The Invisible Mentor

6 Job Search Tips from Career Coach Peggy McKee

October 31st, 2011 |

Career Coach Peggy McKee from Career Confidential presented at the webinar, “How to Find a Job in any Economy.” The following job search tips were gleaned from her presentation with some of my own thoughts added.

View your job search as a sales process where the hiring manager is the buyer, you are the product, and your resume is your marketing and sales material. You only have 15 seconds to capture their attention so use the AIDA formula in your resume. Grab their Attention with your resume or profile headline, capture their Interest by saying something captivating that’s important to them, create a Desire by showing how you can make their lives better, and finally, take Action.
Never go through HR, go directly to the hiring managers. HR uses Applicant Tracking Systems as a spam filter to weed out as many resumes as possible.
Be proactive and work on expanding your network! Use social media to find and build relationships with hiring managers. Make sure that you always complete your profile for social media networks.
If you are interested in working for particular companies, create Google Alerts for the companies so you can keep abreast of what’s happening and discover their pain.
Use SimplyHired.com and Indeed.com, which aggregate available jobs, and set up alerts for specific jobs you are interested in to be emailed to you.
Only spend 10 percent of your job search time using job boards, use them more as a research tool to identify trends, and which companies are hiring.

Please refer to the blog post, 6 Ways to Maximize Your LinkedIn Presence – Tips from Carol McManus, the LinkedIn Lady. How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.