How To Job-Hunt When You're Working Full-Time

As recently as the nineteen-eighties there were people who got through their entire careers without conducting even one stealth job search.

What's a stealth job search? It's a job search you conduct while you're working at a full-time job. You conduct your job search in stealth mode, right up to the minute you walk into your boss's office and say "I'm outta here!"

Back in the day most people didn't have to know how to job-hunt and work a full-time job at the same time. Now we all need to know how to do it!

It has become an essential skill for every working person to know -- how to get a job when you already have a job. Here are the steps:

1. First, decide what sort of job you want. Don't just pull up job ads and start applying for new jobs at random. Doing that is the best way to leave your current job and start a new job that you like even less! Take your time. You have a job, so you are many employers' favorite type of candidate. Decide what you want. Remember that your career will be most successful (and so will your life) when you're moving toward something all the time, rather than away from something.
2. Next, brand yourself for the jobs you want. In your Human-Voiced Resume, emphasize the stories from your career so far that highlight your talents at the very things you plan to do in your next job.
3. You can't update your LinkedIn profile too much when you're about to start a stealth job search, in case one of your co-workers notices the changes and rats you out to your boss. That's okay, because you can let LinkedIn know that you are open to contacts from recruiters. That's a good thing to do as you launch your stealth job search! This post on the LinkedIn blog explains how.
4. Don't rest your job-search hopes on recruiters -- create your own job-search engine, too! Start by creating your Target Employer List.
5. Now, use LinkedIn to search for your own, specific hiring manager at each of your target firms. Your hiring manager is not an HR person or a recruiter (unless you're applying for HR or recruiting jobs). It's the department manager of the department you plan to work in, like Purchasing, Finance or Sales. Use the search bar at the top of your LinkedIn homepage to search on the combination of the company name and the job title your manager is most likely to have.
6. You can also use Google and the company's own website to look for the name of your hiring manager. When in doubt, you can move up the organizational chart and write to the head of your function instead of your own hiring manager.
7. Compose a thoughtful Pain Letter to each hiring manager on your list. A Pain Letter is like a cover letter in the sense that it accompanies your resume, but that is the only thing cover letters and Pain Letters have in common. Read about Pain Letters here and here.
8. Now, customize your Human-Voiced Resume so that it suits the hiring manager you are writing to today and his or her organization as closely as possible. The power of a Pain Letter is its relevance to the reader -- your possible next boss -- and your Human-Voiced Resume must be relevant to your hiring manager, too!
9. Print your Pain Letter and customized Human-Voiced Resume and staple the two documents together with one staple in the upper left-hand corner of the Pain Letter. Send your Pain Packet to your hiring manager at work, at his or her desk! Log the outgoing Pain Packet on a spreadsheet or whatever app you use to track your job-search progress. Celebrate with a nice gelato!
10. You can enlist your friends in your stealth-job-search army, but don't do that by means of a blast email sent to all your friends at once. If you try that, one of your friends is sure to inadvertently forward your message to their friends and then your secret may get out.

What should you do if despite your best efforts, your current boss finds out about your job search or suspects you are looking? Your good instincts will serve you in that moment, but here's what Eliza did when her boss surprised her with a question.

Nora, Eliza's evil boss: So Eliza, are you happy here?

Eliza: Why do you ask, Nora?

Nora: There's a rumor that you're job-hunting.

Eliza: Nora, everyone is job-hunting in a sense. Everyone has their eyes open. You mentioned just a few weeks ago that if Google opened an office in town, you'd have a hard time not sending them a resume.

Nora: Yeah, but Google doesn't have an office in town.

Eliza: Nora, if you ever want to talk about my plans and aspirations that would be fine with me.

Nora: No, I don't have time for that. Just don't quit. I need you on my team if I'm going to hit my goals this year.

There is nothing like the power you will feel when you find the right job and accept a job offer, then go back to your current workplace and tell your boss "Thanks for everything, but I've accepted a new position." You will feel your power in your veins then!

Mastering the art of the stealth job search is a new-millennium career skill everyone needs to cultivate, and luckily it isn't hard to do. You can take a step in the direction of your next job right now!