Hints and Tips for Job Seeking

Lately I’ve been helping out quite a few family, friends, friends of friends and colleagues with their job seeking. I think this is for two main reasons, firstly because I’m a friendly person who likes to help others and secondly because I have been a self-employed contractor for a number of years now, which has taught me a great deal about job seeking!

The nature of contracting means that I’ve always got an eye on the job market and numerous feelers out with relevant recruitment agencies, network groups and online recruitment site profiles. At least once every 18 months I’m back in the job seeking cycle looking for my next contract. Not to blow my own trumpet (but here goes) I have been pretty successful in my job seeking and managed to stay positive and focused in my job searching even during lean times.

Gradually I’ve found myself giving advice to a number of people with greater frequency (especially when people then send other people my way) and I seem to be saying, writing up or copying and pasting a lot of the same information and advice. It got me thinking that perhaps this was something that a lot of people would find useful, so I’m writing a series of articles with advice, hints and tips and resources for job seekers. In this first article I’ve talked about the changing face of the job market and given some broad hints and tips about job seeking.

Please feel free to pass this information on to your own family, friends and colleagues, I hope the information will be useful to you.

Good Luck and Happy Hunting!

Wealie
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The Changing Face of the Job Market

Gone are the days when you needed to print numerous copies of your CV and covering letters, then spend hours walking the streets to put your CV in front of recruitment agencies and potential employers. Then there were the hours spent ringing round companies, colleagues and people in your network to see what opportunities they may be aware of and to ask them if you could send them a copy of your CV. Not to mention all the hours spent filling in the same information on repetitive application forms until you got cramp in your hand and licking stamp after stamp until your lips cracked and then more walking to the post box leaving you dead on your feet!

I sometimes look back on those days when I first started looking for work and wonder how I managed to get it all done, have some semblance of a social life and not get disheartened by the rejection letters or worse the “no response”. However, though much of the physical labour, communication and repetitive tasks have been cut down or made easier, the core principles behind getting yourself noticed and ultimately employed remain the same and I’ve tried to cover the main ones in my hints and tips below.

Some General Hints and Tips for Job Seeking

Stand out from the crowd – There are a lot of people out there competing with you for jobs, so you need to stand out from the crowd to be noticed, wherever possible find innovative ways to communicate your skills and experience to potential employers. Think about what it is that you can bring to potential employers in terms of skills, experience and enthusiasm that will add benefit and deliver results for their business and then make sure that all your written materials and the way in which you speak at interview sell these aspects to them.
Presentation is everything - Whether it’s your LinkedIn profile, your CV, your job seeking website profile, your covering letter, or the suit you wear to the interview – How you present yourself is vital and first impressions still count.
So, make sure your written work (e.g. Job website profiles, CV, Covering Letters) is nicely presentable and easy to view, reads well, is relevant, clear, concise and to the point (remember, less is definitely more) and don’t forget to check it is has correct spelling and grammar.

Make sure your physical appearance is clean, smart and presentable at interviews, wear appropriate clothing, make up and accessories (where applicable). Remember, it’s not just your physical appearance that is part of the impression you make, hold your head high, hold good posture, shoulders back, no slouching and speak clearly with confidence and enthusiasm. You can convince them you want the job with your whole being – body, mind and speech!
Remain confident, positive and enthusiastic – People buy people and they react much better to a smile than a frown. A less experienced/skilled person who appears confident, positive and enthusiastic, speaks clearly and concisely will do much better in an interview than someone who mumbles semi-incoherently, doubts their own worth, has a negative attitude and low levels of enthusiasm and energy.
Now I know this one is easier said than done, people often start out positive, but we’re only human and when it seems like you are continually being rejected or looked over it is hard not to get a hit to your self esteem and if you’ve had the misfortune to be made redundant against you wishes this can start you out on the back foot, which is difficult to bring yourself back from. For a lot of people (myself included) having a job plays a vital role in bolstering our self confidence, sense of self worth and can be directly linked to our self esteem. It’s important to acknowledge this about ourselves, but look to find other sources of inspiration in our lives for these elements of our personalities.

If you find your positivity and enthusiasm is falling look for other things in your life to bolster this, perhaps take up a new hobby, or do some volunteer work, do something that makes you feel happy and good about yourself. Above all remember, that the rejection and lack of response is not meant to be personal, even though it sometimes feels that way.In unsettled times like these, the difficulties and challenges of finding a job are greatly enhanced as you are likely to be up against increased numbers of competition and the employers are much more choosy about the skills and experience they require. All of which means you may get more rejections and no responses than you would like and finding a role may take longer than you anticipated.
Don’t put all your eggs in one basket - We all have our individual preferences of where, for who and for how much we would like work, but by being too picky you can extend your job seeking period a lot longer.
Apply for as many suitable vacancies as you can, across as wide a commute area as possible, remember you don’t have to take a job that you’re offered, but wouldn’t it be nice to be able to choose between a few different offers rather than nervously waiting for a response from just one!

