5 ways to stand out when youre applying for competitive jobs

5 ways to stand out when youre applying for competitive jobsWe all know the market is competitive. Any job you apply for is probably receiving a minimum of 100 applicationswith some getting up to the thousands. But someone has to get every job, right? People do make it through to the next levels of the hiring process, even in crowded, qualified fields of applicants. googletag.cmd.push(function() googletag.display(div-gpt-ad-1467144145037-0) ) You have to assume the majority of job seekers youre competing with are on the balltheir resumes are spotless and their experience and skill base matches or exceeds the job requirements. So how can you stand out as the best person for the job amidst all the house? Use some of these mora targeted strategies to help elevate your application package.1. Make your purpose clear and direct.The most impressive (or at least the most attractive) candidates tend to be the ones that project a kind of professional purpose. These candidates have taken the t ime and effort to figure out what it is they want to do, and why, and how to reach their goals. Recruiters find it very easy to match these candidates into their companies, because its clear if theyll be a fit. Make aya you can articulate the talents that make you a good match and place them prominently in your cover letter, resume, and other application materials. Know yourself and make that sing.2. Dont hold backsell yourself.Its elend enough to just know what drives you. You have to share that vision, enthusiastically, even if youre shy and not prone to bragging. Put together a short pitch that summarizes why you, and only you, are the best person for the job. Once you have this down, you can use it at many points during your job search. Turn it into an elevator pitch for networking. Emphasize it in your interview. Build it into your social media presence. Make your sales pitch a part of how you present to the world while job seeking, both in person and on paper.3. Sanitize your social media.You could have the greatest application in the world, but if your social media profiles are inappropriate or controversial or just childish, a recruiter is going to toss your file in the trash. Make sure to Google yourself and scour your net presence until its every bit as polished and professional as you hope to present yourself to the world.4. Make your professional info a click away.There are some fancy trends out there, and you better believe the competition will be keeping up with them. If youre up for it, try building a personal website to give a sense of your personal branding. Include the link in your resume, and include your resume on your website. A website can also (stylishly) convey all the context you didnt have room to include on your resume. Use this extra space to your advantage5. Network to build a group of reliable referrals.Sadly, sometimes it really does come down to who you know. Make sure youre constantly out there networking and making inquiries. Finding inroads to companies you want to work for to make contacts and seek mentors. You never now when someone you meet at a cocktail party or a lecture is going to be the one to pass your resume to a decision maker.

