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Job Hunting 102: Secrets to a Successful Job Application

PaulFebruary 21, 2024Leave a Reply

Job hunting by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Pix4free

Crafting a Persuasive Cover Letter

Do I need to add a Cover Letter? A persuasive cover letter can be quite challenging to some but if you really want to get that job this would be the something that you will need to do. It however isn’t as difficult as it might seem. The importance of the cover letter is tell the employer in your own words why you are applying for the job and what you might bring to the team. It doesn’t have be multiple pages but a good cover letter uses one page to tell the employer more about you than what the resume can or will. It is also good to have to make sure to highlight those skills that the employer is looking for.

Structuring the cover effectively can make a world of differences from being in the NO pile to being put in the YES pile. The cover letter needs to be easy to ready and something that demonstrates why are a good fit for the company. It could even show them that you are a good fit for team that you might have to work with. Each Cover letter should be personalized and that can be difficult because that will take time but if you do it right then you will most certainly be put in the YES pile. You’ll want to stand out and make them see you may bring a value to the company in one way or another.

Identifying Reputable Job Search Websites

Which sites are good for me to look for a job? Not all Job search websites are the same, some are better than others and that can be negative to your finding a job. You should strategically standout in online job portals. You should have a resume that will draw people to ask for you to apply for a job or a even jobs. The resume then can at least be showing people that you’re got some good talents. What sites are good for looking for a job? Here are a few websites that might work well with standing out, however these are just a few and you should look to figure out which ones you want to use:

These are just few that you can start looking for a job but you should optimize your profiles to show them what you are good at and to bring in those jobs that you are looking to apply to. You’re online profiles are the first impression on what the employers will see when they are looking for potential job applicants that might be a good fit for the job they are looking to fill. You should also setup email alerts for new jobs that show up and be ready to apply for them when they come into your mail box. I am sure if you have filtered the right job searches for a particular field or industry you will be more likely to find those jobs that you want to work at.

Build and Expand Your Professional Network

You will most likely start getting job recruiters looking to fill a job that they have. So you should keep the lists of people who have contacted you in the past and occasionally email them seeing if they have anything that you might be able to apply for. Just be mindful that these recruiters make money by filling positions that companies are looking for so this isn’t always going to be the best approach but I’ve had some good luck with this in the past. You should leverage all the social media sites you can from LinkedIn, Twitter(X), Facebook and maybe even put it out that you are looking for a job on Mastodon. As long as you know that it will be slow work trying to find recruiters that are specialized for what industry you are looking to work in, it can be a great way to at least find jobs that you might not find any other way. Another good way to build and expan your professional network is to attend conferences or job fairs to possibly give the recruiter your resume. These are the best way to make sure the employer gets the resume but isnt’ always going to bring you an interview it however is worth trying to help you job hunt.

If you liked reading this article why not check out the other article I’ve done already, Job Hunt 101: Mastering the Art of Applying for Positions. I am not done with this topic and more are on the way, don’t forget to subscribe to the newsletter for even more articles like this. Don’t forget to share this article to help support this blog.

Job Hunting 101: Mastering the Art of Applying for Positions

PaulFebruary 19, 20244 Replies

Photo by kaushik26795 from PxHere

Importance of Effective Job Applications

The importance of applying for jobs is more important than ever due to more people applying for the same job. If you haven’t been watching more and more people are getting laid off and that is causing employers to get swamped with people applying for same job that everyone else is applying for. It’s a real struggle to find a job for most and all, I am one of those that have been looking for a job for the past few weeks and I have come to understand just how hard it is to get that interview.

The overview of apply for jobs can be quite daunting and challenging for most because you really don’t know where to begin with or where to start looking. Each person is just a little different and that can be a strength or a weakness, depending on your talents. Now it is one thing to know you are looking for a job but that doesn’t mean you are can’t at least start figuring out how you will do it.

Defining Your Career Objectives

Each person has a career objective whether you admit it or not. You have some reason why you are looking for a job in area or industry because you want to accomplish something such as more money, more seniority, or even prestige. You could be trying to get all three or just thinking you could be a better person and that would be only one area where you want to accomplish. There are several different accomplishments people will want when they are applying for a job.

