From Portland to Denmark: Bjarke Kronborg’s Job Search Success Story

Bjarke Kronborg has spent his career working for various organizations in Portland, Oregon and Denmark. In his most recent job search, Bjarke started by identifying appealing job positions. Then, he researched the employers on LinkedIn. Finally, Bjarke searched his connections for mutual contacts at the company to get an insider’s perspective on the companies’ challenges and needs. With a persistent approach and an effective goal tracking method, Bjarke was able to land a new job in roughly five months. Discover his additional advice and career resources for job seekers in his success story.

What do you do for a career? Who do you work for?

I work for the Foundation for Environmental Education, where I oversee all aspects of the financial management of the organization from bookkeeping to financial forecasting and risk mitigation.

How long did it take you to find this job?

About five months or so.

How did you find your job? What resources did you use? What tool or tactic helped the most?

I found it very hard to network without a specific goal or job in mind, so I started focusing on identifying appealing job openings using popular job sites.

Once I found an interesting job, I would search my network for connections in that company — mostly via LinkedIn. Once I found a connection, I would reach out to my contact for an introduction to the people in the target company, and then try and have a chat with one or two people related to the job before writing/finalizing the written application. This gave me a good understanding of the organization and their challenges that allowed me to write an application that got my foot in the door.

What was the most difficult part of your job search? How did you overcome this challenge?

Keeping up my spirit, because it is so hard to see your progress.

I read an article that described a piece of research that people submit an average of 50 job applications before being hired. So I told myself to not despair until I hit that number. Knowing this data also gave me a target to work towards and I could see my progress. Every time I submitted a new application, I was 2% closer to my goal.

What is the single best piece of advice you would offer other job-seekers?

Figure out how you measure your progress, so you can see that you got closer by the end of the week. In my case it was number of job applications submitted.

Why do you love your job?

I get to work with a diverse group (18 people and 12 nationalities) and also support the global environment, which is one of my passions.