Are You Doing the Basics Brilliantly?
Curt Skene’s In2Win! Career Coaching Supplement.
One of the simplest laws of business success is this: if you stick to the basics and do them consistently, repetitively and flawlessly, success is guaranteed. So too is your job search. The challenge for most executives is they make looking for work too darn complicated.
They spend days, if not weeks, tweaking and re-tweaking their resumes. They spend countless hours blindly submitting into nameless and faceless job boards. They surround themselves with a network of unemployed friends and strangely forget about talking to employed people.
If you want to be working know who you are and the value you will bring to the table and find great ways to communicate it to the right people. Take time to review all of your online postings (resumes, letters, group postings and other social media activity) and ask yourself if these messages are representative of the salary and position you are seeking. Use social media to take your brand viral so you get introduced to opportunities you never knew existed.
Reach out to everyone in your network and genuinely let them know you need their help and that you are also there to help them. Make it a habit to read a career-focused book every week and, most importantly, apply what you learn. Finally, be brilliant at doing your interviews as this is the “make or break moment” in your search.
Ongoing learning helps you speak with current insight and become someone others seek out.
Why I Wrote This Page
Because the basics don’t work through any single powerful moment. They work through compounding, the same small disciplines repeated so consistently that missing one day feels harmless, right up until missing days becomes the pattern.
This is why so many searches quietly stall without any single obvious cause. It’s never one missed networking call or one skipped day of reading. It’s the accumulation, weeks of “I’ll get back to the basics tomorrow” that never quite arrive. Complexity feels productive because it’s new and interesting. Consistency feels boring because you’ve already done it yesterday. But complexity rarely wins searches. Consistency does.
The professionals who look like they’re moving faster aren’t usually doing anything more sophisticated. They’re doing the same simple things, every day, without the gaps.
Action Steps
- Pick three basics, daily reading, networking outreach, interview practice, and track them daily, even with a simple checkmark. Visible gaps are easier to fix than invisible ones.
- When you’re tempted to add something complicated to your search, ask if you’ve actually mastered the basic version first.
- If you miss a day, don’t wait for Monday to restart. Restart the next day. The gap is what compounds, not the single miss.
In2Win! Afterthought
Curt’s current observations and updated guidance will be added here.
Suggested Reading Links
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