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Steve Dalton

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The 2-Hour Job Search, Second Edition: Using Technology to Get the Right Job Faster Kindle Edition

by Steve Dalton (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.6 534 ratings

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Use the latest technology to target potential employers and secure the first interview--no matter your experience, education, or network--with these revised and updated tools and recommendations.

“The most practical, stress-free guide ever written for finding a white-collar job.”—Dan Heath, coauthor of Switch and Made to Stick

Technology has changed not only the way we do business, but also the way we look for work. The 2-Hour Job Search rejects laundry lists of conventional wisdom in favor of a streamlined job search approach that produces results quickly and efficiently. In three steps, creator Steve Dalton shows you how to select, prioritize, and make contact with potential employers so you can land that critical first interview.

In this revised second edition, you'll find updated advice on how to efficiently surf online job postings, how to reach out to contacts at your dream workplace and when to follow up, and advice on using LinkedIn, Indeed, and Google to your best advantage. Dalton incorporates ideas from leading thinkers in behavioral economics, psychology, and game theory, as well as success stories from readers of the first edition.

The 2-Hour Job Search method has proven so successful that it has been shared at schools across the globe and is a formal part of the curriculum for all first-year MBAs at Duke University. With this book, you'll learn how to make it work for you too.

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251 pages
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Publication date

April 21, 2020
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“This is the most practical, stress-free guide ever written for finding a white-collar job. Dalton has somehow managed to squeeze all the anxiety out of the job-hunting process. Simply put: If you need a job, you need this book.”—Dan Heath, coauthor of Switch and Made to Stick

About the Author

Steve Dalton is a program director and senior career consultant at Duke University's business school (Fuqua). He holds his own MBA from the same institution. Prior to entering the career services industry, Steve was an associate marketing manager at General Mills and a strategy consultant at A.T. Kearney.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards. —ALDOUS HUXLEY

I’ve heard numerous theories for why the job search is so difficult these days: unresponsive employers, an uncertain economy, outsourcing, nepotism, poor work ethic, too much reality TV. During my decade and a half as a senior career coach and programming director at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, I’ve helped people of all backgrounds, professions, and ages through the job search process, and I attribute its difficulty to something else entirely—technology.

Technology has made our lives easier in so many ways, but it has only complicated the modern-day job search. Before internet job postings grew in popularity circa 2000, the job search was a simple (though tedious) process:

STEP 1 (OPTIONAL). Find classified ads in newspaper.
STEP 2. Mail resume and cover letter to potential employers.
STEP 3. Wait for invitations to interview.

That doesn’t sound so bad, right? Ship out resumes and cover letters, and whoever is interested writes you back. Very straightforward. And, believe it or not, it actually worked! Of course, those with connections to the potential employer still fared best, not having to rely on a piece of paper to make their first impression for them; however, cold calls by phone or mail were often all it would take to get an interview.

Fast-forward a couple of decades. The internet’s in full swing, websites find relevant job postings for you, and resumes can be submitted online at any hour of the day. Although it’s easier than ever before to find jobs, why does it now seem so much harder to actually get one? In short, technology made applying for jobs so efficient that hiring became inefficient.

Technology effectively ruined the “mail and wait” job search strategy because it is now far more difficult for employers to pick out the few interesting applicants from the massive new influx of casual applicants.

Applying for jobs used to require significant time and energy to search classified ads in your local paper, type and print cover letters and resumes (or CVs, depending on your profession and part of the world—I use the terms interchangeably in this book) on nice paper, and package them up in envelopes for mailing. Not everyone had that kind of spare time and energy (or money for that matter—stationery and postage weren’t cheap!), and applying to any job required at least a minimal amount of research—heading to the library to find an address to mail your CV to, for example.

With the internet, applying for a job can take less than a minute. Google a potential employer’s name, click on the careers section of their website, and submit your information and resume. Done. When it’s that easy, anyone can do it—and everyone does. Thus recruiters who, before internet job postings, used to get a dozen or so applications in several weeks from mostly local candidates, now get hundreds or thousands from across the country within hours.

Who has time to read hundreds of CVs? Recruiters today read resumes the way most of us read websites—ignoring a majority of what’s on the page and skipping to the headlines of greatest interest—in the case of resumes, that usually means objective information like schools attended, previous employers, and job titles, if that.

That’s if hiring managers actually look at CVs received online in the first place. My students commonly describe online job postings as black holes, and I agree. Because there is no way for a hiring manager to read all those applications, the only fair thing to do is not read any of them, so they may avoid online applicants entirely. (That this attitude saves a hiring manager many hours of additional work is hardly coincidental!) Employers these days rely instead on internal referrals to decide whom to interview.

