Conducting a job search can feel overwhelming sometimes, especially since the employment landscape has changed over the last couple of years. Social media sites like LinkedIn and Twitter can be time-consuming and so can in-person networking. Many job seekers spend all day searching job boards.
It can be helpful to break down your activities into manageable chunks so that you can stay on task and keep moving forward.
Here are some tips for your job search that take a minute or less to implement:
Practice your elevator pitch and record it using your webcam. Your elevator pitch is what you will say to describe yourself and your background to networking contacts and employers. You can use it at networking meetings as well as in the interview when you are asked to tell the interviewer about yourself. This speech should be short and yet compelling. By recording it as a video you will be able to see and hear how you come across.
Send your resume to a colleague or professional resume writer for feedback. It’s very difficult to be objective about yourself and your experience. You may not be presenting yourself in the best possible light on paper, but it’s hard to know that without objective feedback. Find out what other knowledgeable people think about your resume.
Set up a job alert on job boards such as indeed.com and simplyhired.com. Using job search alerts will make your job search more efficient. There is no need to search job boards every day for new openings. Simply set your search criteria and let the sites send you results that match your criteria.
Update your status. On social media you can keep your network informed of what you are doing and share value-added information with them by updating your status on sites such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook . This is a way of staying in touch with your network without pestering them.
Add one new person to your social network. Growing your network is a very important part of the job search process. You can take a small step towards building your network by identifying just one person that you want to connect with. Sending a LinkedIn invitation or following someone on Twitter takes less than a minute.
These are just a few ideas of job search tactics that you can implement in a very short period of time to make your job search more manageable.
