What Job Search Techniques Work?

Your plan of action will include a variety of job search techniques. You should find those you believe will best help you get the job you want.

• Networking – Let people know you are looking! Talk to family, faculty, and friends. Remember - everyone is a potential contact.

• Cold Calls – This is the old ‘knocking on doors’ technique where you call companies or go in person to personnel offices to inquire about possible openings. Using this technique, however, requires careful preparation as you will leave an impression with every person you meet in the process. You need to be prepared to interview on the spot.

• Field Specific Listings – These are job announcements found in professional jour-nals and newsletters. They are more career specific than those found in daily news-papers. An increasing number of field specific listings can be found in the Internet.

• Mass Mailing – Sending out a large number of Cover Letter s and Résumé s is a common but passive strategy. It is important that you know the odds – for every 80 letters you mail out you can expect 2 – 4 positive replies. You need to consider how much time and money you want to spend for this kind of return.

• Want Ads – This is probably still the most widely used job search technique. Like mass mailing, want ads don’t always yield a high positive return although some fields use them more regularly than others. A better use of newspapers is often for the information you can gain about an area through its news. Subscribing to a paper in a city or state where you hope to work in can be a useful strategy if you plan to relocate.

• Career Fairs – Come and meet employers to network and position yourself for a later application.

• Experiential Learning – These include opportunities such as internships, volunteer work and even student employment in your field of interest. More and more employers are looking for people who already have experience or related experience in their field and some have begun to hire only from their intern pool.

• Luck and Chance – Don't underestimate the power of fortuitous circumstances! Lucky people, however, are frequently those who know how to maximize their good fortune by actively researching their field of interest to learn ways they might position themselves to be in the right place at the right time.

Resume/cv

When you apply for a job, most employers ask for 2 important documents:

1. A resume or CV

2. A Cover(ing) Letter

Your résumé and letter are usually the first impression that an employer has of you. And because an employer may have hundreds of job applications to consider, you have about 15 seconds to make sure that first impression is a good one.

Résumé

In the USA people write a short biography called Résume A résumé is a self-marketing tool, designed with the goal of obtaining a job interview. Résumé information is targeted succinctly [briefly] to a career field and addresses the needs of a specific employer. Your résumé should market your relevant skills, knowledge, and accomplishments.

Preparation

It will be difficult to begin the process of writing your résumé unless you identify the career field and types of employers that will be the focus of your job search. When you know how you will use the résumé, then you will be able to write an effective, targeted résumé that gets results. You will likely spend a considerable amount of time developing your résumé, choosing the right words and phrases to describe your marketable skills and experiences. It is not uncommon to write several revisions before arriving at the final version.

One-page résumés are preferred for most entry-level positions. Two-page résumés are acceptable if the information on both pages demonstrates the skills and/or experience relevant to your profession. Well-designed résumés will be visually appealing and free from any spelling, typographical, punctuation, or grammatical errors. All résumés should be written concisely in an organized format that presents the most important information first.

Employers who read individual résumés spend very little time on each résumé - in most cases, only twenty to thirty seconds. Many large employers are now using optical scanning machines and various software programs to assist them with this initial review.