Research backs this up. According to one study, for every one position the New York Federal Reserve filled with an online job posting applicant, they filled twelve through internal referrals.

Put another way, every time you apply for a job online, not only are you hoping to be one of the handful of applicants employers choose to speak to out of the hundreds who apply, you’re also hoping that it’s the one in thirteen that will be filled by an online applicant rather than an internal referral. The odds are nearly insurmountable. Pouring more hours into online applications is the equivalent of trying to pay your rent by buying even more lottery tickets. It may work once in a blue moon, but that doesn’t make it a good approach.

Getting internal referrals is simply the only predictable way to get interviews; getting them efficiently is the core challenge of the modern job search.

This book is effectively a “speedrun” approach for completing that core challenge. Speedrunning is a video-gaming hobby where players record themselves trying to finish video games in world-record times by combining world-class reflexes and concentration with a deep knowledge of quirks and vulnerabilities in each video game’s programming. Interestingly, it is a communal process rather than a competitive one; once one player identifies a new shortcut, every other player can now adopt that shortcut to improve their own times, further raising the bar. Similarly, this revised edition of The 2-Hour Job Search (2HJS for short) is itself informed by the thousands of readers, users, and practitioners who read the original edition and contributed their own shortcuts to the process. In that sense, we are all now standing on the shoulders of giants, and by considering the steps outlined in this book, you are joining a community that is eager to share their own best practices for this process with you.

Before we proceed further, a quick disclaimer: The titular two hours refers to the amount of time it takes to lay the groundwork for your process, not the totality of your job search. That said, once your foundation is in place, the remaining steps in your search become seamless, almost automatic. More on that later.

Now let’s finish discussing why online job postings make a speedrun approach to networking necessary in the first place. Consider Becca’s experience, for example (see sidebar, below). Online job postings are not inherently evil, nor was Becca being lazy by applying for so many jobs online—quite the opposite, actually. She was simply following the same old “mail and wait” paradigm her parents did, except electronically rather than with stamps and envelopes. It felt like progress, so she decided to invest as much time as she could into that approach rather than risk wasting time by experimenting with other approaches. This strategy is also known as satisficing. Satisfice is a
hybrid word formed from satisfy and suffice. Coined by Nobel Prize–winning social scientist Herbert Simon in 1956, the term describes a person’s tendency to select the first available solution that meets a given need rather than an optimal solution.

Believe it or not, satisficing is actually a good strategy in a majority of cases—it’s what prevents us from spending hours deciding which of the dozens of hand soaps to buy at the grocery store. The alternative to satisficing is maximizing. Maximizing means finding the best possible choice, regardless of the amount of time or effort it takes. For major purchases like a house, erring on the side of maximizing rather than satisficing makes good sense, but in most cases satisficing, well, satisfices.

Hiring managers are classic satisficers, which makes total sense. Their ability to make outstanding hiring decisions rarely if ever factors into how big their raise is at the end of the year—therefore, they’ll want to spend as little time making hiring decisions as possible. For them, finding a “good enough” candidate quickly is better than finding a “perfect” candidate slowly—so their hiring decision is very unlikely to involve reviewing hundreds of resumes!

The fundamental flaw in Becca’s satisficing strategy was that she was satisficing on the wrong need; she satisficed on the feeling of making progress, rather than on actually making progress. To be fair, the latter is much more difficult and the route for how to do so is very unclear—thus many people make this error. But, unfortunately, just because something hurts doesn’t make it exercise. I call this phenomenon the Defensive Job Search (DJS)—job searching for stats and validation rather than efficacy. The DJS is ubiquitous and hard to quit, but quitting it is an essential first step to a successful job search (see sidebar, page 6). No matter how diligently or efficiently Becca employed a defensive job search, pushing out resumes and cover letters to employers through online job postings, she was unlikely to succeed.

Technology in this case had, as Aldous Huxley said, only given job seekers a more efficient means for going backward. It simplified the application process to the point of ruin, drowning out the qualified candidates (who used to be willing to take the time and effort required to apply via the postal mail method, as they had good odds of success) among many unqualified candidates (who didn’t bother to apply when the process was costly but applied in droves once those time and effort costs were removed). “Mail and wait” simply wasn’t designed for the explosion in internet-aided applicants.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07VJZFK4C
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Ten Speed Press; Revised edition (April 21, 2020)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ April 21, 2020
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 8398 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 251 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #51,371 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
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Customer Reviews:
4.6 534 ratings

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Steve Dalton

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Steve Dalton was a career coach at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business for 17 years before leaving to found his corporate training firm, Contact2Colleague. Prior to entering the career services industry, Dalton was a strategy consultant at A.T. Kearney and an associate marketing manager at General Mills. He holds an MBA from Duke University and a chemical engineering degree from Case Western University.

