There has always been a lot of discussion around cover letters and resume's. What is the best format, chronological or functional, what should be included in your cover letter, what cover letters work or don't work? The list goes on. The experts all have their opinions, yet you still haven't found that next job or worse you haven't even gotten a call or inquiry. Trust me, it's not totally your fault. With recruiters and HR professionals receiving over 100 candidates per job posting it is hard to make an impression, but it is still possible. Here are a few tips that you may want to try.
If you think you are being eliminated because of your age, which by the way is discriminatory, there are few different ways of handling this. You can be right up front about it. Most hiring managers can calculate your age by looking at when you graduated or by how many jobs you've had and total number of years worked. The problem is sometimes they overestimate your work experience and therefore your age. Add your age to your resume or cover letter, or better yet add a picture, especially if you look younger than you really are. This eliminates the hiring manager guessing your age, and by being upfront you can be a little clever with it as well. In your cover letter, you can state that you are 53 years young or that you have the mind of a 40 year old. Not only do you get this out in the open, but you can have fun with it and differentiate yourself from other candidates. Remember the hiring manager is a person and may even have a personality.
Try responding to job advertisements without including a cover letter. Sometimes what topic you open your cover letter or email introduction with immediately excludes you. Not including a cover letter will force the hiring manager to at least open your resume. This will allow your experience to speak for you instead of trying to wow them with a cover letter that may be completely off base.
When responding from your own email address/account, under your signature make sure you include any of your social networking websites. My standard signature now includes links to my facebook, LinkedIn, Yasni, Peekyou, Twitter and my two blogs. People are naturally drawn to these social network sites and usually click on at least one link. This is another place for hiring managers to see exactly who you are. One point of caution before you take this approach is to make sure the material on these sites is appropriate. The last thing you want is a potential employer seeing something on your facebook site that might disagree with his or his company's philosophy.
David Goldenberg
Monday, March 9, 2009
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Social Networking
How powerful would it be to reach 100's of would be employers all at once? No, not a blind email blast or a cold calling marathon. The best and honestly the easiest way is to use one of the social networking sites. Whether you twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook or My Space, these are all great tools to reach hiring employers. How you may ask can you reach all of these people if the only people that you're socializing with are your friends and business acquaintances that you've already contaced. One word...."groups". Every social networking site has groups. These can be groups of former employees like the AT&T or IBM Alumni sites on LinkedIn or similar groups on Twitter, Facebook, etc. You can search for groups within your field or groups of former employers. Either way, these groups give you an opportunity to post you resume to hundreds or even thousands of potential employers without encountering a spam filter or the wrath of 100 HR managers that you just blanketed with you resume.
Social networking is the holy grail of this decade. Use it. In fact once you have found a job somewhere you can use it to build business relationships with potential customers.
If you're interested in learning how to use groups, feel free to post your questions to this blog.
David Goldenberg
Social networking is the holy grail of this decade. Use it. In fact once you have found a job somewhere you can use it to build business relationships with potential customers.
If you're interested in learning how to use groups, feel free to post your questions to this blog.
David Goldenberg
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Looking for Work
If you're reading this blog, then you're probably one of the 7.4% of us that are currently unemployed. It's very easy to panic when you are not working and the prospects of finding work are grim, but not impossible. Believe it or not there are lots of jobs out there, but you have to be focused, do your research and make sure your skills match the job you are applying for. This sounds easy and by now you're probably wondering why you're even reading this blog, but let me share some tips with you that I think can be critical to help with finding your next job/career.
First the bad news. For every job posted on Craigslist, Hotjobs, Monster, Career Builder, The Ladders, etc. employers are receiving over 100 resume's. Think about that for a moment. 100 other people just like you are applying for the same position. Some will be less qualified and some more, but the numbers suggest that the HR generalist or recruiter reviewing resumes isn't even looking at all of them. So how do you get better results. Well most people will tell you to contact people you know, "your network". Some of you are thinking that maybe you don't have this so called network, but believe it or not we all do. Some of us are on LinkedIn which is a business to business social networking site. You post information, find business associates and connect with them. You can then contact your "connections" and ask them about opportunites at their company or even have them reach out to their "connections" on your behalf. This works OK, but this is only one avenue. If you have a Facebook account contact your friends. This may be uncomfortable, but trust me it works. The best way to contact everyone is to tell them right in the "what are you doing" section that you are looking for work and you need their help. These methods should help somewhat with your job search, but there are other things you can do as well.
Join a job board, in fact join them all. Most are free and give you access to hundreds of positions. What you'll find is that there are a lot of jobs that list the company name as confidential. Consider this a black hole. If you don't know the company, you can not be sure what you're getting into and worse, how do you know if this isn't the perfect company for you or the one where your brother-in-law works. What you'll find for most of these ads is an overview of the company, without the company name. Something like, "Fortune 500 company, leader in the field of software development...." Cut this text out, paste it in Google and usually you'll find the name of the company somewhere in the search results. Once you know who the company is you can target your response when replying. Using this search method along with LinkedIn or Jigsaw you can get close, if not pinpoint who the hiring manager is. Now your email, or phone call can go directly to the person hiring as opposed to a recruiter or HR person. It may not land you the job, but you certainly stand a better chance of getting the interview.
As this is my first post, please feel free to comment with some of your job search tips or things that worked or didn't work. I will try and post regularly and share any good ideas in forthcomming posts.
First the bad news. For every job posted on Craigslist, Hotjobs, Monster, Career Builder, The Ladders, etc. employers are receiving over 100 resume's. Think about that for a moment. 100 other people just like you are applying for the same position. Some will be less qualified and some more, but the numbers suggest that the HR generalist or recruiter reviewing resumes isn't even looking at all of them. So how do you get better results. Well most people will tell you to contact people you know, "your network". Some of you are thinking that maybe you don't have this so called network, but believe it or not we all do. Some of us are on LinkedIn which is a business to business social networking site. You post information, find business associates and connect with them. You can then contact your "connections" and ask them about opportunites at their company or even have them reach out to their "connections" on your behalf. This works OK, but this is only one avenue. If you have a Facebook account contact your friends. This may be uncomfortable, but trust me it works. The best way to contact everyone is to tell them right in the "what are you doing" section that you are looking for work and you need their help. These methods should help somewhat with your job search, but there are other things you can do as well.
Join a job board, in fact join them all. Most are free and give you access to hundreds of positions. What you'll find is that there are a lot of jobs that list the company name as confidential. Consider this a black hole. If you don't know the company, you can not be sure what you're getting into and worse, how do you know if this isn't the perfect company for you or the one where your brother-in-law works. What you'll find for most of these ads is an overview of the company, without the company name. Something like, "Fortune 500 company, leader in the field of software development...." Cut this text out, paste it in Google and usually you'll find the name of the company somewhere in the search results. Once you know who the company is you can target your response when replying. Using this search method along with LinkedIn or Jigsaw you can get close, if not pinpoint who the hiring manager is. Now your email, or phone call can go directly to the person hiring as opposed to a recruiter or HR person. It may not land you the job, but you certainly stand a better chance of getting the interview.
As this is my first post, please feel free to comment with some of your job search tips or things that worked or didn't work. I will try and post regularly and share any good ideas in forthcomming posts.
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