Welcome back to the Prestige Staffing blog. In the next few editions, we want to focus on helping candidates take advantage of an improving job market.
It has been a rough two years for anyone looking for work, but now could be the time to land your new job! All numbers indicate that employers are hiring again but how do you make sure that you are the one that gets the job offer amongst so many candidates? There are a few basic guidelines to remember that will help ensure that you maximize your chance of landing the job. We will start with networking and the resume.
First, get yourself out there. I am constantly asked for advice on how someone should conduct their job search. My first question is always the same, “have you got your resume online?” It is alarming how many times the response is “NO”. Today’s job market is very different than it was 5 years ago and especially 15 years ago. Simply applying to a job ad is not going to get it done. Companies and recruiters alike are bombarded by candidates that are not qualified for the particular job they are applying for. This means that hiring managers will rely on recruiters and recruiters must be able to find your resume online. Make sure the resume contains all relative key words and skills that you have used over the years.
Next, become an expert with online job boards. I have heard from candidates that the job boards don’t have jobs for them, or you can’t get a job from them. Well, those types of responses also come from those that are still on the job market today. Treat looking for a job as a full-time job. Get up early every morning and review all new job postings. A great site to visit first is Indeed.com. It will pull jobs from all major sites and let you see various postings without having to go to 10 different places. Also, when recruiters do resume searches, the resumes are listed by relevance and date. So you need to make sure that you have any and all applicable key words listed that will cause your resume to come up. To make sure your resume comes up at the top, go in and modify your resume daily. This will keep your resume at the top every day instead of falling further and further to bottom of the list as time goes on. One last resume tip, the resume you have online is not the version you send to a recruiter. You should have a shorter more specific and tailored resume to send to a recruiter.
Lastly, every candidate must make sure that they are using the relationship with their recruiter to the fullest potential. What I mean by this is to utilize your recruiter with your networking efforts. For example, if you find a job posting online that you want to apply for that is directly with a company….don’t. I know that doesn’t make sense, but it will. Hiring managers and internal recruiters for companies receive so many resumes for openings, you will get lost in the shuffle. The resumes are usually screened by someone in HR that doesn’t understand the technology and they may rule you out before your resume is ever seen by the hiring manager. Also, jobs posted online by companies are typically generic job descriptions, thus the key elements a hiring manager is looking for are not represented there. This means you may have these key skills but just are not aware that you need to highlight them in the resume. Instead, I suggest working with your recruiter to develop a game plan to get you an interview. Bring any job openings you are interested in to your recruiter and let them work their network of contacts to figure out who is the hiring manager and they can get the full details of exactly what that manager is looking for. This will allow you to tailor your resume to the exact job you are looking at and not a generic job description. Also, this will get your resume reviewed by the hiring manager specific and not someone else.
Now it is up to your recruiter to get you an interview. In the next installment of the Prestige Staffing blog, we will go over everything you need to know to land your dream job in the interview.