3 Signs You Need to Act on That Nagging Feeling To Job Search

3 Signs You Need to Act on That Nagging Feeling To Job Search How do you know its time to abflug job searching again? Maybe you have a good job right now and enjoy what you do. However, you cant help the nagging feeling that its time to start a job search. Its like window shopping. Youll head over to LinkedIn, type in keywords for yur dream job and see what pops up. It cant hurt to look and maybe apply for a position that sounds like a potential fit, right?Tzu siche may be external factors, like high turnover at work, that influence our decision to conduct an early job hunt. Other times, its a gut feeling. You cant always explain how you know its time for a change. Sometimes, certainty is simply based around the phrase when you know, you know.From a lack of professional growth to consistent dreams about leaving your job, these three signs show its time to act on your nagging feeling to conduct a job search. 1. You dream about quitting your job.Many of us have probably dreamed, at on e point or another, about our workplace. You could be doing something completely out of character in this dream, like completing a ridiculous task or yelling at an irritating coworker. Or, you might dream about quitting your job.Sarah Bird, CEO of Moz, previously worked at a law firm. One night, she dreamed that she had quit her job. The dream was unusual to Bird, who had not been thinking on a conscious level about leaving the firm. If anything, she felt obligated to stay because of her clients.What made the dream strange, however, was that she couldnt stop laughing during it.I started laughing in the dream, Bird says. I had this experience of intense joy. I laughed so hard in my sleep that I started laughing in real life and actually woke up. I woke myself up with laughter, which Ive only ever done one other time in my life.Instead of dismissing it, Bird spent the next morning carefully thinking about the amount of joy and relief she experienced in the dream.I thought Maybe theres something I need to pay attention to there, Bird says.The more she thought about it, the more Bird considered that her job allowed her to serve her clients. However, she gradually realized the role wasnt serving her in the ways she wanted for her life. Bird thought about the dream for the rest of the day, slept on it and gave the law firm her notice the next day.Did you have an experience similar to Birds, where you dreamed about quitting your job? Consider the circumstances of the dream and how it made you feel thereafter. Depending on what happened, you may dismiss the dream as your subconscious being silly or take it seriously, especially if you have recurring dreams of leaving your job that fill you with joy.2. Your boss is acting distant.Have you always had a great relationship with your boss, but feel as though they are not communicating with you as much as they used to lately? Julie Good, partner at talent acquisition firm WinterWyman, says this may be a sign to start seekin g out a new role elsewhere.A less open and communicative relationship with your boss may signal a few things, Good says. Your boss may be looking for a new job or they may have other things on their mind like too much headcount in your department.Good advises to find out why your boss isnt talking if you notice a communication slowdown.The answer could help you decide if its time to leave your job.3. Youve grown as much as possible in your role and feel stagnant.How do you know you have stagnated at work? Ivelices Linares Thomas, CEO of HR Beyond, says to watch out for these warning signs.There are no further opportunities to develop any new skills,Youre unable to grow in your current role,And theres no opportunity to transition into another role in the company.Did you tick off yes to each sign? If so, its time to move on with your job search because youre not just stagnant youve developed a bit of boredom in the position and are able to do your job pretty much on autopilot.If you can do your job without thinking what youre doing or how youre doing it, it becomes more of a subconscious, repetitive act than an affirmative effort, Thomas says. When youve reached this point, you owe it to your professional growth and the organization to start searching for that next opportunity.