Sign up with as many relevant agencies as you can, local, large general and specialised agencies. For instance, Reed is an established general recruitment agency with branches across the country, recruiting across a wide range of roles from unskilled to professions in diverse business sectors and levels of seniority across a broad book of business clients of all sizes. In contrast to Reed some of the small independent recruitment agencies recruit to place people in a local area of around 30 – 50 miles, focusing on more junior office and unskilled roles, in maybe one or two business sectors, with a small book of small to medium sized business clients.
Use a variety of relevant tools – There are many job seeking resources out there, so make the most of as many of them as you can reasonably manage, social networking sites, online recruitment agencies, LinkedIn, your personal website/blog, professional bodies, your facebook page, the Job Centre, face to face networking events, newspaper job listings, speculative enquiries, etc.
You also need to ensure that you’re using relevant tools, for instance if you are a senior specialist manager (say an engineer) signing up with a recruitment agency that specialises in junior to mid manager office roles will not be a productive use of your times and highly unlikely to yield results!
Make sure you thoroughly understand how the resources you are using will benefit you before you invest your time in them, after all your time is precious and you need to focus your energy on the tools that will bring you results.
Keep it relevant and current – There’s nothing worse than when you visit someone’s online job profile or website and find that it is months, if not years out of date, or view a CV that is focused entirely on the skills and experience of a role that the individual hasn’t been doing for a long time. This sends a clear message that you’re not really all that interested in looking for a job right now, even if that is not the case.
As your online profiles and information are the ones that are the easiest to lose track of I suggest keeping a record of all the different resources and tools that you use, with the date when you last updated them. Bookmark all the websites, save a copy of the CV with the date in the name.

As a rule, before I begin job seeking in earnest I always update my CV and online profiles with my latest information. This is doubly important on the online recruitment sites as the longer your CV has been on the site the further down the listings it will come on searches by potential employers. I would recommend reviewing and where applicable refreshing your CV once every 3 months as a minimum while you are job seeking.
Making a little extra effort increases your chance of results - Undoubtedly with online searches, computer filled application forms that can be self populated and the acceptance of computer generated covering letters the process of searching and applying for jobs is much easier than it used to be. However, because of this much easier system, more people are using it and instead of 100s of applications a job might get 1000s!
Just doing the minimum won’t get you far, take a moment to tailor a CV for a role, or tweak the content of a self generated application form to show how you meet the expectations of the role, this could be what makes you stand out from the crowd.

Don’t assume that after you hit “send” or “submit” that the ball is now in the employer’s court. Most of the online recruitment websites have the name of the contact, an email address and if you’re lucky they’re telephone number. I recommend that when you submit an online application you follow it up with an email as a minimum and a call the following day if you have the details. By calling and personally speaking to a recruiter you are guaranteeing that they will look at your application!
Be mindful of how your personal online presence compares against your professional presence – This is an area that it is important to consider at all times and you may have heard of a number of people facing disciplinary action or getting dismissed for the way they have conducted themselves online or the way they have spoken about their employers.With more and more people taking part in social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Flickr and YouTube it is important to consider how much of your personal information is public (i.e. anyone on the internet can view it) and how it matches up against the professional profile you are wishing to present.
It’s also worth considering whether you really want to add work colleagues and employers as contacts on your social media. Are you happy that the things you say on your Facebook status update are right for your manager to see. How would you feel if a work colleague repeated something you put on MySpace to your manager? If you do add work colleagues and managers to your contacts and friends lists it might be worth considering filtering the types of information that they see from you.

Take some time to review all your personal online profiles to ensure you are happy that they don’t contradict your professional profiles, or depict you in a negative light to employers. On highly public sites like Twitter I would suggest being circumspect in the type of information, views and opinions that you share as by tweeting you are in fact “publishing” your thoughts to the world at large.

On sites like MySpace and Facebook review your privacy settings and set them to the levels you feel are appropriate for you. On content sharing sites like Flickr and YouTube, take a look at your content, is there anything that you wouldn’t want a potential employer to see, perhaps you should change the privacy settings on these items.
Build relationships – Fundamentally getting a job for all the technology available to us today is still about one person connecting with another. The biggest hurdle you face is getting noticed, getting the opportunity to talk one to one with a potential employer. It’s important to establish good relationships with recruitment consultants, people in your network such as work colleagues old and new or business partners and suppliers.
These are the people that have the potential to help or hinder your contact with potential employers. Remember, you never know where your next lead for a job will come from and having a personal recommendation from someone is the best way to get an interview, so be sure to cultivate good relationships with as many people as possible.

Once you’ve got the interview then it’s up to you to build rapport and understanding between you and your interviewer(s). You have a short space of time to make an impression, so make it count and remember, you’re interviewing them as much as they are you. Its important for you to consider whether this is someone you could work with, whether the company and it’s ethos is a good fit with your personal code of ethics. Ask questions about what you want to know, not just the pay and benefits, but also things like the opportunities for career progression, the strength of the company and its strategic vision going forward.