Planning your next career move? Make sure you have these 5 things covered...
Searching for a new job can be quite overwhelming. What with the endless searching, re-writing cover letters and shooting out emails; it can become a full-time job in itself.
To help you keep your job search in order, we enlisted the help of Job Search Expert Jerome Young. Here he shares his top 5 tips on what to do when you’re making your next career move…
Research Your Keywords
Keywords are words and phrases an employer would use to find you. The rationale is that if you're qualified for a particular position, certain words will be on your resume. Recruiters, hiring managers and applicant tracking systems use keywords to determine if you are a potentially qualified candidate. It's worth doing some research and really thinking through what keywords define your skills and experience.
Update & Polish Your CV
During the job search process, your resume is your representative. Its primary purpose is to gain the interest of decision makers and get interviews. Before you send it to anyone, take your time to update it and make sure it's polished, grammatically correct and spell checked. Each person in the process (recruiters, hiring managers, senior managers, etc.) needs to feel confident sending it to their superiors. I can't tell you how many opportunities have been lost because of poorly written resumes or careless spelling errors.
Update Your LinkedIn Profile
LinkedIn has become the most trusted professional website. It's often used to validate if you are who you claim to be. When people go to your LinkedIn profile, they are looking for confirmation that it's exactly the same as your resume in terms of experience and education. They are also looking to see your recommendations to determine how colleagues and superiors view your work. Take the time to update your profile and ask a few colleagues for recommendations. It makes a difference.
Determine your Salary Expectations
In this new day of job searching, the "salary expectations" question is often asked in the first screening interview. Stating a salary that is below the range, is often a sign that you're under-qualified and stating a salary above the range often gets you labelled as "too expensive" and placed in the rejection pile. You should do compensation research on a website like Glassdoor and review the compensation of the roles you're interested in before your first interview. If the salary question comes up, you can state your expectations with confidence or better yet, state that you're "expecting market value for the role" and save the negotiations for the end of the process.
Contact Decision Makers
If you want to expedite your job search process, go beyond just applying online and find a decision maker to contact. This can be the hiring manager or recruiter for the position. You can use LinkedIn to search for decision makers, use your network to get an introduction to someone at the company or use a service to help you find and contact decision makers. We actually offer a service where we research and find decision makers and provide job seekers with their contact information. In this age where we can do almost everything online, we often forget that people make job offers, not websites.
Jerome Young is a Technical Recruiter, Job Search Expert and Founder of Attract Jobs NOW .