How to Build the Career Roadmap That Leads to the Job of Your Dreams

How to Build the Career zeitplan That Leads to the Job of Your Dreams I started my current career journey when I was 25. I had a prestigious job at a highly regarded company analyzing potential acquisition targets for the executive kollektiv, regularly discussing our findings with some of the most important people in a very sexy industry. I worked with smart, cool people, and my parents were proud. But something about the job, deep down, didnt feel right, and it was making me unhappy, though I could notlage put my finger on why. The hours were lousy, but I had been working all-nighters since high school and that had never been a problem. I felt overdue a promotion (as usual), and couldnt help but notice the disproportionate money my friends in finance were making, so I assumed that was it, and that once I was finally made a vice president I would be happier.Then a friend who was a kindergarten teacherbeibei invited me to speak to her class at career d ay. I told the kids that I helped come up with big ideas, buy companies, and identify synergies. During the QA session, one little girl approached me and asked her prepared questionsDo you work in New York City?Yes, I do I love New YorkDo you bring your lunch to work?No, I usually buy a salad, but that is a really good ideaIs your job important?What?Is your job important?Well, we guide overall capital allocation, which is a key driver of shareholder value. And, granted, the MA deals do not always work, but we execute those deals and someone has to do that. And look, the business leaders dont have the overall view of the strategic landscape that we do, and Im supposed to write down yes or no.Oh. Um no?And there it was. All my ambiguous work anxiety, my fixation on the next promotion, the residual unhappiness that slipped from my workday to my personal life, and it took a childs simple question to illuminate the issue.This was a perfectly good job. But I had always believed my best work would come when I was leading and executing, not strategizing. I felt that the world is moved forward by people who build, motivate, and direct great teams to do big things. I was not doing that, and I was not learning how to do it. It was a truly great job, and it was not the job for me.I began a soul-searching exercise that would eventually lead me to develop the Impact Map and Happiness Matrix. I kept redrawingthe Impact Map and redesigning my Happiness Matrix until I felt I had the direction my life needed. I faced the fact that I wanted to lead others, be accountable for the success of the team, and have an important impact on the lives of customers. I also knew that I wanted to do this in the context of marrying my amazing girlfriend, making a life in New York City, having kids and being a good dad, and giving back to my community by contributing to education and getting underprivileged people back to work. If I succeeded, maybe I would write a book. If I pulled all of th at off, I would be proud of my eulogy.Just one problem remained. I had virtually none of the qualifications or experiences I needed.By this stage of our journey, you are probably in a similar situation. The career path you desire requires experience doing the job, but how do you get experience without getting that job? The average person is sitting in her role waiting for the person above her to retire or get fired to create an opportunity. But not you, not anymore you create opportunities.We are going to do a couple of exercises to build the Career Roadmap that will help you realize your dreams. This is how I planned the career path that I wanted, which guided me on countless occasions to take on the right new roles, volunteer for relevant additional responsibilities, seek out mentors and coaches who could teach me what I needed to know, read the necessary books, and so on. These exercises are simple, clarifying, and will light the way to your career destiny.Lets pick an example, and pretend you have decided that your career purpose is to be a senior technology leader of a company in the eCommerce space, building an online shopping experience that brings lower cost and improved convenience to millions of peoples lives while lowering the environmental waste of brick-and-mortar shopping. To clarify this picture in our minds, lets call this role chief technology officer (CTO), though you may figure that running a large technology team with any title would be a great career destination.Write down the names of all the CTOs in your industry of interest that you can think of. Google something like best CTOs in eCommerce. Study their bios and look for the patterns in their career paths to learn what skills, experiences, and achievements they have amassed. abflug recording your observations. Seek other avenues to enrich this list, perhaps by talking to friends of friends who are in the higher ranks of technology organizations, reading books on the topic, and so on.As your research is coming together, your list of needed skills, experiences, and achievements may look something like thisThis list is going to form the foundation of what is essentially your career to-do list. Some of these items will appear clear and achievable, like staying current on latest technology trends, while others, like managing a hundred people, will seem insurmountable. Dont panic when I first performed this exercise and reviewed the bios of successful CEOs, the only person I had ever managed was Felix, the summer intern. You just have to make a plan. As Henry Ford once said, Nothing is particularly hard if you break it down into small jobs, and then he turned a horse into a car. For you, then, the next step is to break down each of these characteristics into the small jobs that are easier to visualize and plan to achieve. For instance, lets break down the first itemfrom the list, ability to manage large numbers of people effectively, into some of the components it mig ht entailSo, while you may have struggled with the leap from where you are now to CTO-level organizational leadership, learning the component parts like hiring good people is not so daunting. Next, you are going to make a plan to learn and demonstrate each of these tasks in the coming years of your career. Again, we will break down the first item in the list above, comfortable with management tools like budgeting, designing organizational structures, and wertmiger zuwachs managementYou will do this exercise for each item on the checklist. A few may be achieved just through the normal course of your work for example, if you are currently a software engineer, your day-to-day work and hands-on learning may already support something like excellent engineer who codes well. Others are learning experiences that will likely never present