Designing and Managing a Job Opportunity “Pipeline”

Pipelines serve as a simple means to track each job lead you are working. Pipelines also helps us stay focused on moving job opportunities along by identifying for us what we know, (and don’s know!), about potential jobs.

Simply put, a pipeline is a collection of the job leads and opportunities you are working organized by their progress in a manner that helps us clearly see what next steps are necessary to promote a lead to a job offer. The pipeline stages might look like this:

 LEADS à   OPPORTUNITIES à   PROSPECTS à   OBJECTIVES à   OFFERS 

These categories could be defined as:

LEADS: Virtually every possible form of employment you would consider could be a lead. Likewise, any information as yet unverified regarding potential available positions would be placed in the lead category.

OPPORTUNITIES:  As we learn more about a lead, perhaps verifying a position once rumored as available as true, we promote those leads to opportunities. We are willing to invest more time and energy in the application and discovery process.

PROSPECTS: The discovery process will yield valuable information about the opportunity and help us determine if there is the potential for a “fit”.  These leads, having been promoted twice are deserving of more constant attention and the extra effort required digging deep in discovery to determine our ultimate interest and the quality of the fit.

OBJECTIVE: Following discovery we are able to sum up with the status of a prospect with an affirmation that, given an acceptable negotiation outcome: “I would like to work for this organization”. It is your OBJECTIVE for the employer produce an OFFER. Your research and tactics are very specific at this point.

You see now that as leads progress the discovery and specific activities you are involved in will become less superficial and more targeted as leads progress.  An example correlation:

LEAD à	OPPORTUNITYà	PROSPECTà	OBJECTIVE à	OFFER
2nd Hand info à	Resume/Query submittal à	Telephone screen à	Formal Interview	Offer negotiation

Likewise the information you gather evolves from vague to very specific. In order to progress to an OBJECTIVE from a lead a significant amount of information must be gathered and understood about a prospective position. Most of your leads will drop out of the pipeline as the information comes in and your disqualify leads. Consequently you should constantly be adding leads to the pipeline since only a fraction of your leads will progress through the pipeline to OBJECTIVE status.

The number of unanswered questions about the position should be virtually zero once the lead progresses all the way through to OFFER. Of course, LEADS will have an inverse relationship. By their nature there is more unknown than known about a LEAD. The process of discovery answers those questions and ultimately promotes or disqualifies LEADs. The pipeline is discovery completion rather than time based. As the information comes in, LEADs are evaluated and promoted along the pipeline if appropriate. This could be a matter of minutes or days.

Spend some time developing your categories and subsequent discovery questions early in your search. Be flexible and willing to learn from the process and to add or delete questions as you learn more about yourself, the market and the process.

The actual questions and their relative importance is a matter of personal choice and vocation dependent. Likewise where the categories appear in your pipeline may differ as a function of your priorities.

 Some very basic discovery question categories:

LEADS à	OPPORTUNITIES à	PROSPECTS à	OBJECTIVES à	OFFERS
Location	Relocation	Hiring Manager	Telecommute	Hire Bonus
Title	Compensation	Co-workers	Peer interviews	Stock Options
Job Descr.	Education required	Training	Continuing Ed.	Review cycle
Company	Reputation	Co. Financials	Customer Ref.	Retirement

As discussed previously, use your “team” to aid in the discovery necessary to answer your questions.

Dedicate specific time, perhaps weekly or more, to review each lead status and update your pipeline.

Hold yourself accountable; ask your support team to do so as well.

Up next:  Merging negotiation techniques with your opportunity pipeline to maximize offers.