3 Tips to Winning Your Job Search
Are you fighting the good fight, trying to land a new job? Immediately I want to help you out by providing 3 Tips to Winning Your Job Search. #ProjectHelpYouGrow was created to help business professionals with a variety of tasks, including finding a job. This blog will have a variety of contributors to help you improve your skills. Authors will include: SME (Subject Matter Experts), Business Coaches, Recruiters, HR Directors, and Business Owners. I will also write about topics to help you not only land a job but improve your overall business acumen.
Have you been on the job market for a while? If so, are you having trouble getting an interview or receiving offers from prospective employers? You might need to make some adjustments to your strategy. Get ready for the first of many blogs to come. My friends and I will help you improve your skills, so you can pay your bills.
Most people are swimming through life with minimal effort. The job search is not the time to shrug your shoulders and hope for the best. If you don’t have a job, your job search IS your job. You need to invest your time networking, applying for jobs, developing new skills and working on your communication pieces. Are you ready? I am excited to help!
Take Advantage of Your Tools
Filling out a free profile on job search websites like this one can help you increase your exposure, but truly only if you utilize all the fields. Maximize your benefit by maxing the opportunity to describe your skills. What does that mean? Don’t think of the fields as a way to tell a story. You need to write each section with key terms to increase your chance of being found by employers. Use key terms so that recruiters and employers will find you in their search to find professionals in order to fill their open jobs. You want to use the words they will search with. Use key terms in your profile, to improve your chances of being discovered.
Want an example of key terms that can help you by industry role?. Sales professionals like myself can add industry terms such as Account Manager, Business Development, Sales, Quota, Territory, Vertical, Clients, Customers, Prospects and more. Sprinkling in these commonly used words can help trigger a key term match for employer searches. You don’t know the person searching, nor can you know for sure what term they will search. Increase your odds of being discovered by using a large spectrum of descriptive words.
This will help to increase the chance that one or more of your key terms will ultimately ensure you are included in the search results. Get found, by using more terms. How many should you use? Each field has a maximum value, find the maximum and fill it up. Use the word allowance in interesting yet relevant ways and you will have just increased your chance of being discovered. Remember if they don’t find you in the search results, you have zero chance of being interviewed.
Another key to success is to use profile photos that are both fun and relevant. You should have a smile on your face. You should minimize any unprofessional images but keep in mind that humans make hiring decisions, so showing personality is OK. My cover photo on LinkedIn is a professionally shot family photo and I get nothing but compliments on it daily. Find something that helps people know more about you and what makes you tick. Good photos can make you faster than fancy words if you use them correctly.
Engage Target Employers on Social Media
Do you feel like a small fish in a giant lake, waiting for your future employer to catch you? If so, you should flip the script. Become the fisherman and bait your hook by engaging your target HR, Business Owners and Recruiters on social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
I engage people every day by liking, commenting and sharing their posts. After I find the posts from people I want to meet or do business with, I read what they have written. This approach gives me insight into who they are and how they think. Once I read their posts, I support them by giving them a thumbs up or I comment on a post or two that I like the best. Sometimes I’ll even share their post if it is amazing or thought-provoking.
Most people enjoy having their ego stroked. If you want to catch someone’s attention, make them feel good. Allow them to talk about their favorite topic, themselves! If you engage with someone like this for a few weeks, they’ll typically send you a connection request and you can then ask them if they would consider you for their job openings. This is a natural course of human interaction sparked by a little bit of forwarding thinking and putting in the time to research. You can become a master fisher of employers this way.
Interview Peers Who Do What You Want to be Doing
Most of us want to climb the ladder of success and one key to improving is not to reinvent the wheel, but to follow proven paths others have traveled. A surefire way you can you go from where you are to where you want to be is to talk to others who are currently in the role you aspire to. Ask them how they got hired and then lean on them for advice. Sincerely ask them how they would chart a successful course from where you are to where they are. Most people are willing to help others if it doesn’t cost them anything and even more so when you elevate them to expert status. We’ve already covered that people love to talk about themselves, so take advantage of that.
How do you find these types of folks, who do what you want to do? Industry-specific networking events are an easy place find most categories of professionals. Simply use Google or ask Siri to locate your local networking opportunities, then go and engage the people who are there to network. The key here is not to race from person to person, rather you need to take time and engage them. You will make fewer connections this way, but these budding relationships will pay dividends later. To win at networking you don’t need more cards, you need more people to take your call after the event is over.