themselves to you unless you are magically promoted into the big job or you create the synthetic experiences, like those illustrated above, that will give you your first taste of the new skill. This checklist will inform the action items you tackle every week of your career. Write it all down, set deadlines, and commit. Each time you execute one, you will learn, grow, and demonstrate success in some way that helps advance your plot.There are some keys to getting your Career Roadmap and its execution right. Here are a few snippets of advice that others have found helpfulCommit to an Unusual PathAchieving extraordinary outcomes will require unusual measures. Very few of your colleagues, classmates, and friends will have a Career Roadmap most of them will be measuring their success in titles, compensation, and awards, and behaving accordingly, rarely with a clear-eyed plan for their future. Many of the people senior to you in your chosen profession will be guilty of the same if enough people just do what is expected of them, eventually a few of them will be made senior vice president. Most people will find the idea of a big detailed pla n for their future to be somewhere between odd and off-putting.They will also find some of your career choices to be confusing. Not long after a kindergartner had shamed me for being misaligned from my career purpose, my team had begun negotiating the largest acquisition in the companys history. Everyone was salivating over putting this career-making deal on his or her resume. At the same moment, a mentor of mine, who understood my Career Roadmap better than I did at the time, offered me a long-shot opportunity to develop and launch a new channel for the company, which would provide me with extensive operational and leadership experiences. For the next few months, the whole team worked excitedly on a deal thatconsistently graced the cover of the Wall Street Journal, while I played alone in the corner developing a new business plan. That channel became my first business launch, my first management experience, my first PL responsibility and it catapulted my career in the arc of mynew Career Roadmap.I have yet to read in the autobiography of an important person, I just did what everyone else did and, wow, here I am. If you do what everyone else does, you are going to get what everyone else gets. I want a lot more than that for you. Achieving yourCareer Roadmaprequires a commitment to executing your own path.Do Your ResearchYour Career Roadmap calls for you to advance in your field well beyond your current scope of knowledge. By definition, that means you are making big assumptions and plans regarding a career and jobs about which you are at least somewhat ignorant. In ways you cannot yet see, your plan is wrong. Poring over books, articles, blogs, and TED Talks on relevant topics can help. And there is no substitute for talking to someone on the other side of the journey.Delightfully, people are usually happy to share their advice the successful tend to be motivated by service or by ego, and telling someone else the secrets of their success is consistent with bo th. With some hustle, you can gather a lot of insight and inspiration. For instance, in the exercise above, we strategized a CTO career path and collected a list of top CTOs in the industry. With some time on Google and LinkedIn, you could find a way to get in touch with each one of them and ask if you could visit or call them for fifteen minutes of advice, and if that would be too much trouble, could you email a question or two. At least one, likely more, will say yes. If you can find someone in your network who knows an individual on the list and agrees to make an introduction for you, your likelihood of success increases tenfold. Ask them what propelled theircareer. Ask what they look for in top talent. Ask if the items on your Career Roadmap are consistent with their career observations. Ask them, if they had to go back15 years and do it again, what they would do, knowing all that they know now.Will this feel awkward? At first, of course You are asking intimidating strangers exo tic questions about their success. But each of them can give you a piece of the map to the special place you are trying to go. Most every step of this extraordinary career path is going to require you to make yourself uncomfortable at first. Again, get comfortable being uncomfortable.Enter Into a Career Covenant With Your ManagerYour current manager can have a significant impact on your success. If advancement in your company is a component of your career plan, she can advocate for you at critical junctures, like when promotions are considered. Even if your Career Roadmap points in a different direction, your manager is someone who regularly observes your work and can provide valuable feedback and advice. Recruiting your manager to be a part of your Career Roadmap is key to success.Michael Feiner writes in The Feiner Points of Leadership that a leaders responsibility is to deliver on a career covenant, agreeing to provide skill development, performance feedback, advice, and career s ponsorship to employees who deliver good work. You can initiate this relationship by asking your boss explicitly if she would be willing to provide this mentorship, and if shed dedicate a fraction of your one-on-one meetings to coaching you on your career plan. Here you could discuss elements of your Career Roadmap and solicit advice or introductions as you work your way through it.Your bosss commitment to a career covenant with you also opens the door for you to take on side hustles bonus projects that will develop new skills and experiences for you and benefit your boss. For instance, you may conclude that you need to become a better interviewer on the path to learning to be a manager, and you ask if it would be appropriate to join your boss for interviews and take notes for her and send her the summary. At some point in the future, you might be positioned to do first-round interviews for your manager and screen out candidates who are not worth her consideration. Or you may have a Career Roadmap action to learn marketing, so you are reading a few books on the topic and you offer to take a crack at producing a new marketing brochure for customers describing one of your teams services. If you deliver in your day job and in your side hustle, you will continue to build your managers trust and receive more and more responsibilities. This has the added benefit of distinguishing you as a person who is learning the craft at the next level, which puts you on the radar for promotion.Your side of this bargain is the heavy one You need to do excellent work in your day job, keep your relationship with your boss focused on the work she needs the team to get done, and then create added time for the