Getting Interviews

Sending an email vs an old-fashioned letter

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Job-search clients often ask me whether they should mail or email their cover or followup letter.  I tell them to default to email unless there is a compelling special case for sending a traditional letter.  The reasons I recommend email:More

Four Ideas for Getting Interviews via the Hidden Job Market

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Most of my job-search clients get interviews by tapping into the hidden job market; they are both reaching out to their network and cold-emailing/calling people they don’t know.  You, too, want to prioritize efforts that will allow you to bypass the glut of applicants going through job postings or recruiting firms.  Spend only 20% of your valuable job search time on postings and recruiting firms, and the remainder on the hidden job market.  Here are four ideas to get you started.More

In a Job Search? You Should Be On LinkedIn

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LinkedIn, accessed for free at www.linkedin.com, enables users to keep in touch with and expand their professional network, get introductions to others outside their network, and join groups of professionals organized around industries, professions, and associations.  Recruiters routinely use LinkedIn to scan profiles for viable candidates.

LinkedIn has become essential to conducting an effective, productive job search! I hear from clients almost every day about how they got an interview or informational meeting via LinkedIn.  Below I’ve included a few success stories culled from my clients’ experiences, to help generate ideas on how you can use LinkedIn.  Read More

Letting People Know about your Job Search

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The Five O’Clock Club’s book Shortcut Your Job Search has a great technique for getting interviews.  My clients have used it to land interviews in organizations they are interested in.  A prerequisite is that you have a list of target organizations ready, i.e. your “job-search marketing plan”.  Then, send an e-mail out to everyone you know– family, friends, former business associates, old More

Employment Trends: Health Care Hot, Real Estate Not

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Indeed.com, an online job-search engine that aggregates job postings from across the web, released an analysis of employment trends by industry and geography.  Their findings could be helpful to those of you who are looking to develop job targets– I recommend checking it out.  My observations from their data:

  • The health care sector shows the largest opportunity by far, with a total of 813,000 job-postings, followed by Retail More

Using LinkedIn for Job-target Research

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Many (or most) of you are probably on LinkedIn to some extent (if you’re not you should be– www.linkedin.com).  LinkedIn is an awesome tool for getting results in your job search.  But are you really getting the value out of it that you could be?  Use LinkedIn to advance your search in three ways: More

Getting Results with Job Ads

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When you answer an online ad, you are competing with hundreds, or often thousands, of other applicants. In fact, I was recently talking to an HR Executive at a Fortune 500 company who shared with me that they received 6,000 resumes for one Customer Service Manager opening! Because of this situation, the filtering process (either human or computer) looks for as close to an exact match as possible. So, you could have a great resume and cover letter, but statistically speaking the odds are still against you making the cut. More

The Importance of Targets in Your Job Search

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I see a lot of new job-hunters who are unfocused about their job targets. They feel that their background allows them to do many things (e.g., I can be a project manager, marketing director, or a corporate trainer). So their whole approach to the search is to position themselves as generally as possible, in the hope that others (recruiters, network contacts, etc.) will decide for them.

This approach doesn’t work for a couple of reasons. First off, you need to make it as easy as possible for people to help you, and that means pitching yourself appropriately for a specific position. Don’t ask them to do the work to translate your varied background into specific targets– do this for them! Second, targeting is all about the benefits that accrue throughMore

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