In an effort to organize and simplify your job search I will pass on some nifty advice that worked wonders for me and my clients:
Always keep a day to day job journal going this serves several purposes. First of all it keeps track of all your cover letters and resumes sent out so you can follow up. Second of all it keeps track of all your interviews so you can follow up and send out those thank you letters. Third it gives you a daily record of your progress so you can feel good about your work. Finally, it eliminates any great opportunities from falling through the cracks as you are busy finding work. Even better should you become unemployed again you can pick right up where you left off by touching base with folks you already made great impression on.
The job hunting journal certainly does not have to be anything fancy. I have just used MS Word or MS Notepad right on my computer desktop. This will enable you to just cut and paste all the original contact info & or the original help wanted ad right into your job hunting journal quickly and easily. Let's say you sent out 16 cover letters one weekend to great employment targets, all of them would be recorded so next time you are on LinkedIn.com making networking connections if you came across the very person you sent a cover letter to ten days ago you could remember that. Even more importantly using MS Outlook's Calendar function you could set an alarm reminding you to either follow up or send out an interview thank you letter.
I have found by using the MS Outlook's Calendar function to set alarms the incidence of me missing out on any follow up drops to near zero. Not that you would ever want to make a pest of yourself ever, but if these powerful tools are free and beneficial use them. This way you have established a sincere desire to work at that particular company. Guess who will be the first one called when that person who was hired does not make the cut after a month. So here it is in a nutshell: Keep a job hunting journal, focus on getting interviews not sending out resumes, go on the interviews, send thank you notes, get second interviews, send thank you notes then use follow up letters afterwards.
The goal of this plan is to be right on the tip of the managements tongue should they need another employee for any reason or should the first hired not work out. This is a simple system but so effective. Another benefit would be you can come back and look two months later and find a brand new job "connection" from someone you have already interviewed with. Now when you see another help wanted ad from the same company but a different department/location you can ask permission to use your first interviewer as a referral on the job application so this time you have the inside track. People who are referred by an existing employee go right to the top of the must hire list. In addition the referring employee gets a nice bounty from the company for the referral so you have just made a friend indeed.
Automatic blog by iAutoblog
No comments:
Post a Comment