coaching and advice. You will very quickly lose your managers support and goodwill if your assigned work appears to be slipping because of your focus on longer-term goals. You can be both Superman and Clark Kent, but you have to get your articles in on time.Be a Giver, Not a Ta kerBlatantly ambitious people often come across as needy, selfish climbers. There is a way for you to be ambitious without being that kind of person Frame your Career Roadmap and your career discussions in the context of what you want to contribute and how you want to help. You could, using the interviewing example above, just go to someone in human resources and impose on his time to learn how to interview. Alternatively, you could say, I have always respected professionals who value their people and understand HR and am hoping to be able to do the same someday. If this is something important to you, too, could I pick your brain? I dont know if you have interest in engineering, but I would love to repay the favor if you ever want to see how we do it. The latter is a sincere exchange and one to which an HR professional who cares about his craft will likely be excited to contribute.There will be people upon whom you impose for instance, the successful people in your field whose advi ce you solicit to whom you cant really provide much value today. But you will someday, and it is important that as you progress along your path, you do not forget the people who helped you get there. In the meantime, there is always someone junior to you, who could use your help in one way or another. If you have read this far, you would probably make a good mentor to someone else. Pay it forward.Change Jobs Thoughtfully and PurposefullyYour job needs to be important to you, aligned to your Happiness Matrix, and challenging to you in ways consistent with the demands of your Career Roadmap. Unfortunately, many settle into jobs that do not achieve these principles. Some are aware that their job is not right, but are afraid of making a mistake, so they wait for the perfect opportunity to come along next. Others may not be comfortable pushing themselves to the next level, getting soft and lazy instead, convincing themselves that they have worked hard to get here and deserve to sit back and enjoy it for a while. The problem is, if you are not moving forward in your career, you are moving backward, because there are ambitious people all around who are gunning for the next challenge and are going to take your seat. The alternative to an extraordinary career is not an easy and comfortable career it is failure.Properly executing your career plan requires constantly assessing your current role and other potential roles in the context of your Career Roadmap. This does not mean opting instead for job hoppingvariety without a strategy is hardly better than sitting passively with the same old responsibilities. It does mean working relentlessly through your checklist of skills and experiences you need to achieve the next level. A well-managed career covenant with your manager can help to maximize what you are learning in your current role, but at times the next set of lessons will require a new job with your employer or with a new organization. For instance, your employer m ay not have management opportunities available for you, but another, faster-growing company does. Or your career plan may require you to work in a different industry or region, necessitating a move. Another company may be more willing to give you ownership of your own budget or some other broader responsibility. Or perhaps your Career Roadmap is leading you to starting your own business. Your job may change a dozen times over the next few decades the key to a successful career is making those decisions proactively, with a focus on accomplishing the items in your Career Roadmap as quickly and successfully as possible, while continuing to honor your personal values.With regularity, you should assess your current job as well as other jobs for which you may be qualified in the context of your Career Roadmap. As you do so, keep in mind the human bias to overvalue what you have and undervalue what you could have when comparing opportunities, pretend you are already in the other job you ar e considering, and ask yourself if you would leave it to take the job you have now. If not, then it is time to think harder about making amove.Fundamentally Change How You Think About Time ManagementMost people see their lives in two parts working and playing. Either they are required to be at work to get their job done, or they can do whatever feels fun. Executing an extraordinary career and life requires a radically different approach. You have to set goals and action items and deadlines, and a good number of them need to be due this quarter. They must be in your calendar and you have to commit to them. You should be checking in on your plan regularly, assessing and adapting yourplan based on your progress. Leaving work on Friday for two days of mindless fun and returning Monday morning sleepy are for someone on a different path. To achieve your career goals, we are going to stack the calendar with the routines that are fundamental to your success.Dont Lose Sight of the Big Pictur eThe examples offered here focus on work-related strategies and tactics because they are the most universally relevant (we all suffer from email overload and endless meetings). However, that is not meant to imply that work is more important than the other things you value in life family, friends, and community may play a more rang und namen haben role in your lifethan anything you do at work this year. My goal is to help you succeed in your career as part of an impactful overall life plan.Therefore, your Career Roadmap should accommodate, and force thoughtful trade-offs among, the things that are truly important to you. You could spend all your waking hours working on your Career Roadmap, but that would come at the expense of your relationships with the people you love. A big promotion to a role full of international travel may fill important gaps in your Career Roadmap, but if that conflicts with your important responsibilities as, say, a new parent, you may be wise to decline. Be ing the first to reply to the bosss emails may earn you goodwill at work, but a life spent glued to your screen may not be the eulogy you were looking for. Having a clear plan for each of the things truly important to you, and investing the time and focus each deserves, is the balance required for an extraordinary life and career.Adapted fromThe Career Manifestoby Mike Steib, copyright (c) 2018. Published by TarcherPerigee, a division of Penguin Random House, Inc.Mike Steibis the president and CEO of XO Group, a family of brands that includes the popular sites The Knot, The Nest, and The Bump.

