1. At all costs, AVOID looking for a job between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. Companies are too distracted with family and the holidays to look for employees. In January, however, companies get a new budget and lofty goals for expansion, so this is the perfect time to be looking.
2. Once you’ve focused on a career path, don’t divert your attention into other possibilities. It takes A LOT of work to demonstrate your abilities and skillsets. Looking elsewhere means you have to start all over.
i.e. After a few setbacks, I tried getting a temp office job and had to prove a mastery of MS Office. They expect you to know every little detail of the programs and expect you to finish like 140 questions in 45 mins for each program… LOTS of prep work to ace that thing. Conversely, I’d been working on my portfolio for what seems like forever, so there were only little gaps that needed to be filled. So yea, I failed that skills test miserably!
3. See how you rank with your competition. Look online at other resumes, portfolios. Identify those who have “made it” and compare yourself to them. What are they doing? What do they have that I’m lacking? How do I fill those gaps?
4. Go waaay over the top in demonstrating positive attitude, passion, and commitment. It’s cliche, yes. But if you’ve chosen the right career path, you’ll automatically be passionate about it, so tell the company you’ll commit to their company because of this passion.
5. If applying to a job posting, read into the ad and make assumptions on what you think the company really wants. In the cover letter, address these assumptions and tell them that you are the embodiment of these traits with a proven track record. Reword your work experience to support the embodiment claim. Its ballsy, its cocky, and it grabs their attention.
6. If you get an interview, the cover letter worked and you’re probably right about their needs. They will spend a lot of time talking about what the company does and what they need done. This is your opportunity to tell them how you would fit in, and give examples of how you accomplished these things in the past.
7. Make sure to ask for the job before you leave the office. I read somewhere that most people don’t do this.
8. Send a follow up email restating their needs and how you intend to fill those needs (like in the cover letter, but more task specific).
9. Take it one day at a time. Every night, identify one thing you want to accomplish the next day and use that the get the ball rolling in the morning. If you’re unemployed and looking for a job, it gets increasingly difficult to stay productive (or even get out of bed) if you don’t do this.
I could go on and on… in the end it came down to a lot of personal development literature helping fuel the desire to keep going, learning what I gotta do to make it work, then doing it, trial and error, until it does work.
One last, very important thing I want to add:
10. Get over the sense of entitlement. I’m 23 and my generation has been dubbed “GenMe.” I started out this way, feeling as though people should be begging me to work for them. But the sooner I got over this, the sooner I got to being honest with myself, and the sooner I got to working to achieve this goal.”
Thursday, February 1
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