First thing you’ll need to do is a self assess what is your strengths and identify your talents. What are you good at? Are you good at talking to people? Are you good with your Hands? These are the questions you should be asking yourself before you start to even consider applying for a job. You’ll need to take a deep dive into what you are good at and what you where you’re strengths are. Monster has some great career tests for you to use to figure help you figure out what you are good at and your strengths and weaknesses. Even if you want to go deeper than that, you should check out Yale’s Self-Assessment and career exploration pages, where they will give you even more enlightened out look of who you are and what you might be good at. There are to many websites to put in this blog but these are just a few that you can check out to learn who you are and what you are good at.

After you’ve done all that and know what you might be good at, the next step is to research industries and companies that might be good fit for your talents and strengths. Each company can be different but if you know what you are good at then that’s at least the first part of the battle. Knowing that you are good at typing or that you are better at your hands can be a big help with where you should look in the company whether it be in productions, office work, driving a car, or calling clients to do check up on what needs to be done to keep them. The one way I research the companies is use Indeed to research the company and they even have great article on how to do it. It just depends on how you tailor searching for jobs in certain industry and know that is where you want to pursue your career with. It’s not going to be as black and white but it should at least keep you on the right path.

Creating an Outstanding Resume

Effective resume writing techniques for job applications can be quite challenging due to the fact that you have to know what the company is wanting. They may want some specific soft skills, and they will most likely want even more hard skills or you having an education that is a requirement to get the job. So you should create an resume and then change it when you apply for a job to better help you get that chance for the interview.

Craft a compelling summary and objectives is something else you will need to do to stand out from each and every other applications. Each application is going to be different so each resume should be slightly different from the others. Although this isn’t the always going to work it however is going help you get that proverbial foot in the door as I would say. Highlighting your achievements and skills are the first part of creating a good resume. You should make sure to have those in your resume to show them how unique you are and what you are good at. Formatting the resume will help with hiring manager being able to a glance to see what you are are, so you should have bulleted lists or number lists to show them you qualifications and you’re experiences. This sets the tone of the resume to better make your application stand out.

These are just a few ways for you to learning how to job hunt effectively and this is just the tip of the iceberg because I will be writing about even more of this in the future so you should bookmark my site or better yet sign up for my newsletter and keep watch on those other articles to come in the future. If you liked this article how about sharing with your friends and family to help support my blog and my efforts.

A Few Ways to make money while you look for a long term job!

PaulFebruary 15, 2024Leave a Reply

Make money by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Pix4free

Those Side Hustles

Can you make money while looking for a job? Most of us who are unemployed are looking for ways to earn some extra money to pay bills. I thought it would be an idea to at least suggest to people who are in the IT field where they can go to possibly earn money while you’re either looking for new a job or pivot to do something else. Either way is up to you but this is something that can be quite useful even if you need extra money for one reason or another. This is something that can make your even more money or find you a new job that you have been looking for.

Blogging / Vlogging — Both of these do the same exact thing. You either write or start creating videos on YouTube and other video platforms to bring in entertainment, Educational, or provide a unique view to something that most others may not see. I am not saying this will bring in a lot of money but if you have been doing this for a while, you could simply ramp up and help you bring in some revenue. You’ll have to decide what you are good at and explore those possibilities.

Taking Surveys — There are several different surveys sites out that will either give you amazon cards, or other ways to pay you. I’ve been using Survey Junkie for the past few months and it is nice because you can take survey’s whenever you have a chance and get paid for them. However you will not get a lot from them but if you do enough survey’s you could bring in some extra revenue that way. No more than maybe 100$ if you really just do as many survey’s as possible each month.

Find Freelancer Jobs — If you are good at computers then you should check out upwork and look into finding some freelance jobs that will pay you to do, either temporary or a rolling bases. Each job can bring in some money per month and keep you from drowning in debt. However you should consider how you approach the perspective jobs and make sure you show them that you have what they are looking for. Depending on the jobs it could be just a few hours or a monthly type of part time jobs.