How to Handle Negative Emails Professionally

How to Handle Negative Emails ProfessionallyHow to Handle Negative Emails Professionally4Resist the urge to respond. Your first reaction upon reading the emaille might be to respond right away. But firing back an equally emotional email can land you in a lot of hot water- and possibly ruin your relationship with a tauglichkeit employer or your boss. So stop yourself from answering the email right away, no matter how much you want to dash off a response.Get up from your desk. In order to gain some perspective- and give yourself time to cool off- you should stand up from your desk. Take a walk, get a glass of water, or chat with another colleague or friend for some perspective. This will give you time to decompress and calm down before sitting down again at your desk- and facing the email.Reread the email. Once youre in a better, calmer frame of mind, sit down and reread the email. After all, it may not be as bad as you think it is. It might be that you read through it hastily and misi nterpreted the meaning of the email. Go through and write down the underlying issues being expressed by the potential employer or your boss. This will allow you to address all of them appropriately in your response and help you to communicate better as you work from home.Think your response through. Time is of the essence, so you should definitely respond as quickly as possible. Be sure to answer any questions or clarify any miscommunication. If you feel that you might be misunderstood- or worse, that your job may be on the line- you should pick up the phone and call the email sender right away. By doing so, youll avoid long-term damage to your job candidacy or working relationship.It can be easy sometimes to misinterpret the intent of an email, so its best to clear the air as quickly as possible. That way, you can establish open lines of communication with potential employers or reestablish the lines of good and clear communication between your professional network or current boss again.Readers, how have you handled problematic emails in the past? Let us know in the comments section below

Why it seriously pays to walk or bike to your job

Why it seriously pays to walk or bike to your jobWhy it seriously pays to walk or bike to your jobYour miserable commute might get a little better if you consider walking or even cycling - and it even could make you more productive at work, according to a new study.Researchers in Australia took a look into the commuting habits of workers and found that commuting shorter distances, and have an active commute like walking or biking, makes commuters more likely to be happy, which positively influences their behavior at work.The study, published in the Journal of Transport Geography, observed more than 1,000 full-time workers and found that long commutes arent for the best. Workers with long-distance commuters have more absent days, according to the study. They claim that workers with lengthy commutes miss more time because they are more likely to get sick and miss work. Long commutes also have an adverse effect financially due to travel costs.Follow Ladders on FlipboardFollow Ladders m agazines on Flipboard covering Happiness, Productivity, Job Satisfaction, Neuroscience, and moreBut theres good berichterstattung for those who get to work differently. Participants who walk or bike to work reported having betting working habits compared to participants who take public transportation or commute via car. Participants reported feeling relaxed, calm, enthusiastic, and satisfied with their commuters, which made them more productive.This revelation isnt exactly groundbreaking, but it further shows how an active commute has its benefits. Cycling to work has big health benefits, according to a study published in 2018, which claimed cycling drastically lowering the risk of cancer and cardiovascular disease compared to commuters who travel via car or public transportation.Longer commuters have also been targeted for its health issues in the past. A study published in 2012 looked at Texan commuters and found those with lengthened commutes of about 15 miles were overall less p hysically active and more likely to be obese.

