How to get Recruited for a Job

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22
Jun 2017

Recruitment for a job can come in many different forms. Traditionally, job recruitment has been limited to job boards, classified ads, and recruitment firms. Nowadays, job recruitment, like many other industries, has sprawled out across the Internet and takes place in a myriad of unique and unconventional ways. Digital job boards like Monster.com, Indeed.com, Idealist.org, and CareerBuilder.com have replaced traditionally published classified ads, and have become the “go-to” platforms where job seekers search for open positions. However, recruitment (in which hiring managers and recruiting agents seek out potential job candidates, not the other way around) is now happening at several other levels. There are many strategies job seekers can utilize in order to get noticed by recruiters and be ready to jump on exciting opportunities that arise in the ever-constant job hunt. While recruitment is certainly not something that job seekers can consistently count on, it is certainly an exciting way to open yourself up to opportunities that you might not have otherwise encountered on your own. What follows are Resume Yeti’s Pro Tips on how to ready yourself to be recruited.

Pro Tip: Keep your resume up to date, up to the minute.

Keeping your resume current is the most important element of job hunting. It’s an easy thing to let go of when you’ve been employed for a while or when you haven’t had to send your resume out in a long time. But it is absolutely crucial that you tend to your resume each and every time there is something new that you could add to it. If a recruiting opportunity arises and your resume is not ready, you will become overwhelmed by the process of updating and perfecting your resume, and in the time it takes to do that, you may miss the deadline to apply, or the recruiter might think you lost interest because of the lag in your response time. So, right now, before you do anything, get your resume up to date!

Pro Tip: Develop your skills to stay relevant

Almost as crucial as keeping your resume up to date, is keeping yourself up to date. Your skills, that is. As we mentioned above, today’s job market is seamlessly intertwined with the digital realm. Digital technology upheaves, updates, and revitalizes itself seemingly in the blink of an eye. This means that, at any given moment, your digital skill set may become outdated or obsolete.

To keep your skills relevant, it’s important that you’re constantly searching through job listings and job descriptions to ensure that the skill set that you posses is in line with what hiring managers expect of job candidates in your industry. If you come across something in your skill set that you need to brush up on or learn for the first time, you can keep yourself relevant by signing up for a seminar, class, or workshop to develop that skill. Attending skill development classes in your industry will also put you in contact with others in that industry whom you may not have met otherwise. Who knows, recruitment opportunities could arise for you simply by keeping your skill set up to date.

Pro Tip: Go to networking events and keep your own network current

Another way to be recruited, outside of digital job boards and attending skills development workshops, is to network your heart out. This includes regularly attending networking events within your industry. A quick Google search of “[your industry]” + “networking events” + “[your location]” will yield tons of networking opportunities for you, ranging from formal meet and greet events to more informal networking cocktail hours. Don’t forget to bring your business cards!

Staying on top of your networking game doesn’t only apply to expanding your professional network. It also applies to keeping in touch with your current network. Your contacts will be much more likely to reach out to you with an opportunity or help you out if you maintain your relationship with them past the time that you actually worked together. Keep in touch with them. Invite them to coffee or happy hour to catch up, see what projects they’re working on, what their next career plans are. That way, your relationship with your contacts is not purely transactional. It’s pretty transparent when an old work contact emails or calls out of the blue and asks for a favor. People in your network are much more likely to reach out or respond to you if you show them that you genuinely care about them outside of asking them for a random employment favor.

Pro Tip: Make yourself visible

Make yourself easy to find. One of the easiest methods of screening applicants or recommended job candidates is to Google them, and hiring managers do it. If you’re hoping to be recruited, you need to find ways to make yourself come up in a list of search results. There are so many ways to improve your visibility. The easiest and most practical way is to open your own professional social media accounts. Number one on this list should be LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a pool of about 250 million people in the modern workforce. Participating in this community increases your odds of being noticed by some of them. Making a LinkedIn profile in your name will also make your name appear in the results when someone Googles you. For tips on how to increase your visibility on LinkedIn, check out their article, “It’s Your Career: How to Get Recruiters to Notice You on LinkedIn.” Another way to increase your visibility in search engines is to make a website, if it makes sense for your work and your industry. Even if the “site” is just a landing page with some information about you, the most important thing is that your name and site would be another item that surfaces in a Google search of your name.