Ask friends and Family — Another way to make some money on the side while you are either working or looking for a job is tell your friends and family what you might be able to do for them and let them know you are available. This won’t bring in much but depending on your skill set and what you are willing to do, it might help bring in that income you are probably needing for bills.

The Unusual Circumstances

As you can see I’ve talked about why the unemployment rate is no correct. I’ve talked to several different friends on Facebook an some other places and we all agreed we are probably already in a recession and you should consider ways to bring in money while we weather the storm, as I would say. I couldn’t fully attest to this idea but I hope to keep myself a float and bring in money to keep from having to worry about where I will live in the future. I am sure the stress that people are experiencing is quite real among us around the world. There are some good ways for your to make even more money, so I will link to Dave Ramsey’s website on other ways you could make money in case you are really interested in this type of side hustle or other ways to make money while you are unemployed.

Are you trying to make money? Has it been good for you and what have you done to make money while you are looking for a job? Any advice you can give others why not leave a comment and subscribe to my blog for more blog topics to help you survive while we are in the trying time.

Why the Unemployment rate is Wrong and why you should care!

PaulFebruary 14, 20243 Replies

Photo by mohamed_hassan from PxHere

The Unemployment is at 3.7% for January(2024)!

Now that isn’t bad for the economy if this was actually true. I know that there are even more people searching for a job than you can imagine. Is the unemployment rate wrong? I suspect it is way higher than what the US government knows about due to the fact that most of the jobs that people got let go from were less than 6 months contracts or some probably even have money in their account to survive for a while unemployed. I am one of those who have enough money right now to have 3 or 4 months off and not have to worry about anything. I don’t have any major debt and I have no loans out that would be cause for me to have to make payments on those things. So the real question we need to ask is what is correct percentage of people who are unemployed. I think it would be more like 5 to 6% right now if everyone would file for unemployment. I think some worry that if the unemployment rate goes to high then it will cause problems in finding a job even more.

Understanding the Unemployment Rate

It can be quite difficult to figure out what the unemployment rate is actually but I do think we have to at least consider that it’s higher than we thought it is and we may be in a form of recession / Depression scenario. I saw a video that I’ll share with you and you can see how this might be viable to what is happening now. I encourage to watch all of it and decide for yourselves if this is even a possibility. I however know that the ones I have talked to have not filled unemployed for one reason or another.

Now after watching this video, I am sure you have some questions that you might want to ask. One of the obvious questions I came up with myself is this relevant to what is happening now. I would say yes it is due to the fact that I am seeing this more and more the last few weeks with people struggling to keep a job and applying to jobs in general. We aren’t going to get out of this real quickly and I even think we will have more aggressive layoffs in the future just by looking at the spike of layoffs we’ve already had in the January.

Since most companies only worry about Quarterly earnings the next quarter starts in April and as such it would seem that companies will downsize even more either March or April. It would be a good guess that it would be likely in April after the earnings report for each company is looked at and examined by the stock holders and CEO. They will execute a decision to layoff more people to keep the projected earnings reports from impacting their bottom dollar. It will also keep the stock holders happy that they don’t see any layoffs that month before hand. It doesn’t look good to the stock when layoffs happen right when the earnings report becomes available to them.

Unemployed people are just burned out!

The reason why the unemployment numbers a re wrong is that most of those who have been trying to find a job ever since they have been laid off is they are just burned out and are tired of getting those rejection letters and companies that say they are hiring but looks to just be phishing for the right person and not really looking to hire people that could fill the spot they are advertising about. So that being said, they haven’t even filed for unemployment and that is why you haven’t seen the unemployment rate getting higher and people thinking we aren’t in a recession or even a Depression due to that the Government doesn’t know they are looking for a job. I know that most of the people want a job but they either pivoted to work where ever they can or created other ways to earn income right now without having to file for unemployment benefits. I would bet they either took part time jobs or they have other ways to bring in the money to help them survive.

