RETHINK YOUR JOB SEARCH STRATEGY NOW

What can you change in your strategy today that can help advance your job search in the future? It is a good time to take stock of what is working in your present job search tactics and what is not.

Rethink how you plan your search:

 Few job-seekers have a written job project plan, even those who are certified project planners. Without a project plan, your job search has no guidance, no benchmarks, and no feedbacks to determine if your search in  on plan or facing delays. Components of an effective project plan include a marketing plan, to-do list, tracking opportunity, and beginning to end goal activity planning and tracking.

Rethink how you research:

Few job-seekers spend much time researching employers until just prior to an interview. However, the earlier you research an employer and the more effort you devote to researching, the higher your odds that you will get an interview. In addition, the more information you have about an employer before communicating with them, the higher your chances in being considered as one of the top candidates-even before interview. Look for non-public information, by going beyond websites and financial statements.

RETHINK HOW YOU NETWORK:

Most job-seekers have very short-term goals that limit their job search effectiveness. Information is your greatest currency as a job-seeker and networking gives you the opportunity to gain you the opportunity to gain non-public information for your pre-resume research. Your network can provide you access to company insiders. Your conversations with insiders are most effective when your goal is to discover company’s problems, goals and roadblocks. Just asking about openings or asking to have a resume passed is a terribly wasted opportunity and wastes your contact’s time.

RETHINK HOW YOU USE JOB BOARDS:

Job boards are great for research, but lousy for applying for a job. Job boards signal which companies have the budget to hire and which positions they are hiring – allowing the job-seeker to predict future hiring needs, which other positions, and what problems the company might have. Job boards can be a great tool to identify target companies, research types of positions and typical criteria.

RETHINK HOW YOU APPLY FOR A JOB:

Get ahead of the curve by identifying target companies and concentrating your networking to getting to know hiring managers at those target employers-long before these positions are advertised. By the time a job is listed on a job board, a hiring manager has already developed a list of people they have already met who could do the job. Job boards and recruiters are used as an employer back-up plan.

RETHINK HOW YO COMMUNICATE WITH EMPLOYERS:

Just like individualized marketing is more effective than sending mass e-mails, sending an individualized resume is also much more effective. According to multiple studies, less than 7 percent of candidates customize their resume and most send the same resume to each employer. This suggests that a customized resume strategy is even more effective, because so few of your competition actually do it.

 

Building an impressive resume

Focus on your knowledge, Achievement, skills, Qualities and responsibilities

When  you apply for  a  new  job, you  are  actually being  a salesperson  and  marketing a  product and the  product  is you .The first thing you need to do is to write an excellent cover letter. The second thing to do is build a great resume or CV. Together, your cover letter and CV or resume make up your ‘sales brochure’.

      The mistake many candidates make is to trot out their usual resume or CV, whatever   the job or employing organization, without tailoring their resume or CV to the job or company requirements. This is a fatal mistake. Interviewers often receive hundreds of resumes or CVs for every position and do not have time to make sense of each one. They want you to explain why you are ideal.

#Points that are explained !!!!

Where to start?

Understanding key terms

Review your work history

Resume objective

Rewrite using “Trigger” words

Achievements

Responsibilities

Qualities

Skills and qualifications

WHERE TO START?

Plan your resume or CV properly. Too many people get hold of a resume or CV template, populate the sections, send it off and wonder why they hear little back. CVs and resumes that win interviews are relevant and compelling, if you want to win interviews, yours must be too.          

UNDERSTAND KEY TERMS

The first step in resume preparation is to understand what the key terms mean so that you can use them appropriately. Figure out what knowledge. Skills, responsibilities, qualities and achievements mean.

Knowledge is what we know. We learned it through observation, study or experience, and it is familiar to us. For example, doctors know about the body.

A skill is the application of knowledge, usually comprising a practical ability. You are competent in something because of practice, training or experience. For example, skills include working on a computer, driving a car, influencing and facilitation.

Responsibilities are tasks we are required to undertake. These might include managing a budget, making sales, answering calls, or producing documents.

Qualities are what we are. For example. We may be trustworthy, reliable or flexible.

Achievements are things we have accomplished as a result of knowledge, skills or qualities and we should be proud of them. Most employers are interested in what we have achieved more than anything else.

