Finding Your Next Opportunity: Job Search Best Practices
On July 1, 2025, Steve Dalton kicked-off the second theme of our seminar series, Searching for Opportunities in and beyond a Transformed Industry, highlighting best practices to adopt in our job searches. Laura Sheehan, Walsh School of Foreign Service, joined Dalton in this session.
Drawing from his significant expertise, Dalton a proven, shared a practical framework for job searching and emphasized the importance of building authentic professional relationships. Doing so will allow you to cut through the noise, prioritize your outreach, and create meaningful connections – without burning out.
Although networking can be an intimidating and tiring experience, Dalton and Sheehan both stressed its value and reassured attendees that it doesn’t need to be a painful process! Especially in this challenging economic landscape, maintaining networks is crucial to land your next opportunity.
Given these considerations, Dalton introduced participants to his 2-Hour Method for job searching. This method challenges us to spend about one hour identifying organizations for which we would like to work and take the second hour reaching out to contacts or potential connections affiliated with these firms.
Within two hours, you should have a list of potential organizations, sectors, and people to contact and keep tabs on throughout your career transition. By virtue of doing this exercise, you should also have a good idea about what aspects of your next job are required, good to have, or relatively unimportant.
As part of this approach, Dalton also recommends we create a LAMP List when identifying potential places to work. This list would include:
- List of Employers.
- Information about Alumni who may serve as potential contacts.
- Your Motivation to contact this firm or individual.
- What Current Postings are online? What Opportunities Exist?
This structured approach to job searching is designed to both guide your actions during the job search, and to remove the decision-making fatigue and anxiety from questioning who to contact, where to work, or whether you could see yourself in a certain role.
Of course, this method is not designed to identify perfect job opportunities or nurture perfect contacts. It is, however, meant to give you a solid starting point from which you can explore new roles and organizations with confidence.
Other Previous Sessions
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