In this day and age, everything seems to be done online. Even if you are looking for a career in a brick and mortar building, they still have the applications online often. This saves the business owner and you time but if you aren’t sure how to navigate the waters you can get overwhelmed!
Here are 8 tips to help you navigate:
- Instead of posting your résumé on Linked In or Monster and hoping that people will see it and call you with the perfect position, go a bit further and design an online portfolio where recruiters can view your work, read about you and your goals and obtain contact information.
- Google your name and see what pops up. These prospective employers are going to be doing that so you need to get a jump on that and know what is out there. If you don’t like things you find, you need to start to do damage control.
- Many job boards offer filters to refine search results. You should have the option to narrow your job search by region, industry and duration, as well as keywords, company names, experience needed and salary desired.
- Most job boards allow you to sign up to receive e-mail alerts about newly available jobs that match your chosen criteria. The job boards will send you emails every few days with a list of potential opportunities.
- One of the best strategies to finding your dream job is to know where you want to work so you can target that particular company/industry and contact the hiring manager.
- Visit your industry’s national/regional Web sites, where you can find jobs in your field that may not appear on job boards. Many companies post opportunities on their association websites.
- Video résumés are a new way to stand out to possible employers. They are intended as supplements to — not replacements for — traditional résumés, video résumés allow you to showcase a little bit of your personality and highlight a couple of points of interest from your résumé.
- Successfully navigating the online job search comes down to being organized enough to apply for many jobs at one time which allows you to maximize your chances of landing one.
Employers like to see that you have a personal interest in their open position. To convey interest in the particular company and position, you need to customize your resume and a cover letter for each job application.
This is where organization is key. You need to save a template of a generic resume, and then save each customized version separately with the name of the company you sent it to. Should you get called for an interview, you want to have the correct resume accessible.
Don’t fool yourself into thinking organization is more trouble than it’s worth. Organization can only help you in your search.
Happy Searching!
