Finding Your First Job and Starting Your Career
With the advent of Internet job boards, many people think of that as “THE” way to conduct a job search. Job boards do have some advantages like job agents that will do searches for you and send you job matches, the ability to do your searching after hours from your home computer, and will make you aware of positions that you might not have known about. However, there are equally as good if not better methods of conducting a job search that you might not have considered.
The common element that we hear all of time from job seekers that have quickly found employment is that they were able to get directly to the hiring manager or person that was over the job search. Remember when you were in school and someone would give you “cuts” so you could jump ahead in the line? You were able to get to the food quicker and sometime that meant you got the good stuff before it was all gone. Think of Job Searches in the same terms. If you can jump to the head of the line, very often you will eliminate much of the competition for the position you were trying to land.
Unlike Newspaper ads or Job boards where your resume is one of many, you need to think in terms of getting “cuts” to get in front of the hiring manager before the other “kids” can. The strategies that we are going to talk about will allow you to do just that.
Networking
Developing a personal job network is still one of the best methods of finding a position. If you are just entering the job force and so are most of the people that are in your graduating class. Prior to graduation build a network of people in your class. There is really power in numbers. If you design your job search team up to share job openings with each other. you will all multiply your ability to land the kind of position you want. The key to good networking is giving something away with out expecting anything in return. If you are sitting at home saying, “why isn’t my network producing any job leads for me”, then you are going about it wrong. Be the leader! You should be the one that sends out job leads to 5he team. When you hear about something and put it out to your network, you’ll be surprised how much comes back to you.
What social groups do you belong to? Alumni? Clubs? Church? Teams? These all should be thought of as job lead networks that you could tap into for job leads. It can be as simple a sending an email out to the people in your social group or selecting a couple of people that have been in the workforce for sometime and asking for them to give you advice. No matter how you do it, put the word out to your social group.
Also, under personal networks, make sure to include your family. Let everyone in the family know that you are looking. Many times you’ll hear in reply, “oh you want to work there?, Uncle Frank has a lodge brother that is the HR Director and I am sure he will help you.”
Finally, with the cyber networks we have today like Facebook, Myspace and the more professional LinkedIn, there are now ways you can be “cyber” networking 24x7, 365. We suggest that everyone joins LinkedIn and set up a professional profile. Once you have done that, you should also go back and give your Facebook and Myspace site a professional look with your information, career goals and resume available for anyone that wants to review it. Set up an email account that you will use for job searches and put the links back to your professional personal pages in your signature. In doing so you have created another tool for giving you cuts in line. Every time you send an email that is forwarded, you expose your credentials to people in the email chain. Who knows, it may be the president of the next company you go to work for.
As a side note before you begin your serious job search you will want to take down picture of you at spring break (or anything else that may be embarrassing) from your personal website. We always Google a person’s name that we are interested in interviewing and check out their Facebook and Myspace sites as well. You would be very surprised at what we find sometimes (or maybe you wouldn’t :).
Once your network produces an interview for you will need to prepare. We have screened for your consideration materials that will help you prepare. Be sure to check them out and our other sponsors as well.