Again, being recruited is not a given. But if you test out these Pro Tips, you may find opportunities rolling in that were not made available to you previously. At the very least, by constantly readying yourself for job opportunities, you open yourself to be capable of applying immediately and confidently for outstanding positions you come across in your job hunt.

Image Source: #WOCinTechChat

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How to Write your Resume if you have little or no Professional Experience

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07
Jun 2017

Summer is heating up. For many of this year’s college graduates, the festivities are dying down, and the need to find a job is becoming more pressing. Yet many recent grads or those who have taken career breaks find themselves in a conundrum when they begin their job search: how to write an outstanding resume if they have little or no professional experience. Embarking on a job hunt is never easy, but it can seem even more daunting if you feel you haven’t had the professional experiences that hiring managers look for when screening job applications. Fear not, however, because there IS a way to frame your unique experiences and skills so that they translate in to valid, valuable bullet points on your resume. With a little research, some personal reflection, and determination, you can write your resume and begin applying to jobs within a few hours of reading this post.

1) Do your research

Decide which industries you would be interested in working in. Once you’ve picked two or three, use sites like monster.com, indeed.com, and idealist.org to peruse some job postings for entry-level positions in your chosen fields. In each posting, there should be a list of qualities and qualifications that hiring managers desire in potential entry level job candidates. Make a list of these traits and skills.

Once you have a good list with quite a few skills and traits, examine any that repeat. If you begin to notice patterns across job postings from various companies, you can get a general sense of what is expected of an entry level worker in that field. For example, if you were researching desired traits for jobs in sales, you might see that customer service, persuasion, negotiation, and diligence are among dozens of skills that are emphasized when working in that field, according to TheBalance.com. Now, analyze your findings. Do you possess any of the qualities that recur across job postings? Circle all that are relevant to you.

2) Do some personal reflection

Once you’ve got a sense of what hiring managers are looking for, you can begin to reflect on your own experiences to discover if any work you’ve done over the years would demonstrate your suitability for a position in your chosen field. The trick here is to stop limiting your interpretation of “professional experience” to solely conventional long-term jobs, which you may not have had yet. Professional experience can be anything you have done that utilized or developed your skills. Perhaps you were a TA in college or you volunteered at the writing center or as a tutor. Maybe you gave tours to prospective students or were assigned to have a visiting student shadow you one day. Maybe you worked at the library.

For recent college grads, work experience doesn’t necessarily have to be confined to your college, either. You may have worked on a catering team at a wedding, or helped take care of your neighbors’ children. A family friend may have asked you to help with a home improvement project or help fix a car one summer. Even hobby activities can be considered experiences that demonstrate your value as a worker.

It may make it easier to reflect on these experiences if you think of times when you collaborated with others to achieve some sort of end. What projects have you completed? What volunteer work have you done? Now reexamine the list of desired qualities in your industry. Focus on the ones you circled, those you possess. Try to think of how you acquired, developed, or utilized these skills throughout your past work, volunteer, or other project experiences. These experiences will be the bullet points in the Professional Experience section on your resume. For help formatting this section and others on your resume, see Resume Yeti’s “Anatomy of a Perfect Resume” Pro Tips.

3) Make your resume look the part

Since you are searching for employment with few “conventional” job experiences, it is of paramount importance that your resume be as close to perfect as possible. In an article about the most important resume characteristics for an applicant with no experience, Business Insider states that the number one way to make a resume stand out is that, “The layout is clean and easy to read.” Your resume should contain no spelling or grammar errors, no formatting inconsistencies, and it should have a clean, polished design. In order for hiring managers to take your resume seriously, it needs to be visually as good as or better in caliber than those of applicants competing for the same positions. First impressions are key!

 

Once you get over the initial anxiety of feeling like you have no work experience, you’ll be able to crank out your resume and start applying to jobs immediately thereafter. And remember, the employee profiles that hiring managers post in job listings are only desired qualities; they are usually not hard line requirements for every applicant. Show hiring managers that despite not having had conventional work experience, you have had valuable learning experiences in the past, and you are ready to put your skill set into action.

