit neatly into boxes the employer has defined. Conventional jobs are like ready-made suits. If you can walk into the store, pull one off the rack and find it fits perfectly, there is absolutely no reason not to buy it. There is a large market for ready-mades. But career shifters usual require custom-tailoring.

The people who screen ads and the recruiters who represent employers have no incentive to be charitable or imaginative or innovative. Their job is to plug conventional people into conventional slots � and to reduce the risk of a mis-fit as much as possible. Put another way, they are risk reducers, whose job it is to cull the few from the many and look for the safest bets. The safest bets will be people with nice, linear career paths, people who have found what they like to do and have stuck with it, advancing steadily and becoming more and more conventional as their career progresses.

Why should a risk-reducer be interested in you? You�re taking a step that creates a huge discontinuity in your career path. You�re (gulp!) leaving a profession -- how dare you! You don�t have any current product identity; you�re simply an ex- something. Your motivations are not clear: are your running from something or moving toward something? Maybe, they think while reading your wonderful, engaging cover letter, you�d be a great candidate � articulate, analytical, highly-motivated. But maybe you wouldn�t, so why take a risk? So they go with the safer bets, and your resume and ad response go into the round file.

About 15% of job seekers in the conventional job market find jobs through some form of ad. Maybe another 15% are placed by some sort of middleman � recruiter, headhunter, placement office, etc. Less than 5% -- even in the conventional job market � find their jobs through direct mail. The rest hear about, develop and close on opportunities through interpersonal networking.

For unconventional job seekers � and that means all career shifters � the numbers are very different. Jobs found through ads? Close to 0%. Jobs found through recruiters? Minus 10% -- as in �Shoo! Get away from me! Don�t waste my time!� Mailings? Totally ineffectual. How can you pitch a product (�if you should have a need for a _________�) when you don�t know exactly what the product is? Networking? That�s the ticket.

The vast majority of career shifters find new employment through interpersonal contacts and networking. Why? Because people are encountering � and making subjective judgments � about you, not a conventional product profile (�fifth year toxic-tort litigation associate�). You get to explain both your motivation for shifting or changing careers and how your prior experience would translate into you chosen field. You can create the rapport that leads someone to say, �Wow, we really could use someone like you.�

Ad screeners and recruiters don�t start by screening for rapport; they start by screening out risk factors, unknown quantities and unconventional profiles. Simply put, they have so many conventional candidates (ads often pull several hundred responses) that it�s easier and more cost effective to screen you out than give you a chance to strut your stuff in a complete selection process.

Sincerely,
Douglas B. Richardson
President, The Richardson Group