REVIEW YOUR WORK HISTORY

Think over your work history carefully. As you do, list your :

1.     Main responsibilities for each role

2.     Acquired skills – both technical and non-technical

3.     Qualities that have helped you be successful

4.     Specific achievements and their results

5.     Small and large achievements , whether achieved on your own or as part of a team

Do not worry about length, format or spelling .All you want at this stage is to generate content   ideas.

RESUME OBJECTIVE

It will set you apart from other candidates if you include an objective or some kind of personal   summary at the beginning of your resume or CV. It should state, briefly but clearly:

1.Why you want the job

2. Why you are a suitable candidate

3. What benefits you can bring to the company

All employers want answers to these three questions and you can expect them to be asked in your job interview. What better way to impress  your interviewer than by answering these up front in the opening paragraph of your resume or CV?

REWRITE USING ‘TRIGGER‘  WORDS

There are words you can use in your CV or resume that have powerful meanings for employers and will cause it to have greater impact. If you use them appropriately, you can make a real impression, because they trigger the right reaction in your interviewer’s mind.

ACHIEVEMENTS

Remember that all potential employers want to know what you can do for them. They usually judge this based on what you have done for your current employer – your achievements. Employers want to fee l confident that you are able to work efficiently and resolve problems. Go back  through your achievements in your work history and objective and see if you need to re-word or add to each achievement so that it obvious to your potential new employer what the benefit was to your employer at the time.

RESPONSIBILITIES

Go back through your list of responsibilities. Re-word or add to them, incorporating some of the r\trigger words like budgeting, exceeding, evaluating, prioritizing, networking, motivating, etc. these are also powerful action words.

QUALITIES

You will have described some of your qualities in your personal summary or objective and also in work history, you will explain them more fully in your job interview. Some good trigger words to use when describing personal qualities here and at you interview are tactful, flexible, motivated, reliable, analytical, resourceful, thorough, people-focused etc. They help create a good impression.

SKILLS AND QUALIFICATIONS

Many CV’s and resumes have a separate section for skills and qualifications. Wherever you state these, use strong action words. Also remember to use short, punchy sentences that are going to get the information across and nothing more.

MAINTAINING Consistency online

MAINTAINING  Consistency online

NOTHING WILL DEEP SIX A JOB HUNTER’S CHANCES FASTER THAN THE APPEARANCE OF DECEPTION

To a potential employer who knows little about a person he is thinking of hiring, consistency conveys not only virtue but a whole lot more. A job candidate who comes across as consistent yields a first impression of reliability and trustworthiness.

         Recent surveys suggest that over 30 per cent of employers are using Facebook as a resource to screen potential employees. Many are also tapping heavily into professional networking sites like LinkedIn. If information from one or more of these online sources does not jive with the information in an applicant’s resume, red flags will be raised –and quickly; Nothing will deep six a job hunter’s chances faster than the appearance of deception. Here are a few things for job –seekers to remember to help avoid the inconsistency impasse.

  An online presence can hurt you but you might need one; in today’s world, just about every recruiter will try to find as much info as possible by conducting an online search for each potential candidate’s name. So, if you are completely devoid of an online existence, they cannot find anything contradictory about you ,right ?Well, yes, but the bad news is  that lack of an online presence can just as easily make them forget about you altogether. They are likely to quickly move on and check out other prospects, thereby eliminating you from the competition. It is so much smarter to make things easy for them by creating an elegant but accurate online identity which casts you in the best possible light.

Always tell the truth. If you cannot, then do not lie. If your resume says that you have a bachelor’s degree but your Facebook profile says you have a Master’s, it is very likely that your resume is headed for the trash can along with your chances of landing the job. Even  when the resume version seems less flattering, the two versions still conflict and you are about to come apparently as untruthful careless or both.     

Never deal in half-truths because the other guy will inevitably see the wrong half! When you say you are not employed full-time right now and then they find out from your Facebook page that you have actually been unemployed for over a year, the fact that you technically were not lying will not earn you or your candidacy very much sympathy.