Did you apply for unemployment or did you find ways to bring in income without having to work at an office job for the time? why not leave a comment and let people know what you’ve done to keep bringing money in so you can let others know how they can earn money even in this trying time.

Remember to subscribe to my blog for more articles like this and other technology information.

The Real Struggle to Finding a Job in 2024

PaulFebruary 13, 20243 Replies

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Why is Finding a Job in the US Really Hard?

I don’t say this lightly because I’ve come across so many people talking about this that isn’t even funny. Most of these people are just trying to find a job and it seems that they aren’t even able to land any real interviews. I’ve had that same problem as of late, no one wants to interview they just go to another qualified applicant and either Ghost me or tell me that I wasn’t selected for the interview.

I’ve personally been dealing with the Stress of looking for a job for over 2 weeks. It can be quite hard not to worry and think about what may come but this is just another example of what it is like to find a job in the year 2024. Even if the US Government says we have all these Jobs that were created, I seriously doubt this is going to help those who have been laid off and the one that may be lay off in the future.

Few Examples:

Linkedin Layoffs Trends By Nicole Roundy

Why Can’t People find a job?

More and More people are asking the same thing. “Why can’t I find a Job?” on Google. That seems more than plausible, if the US economy was so robust and we had all these jobs than it should be easy for everyone who was laid off to find a new job. It however isn’t that way and I hate to say it doesn’t look promising for the future. As I have been doing my research more and more people are having the same issues as I am and if people are not finding jobs and they have more qualifications than me then It just can’t be how I am applying and that I am applying. It has to be deeper than that and I believe it is.

Even now it isn’t clear on what people should do, because more and more people are asking the same thing. Even more “experts” try to give advice. I put quotations around the word to make sure you know that I don’t know if they are right or wrong or if they are actually experts or just people who know how to get a job easier.

I’m not here to tell you who I believe is or isn’t a expert in this field but to at least tell you that even if you do some of the things these people tell you to do to get a job may or may not work in your situation. I’m going to at least talk about what I am doing to try to get a job that may help you in your job search.

My Job Search Activities

What I am about to tell you is what I’ve been going through trying to do to hunt for a Job. However, This doesn’t that this is how you should do it but it is something to consider while you are looking for a job.

Setup Email Alerts on Job openings — This can be quite helpful. I’ve done this for sites like Indeed, Monster, Linkedin, Google, and even Bing to find new jobs around me that I can apply for it and it helps to keep me from spending to much time each day to look for jobs. Each of these are easy to do and you can have each site email you daily or when there is a new job that pops up that you are looking for.
Spend a Maximum of 2 or 3 hours and No more looking for Jobs — I say this because I’ve heard people say they were looking for job as if they have a job Full time and that can’t be good or healthy to the individual. There is no way you can find jobs and apply to them all day. You should spend only a limited amount of time finding jobs. That is the best approach.
Get Resume Help — This can be quite easy for some of you but others might need to search their local community to see if you can get someone to help you write your resume even better. It never hurts to get someone to check it out and give you some advice on how to get the employer to see your resume.
Apply for Jobs that you have excellent Soft Skills for — This is something that seems to be overlooked but you should always apply to jobs that match your soft skills even more. This will get employers more interested in your application. If you can show them you have the soft skills they are searching for they may want to get an interview with you.
Don’t be afraid to ask for help with Friends And Family — This can be really helpful to be able to talk to your friends and family. It can help with your stress also but they may know of jobs that may be able to get your foot in the door. It’s what they call networking which has helped me in the past and this is something I am constantly doing now but still haven’t gotten past the interview stage.

As you can see these are just a few tips that I can give you to better keep you in the know of new jobs and how to deal with the rejections you may get. I’ve seen more and more of those rejections come my way but with all this it helps to keep me from getting depressed and discouraged. You should consider how you can better help yourself from getting that way too.

Are you looking for a Job? If so, we are both in the same boat but you can always subscribe and find out even more tips on Job hunting and just technology industry in general. Remember you’re not alone in this and we are all in this together.