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Tips for Job Search
- Be More Than Prepared and Create Your Own Templates:
Always have an up-to-date resume ready to send – even if you are not currently looking for work. Have copies of your resume and cover letter ready to edit. Focus on skills and accordingly highlight in your resume. - Use Job Search Engines: Search the job search engines. Use the job search engine sites to search the major job boards, company sites, and other sites with job postings for you – fast. You will be able to search all the jobs posted online in one step. Use Advance Search options to find jobs that are the closest match to you.
- Jobs by Email Let the jobs come to you. Use job alerts to sign up and receive job listings by email. All the major job sites have search agents and some websites and apps specialize in sending announcements.
- Don’t be a copycat candidate: Job searches are a very personal experience and one-size-fits-all strategies will not help you stand out among the competition. Even though a certain interview tactic or style was successful for one candidate doesn’t mean it is the best strategy for you. Take into consideration your personal experiences, preferences and career goals and use them to position yourself as a unique candidate.
- Set Yourself Up for Success: If your skills aren’t current and competitive, it is awfully difficult to feel good about your viability as a candidate. To be successful, you will need to sell yourself with confidence to potential employers.
- Learn to look at job titles differently: Be open-minded about your preconceived notions of job titles. Roles in compliance, human resource, or administration, for example, are often perceived as being boring, career-limiting or otherwise undesirable. Such preconceptions, however, about the scope, strategic importance and long-term potential of these positions are not always true in today’s market. In many cases I’ve seen, these jobs offer exceptional opportunity for influential and attractive long-term careers.
- Network with your peers:One should aim to network with your peers, in addition to your more senior team members. Find ways to be the person that comes to mind when recruiters ask them who they’d recommend for the job. Your peers can also offer off-the-cuff, honest appraisals about your performance and work reputation when referring you for a job. These connections have the power either to open or close doors and your relationships with them will have a direct impact on which way the opportunity swings.
- Create your position:Don’t just sit around waiting for your “dream job” to open. Study the industry or field that you’re looking to move into, and determine a company or two that you’d like to work for.
- Learn how to listen:Job seekers are so caught up in conveying a certain message and image to the employer that they often fail to listen.
- Be strategic with social media:Social media is a vast resource for job seekers. The amount of content and connections thrown at you every day can become overwhelming and a time-suck if you’re not careful. Be strategic with how you use social media to seek out job opportunities. First, know where recruiters and hiring managers for your desired industry spend most of their time. For example, in you’re looking for a job in finance, LinkedIn might be a more valuable social media site to keep updated as opposed to, say, Twitter. If you are looking to land a job at a media company, on the other hand, Twitter is a great resource. Be sure to also connect with the profiles or pages of companies you want to work for to stay up to date on job openings and announcements.