Dalton has appeared in the Financial Times, Wall St. Journal, and US News & World Report, and he is a regular contributor at The Huffington Post.

Dalton presents workshops on The 2-Hour Job Search at dozens of schools across North America and Europe each year, and its concepts are taught at over one hundred universities worldwide.

Dalton can be followed on Twitter (@Dalton_Steve), his book’s LinkedIn Group (The 2-Hour Job Search Q&A Forum), and at 2hourjobsearch.com. He currently resides in Durham, North Carolina.

Customer reviews

4.6 out of 5

534 global ratings

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Customers say

Customers find the book practical, actionable, and perfect for STEM professionals. They say it improves results fourfold, eliminates stress, and saves time. Customers also say the instructions are clear and relevant.

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Practicality Writing quality Readability

15 customers mention "Practicality"15 positive0 negative

Customers find the book practical, actionable, and effective for entering the workforce. They appreciate the great methods for networking and acquiring meaningful knowledge to assist in the job search. Readers also appreciate the trouble-shooting sections that cater to unique situations. They say the book has changed everything and eliminated much of the stress they have had about the job hunt.

"...This book is great for introducing techniques to define and streamline the techniques and has improved my results fourfold...." Read more

"...The second edition's enhanced Q&A sections are particularly beneficial, addressing common concerns and scenarios job seekers frequently encounter...." Read more

"I never write reviews, but I can’t pass this one up. This book has changed everything...." Read more

"...The process is quick, simple, and effective." Read more

6 customers mention "Writing quality"5 positive1 negative

Customers find the writing quality of the book clear and relevant.

"...this method many times at the university level, because his instructions are clear and his explanations are relevant...." Read more

"Simplistic language and dialect are easy to follow, yet largely missed by the arguments of academics in this respect." Read more

"...The process is quick, simple, and effective." Read more

"...The process itself is fairly obvious and has been set out in multiple sources over the years...." Read more

4 customers mention "Readability"4 positive0 negative

Customers find the book easy to read and say it saves time.

"...Dalton's approach effectively prioritizes efforts and eliminates time-wasting activities...." Read more

"...The process is quick, simple, and effective." Read more

"...providing step-by-step strategies to find jobs faster and more efficiently...." Read more

"I like that this book has a system that is repeatable and saves time.I am not this book will work well with an executive job search." Read more

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GeepersKid

Perfect Job Search setup for STEM professionals and those who are more process oriented

Reviewed in the United States on July 6, 2023

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As a career coach for STEM professionals, I notice that many of my clients are pretty process-centric. They like to follow instructions and check boxes. So to them, getting vague advice like "you need to network more" or "reach out to people on LinkedIn for informational interviews" can be panic-inducing.

Enter: Steve Dalton's 2-Hour Job Search.

Steve lays out, in incredible detail, how to evaluate your needs and then start a structured approach to networking through Informational Meetings - from finding the companies, to finding contacts, to reaching out to these contacts, to researching for the Informational Meeting, to the meeting itself and the FollowUp. And, you'll never be sitting around agonizing about when to send a follow-up email to a potential contact because, yep, Steve has a method for that as well!

It is obvious that he has taught this method many times at the university level, because his instructions are clear and his explanations are relevant. He knows every place were people might want to short-cut his program steps, and he has examples of what happens when they do.

I use this program to coach my clients who get overwhelmed easily because it is broken down into clear steps. And for visual learners, Steve includes flow charts to summarize the process. For those of you who like outlines, Steve supplies those at the end of his book as well.

I found that having the digital version of this book was more useful to me because it's easily searchable. I do have a hardcopy as well, though, full of tabs and dog-eared pages. If you are comfortable with a spreadsheet, google searching, job-search websites and LinkedIn, you have the skills to use Steve's methods.

6 people found this helpful

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Shrinivas Shenoy

Great book for a beginner job search

Reviewed in the United States on March 16, 2024

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I have not had to look for a job for almost 10 years now and entered the job market end of 2023. The job searching techniques have changes so much that I knew I needed some help with revamping my techniques. This book is great for introducing techniques to define and streamline the techniques and has improved my results fourfold. The techniques will help you make the job search way less stressful and a much smoother process.

The only con for people more long term in their career, the book defines some components most specifically to industry beginners. If you wish to implement them you will have to modify them per you experience and industry as well.

2 people found this helpful

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Easiest Columbus OH overnight delivery… for a great product with the cheapest price out there!

Good reference for job seeking… but requires a lot of effort!

Reviewed in the United States on November 4, 2023

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Simplistic language and dialect are easy to follow, yet largely missed by the arguments of academics in this respect.

