Eureka! A Job Search Lesson From The World Of Chess

Behind networking, the most successful job search technique is targeting companies. This involves identifying organizations you’d like to work for, researching them, and approaching them, regardless of whether there’s an open job on the table, but to get on their radar screens, to become known to people who are about to hire or who will in the future be hiring. Sometimes, though, there is an immediate need to fill a job, but even when there isn’t, jobs often get created when the right person shows up. Don’t think that’s fantasy; it happened to me twice in my career.

This proactive targeting results in somewhere around one-third of all jobs in America (maybe more) but, because it is an outgrowth of a completely different mentality, it isn’t used by enough candidates.

That different mentality is one of acting, not reacting; taking the first step, not the second one; initiating, not responding.

Now, I’ve been talking about this until I’m blue in the face (one of my grandmother’s favorite expressions), and I know I’m pretty good at this communications thing, but this is perhaps the one point I have most difficulty in getting across.

Then it hit me. Why I started thinking about chess, I have no idea. I don’t play the game, although I was taught chess in my teens and thought, for a fleeting moment in time that I was getting good at it. Boy, was I delusional! I’m either not smart enough to be good at chess or, at the very best, not left-brained enough. Left-brainers are logical, linear thinkers.

Be that as it may, the subject of chess popped into my brain this week, and all of a sudden, there it was: the idea of how to get this message to you in a different form. Eureka!

In chess there is something called the “first move advantage” (if you play, you probably know already what I’m driving at). This refers to the fact that the player who starts (“White”) wins more often than the other player (“Black”).

Numbers don’t lie

A little research came up with an interesting perspective: that this advantage is not random. It is, in fact, consistent. In 1946, W. F. Streeter examined the results of 5,598 games played in 45 international chess tournaments between 1851 and 1932, and the statistics were compelling. “White” won 38.12 percent of the games, “black” won 31.31 percent, and 30.56 percent of the games were played to a draw. If you split the draws in half (which is the accepted way of measurement in chess), “white” outplayed “black” 53.40 to 46.60. Since this landmark report, other chess organizations have found equal or better results, as high as 56-44 for “white.” When a presidential election is decided by that kind of margin, it’s called a landslide.

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Overall, every study ever done has put “white” ahead in victories by a margin of four points or more – all because “white” made the first move. Of course, disparity in skill changes this equation and, interestingly, it does not hold for games between beginners. Also, most grand masters agree that “the proper result of a perfectly played game will be a draw,” in the words of current Scottish GM Jonathan Rowson.

That said, you might ask, then, what is the advantage of making the first move? That question is simple enough for even a non-chess brain like mine to answer. In the “game” of careers and job searching, there is no perfectly played game. Therefore, as Joseph Bertin wrote in his 1735 textbook, The Noble Game of Chess, “He that plays first is understood to have the attack.”

And while I seriously don’t think I could beat a fourth grade kid at this game (providing someone reintroduced me to the rules – and I admit that would require someone with infinite patience and a rollicking sense of humor), I do clearly understand this concept, and I do see the vivid career lesson we can draw from it: Attack!

Proactive Job Searching

If you do this – targeting, researching, approaching, following up – by using a pretty simple set of steps and action points – and if you do it in an unrelenting manner, your winning percentage will rise. Will you win every game? Of course not. Will you win more than you lose? You can bet on it.

I’ve had a lot of fun researching the world of chess – and winning at chess – not because I intend to play the game (I know better than to fool myself) but because I love finding analogies, especially unorthodox ones, to make an old point in a new way.

The old point? Be proactive. Attack. Do not consider the game to be “perfectly played.” Just play it better than the other guy.

You’ll do that by making the first move.