3 Job Search Tips For The Frustrated Job-Seeker.
Hi Everyone,
Melissa Varischetti here, owner and founder at FindAJobPA.com.
It’s August, and for many of us that means one last hurrah of summer fun before school starts back up and the weather turns colder. If you’re like me, you don’t mind colder weather because FALL is where it’s at y’all.
Anyway, when I was sitting down planning out this month’s blog post, I was reminded again of how difficult it is to be in this business of job-searching.
Looking for a new job is one of the toughest things you can do.
There’s constant rejection.
There’s a lot of manual labor (building resumes, writing cover letters, researching what’s available, etc.).
The timeline is anything but certain.
And to top it off, you’re not getting paid to find new jobs!
Taking the stress and hassle out of job-seeking is one reason I started FindAJobPA.com. With an MBA and years of HR experience, I’d seen first-hand how stressful the job search could be, and I wanted to do something to change it. Because guess what – when it’s hard to find a job, and hard to apply for a job, how do you think that candidate will feel if they ever get to talk to the recruiter? It’s like when you’re on hold with customer service so long you have to put your phone on speaker and clean your entire house before someone comes on. When you actually get talking to someone you’re probably not in the best mood, and it’s a lot harder for the person on the other end of that conversation to bring you back into a positive state of mind.
With that being said, I wanted to share a few quick tips this month to help with your job search. While it’s never going to be completely stress-free, following these simple steps will help take some of the frustration out of the job search process.
1. Know Your Non-Negotiables.
When you’re looking for a job, especially if you’ve just recently been laid off, it’s easy to think “I’ll do anything just for a paycheck!” But take a second when you have those thoughts and write down a handful of things that you really would never do. And then when you’ve got that list, write down a few things that are super important to you in that next job. It doesn’t have to be anything super complicated – you could say “I don’t want to work more than [x] miles from a certain ZIP code”, or “I want to work somewhere that offers subsidized child-care.” Once you know what you want and don’t want (and have it notated to match up against a job description), you’ll be better equipped to filter the jobs you find and see if it’s even worth submitting an application. This will also help you strategize questions for the recruiter and ensure the job you’re applying for checks all your boxes.
2. Expect This Won’t Be Quick.
It would be wonderful if getting a job was as fast as getting your favorite drive-through combo meal. But sadly this is rarely the case. Provided you don’t need a new job ASAP (even better if you’re applying while currently employed elsewhere), you should expect it’ll take at least a month or more to actually talk to someone once you’ve submitted your application and processed through a virtual one-way interview (if those are offered). If you go into a job application expecting it to not be an instantaneous process, it’ll help when it feels like it’s been forever since you heard anything back. Plus, knowing the timeline isn’t immediate will help you when applying for multiple jobs
3. Plan to submit a lot of applications.
If you know you’ll be submitting many applications, make it easy on yourself and have templates ready-to-go with executive summaries, bullet-pointed skills lists, and a few references. Make use of Google or Apple’s auto-fill feature for basic contact information. And feed your resume and cover letter through a spell-checker like Grammarly to make sure there are no typos. Just because you apply for multiple jobs does not mean it has to take hours to submit all those applications.
I could go on, but for the sake of time I’ll leave you with just these 3 tips for now.
Again, job-searching is not an easy process, but I hope these tips will help make it a little less stressful for you.
And if you need a place to start looking for jobs, check out all we have available at FindAJobPA.com!
Until next time,
Melissa