Tailor your brand to the company. Just do not go too far. Simply copying your resume verbatim into your LinkedIn profile is not a good idea. Sure, it avoids inconsistencies, but it fails to showcase your personality and even worse, can make you appear lazy and uncaring. Your resume and profile should be complementary pieces to one another. It is alright to tailor your resume to the specific company or position you are vying for and make it look different from the resume you submit to another company. Just make sure the facts on the resumes are the same as those on your online profiles!

Look in the mirror but do it online! Before contacting potential employers or submitting resumes, find out what look like online. You would not go into an interview without first looking in the mirror, right? Well, you need to look at your online self just as carefully you can being by doing what most employers do: Google your own name. This is the first step in establishing a baseline of the information about you which is readily available to others. Then check every piece of information about you on every site you come up with and make sure it is both accurate and consistent with what you intend to tell your interviewers.

Consistency is not that hard to achieve. All it takes is a combination of honesty and diligence. The candidate who is so impressive offline needs to be the same guy as his online counterpart with the same name. Being truthful are the keys to maintaining on and offline consistency.

      

6 Reasons to Run

Job-seekers have issues to keep them up a right. They worry that the beautifully crafted cover letters they are sending off will not be read and that plum jobs will go to less deserving candidates. They worry that their resumes do not showcase their shining accomplishments well enough to command the six-figure offers they are hoping for. If they are job hunting while working, they worry that a stray comment be a hiring manager or human resources screener to the wrong person will make its way back to their own boss.

These are all reasonable worries. However, there is something else they should be worried about-that they will tumble into vortex and accept a job they should have scorned. What is vortex? It is the set of forces that overtakes a job-seeker when he or she is deep into the selection process and when the employer begins to send signals that he or she is interested.

The vortex is deadly because in the face of all that approval and positive feedback, it is easy to overlook slights and red flags that should warn us away from dangerous waters. It is easy to get sucked into the vortex and let our brains override what our instincts are telling us – that no matter how much winning and dining and affirmation is involved some companies do not deserve our talents.

If we end up taking a job because of the vortex effects, we will regret it. So, here is a list of six reasons to run from a job opportunity.

1.     Your employment references are requested before a strong mutual interest is established.

Any employer who values a job candidate also values his or her time and relationships. When a headhunter or company recruiter tells references too early in the game, they are sending a signal that the valuable time of your reference-givers is not nearly as valuable as the time that the company would waste in interviewing you before checking up on you. Your cue to bail.

2.     The employer asks for your approval for a credit or background check before strong mutual interest is established.

When a company says,” We need to check on you before we can spare the time to talk with you”, it is time to dodge. A talent-focused employer will at least call you for a phone interview before bothering you for personal information that they will not require if they do not make you a job offer.

3.     You are sent a questionnaire (not a job application) or online test to complete before you have had any human contact with the employer.  

When a company makes its selection process more efficient by shoving tests in your face before even chatting with you, they are sharing their views on reciprocity. “Prove that you are worth our time” is not the message that a talent-aware employer sends to the talented people applying to use their talents on their behalf.

4.     Unreasonable or short notice to travel for interview

Many a job-seeker are excited that a company is flying them to another city the very next day without stopping to think, “Wait a second, they didn’t ask me whether it was convenient for me.” One candidate was pressured to fly to the company’s headquarters on his wife’s birthday.  He was told,” If this isn’t a priority for you, you aren’t a priority for us.” He wanted for an hour or two before telling them,” If my personal life and important relationships aren’t  important to you, I don’t want to work for you.”

5.     You are told you cannot meet the team, or see the employee handbook before an offer is extended.

This is a big, neon red flag that plenty of job-seekers miss in the swirling colors of the vortex. You need to meet your co-workers, Period. You need to see the employee handbook, which you will be expected to adhere to during your tenure with the company and which will govern your working relationship. Ask yourself,” Why wouldn’t they? What are they afraid off?”

6.     All communications is funneled through the HR rep or the headhunter.

It makes sense to have an HR or third-party recruiter handling communication with a candidate over ‘mechanical’ issues. But if you are really interested in a job and have a question for your prospective manager, the manager absolutely needs to take that call. If you cannot get the manager’s attention now, what makes you think you will be able to when you work there?

Leave any of these six scary vortex situations behind and do not look back. You have a lot to offer, and if an employer cannot see it as the selection process unfolds, rest assured that your talents are better elsewhere.