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3 Creative Ways to get Noticed and Land the Job

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23
May 2017

There is a fine line between gimmicks and authentic creativity when it comes to capturing the attention of hiring managers. A stunt too outlandish will land your resume in the garbage, but there are several tricks job hunters may employ that—with finesse—just might pique the interest of hiring managers and get you in the door for an interview. Each of the following strategies requires a bit of extra time, and in some cases a little money upfront, but each is a way that has been proven to move job hunters forward in their search for employment.

1) The Unsolicited Application

The strategy of cold calling has historically been one of the most tried-and-true methods of job hunting, although it has changed a bit in the last decade. To set this strategy into motion, you need to do your research. It’s a good idea to use a spreadsheet to organize your findings. Start by making an exhaustive list of companies and organizations that interest you—be it the company’s mission, the products they make or advertise, or the ideal next step up in your career. For each entry in your spreadsheet, record the company’s name, a sentence about why it interests you, and the available contact information about the staff member most likely to be in charge.

Once you have several entries, begin contacting the companies. In an email, send your resume along with a formal, individualized message about why you’re interested in the company, your skills that you think would make a positive contribution to their staff and workplace, and a reminder that even if they are not hiring at the moment, to please keep you in mind for future opportunities. The majority of these emails may go unanswered, but sometimes, companies are looking for employees for positions that haven’t been posted yet, or hiring managers and staff members will remember your outreach efforts and might contact you in the future.

2) The Role Reversal

Some of you may have heard about programmer Andrew Horner’s website that encouraged employers to apply to have Horner work for them. While this strategy was ultimately very successful for Horner, it is not likely that everyone will achieve the same results. However, there are a few ways that you can “turn the tables” so that people solicit you to work, rather than the other way around.

One tactic is to advertise on Facebook and Google. To make a Facebook ad, you’ll have to start a business page. Once you do, you can follow these steps to create advertisements for small fees to reach specific audiences. To place advertisements on Google, you’ll have to make a Google AdWords account. Once you’ve set that up, there are many options to create Search Ads (those that appear in the list search results when you Google something), and Display Ads (those that appear as banners on websites you visit). There are also many different payment tiers, depending on your needs and the audience you want to reach. You can learn more about how to effectively use Google Adwords here.

Another “role reversal” tactic is to post advertisements for your services on sites like TaskRabbit and Craigslist Jobs**. While Craigslist tends to be a bit more of a wild card in terms of gaining actual clients, it has proved effective when used intelligently and persistently. It’s also easy to post–you can do it within 10 minutes! Craigslist uses what’s called “relay mail,” so that you can communicate with potential clients anonymously until you have reached an agreement and feel comfortable exchanging other contact information with your client.

TaskRabbit allows you to create a profile that lists your skills and strengths so that people who need work done can contact you if your skill set is a match for what they need. You can become a “tasker” here. As a tasker you can also browse work that people need done and contact them to offer your services. If they agree that you’re a match, then you’ll move forward with a contract and you’ll be on your way.

** Remember never to post personal information inside ad text, never to give bank account information or passwords, and never to send/wire money over Craigslist.

3) The Imitation Game

Maybe you’ve heard of Alexander J. Velicky’s video game resume, which he submitted to Bethesda Game Studios, where he was keen on working. Or perhaps you’re aware of Jeanne Hwang’s Pinterest CV, which she submitted to Pinterest. Or Leah Bowman, who built a Lego-themed resume to appeal to future employers.

These are three examples of job hunters who grabbed hiring managers’ attention by synthesizing and personalizing elements of the companies’ branding, mission, and work. By thoroughly researching the companies they wanted to work for, these job hunters were able to project their best qualities by imitating the characteristics they loved best about the companies. When the hiring managers saw enthusiasm for the companies mirrored in their job applications, these applicants were invited to interview.

 

All three of these creative strategies require a bit more time, research, and even money (in the case of advertising) upfront. But for jobs that you’ve got your heart set on, it just might be worth a shot!

Have you ever used a creative strategy to land an interview or job offer? Share it with us on Facebook or Tweet us @ResumeYeti!

 

Cover image provided by WOCinTech Chat

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