Job Search Methodology

(Expanding on a linkedin discussion board topic)

"How to get hired" books will tell you there are two approaches to job searching: front door and side door. Front door means the traditional methods of sending in resumes to apply for open positions. Side door means directly contacting the people in charge of hiring, or who can influence hiring. The books say side door methods are far more likely to actually result in getting a job. Which is not to say that calling the head actuary at some company will get you hired there. You may just be politely told he or she is busy and may or may not get back to you. In fact, more often than not that's what happens. However, most of the resumes we send through the front door get an equally dead-end response, but we do that anyway, right? The important thing is to use both methods. If the books are correct, odds are one of the side door attempts are what will get us a job. But people also get hired through traditional channels, so also keep blasting out those resumes.

One of the side door methods I've used are talking to people I know who know people in the insurance industry, e.g. my insurance agent or a coworker whose dad works in IT for a local company. That hasn't gotten me anywhere, but it could have and it was easy. Another was suggested to me by a recruiter. Use the soa.org actuarial directory advance search feature to find the names of actuaries at organizations in which you are interested. Click their names to get contact information - usually numbers at the companies they work for. The search is pretty good, alowing for partial words to narrow it down. For example, I typed "WI" in the state and "G" in the city to get actuaries in Green Bay, WI. "M" in the city got me both Madison and Milwaukee . . . and Mequon and Marshfield and Menomenee Falls. The point is, just searching by state was too broad, but it's possible to narrow it down. That let me pick several local companies and contact their head actuaries. Just called them up and let them know I'd like to work for their companies and wanted some advice on the skills they look for that I should emphasize or acquire on my resume. Of the five or so I've called, I only actually got to talk with two of them, but they were good conversations. And a step ahead of not talking to anyone.

I've got to admit, though, what seems to have been the most successful is simply sending out resumes to positions I've found through internet job board searches, i.e good old front door methods. I've mostly used http://www.actuary.com/ and http://www.americasjobexchange.com/. Some of the positions I applied for put me in contact with a couple recruiters. One of them set up a phone interview. Another phone interview is with a company responding directly to a resume I sent.

I haven't gotten beyond a phone interview yet, but I keep plugging away. I keep applying for open positions for which I'm qualified and continue preparing for exam FM to be more attractive in those positions and maybe qualify for more. Yeah, the field is tight, but someone gets hired, right? Who knows what goes through interviewers' minds when they're making their decisions? I figure if I just do the best I can, eventually I'll make a good impression on someone. And as competetive as it may seem when there are 100 applicants for a position . . . when I was looking for a mainframe developer job it was 300 applicants. So hey, it's not as bad as it could be.