One person found this helpful

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J. Edmunds

Excellent resource for all types of job seekers

Reviewed in the United States on January 20, 2023

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Dalton's "The 2-Hour Job Search" offers a refreshingly systematic approach to the often overwhelming task of job hunting. The second edition builds upon the original's time-saving strategies while introducing valuable new content, particularly in its expanded questions and answers sections to troubleshoot and motivate that monkey mind.

Dalton's method, centered around the LAMP (List, Advocacy, Motivation, Posting) framework, provides job seekers with a clear, actionable plan to efficiently identify and pursue promising opportunities. The book's strength lies in its ability to demystify networking and transform it into a manageable process.

The second edition's enhanced Q&A sections are particularly beneficial, addressing common concerns and scenarios job seekers frequently encounter. These sections offer practical solutions to challenges such as dealing with unresponsive contacts, navigating applicant tracking systems, and adapting the method for different career stages or industries.

While the two-hour timeframe may seem ambitious, Dalton's approach effectively prioritizes efforts and eliminates time-wasting activities. The book's step-by-step guidance, coupled with its newly expanded troubleshooting sections, makes it an invaluable resource for anyone looking to streamline their job search and increase their chances of landing interviews in today's flooded applications portals world.

One person found this helpful

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Tiffany

2 Interviews in 2 Weeks With 2 Different Dream Companies

Reviewed in the United States on March 19, 2024

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I never write reviews, but I can’t pass this one up. This book has changed everything. I am now telling everyone I meet that is looking for a job to buy this book right away!!!
I wasted a lot of time not being able to create a process for my job search. For months I’ve been trying to piece together the MASSIVE amounts of advice I’ve been getting, which left me with a lack of direction, and a lot of rejection.
There is NO WAY this book won’t help you!! Good luck!

2 people found this helpful

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Ali Reza Soltani

THE ONLY WAY TO GET A JOB IN TODAY'S IT JOB MARKET

Reviewed in the United States on March 27, 2024

Verified Purchase

I was introduced to this book in 2018 during my MBA studies and then bought another copy of the book in early 2024 when I was laid off from my IT consulting job. This book teaches you how to spend 2 hours laying out the framework for your job search.

It teaches you how to prioritize companies you want to work for, how to reach out to the right people in your network, how to communicate with them and find the right ones that want to help (think of like an NPS scoring system), so on and so forth.

The important lesson it teaches is the fallacy of applying for endless jobs online and how pointless it is. Thanks to this book I was able to land a product manager job through a contact I worked with 8 years ago. 2 15 minute interviews and I was in, because he was the hiring manager.

For the cost of this book the ROI is unbelievable. It's a good read, give it a shot!

5 people found this helpful

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Anthony J. Moffa

Good strategy

Reviewed in the United States on January 22, 2024

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Instead of giving stock job hunting advice like apply to online job posts or work your network, the author gives actionable step by step instructions on how to network and how to meet hiring managers. The process is quick, simple, and effective.

3 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Derick

It works

Reviewed in Canada on July 9, 2021

Verified Purchase

Prior to this book, I applied to jobs like normal people. I probably applied to 50 job applications per week with not much luck. Every 50 applications would probably get me 1 or 2 interviews. This was my comfort zone, it was easy to do and quite fast. After doing this for 9 months, I got discouraged during COVID so I decided to try a new method. The 2-hour job search method. I might have gotten lucky because I found a booster from my very first email and that landed me a job 2 months later. But even if I hadn't secured that job I would have continued using this method. My interview rate was a lot higher at a 20% response rate and the method was even faster. After the initial setup, it takes probably 10 mins of work each day.

I don't usually write reviews but I feel like this book should be shared more. It works and it's efficient. It does involve you getting out of your comfort zone if you aren't used to networking. But once you do one or two interviews it's easy sailings.

I'm actually surprised there are so few reviews for this book.

4 people found this helpful

Edward Chung

Very very practical strategy

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 26, 2024

Verified Purchase

After sending out hundreds of applications without any feedback, I was on my nerves' end. This book layouts a refreshing and practical strategy for tackling the job hunting game. Still working hard at it but does make sense.

Client d'Amazon

Perfect

Reviewed in Spain on November 20, 2023

Verified Purchase

Nice book

Christian Añon

Helpful information

Reviewed in Australia on March 19, 2021

Verified Purchase

Book was a good read. As a mature age student completing university as part of a career change plan, the information provided in the book is very useful in learning the job searching techniques used in today's world.

kishore

Great book for systematic job search approach

Reviewed in Canada on November 6, 2023

Verified Purchase

The book has very good systems to follow. It is not generic advice but specific steps to speed your job search. Highly recommend it to graduates.

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