Job seekers often ask “How much time should I spend each day on my job search?” There is no one right answer, but suffice to say the amount of time you spend making strategic efforts directly correlates to your results. If you put in the bare minimum, such as just enough to collect unemployment insurance, you should not be surprised to see minimal results.
Troubleshooting Tuesday: Are You Spending Your Time on the Wrong Things?
The old saying “Time is money” may seem irrelevant to job seekers. After all, you’re not getting paid to look for work. Yet time out of work equals lost income, so how you spend your job search time has great financial impact. Today on Troubleshooting Tuesday, a look at whether you’re spending your time on tasks with the greatest benefit to your job search success.
Baseball’s Lessons for Job Seekers
Baseball’s World Series is an exciting celebration of the sport known as America’s Pastime. It marks the end of a long, hard-fought season played out on fields and in stadiums across the country. Believe it or not, baseball holds a number of great lessons for job seekers:
Is Your Job Search Target Unrealistic?
If you are finding it difficult to locate any open positions at all in your targeted area, it may be that you have picked too small a target. Job searchers today are particularly challenged because there are many job areas that have greatly diminished due to changes in the market and economy. If you are targeting such an area, it’s time to widen your target.
What are Twitter Hashtags, and What Can They Do For You?
Twitter can be a very powerful tool for your job search. Not only do many companies now post job leads on Twitter, but it’s also a good place to find and interact with recruiters.
Finding jobs on Twitter is easy if you know how to do it. The most popular way to find jobs (or any other topic) is through the use of a hashtag (#). What is a hashtag? Hashtags are a way for people to categorize information in tweets to make it easily searchable. Hashtags are like keywords marked with a (#). For instance, do a hashtag search for #career, and you’ll come up with a list of people tweeting about career topics.
Troubleshooting Your Job Search
Job seekers sometimes say to me “I’m doing everything, and nothing is working.” The truth is, there are things every job seeker can do to improve their job search. But often job seekers don’t see beyond what they know about job searching. What they don’t know could change their strategy and execution. With that in mind, I’m kicking off “Troubleshooting Tuesday”, a series designed to help job seekers locate and fix the trouble spots in their job search. Today, I’ll go over some common trouble areas and raise some questions for rethinking your future job search efforts. In the weeks that come, we’ll tackle each area in depth.
Keeping Your Age from Being an Issue
Age discrimination is illegal so your age should not be an issue in your job search. At least that’s how it’s supposed to be. In reality, some feel their age might be a liability in their job search. A strategy to avoid the issue is to keep your age out of it until you’ve had the chance to sell yourself as a great match for a position.
Job Openings: Vertafore is Hiring
Vertafore is hiring. Their website tells a little about the company:
Vertafore, Inc. is a leading provider of software and information to the insurance industry including independent agents, brokers, MGAs, carriers and reinsurers. For more than 30 years, Vertafore has leveraged a unique industry presence to deliver meaningful solutions—powerful technology, critical information and robust insights to help organizations effectively respond to business challenges and capture new opportunities. Vertafore solutions have helped more than 17,000 customers and 500,000 end users gain a competitive advantage to accelerate their business performance.
It goes on to list job openings in these areas:
Accounting (1)
Customer Service (6)
Human Resource (1)
Information Technology (4)
Marketing/Product Marketing (4)
Product Development (16)
Product Management (1)
Professional Services (4)
Quality Assurance (1)
Sales (12)
Learn more on the Vertafore website.
When Your Job is Looking for a Job
If you are between jobs, people probably assume you have lots of free time. But the truth is, if you’re actively seeking a new job, you should be pretty busy. Here are some ways to bring organization and discipline to the job of looking for a job.
Set up workspace. Organize your papers, have a place for your computer, good lighting and a comfortable chair. If possible, pleasant, quiet workspace set away from the rest of the home is ideal. But, if your workspace is the kitchen table, that’s OK, too. Just set it up for function and efficiency and be clear with yourself that, when you’re sitting there, you’re at work.
Making the Most of Hiring Ebs and Flows
Have you ever heard that no one gets hired in August? That’s not really true, of course, but there are seasonal recruitment cycles including peak and slow periods. Understanding them can give you an edge and improve your chances of getting hired. By knowing which months of the year are the most popular hiring periods in specific companies and industries, you can plan your job search process more efficiently. During the months of slow hiring, prepare yourself for the busy hiring period.