Some people, when about to lose a job or just after finishing an assignment, think of themselves as “being available for reassignment” or “available”.  This may work for rock stars, star athletes and other people, famous for their particular skills and expertise, but it really does not for the majority of workers.  If it does work for you, stop reading.

For the rest of us, job search really is about finding and being found.  You have to do both.  Waiting to be found is like being the average-looking high school good girl who is “available” but still doesn’t get asked to the dance because the average high school boy just didn’t ask.  

So how can you find the right next job and how can you be found? 

The first step is to know what skills and expertise you have and how to express those skills in the language of the people you want to know about them.  The internet has given us the expression “keywords”.  These are words and phrases used in your area of expertise that are searched for by recruiters, used in job postings, spoken by hiring managers when they ask HR to find someone and used over the cafeteria tables by the teams that work for them.  They are specific and technical.  They are rarely aspirational or even motivational.  Do you know what your keywords are?

You can find your keywords in your old resumes, your old performance reviews, your old profiles.  A better place to find them is in the profiles of people with titles you want, job descriptions of jobs you want, on the websites of the companies you are most interested in and in conversation with the people in the companies you want.

Some examples:

• Actinobacteria
• Bacillus
• Bacteroides
• DNA, Bacterial
• Drug Discovery
• Escherichia coli
• Gastrointestinal Tract