The key to successful networking is to get more than the card. Get to know at least two or three key things about the people you are talking with, before you move on to the next person. You want to have enough information to know if they are worth taking to coffee at another time. You want them to feel comfortable enough with you to accept your coffee invitation. When you network well, you really can accomplish anything, including landing your next job!
Recap and Win!
Are you ready to quit searching and land your next great job? Make sure you follow these 3 helpful tips in order to reduce the time needed to finish the process. Take advantage of your tools. Engage the employers who you want to hire you. Interview with your peers. Read my blog regularly. Send me a connection request on LinkedIn and subscribe to my YouTube Channel for more helpful business tips. I am here to help you. Incorporate my advice and find a great job quickly.
IRA, thank you for the blog. I will try to implement these 3 immediately. Recently, I have also began personalizing my resume to be specific to jobs sent to me by recruiters. I will let you know if the results of this tactic prove to be fruitful.
I think I need to do more to personalize my resume for each job. My cover letters are customized for each job but not my resume. Thanks for the post!!
My pleasure Jim. I hope the blog helps. There will be a lot more advice, tips and ideas from SME, Coaches, Industry Leaders, Authors and more, as they contribute to the Job Centric posts. If I can help you with anything specific, please reach out to me via private message and I’ll do my best to help guide you or connect you with someone who can.
Great job search tips!! I’ve been contacting as many legal professionals as I can for advice and suggestions. I’ve gotten some valuable information and insights.
I love networking events for job seekers because it’s an environment that encourages social interaction and gives people an opportunity to build professional relationships. Looking for a mentor, asking for help from those who are where you want to be and even making connections that can lead directly to open positions in your field can all be made in these social settings.
Let me know if there’s anything specifically that I can do to assist you in your search. I am here to help.
These are definitely helpful tips, thank you
Very Helpful Tips “Ira” you are doing a great job, I wish you very Best of luck
Thank you Ira – your tips are a clear summary of how to systematically approach “hired.” There is a lot of advice out there and it can be overwhelming to craft a job search strategy. And yet here it is, right in your succinct advice. Now I can spend time on a job search instead of figuring out how to job search. This is invaluable!
I’m happy the blog was a help Kathleen. There will be more posts from a variety of professionals to add to the conversation and help the members of my site improve their skills. Ultimately, I’m hoping to help everyone find a job, fill their openings and be a blessing.
That’s wonderful!! These inputs will surely help to improve networking and find right opportunity. Thank you Ira.
Hello Ira, I am from the small Island of Jamaica and when I tried to do a search on your site nothing turned up. I would love your help in any way possible. If possible can you message me privately so we can discuss this?
Thanks in advance,
Jonnelle C.
Jonnelle, make sure to incorporate the tips shared here in this blog. Being from a small island, you might need to fish stronger than most but you can do it.
These 3 tips are wonderful! There is a lot of information and advice. Of course this will prove to be important in the job search process.These tips also will be helpful to improve network. I wish you all the best.
Thank you for your kind words Rajiv! I hope the tips and this website as a whole, help you find a job faster my friend.
Thanks for the helpful tips IRA.job searching can be a strain but having people like you keeps us going. As job seekers we never know of the right time to directly approach the potential recruiters in our networks because it is sometimes the last conversation you have with them in your inbox.
I’ve been following up with all the recruiters in my network once a month to touch base. I haven’t received any negative feedback or push-back.
well, this works good. Thank you
Very useful tips. Amazing part is we are already spending some amount of time already doing these things but we just have to use only few more minutes to make it more efficient. Ira, I found you and your website from Linkedin while reading another article from my favorite author and I started following you. People like you keep us going and make us more motivated helping others who are going through the same phase we were once in.
When i saw that union bank job advert filor nigerians,it comfirmed my belief that ‘this’ man Ira Bowman is indeed who he claimed to be on his blogs, imagine, Nigerian job, that commendable sir. Though i can’t apply for the position based on age-typical stigmatization in Nigeria.
Thanks though, but am still on the search. Rven though i am feeling tired already.
At 34years,no decent job. Unhappy ?
Don’t give up!! YDon’t give up!!
Don’t give up!! You will find a job soon. Keep checking the job bank because you never know what opportunities are waiting.