Americans want to make machines do the dirty work

Americans want to make machines do the dirty workAmericans want to make machines do the dirty workWorkers of the future may be competing for jobs against machines who can work longer, harder, and without complaint. And we are increasingly aware of this future. The majority of Americans believe that robots will replace our jobs in 50 years. As you look at your ordinary, human body, its easy to feel anxious about how our bodies and brains can measure up.How can we fight against our approaching obsolescence? In a new Pew Research Center survey, Americans offered solutions to manage machines before they manage us.Overwhelming majority Restrict robots to dirty and dangerous jobsFirst things first, the machines have to be reminded of their place. The overwhelming majority of the 4,135 U.S. adults surveyed - 85% - said that they would support restricting automated jobs to those that are dangerous or unhealthy for humans to do. Automated machines can continue to do the grunt work, in other words, while we get the opportunity to pursue more creative, less monotonous tasks.Majority support government income for displaced workersAlthough Americans surveyed were split on whether it was the governments responsibility or the individuals to handle how exactly we are going to restrict machines jobs, the majority of us think we should get compensated for living with the effects of automation.More than half of those surveyed thought that there should be some sort of government policy guaranteeing a basic income for workers displaced by machines even if they can do work faster than us.Where automation is actually headingAutomation, however, is heading in a very different direction than these survey respondents might hope. Machines are continuing to replace jobs that are not particularly dangerous or unhealthy. McDonalds and Shake Shack, for example, have both recently announced that they are replacing the role of cashiers with self-order kiosks at certain locations.Meanwhile, r obots and AIs are taking over more and more white-collar tasks, such as providing therapy and screening job candidates.

Managing Your Job Search During a Vacation

Managing Your Job Search During a VacationManaging Your Job Search During a VacationIf youre in the middle of a job search, you understand how time consuming that process can be. From scouring job boards and introducing yourself to potential employers, to networking and reaching out to past coworkers and bosses, theres a lot involved with finding that dream job.Unfortunately, the process of finding a new job can take a while, and during that time you may find yourself in need of a vacation. Or perhaps you find yourself in the middle of a job search during a time when you had already planned to take some time away. It is possible to take a vacation and still charge ahead with your job search, as long as youre strategic.Consider following these steps if you need to job search during a vacationtischset aside time to keep searching.Taking some time away from the daily grind of work and searching for a new job is a great way to get some much-needed rest and to recharge your batteries. If youre looking for a new job, though, its important to understand that opportunities can pop up at any time, and you wouldnt want to miss one just because you were away.To that end, make it a goal to set aside a small amount of time each day to check in with your resources to make sure you arent letting opportunities slip by. That could mean taking 30 minutes at the start of the day to log on to your email to see if any notifications or correspondence has come through, or maybe it means briefly logging on to those job boards before you head to bed to see if anything looks interesting.Be sure your systems are in place.Itll be easier to step away from the day-to-day tasks of searching for a job if you know that youve done all you can to make sure any job opportunities you want to know about will come to you. That means making sure that all your job board notifications are turned on before you leave so that jobs that might be a good match will come right to your inbox and you can easily check them (and apply, if need be) while youre away.Turn on your out-of-office reply.Even if you arent currently employed, set up a thoughtful out-of-office message so that prospective employers who reach out while youre on vacation understand your potential delayed response. Assure people in your message that although you are away, youll still be checking your email every day and will respond to anything important as soon as you can.Do as much as you can before you leave.If you can be as effective in your job search as possible before you leave, youll have an easier time stepping away for a couple of days. That means making sure your resume is up to date and is ready to be sent at a moments notice if need-be, letting any potential employers youve already been in contact with know about your time away, and RSVPing to any upcoming networking events youre interested in before you head out the door.Be prepared to hit the ground running when you get back.Lets be honest- sometimes we ne ed a vacation from our vacations. Getting back into the routine of things when you get home can take time, but if you can do everything possible to ensure a smooth transition back to your job search when you get back, youll save a lot of time. That could mean tidying up your office area before you leave and leaving yourself a to-do list for when you return, including setting up some meetings ahead of time with former coworkers.Vacation is important, so you should definitely take some time away. Still, if finding the right job is important to you, as well, take a little time to set up these suggestions so that you can enjoy your vacation while knowing youve done everything you can to ensure your job search continues while youre gone.BROWSE OPEN JOBS