New Year, New Career: Expert Job Search Tips to Land Your Dream Role in 2025

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David Perry
January 1, 2025
5 mins read

A One-on-One New Years Eve podcast interview with Tony Beshara & David Perry

[00:04:42.310] Tony Beshara

You want to talk about how to Get off your ass? That’s great. That’s great. All right, here we go. Welcome back, and as we do every Tuesday evening, we’d like to welcome Dave Perry. Dave is a particularly good friend, but what’s more important is he’s a retained search consultant from Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. We are international. He has been around the business for 39 going on 40 years. He’s not only an active, one of the best retained search recruiters in the world, he’s written nine books on how to find a job as well as how to hire. He’s produced two online programs about how to find a job and helping people find a job. And he comes to us every Tuesday evening talking about issues regarding looking for a job as well as hiring. It’s one thing if you’re in this profession to know to do it, it’s another thing to know what you’re doing, and it’s quite another thing to even give advice to people. He has a real interesting topic this evening since it’s New Year’s Eve. And New Year, a new you. And I got this message yesterday. That’s what he was going to talk about. I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

[00:06:08.980] Tony Beshara

So as always, Dave, welcome. And new year, new you. What brought this to mind?

[00:06:15.900] David Perry

Well, I’ve been at this a long time and I get these calls every year like this. What should your New Year’s resolutions be? We all do. And I’d like to suggest to my American friends, don’t resolve to get a job this year. Don’t.

If your New Year’s resolution includes finding a new job, let me make a suggestion. Forget about it.

Because most New Year’s resolutions are little more than vague wishes that never get acted on. I think I’ll lose weight. I’ll get more organized. I’ll find a new job. Sound familiar? So instead of resolving to find a job, you should commit to finding a job. There’s a difference in. Because a commitment is a whole lot more powerful than a resolution. So let me give the listeners four ways to get hired faster by making a commitment to find a new job. Here’s number one, set a clear goal with a deadline. You and I have written many times. We’ve talked many times, Tony, before about setting job search goals, so I’ll just hit the highlights here. Folks, choose a specific job title to aim for. Here’s the wrong thing to do. I want a job with benefits or something in retail. No!

Right? “I want to be a store manager.” Set a deadline, because this tells your subconscious brain that you’re serious about your goal. Pick a date in the future when you want to be employed, then get going. Make course corrections. What I mean by that? Once a week, sit down and analyze your results, whatever you’re doing. What activities brought the most calls from employers? Do more of that. What didn’t work? Do less of that. Change or stop doing it if it didn’t work. What’s next? Plan your week to do more of what’s working and less of what’s not working. That’s the first one.

Number two, stop wasting time. Seriously, a lot of folks complain that don’t have enough time to look hard, just find a new job. And that’s just below You have the same 24 hours that Bill Gates and Donald Trump get every day. You just need to use them more productively. So the next time you’re tempted to watch TV, crack a beer, sleep in or read People magazine, ask yourself, will this improve my life five years from now? The answer is no. Use that time to look hard for a job which will improve your life long term.

[00:08:54.430] David Perry

Number three, start job hunting right. Instead of passively waiting for jobs to appear in the one ads, on the Internet, in LinkedIn, in your email, go out and make your own luck. That means telling everyone you know about the position you seek. Now, listen carefully here. Do not call up folks and ask, “Hey, do you know anyone who’s hiring?” I can answer that for you right now. No! Oh, actually, yes! McDonald’s and Walmart are hiring. They’re done!

So if you want to be more prospective, more productive Instead, be specific about what you want and why you’re valuable. Say something like this instead, I just wrote this this morning: “I am looking for a small to mid-size firm within 45 miles of Dallas. Us that wants to save $200,000 or more on their shipping this year. That’s what I’ve done as an operations manager several times. Who do you know that I should be talking to?” Now, that’s a question!! If you call 20 people this week, With that statement or something that’s going to get you what you want, You’re going to get at least one referral that leads to a job, and that’s a five % success rate, which is considered extremely high in market.

[00:10:15.940] David Perry

Try it and see what happens.

