7 sure shot tips to get hired quickly
In the words of many great motivational speakers, “Confidence is key”. But in today’s world, there are a lot of things you need to take into account, like your job profile. Whether or not you are looking for a career change, getting a recruiter call is never a bad idea. It tells you that you are in demand and a few interviews here and there keeps you grounded about how the job ecosystem is evolving. One of the biggest challenges for job seekers is how do they get their profile noticed? Or how to get the attention of recruiters who are stifling through thousands of profiles on the recruitment databases. The key to getting recruiters attention involves a few simple steps that will make your profile stand out. Here are a few of them:
Tailor your CV
Relevance is crucial when applying for any job. Your CV is most likely target ed towards one profession or industry, but no two jobs will be exactly the same. Whenever you apply for a role, take a few minutes to check your CV against the job advertisement or job description and look for any potential improvements you can make. For example, if you are hiding a crucial qualification at the bottom of your CV, move it to the top and make it prominent, if that’s a key requirement of a particular role. Tailoring your CV for every application may take a little more effort, but it’s a better use of time than making 10 generic applications that may not attract the attention you need.
Career Objective or Career Summary
This is the opening and probably the most important part of your profile and make sure that it adequately represents you. A lot of people don’t pay attention to this and will just copy from other resumes that they find good. That is a big mistake which everyone should avoid. A suitable career summary is like a two-minute presentation of your career, your achievements, interests, motivation and your aspirations. It’s about who you are, what you have been and where you want to be. We can see one of these in many websites of prominent people, especially the best motivational speakers in India. It gives the audience an idea about the speaker and their experience. This is why we should also create a suitable summary. Make sure you don’t keep it inadequate or make it sound like hundreds of other profiles.
Update your profile photo
LinkedIn, one of the largest business networking professional websites claims that profiles with updated photographs get 21% more views than profiles without a photograph. Likewise, if you are sending your profile to recruiters over email, make sure that your CV has an updated picture of yours.
Update your location
Most recruiters screen or search for profiles based on location criteria. Make sure that you have updated both your current location as well as a preferred location. A small miss here can make your profile go unnoticed with thousands of recruiters searching for profiles like yours both on job portals as well as on social media websites.
Showcase your achievements and the impact they have made
A lot of profiles are just bullet points listing what they have done. Understand that your profile is not a task-list. Don’t list everything that you have done. List important projects you have undertaken and the overall impact they created. The impact could be in terms of profitability, cost-savings or process enhancements or shortening the time of the production cycle. As mentioned earlier, this method can be seen on the websites of the top motivational speakers in India. They list their important life achievements, be it an award or a published book. Therefore we too should indulge in making such a list. Highlight the successes and it would not be a bad idea to list a few failures too! We all make mistakes and acknowledging them and showcasing them projects honesty and accountability, qualities that a lot of potential employer’s value seriously.
Make sure your profile has the right keywords
Most recruiters today search for candidates by applying keyword filters when performing a search on job databases. These filters could be skills, years of experience, location, salary bracket and so on. So when you are updating your profile on a job portal, do ensure that your profile carries relevant keywords which may make your profile searchable.
Create an impactful cover letter
Imagine you are watching one of those motivational speaker videos. At the beginning of the video, they tell you about what they are going to talk about and which topics they will cover, wouldn’t you be more excited to watch the full video? In a similar way, one should create an impactful cover letter for their application. Many times, people just send their resumes to recruiters without mentioning anything in the body of the email, assuming that recruiters are waiting to receive their profiles. This should be avoided at all costs. Understand that recruiters are always hiring for multiple skills, multiple positions and every resume received by them is not immediately opened. They would classify the received resumes into folders on their system and start reviewing them as and when they have an urgency to close a position. Now when a candidate sends their profile without a covering letter, the recruiter has to take the effort of opening the profile and then save the profile into his folders for relevant action if found suitable. If you are actively seeking a job change, the least you can do is to create a powerful cover letter that should summarize what position you are applying for and how your experience makes you the right candidate for that position. This saves recruiter effort and also shows that you have taken the effort to describe who you are and thus making recruiters' task a little easier.
Therefore we see apart from having confidence and a certain presence about yourself, having a good CV with all the prerequisites is very much needed in today’s job environment.