It's the holiday season and time has become a valuable and short commodity to most of us. My Day-Timer looks like a bus schedule with appointments, clients, holiday events, end-of-year deadlines, and other things that just HAVE to get done. I'm sure you can relate to how hectic lifestyles are at this time of year.
Have you ever thought about how much your time is worth? It's important to work smart and often working smart means outsourcing things that take a lot of your time or that someone else can do better. We outsource many things in our lives ranging from child care to things as complicated as dentistry. (You wouldn't do your own dentistry so technically you outsource that to a professional.) Busy executives know how to delegate and choose other talented people to complete tasks and projects for which it makes more sense economically and efficiently to outsource.
Let's look at some numbers. (I warn you, I'm not a numbers person so check my figures.) If you are targeting a salary of $150,000 a year, that works out to be about $75 an hour that you make if you were on an hourly scale. Throw in benefits, stock options and other factors like bonuses and that goes up. If you were going to rewire your house, you would hire an electrician, even if you happened to have an electrician's license yourself because A) you make more money as an executive per hour than you would spend paying the electrician, and B) the electrician probably has more experience, knows the little tricks, and has a relation with the codes people - benefits you can't bring to the rewiring job.
Let's look at the numbers on this concept. Let's say you are an executive making $150,000 a year (remember, works out to be about $75 an hour). You decide to rewire your house. That project ends up taking 80 hours of your time, a lot of stress, and a mess in your house that you have to clean up. 80 hours at $75 equals $6000. You could have hired an electrician who could have done a better job in a shorter amount of time for a lesser hourly rate, say $45 an hour. If the electrician did the job in half the time (40 hours) at $45 an hour, your cost would have been $1800. The SAVINGS to you would have been $4200 not to mention the hassle, the stress, and the mess.
Smart executives know that it is often more cost effective to have complicated, important tasks outsourced to someone who is an expert. The cost is less than the money saved so it's a good decision. Additionally, the knowledge, background and objectivity that a different person brings to the process is a benefit.
As a busy executive yourself, you need to consider this when thinking of having your resume developed by a professional career services firm. It is often more cost-effective to outsource the development of your resume and some of the tasks involved in job search than to struggle with them yourselves and still not be sure that the end result will produce results.
The first of the year is approaching rapidly and many people are procrastinating getting their job search materials ready to go until January. That's a poor decision. It's best to get everything prepared now so you are ready to go immediately in January when the hiring rush starts. Think about it.