Success Stories
from the "Insider" Program

“The process is great, the materials are great, the whole program is really terrific— it’s the best thing I’ve found.”  

             So says Wayne, a Los Angeles real estate executive and veteran of 10 sessions of the Five O’Clock Club Insider meetings.

            Wayne signed up for the Five O’Clock Club job-search seminars after registering with FutureStep.com. Since he was attempting to leave his role as director of a not-for-profit, he knew that his old résumé was inadequate. He arranged first for private counseling to help with résumé building. “The Club approach to résumés is really different, and having the one-on-one input from a counselor on résumé building was a huge benefit.”

            Wayne had targeted commercial real estate companies, and he was about half way through his Insider Branch sessions when he reached the salary negotiation phase with the firm he is now with. “The tactical salary negotiation methods taught by the Club were tremendously helpful. I listened to some of the tapes more than once—I listened to the salary negotiation tape many times. What I learned was really central to pulling it off well. It’s something I’d never done well in the past.” He did it well enough to secure the position he wanted with a real estate investment portfolio.

            The group had input on salary negotiations as well, and he found that that it boosted his confidence to help others in the group who were just getting launched on the process. “You’re telling them to hang in there. This helps you to hang in there.”

Discovering that a Job Search Isn’t a Job Search

            Anthony was also grateful to have a group to bring his issues to every week. A not-for-profit COO in Connecticut who also discovered the Five O’Clock Club through FutureStep, he had been job searching for a year and a half. “I thought I was doing job search, but I realized I wasn’t after reading Targeting the Job You Want. The books helped me come to grips with reality. I saw that I needed to be more proactive in the search, more focused, more targeted. I’d simply been sending my résumé to ads for months on end.”

            And he came to look forward every week to the Insider Branch session. “It was helpful to have the other people hear what I was doing. The job hunt process can be very intimidating and lonely, and hearing what the others were struggling with was useful. There were a couple of people trying to make decisions around new jobs and new fields, very similar to what I was going through.

            “I learned to push more than one opportunity at once, which I hadn’t been doing prior to the Five O’Clock Club. It was helpful to get the assignment every week from the counselor—it would have been very easy not to have a focus for the week.”                        

            Anthony got his job after only four Insider Branch sessions. He believes that another aspect of Club methodology proved to be the key in landing his new job as COO of a much larger not-for-profit, which he was led to through networking. “The president of the organization that hired me told me that my follow-up letter was what did it—it differentiated me from two competitors.”

Benefiting from the Methodology in a Hot Market

            Irene, an IT consultant from Oklahoma, had a fairly short job search that was wrapped up after only 3 Insider Branch sessions. “The group was helpful from an emotional standpoint—knowing that there are people in similar situations, being able to listen, talk and brainstorm—that was useful.” She feels that key aspects of Five O’Clock Club methodology played a role in shortening her search. “The books were a great help. The targeted approach to job hunt helped me organize what I was doing—otherwise it was a random walk without much structure. And the Two-Minute pitch was very helpful.”

            Having valuable knowledge and skills in a hot field helped Irene land so quickly. “I contacted only about ten companies, based on referrals from friends, and got eight interviews. But structuring the process according to Club methodology was very useful.” Irene secured a consulting position with a small information technology firm, and has no intention of abandoning what she learned at the Five O’Clock Club. “I’m going to apply that structure to my consulting business—the objectives are the same.”

 “It boosted my confidence to help others in the group who were just getting launched in the process.”

When the Group Won’t Take "No” for an Answer

            Jack, a senior bank operations manager from New Jersey, switched to the Insider Branch after attending a few physical branch sessions. He wanted to avoid a commute to get to the meeting, but didn’t want to give up the group. "There were nights when we were all down, but it was a good group and our counselor was a good cheerleader and advisor. It kept me on a positive road. It was a great experience all the way around having the weekly group to check in with. It gave me momentum—I wanted to have things to report, to see what other people thought about what had happened.”

            Jack landed with a major investment bank managing Internet strategy, a position that he feels positions him well for the future. The lead that paid off came from networking with an old colleague and took several months to get to the offer stage. But the group helped him keep other things going. “At one of the Insider nights I said I was going to give up on one company. The group came after me and persuaded me not to give up. I wrote to the company again, made the follow-up phone calls, and got the right dialogue going.”