The author of  The 2-Hour Job Search  shows you how to land your dream job, from writing the perfect resume and cover letter to nailing any interview and negotiating your offer   Steve Dalton’s 2-Hour Job Search simplified the process of finding work by utilizing technology, and now The Job Closer helps you seal the deal by applying his time-saving techniques to the surrounding steps. As a career consultant, Dalton has found that job seekers routinely overinvest in trivial aspects of the employment hunt while underestimating the important ones.   In this guide, you’ll learn how to avoid wasted effort and excel in all areas by using tools such as: • The FIT Model, which helps job seekers nail the answer to “Tell me about yourself” using principles from the world of screenwriting • The RAC Model, perfect for writing efficient cover letters and answering “Why this company or job?” in an interview • The CAR Matrix, designed to help you craft compelling interview stories and deploy them in the most powerful way • The Prenegotiation Call, which takes the awkwardness out of asking for more and turns your negotiator from an adversary into a partner • And many more . . .   The Job Closer will leave you with more time for networking, making meaningful connections, and showcasing your unique talents, so your odds of success in landing the perfect job improve exponentially Steve Dalton is a program director and senior career consultant at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. He is also the founder of corporate training firm Contact2Colleague. INTRODUCTION The real voyage of discovery consists, not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. —Marcel Proust Prepare to be taken aback. My students and career center colleagues at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business know to expect this from me by now, but others may find my approaches . . . jarring. I happen to think that there’s a best way to do everything in the job search. Not a general best way, but a specific best way—a recipe, in other words—that different people can follow to create similarly tasty results. This is a surprisingly uncommon perspective in the job search world. For example, think back to the last job search article you read. Did it give you actual instructions to follow? Or did it suggest general tips that you’d have to convert into a plan of action yourself? I see way too much of the latter and basically none of the former. Tips are job search junk food—satisfying in the moment but lacking any real nutrition, repackaging conventional wisdom you’ve heard before into a slightly different format, making it seem new but adding no real value. It doesn’t have to be this way. Instructions for your job search are possible and frankly should be the norm. Aren’t job search experts in a better position to curate all of their tips into a usable format than overwhelmed job seekers conducting their first, second, or even tenth search? So, I created such a set of instructions for job search networking in my first book, The 2-Hour Job Search (2HJS) and eight years later I’m finally able to share with you my sets of instructions for everything else in your job search. Now, some tasks are difficult even with exact instructions. Take assembling furniture from IKEA, for example. Could you imagine what would happen if IKEA replaced their assembly instructions with assembly tips ? “Consider attaching the largest pieces to one another first,” or “Try to identify pieces that seem to naturally fit together”? There would be a revolt of literally global proportions, or at least a dramatic disruption in the Swedish meatball and lingonberry supply chains. Rest assured, I am not going to do that to you. Like you, I roll my eyes when I hear old career maxims such as these trotted out: • “The job search is a full-time job.” (If it was, how would people with full-time jobs ever find other jobs?) • “Sell yourself!” (Few people enjoy selling themselves, and fewer still enjoy hearing others sell themselves , so basically everyone hates this.) • “Put yourself out there!” (If you’re charming and extroverted, great advice! If not, terrible advice!) • “Job searching is an art, not a science.” (“I was much better at art than science.”) This book doesn’t do tips, and it doesn’t do conventional wisdom. It does frameworks—techniques you can immediately use to find the right job faster. A career center that fits in your pocket, if you will. Now, some of these frameworks may not work for you—some may even anger you—but if you’re in a pinch, any of these frameworks will be better than no framework at all, and you’ll find many of them are much more than just serviceable. They’d better be, as they are approaches I’ve refined over fifteen years as a career coach and literally thousands of attempts. To be fair, my goal here isn’t to give you perfect solutions; it is to give you the best readily-available solutions. Don’t think brain surgery