And the fourth one, and then I’m going to be quiet, Tony, is never, ever give up. The most striking difference I see between successful job owners and people who struggle for months to get hired is how they handle problems, how they handle a rejection or perceive rejection. Successful people are not free of problems. They simply refuse to let problems keep them from their goals. Unsuccessful job hunters, on the other hand, let almost anything derailed the reference. I’m too tired. I don’t know the right scale. I don’t know anybody. I don’t have a college degree. Let me be blunt here, Tony. People may not want to hear this. Unless you’re in a coma, remember, I’ve been in a coma. Unless you’re in a coma, there’s really no excuse for not finding a job. The answer to any job search problem, anything you might have, is somewhere. Someone’s got a solution. It may be on the internet, it may be in a book, your book, maybe in one of my books, it may be at the library, or it might be on the tip of somebody’s tongue.

[00:11:21.800] David Perry

Your job is to persist until you solve your employment problem and never give up until you’re hired. So, Tony, there’s no shame in being unemployed or underemployed. The only shame is remaining that way. So don’t make a New Year’s resolution. Don’t make a resolution. Make a commitment. That’s going to be the difference. New year, new job. New year, new career. New job, new you, new attitude. There. I’ll stop.

[00:11:53.790] Tony Beshara

Well, we’re going to take a short break now. I’d like to go over some of the things that you mentioned that are that are to reinforce because you bring up such important things that a lot of people will make a vague commitment to I want to and think. I think I’m passively doing this and there’s nothing passive to it. There can’t be anything passive about taking a short break. Stay tuned. I don’t even share with Dave Perry on the job search solution. We’ll be right back. Don’t go away. Brilliant, brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

[00:12:54.510] Tony Beshara

And we are back with Dave Perry here on the Job Search solution, getting ready for the new year. Man, he’s got some great ideas. Before we get to that, Dave, tell people how they can reach you when they need you and your new products.

[00:13:09.090] David Perry

I’m going to make a different suggestion. Don’t mind. My wife, my business partner, Peter Martell, wrote a book about 10 years ago. Still appropriate. She wrote the book because she was teaching a class at an adult education center, and she was teaching the class to immigrants, many of which barely spoke English, couldn’t speak French at all, barely spoke English. So she was teaching them job search. Essentially, most of these adult education places, at least in Canada, sponsor immigrants. The schools only stay open if they’re effective. If people go there, learn stuff, and don’t get jobs, they’ll stop funding it, right? So she was hired to go in and teach job search because the year before they had about a 15 % success rate. The year, she taught job search. They shut the program down the next year. I’ll tell you why in a second. She had a 96 % success rate across the year. And out of that, she wrote a book called The Absolute Job Search Guide. It’s available on Amazon. It’s a workbook. It’s printed. It’s called The Absolute Job Search Guide by Anita Martell.

[00:14:29.430] David Perry

And The reason she was canned, or the program was not continued is because what we didn’t know, we knew that they had to be successful. What we didn’t know is that the schools counted on three quarters of the students coming back the next year to learn another set of skills because they hadn’t found a job. Well, her program resulted in a 96% of success rate. Students didn’t need to return, so registrations were down and they lost funding for two complete teachers. Anita was the first one to go. So that’s why she sat down and wrote the book. Irony, I know, I know, I know. But this is real life, right? If you’re looking for a job, take a look on Amazon for The Absolute Job Search Guide. It’s not expensive. And you can sit and write in it. A The Absolute Job Search Guide takes you step by step by step by step through everything that Tony and I talk about. I don’t normally talk about the book because when I do, they sell a lot, and then I need to get a lot of phone calls to drive you nuts. But hey, It’s the new year. Go ahead. Drive her nuts.

