Hope; key to job search success

What is the most important ingredient for a successful job search? No, it’s not a brilliant résumé nor great interview preparation although those are of course important. Hope is the factor which will have most impact on the success of your campaign.

“If you are job-hunting, the most important thing you need to do is to keep hope alive” according to Richard Nelson Bolles, author of What Color is Your Parachute? and The Job Hunter’s Bible. ?

What exactly is hope?

The word ‘hope’ is sometimes used to describe a desire for an ideal but probably unrealistic outcome. For example, you’ve planned a family picnic but the day dawns with heavy grey clouds and you hope the weather clears up in time. This is not hope; it’s wishful thinking.

The Oxford Dictionary defines ‘hope’ as the expectation of something desired and that is how the word is used in this article. Expectation of a successful outcome, or at least acknowledgement that the outcome is achievable, is essential if this hope is to drive you to working hard to achieve the outcome.

Hope was defined by Charles Richard Snyder as the sense of success resulting from the interaction between pathways and agency. From my understanding, there are at least three prerequisites for hope. These are:

1. focus on a specific objective
2. develop strategies to achieve this objective
3. be sufficiently motivated to put in the effort required to succeed

Going back to the picnic, you can’t do anything to change the weather so there would be no objective for you to work towards, no planned strategies to make the weather change happen and no sense of agency, no feeling of control and so no motivation to take any action. So hoping the weather would change for the picnic is not real hope with expectation.

If you see the outcome you hope for as ‘lovely but not likely’, your hope won’t do anything for you. But if you see your hope leading to a great and achievable outcome, if you can envisage a pathway to success, if you believe that you can do it, you will find yourself excited and enthusiastic. And as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “Nothing great has ever been done without enthusiasm”.

This sort of hope is motivational, exciting and it generates enthusiasm.

How to keep hope alive in the job search

Unless we work on keeping hope alive, job search can become a depressing experience leading to a downward spiral, hopelessness and failure. We all know stories of unsuccessful job seekers who believe there are no jobs for them, they’re too old or too young or they don’t have the right experience. No employer will look at a candidate who looks and acts as if without hope and confidence.

So let’s look at ways to build and maintain hope in the job search using the three components, focus on a specific objective, planned strategies and motivation to achieve the desired outcome..

Focus on a specific objective

Know exactly what job you are aiming for. That’s job singular, not jobs plural. Focusing your hope on that one job is much more powerful than trying to hope for a vague variety of jobs. However, you should have two possible employer organizations in mind. This is so that, should you not be successful with the first organization, you have still got the second one to work on so as not to lose momentum. Discuss your choice of job and prospective employer organizations with your support group, listen to their responses and let these boost your hope.

Yes, make sure that you establish a support group consisting of perhaps five or six people you know, like and trust, people who have faith in you. Discuss with the members of your support group the issues you face and how you plan to tackle them and ask for their advice. They will encourage and support you, boosting hope and confidence.

Write a mission statement. Every time you look at it, you will be reminded of your goal, you will think of the progress you are making and renew your hope, more determined than ever to continue to progress your campaign.

Planned strategies

Once you have decided on the sort of job you want and on the two organizations you are going to apply to, start creating a plan of how to achieve your objective. Make timelines to include thorough online research and identify names of possible contacts.

Find these people and follow them on LinkedIn, Twitter and other relevant social media platforms. When you feel confident to do so, comment on their posts and tweets, and invite them to connect with you. In this way you will be making yourself known within the organization and these connections, and their responses to your comments, will further raise your hope.

Meet regularly with your support group, discuss your progress, your plans and the challenges you face. Their belief in you, their wise advice, will strengthen your resolve as well as your hope.

Motivation to achieve the desired outcome

Hope is the belief that you will get the job. Visualize yourself in the job, see yourself being successful; this will boost your confidence and confirm your hope, your belief that you will be successful.

Regular contact with one or more members of your support group, reporting on your progress and seeking information and advice will also boost confidence and strengthen hope.

So too will simple things like saying thank you. Psychologist Jill Suttie’s research found that people who most frequently thanked those who had helped them were seen as more competent than those who don’t. If you are seen as competent by others, that, too, will strengthen your hope.

As you get closer to your goal, as you find out more about the position and establish a rapport with people working for your target organization, you will become better able to visualize yourself in the role and this will make a significant boost to your hope.

What hope does for your job search

Hope not only reduces the stress caused by job search, it helps us overcome stress by enabling you to visualize successfully getting the job you are seeking. It will build confidence in your job seeking skills and so motivate you to push ahead with your campaign.

As we said earlier, hope builds confidence – hope and confidence are not the same thing, but they interact with each other closely. Without hope there can be no confidence and when there is no confidence, there is no action. Hope without action is wishful thinking but when hope leads to confidence and confidence to action, then you have progress.

So start your job search campaign by setting a challenging but achievable objective, an objective worth hoping for, and then push through using these strategies to keep that hope very much alive.