Creating a Gem of a Career

So like him, consider what's at the root of what you do now. Are you an ideas person? Then think of different platforms where your ideas can help create a new product. Are you someone who's great at management? Try to get a seat on a board of directors or an advisory board to broaden your experience and develop a high-level perspective. "Top performers are always thinking, What comes next?" says McGovern. We need to feed the different parts of our personality, because one job may not provide all of the satisfaction we need to derive from work. Some of those 15 jobs you'll hold over the next decade may be at the same time. This mini-mogul approach is also a hedge against burnout and the rapidly morphing economic landscape.

Post Your Résumé . . . Forever

Although everyone may already be willing to take a new job if a great new gig smacks them in the face, the changing nature of technology means that we'll all be in the job market, all the time, even if we're happily employed. The first wave of online job boards made the want ads searchable, but they also let dilettantes flood hiring managers, making it unlikely for any given CV to float to the top. It also made it all too easy--and embarrassing--to apply for a job online only to find that you were applying for something at your own company. Busted.

The next generation of online job services gives more control to the employer than the job seeker. Employers are tired of sifting through junk from a pool limited to the unemployed and disaffected. Those aren't the best candidates. "We're all about the employed person," says McGovern, who founded job-matching service Mkt10 to meet this shift. "Companies want the top performers who are already doing well." That also means the gloves have come off. "Ten years ago, people didn't admit they were trying to hire the already employed," says ZoomInfo's Stern. "Now it's the other company's problem to figure out how to keep their own employees."

The new services force candidates to state their skills and interests honestly rather than just apply for a job with a large starting salary. The technology lets employers find qualified matches. Fortunately, it also gives job seekers more privacy. Services like Mkt10 reveal only a candidate's skills and profile. The potential candidate gives up her personal info only if she's interested in a company's offer to meet.

Missele Vegas, the HR director at VitalSpring Technologies, a health-care-benefits software company in McLean, Virginia, has been beta-testing Mkt10 to find candidates for the past seven months. She has used Monster since 1996 to fill positions but says that service too often left her with résumé spam and mismatched candidates. Vegas is currently using Mkt10 to look for everything from a CFO to an SAP program director. "They find people for me with 100% matches in the key elements I'm looking for--secret clearances for government work, technical skills for other positions," Vegas says. "It cuts down a lot of my pre-work." Positions that once took three or four months to fill now take 30 days.

Tushar Desai has benefited from the new approach, too. He completed a profile on Mkt10 that led to an account-executive position with VitalSpring this past fall. "The form was more detailed than 'What's your skill set?' " he says. "There were qualitative questions: Where did I want to be? What were my long-term goals?" Desai appreciated that depth, as well as the constant updates from the system about where he was matching and how far along his materials were. Having experienced a job match in place of a search, Desai is unlikely to go back to the old way of posting his résumé on Monster the next time he's thinking about a job change.

And that's exactly what these services want to accomplish. By helping us think about who we are, what we want from work, and what experiences we need to get there, they hope to create a pool of elite, available employees all ready for their next big thing on a moment's notice. "In the future, [employers] aren't going to advertise job openings anymore," says Warren Bare, CEO and founder of Jobkabob, another job-matching service. "They'll find you." It's a scary prospect for anyone who has ever been out of work. But for the agile, well-presented, ever-learning, constantly networking top performer, it sounds . . . perfect.