Accelerate Your Job Search in the Summer Slowdown

Accelerate Your Job Search in the Summer SlowdownAccelerate Your Job Search in the Summer SlowdownSummer is upon us The price of gasoline has gone through the roof millions of children are unleashed from school and, guaranteed, job seekers are frustrated enough to put their job search on hold.As we find ways to survive the gas prices and summer schedule, so too must job seekers find ways to accelerate their search.While there is a general slowdown in hiring during the summer, the search process for exceptional talent is ongoing. In fact, decision makers continually evaluate talent in order to fill executive positions as soon as the Labor Day holiday is over. Smart job seekers should do everything possible to position themselves for the demand for talent in September and October.Lets explore traditional and out-of-the-box search strategies to give you a competitive edge.The 3ft. RuleSummer is an extraordinary time to network, as the season is filled with festivals, barbecues, garage s ales, sports, and endless other activities. Guess what? Decision makers from every industry and functional area are participating in those activities. Nows the time to implement what I call The 3ft. Rule. Dont hesitate to talk to anyone who comes within three feet of you. If youre camping, its the people whove pitched tents around you. If youre at the beach, its the family swimming next to you. The list goes on. You can easily break the ice by talking about the activity you have in common. Then ask, By the way, what is your business? or, What do you do for a living? This kicks off networking that wouldnt have happened otherwise.Heres a great summertime success story. One of my clients was having a garage sale and there was an individual checking out the used refrigerator for sale. My client thought Okay, Im going to use The 3ft. Rule. After a brief discussion about the refrigerator, my client inquired as to what the man did for a living. He happened to be looking for a mechanical en gineer at his company, Mare Island. As youve probably guessed, my client was a mechanical engineer and landed the position in just three weeks.It never would have happened if he hadnt turned the conversation toward work. When you attend summer activities, dont just hang out with your friends. Seek out other participants and network away.Be VisibleIf youre notlage already actively listed on social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook, what are you waiting for? Recruiters and executive decision makers use those sites on a regular basis to find talent. During the summer, recruiters and decision makers spend a great deal of time surfing online networking sites. They take their laptops with them on vacation, and browse for talent while lounging on the beach. Actively build your Internet presence so key decision makers can find you.Diversify your StrategiesUse multiple strategies to reach executive decision makers. Here are some rapid-fire ideasSpice up your resume with visuals. Hi ghlight your performance with graphs, tables and charts. Like they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. Be sure to see my article on developing an executive portfolio in next months newsletter.Target specific executive decision makers, not just an employers HR department, with your resume or executive portfolio.While everyone is using schmelzglas to contact decision makers, take a step back in time and use old fashioned snail mail. It works particularly with an executive portfolio.Make certain you attend local industry trade associations summer meetings. The lower turnout common at these meetings gives you the opportunity to spend more time with the decision makers who do attend.If you can secure summer interviews, they can be very productive. While the hiring decision might not be made until fall, the company pace frequently slows down and interviews can be more casual. Your potential boss might even be able to spend more time with you in the interview. Its a great time to bu ild relationships and sell yourself.The summer slowdown is very much like the slowdown during the November and December holidays. Despite the lack of hiring activity during those times, key decision makers are always on the lookout for peak performers. Hiring takes off like a rocket at the end of summer. The job seeker who has been pursuing opportunities during the slowdown will be first on the list when hiring accelerates in September.When summer draws to a close, if you have spent your summer wisely, maintaining a focused, intense job search, you will likely be starting a new opportunity.