[00:15:33.550] Tony Beshara

That was some fun. Great. Well, some of the things you mentioned in the first portion of the program. One of the first things you mentioned was, quit doing the things that don’t work and doing the things that do work. And I’m always amazed at the, not just fairly, but very intelligent people that I run into that keep doing the same thing that doesn’t get them anywhere. And a friend of mine, everybody knows Phil McGraw, one of his mantras is, Well, how’s that working for you? And people don’t analyze, fairly often, once a month, at least. Well, what am I doing? What are the routines that I’m following? And how are they working for me? What are the results that I’m getting? And how should I change them? And what can I do to change them. And I’m all the time asking people, especially ones that have been out of work for some reason, they call me after they’ve been doing this for four or five months often. And they say, well, I finally need your help. And I’m thinking, what do you mean you need my help three months ago? And what are you doing?

[00:17:13.250] Tony Beshara

What have you been doing? And they go through, well, I respond to LinkedIn ads. And the things they do, they’ve gotten no direction from them. They’ve not thought. And then when they don’t work, they don’t think, well, what else could I have been doing? Man, if it doesn’t work, change it. And it isn’t hard to find that. Dave’s books, for instance, they’re full of things you can do. I mean, you could fill your year up with things that you could do that work. And you wouldn’t have to do all of them because the first So three or four are going to work real well. So you got to be thoughtful about it. If you worked in a job the way you are looking for a job, you’d lose it because you keep doing the same things that don’t work, and they’d go, that’s not working. They fire you. And I’m amazed at how people just don’t investigate it, don’t think it, don’t even think, well, this is not working. What should work? It’s easy to change. You just change it, and you struck on it in the beginning. Those four or five things, those five things you mentioned there are critical to it.

[00:18:51.310] David Perry

And folks, don’t beat yourself up because you’re not taught this. You’re not taught in school anywhere. Parents don’t know how to do this. Here’s the real part that just burns me. The average American spends 48 minutes a day looking for a job. So the average job search takes 38 If you take 40 weeks. Do the math. You know I’m a statistician, right? I’m going to call this my training. 48 minutes, that’s three quarters of an hour. Let’s call it 75 % of an hour. Well, if you multiply 48 minutes, 45 minutes times five days, because no one works on the weekend for a job, times 40 weeks, you get 154 something minutes. Here’s my point. If you take the 154 minutes and you divide it by eight hours, so eight times 60 minutes. Okay, folks? You divided it to eight hour chunks, which is, as Tony said, is a job. If you went to your work and you only worked for 45 minutes, it wouldn’t be working there very long. But job search, 48 minutes. This is a national survey. So if you divide the time it takes the average American to find a job by an eight hour day, you could find a job in two and a half weeks.

[00:20:15.480] David Perry

It’s math. It’s real simple math. This is why Anita wrote The Absolute Job Search Guide. It’s why we developed my new job on platform. It’s a step by step by step. And that’s the problem. Most people don’t have great project management skills. Most people, almost everyone has never been taught, do this, then do that, do this, then do that. You and I both know this because we’ve written books. You do this, this, this, this, this. There might be a hundred different things you have to do to find a job, but you have to do them in sequence, folks. And you have to know what that sequence is. So do yourself a favor. You’re looking for a job, pick up a copy of Tony’s books. Goodness, Gracious. What’s the most recent one? A hundred thousand. I can’t remember the title, Tony. It’s too early in the morning. But you wrote this after your company did a hundred thousand placements. That’s unbelievable. If I didn’t know him, it’s unbelievable. The average recruiter, if you can listen to the show, the average recruiter places three people, his best two friends and himself, and then they’re out of business.

[00:21:28.510] David Perry

Tony has been in this longer than I have. He remembers petting dinosaurs, okay? So, pick up his book or The Absolute Job Search Guide and follow it step by step.

[00:21:42.120] Tony Beshara

It’s not hard. You got to mind days, somebody just follow the instructions. It’s just a formula. Dave, you always make us think and wish you a wish you and your lovely wife, a beautiful Wife, a Happy New Year. Thank you all for listening, Christie, honey. I love you. So, I’ll pray for the world, please. Pray for the unborn, forgiven, ask forgiveness. Stay humble. Take a moment today to be grateful. Pray for those that are needing work. Pray for our society. Join us again for the Job Search solution. Well, that was… You always keep getting better, man.