5 Things You Might Not Have on Your Resume, But Should

5 Things You Might Not Have on Your Resume, But Should 5 Things You Might Not Have on Your Resume, But Should If youre trying to write an effective resume, here are five things you might not be including, but should add.1. A profile at the top of your resume. Profile sections or summaries have replaced objectives at the top of modern-day resumes. This is a quick list of the highlights of your strengths and experience, summing up in just a few sentences or bullet points who you are as a candidate and what you have to offer. A well-written profile or summary can provide an overall framing of your candidacy, setting the hiring manager up to binnensee the rest of your resume through that lens.2. Accomplishments at each job. If youre like most people, your resume lists what you were responsible for at each job you held but doesnt explain what you actually achieved there. Rewriting your resume to focus on accomplishments will make it far mora effective, and more likely to catch a hiring m anagers eye. That means getting rid of lines like managed website and replacing them with lines like increased Web traffic by 15 percent in six months i.e., something that explains how you performed, not just what your job was.3. Volunteer work. Too often, candidates dont mention their volunteer work on their resumes, even when its relevant to the jobs theyre applying for. If you believe that volunteer work doesnt count because you dont get paid for it, think again. Employers want to know about all the experience you have that might be relevant, whether you received pay for it or not. Hiring managers have plenty of stories of nearly rejecting a candidate for lack of experience before discovering that the person simply hadnt mentioned their relevant experience because it had been gained as a volunteer.4. Relevant hobbies and side projects. As with volunteering, too many people neglect to mention relevant experience that theyve gained through hobbies or side projects, mistakenly thin king that it doesnt count because its not real work or its just for fun. But to the contrary, it can help flesh out your skills and experience and can demonstrate a passion for the work that paid jobs cant always do. For instance, if youre applying for an IT position and you run an online software discussion group in your spare time, mention that. Or if youre applying for a teaching job and you review childrens books for your website, thats important to mention too. These types of details help paint a stronger picture of you as a candidate.5. Bullet points. Too many job candidates have resumes that are filled with large blocks of text. Hiring managers will only skim your resume initially, and big blocks of text are difficult to skim (not to mention, they often make employers eyes glaze over). An employer will absorb more information about you with a quick skim if your information is arranged in bullet points rather than paragraphs. And after all, thats your goal to have your inform ation read and processed, not to cram as much in as possible.Alison Green writes the popular Ask a Manager blog, where she dispenses advice on career, job search, and management issues. Shes also the co-author of Managing to Change the World The Nonprofit Managers Guide to Getting Results, and former chief of staff of a successful nonprofit organization, where she oversaw day-to-day staff management, hiring, firing, and employee development.

This is By Far the Dumbest Resume Trend

This is By Far the Dumbest Resume Trend This is By Far the Dumbest Resume Trend This is By Far the Dumbest Resume TrendDear Job Seekers,If you decide to create an infographic resume (against the suggestion of basically every hiring manager), please, for the love of god, DO NOT do this for your skills sectionDo not do this or you are a Bad Person.Oh look, a cute point system to visualize your skills Too badeanstalt it makes no sense.Creating a skills point system is an awful and illogical style of presentation that will only serve to confuse the hiring manager and make them trash your resume quickly. This trend is most often found on graphic design resumesthat like to push the limits of creativity.Lets take a close look at why a skills point system makes no sense at all. Take this exampleAdobe Photoshop 7/10Adobe Dreamweaver 3/10Microsoft Word 10/10Excel 3/10Atrocious. Presenting information like this relies on a series of moronic assumptions which, stacked againstone another, creates a towering pile of illogical BS so high the peak is barely visible. Its a bad resume trend, and people should just stop it.Spock finds your resume most illogical.Nonsensical Assumption 1 All of these skills have the same level of difficultyIf you think Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Word have the same level of difficulty, you are either living under a jupe or seriously overestimating your Photoshop skills.You cannot create a point scale and compare your skills against each other when those skills differ in quality and difficulty. Period.Dont believe me? Tell me if this makes any sense to youKickball 10/10Brain Surgery 5/10It doesnt make sense, does it? The only thing youve learned about my kickball skills is that Im utterly perfect at it (which is true). With regards to brain surgery, would you trust someone with an 8/10, or a 9/10? What does that even mean?It means nothing. Literally nothing which brings us to point 2.Stop doing this. Just stop.Nonsensical Assumption 2 The point s cale means somethingIn fact, these scales are completely meaningless.In order for a 10-point scale to have any meaning, people would need to design standardized tests that measure each skill on a 10-point scale.NEWSFLASH No one has designed tests to rate your ability on a 10-point scale for the majority of skills youll put on a resume.In other words, when people rate themselves, it is also known as making $h up.Try asking someone what the difference is between being a 5/10 and a 6/10 on Microsoft Word. What do you think they would say?RG Hint There is no difference.Please stop. I cant take it anymora.Nonsensical Assumption 3 People are good at rating themselvesActually, people are horrible at rating themselves across the board.Did you know that idiots are more likely to rate themselves higher for tasks they are awful at, whereas intelligent people are more likely to rate themselves lower for tasks they are good at? This is a cognitive bias called illusory superiority.How can that be ? Whereas intelligent people are more aware of the inherent difficulties of a given task, an idiot will obliviously think that everything is easy because theyre incapable of thinking deeply enough about the problem.(This explains the middle-management idiot phenomenon, and also why braggarts tend not to be the sharpest tools in the shed.)Just awful.So how should you present your skills?Theonly place your skills actually mean anything is in the meat of your professional experience section. Thats where you tell the hiring manager exactly what you accomplished with your skills, which is literally the only thing that matters.What have we learned? A fanciful skills rating scale gives absolutely no information whatsoever and you should burn your resume to a crisp if youve included one.Thanks for reading.