Are you disappointed with your career search?
Sending out resumes after resumes but they just seem to have disappear into a black hole?
What is going on? You did everything that the “career experts” are advising. A two-page resume and a customized cover letter that emphasize on your strengths.
The fonts are right and you are pretty sure there are no typos or grammatical errors.
But no one is picking it up. You don’t get any phone calls. Heck, sometimes you don’t even get an acknowledgement.
Frustration starts creeping in. What is going on?
Know How The System Works
To know what went wrong, you need to know how things are done on the other side of the fence. In today’s world, HR in companies are overwhelmed by the sheer amount of work.
In the old world, getting job applicants is pretty easy. You post a job ad on papers or job boards and you wait. Fast forward to today, many HR are given the role of internal recruiters.
The job that was previously done by external headhunters now fall onto the shoulders of HR.
And then you have social media. It represented an alternate channel for employers to do their outreach. With more than 3 million users just on Facebook alone, it serves as a good platform to connect with potential job seekers or to get referrals on good talents.
To make that outreach effective, you need a proper employment branding strategy. That means focusing on things to make it as frictionless as possible for your target audience and allow them to know beyond the job description.
According to a study by HRBoss, employers would need to check off every items on the following list before they can proclaim their competence in this area:
- Build an in-depth mobile-optimized career page that gives jobseekers an idea about your company
and an accurate glimpse of the company culture. - Include historic infographics, team biographies and detailed benefits that build a clear vision of your company.
- Include conversation points such as awards, press mentions, goals and acquisitions in your company website
- Include photos of employees at work and enjoying themselves
- Make use of Social Media sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Google + to promote your company and share vacancies
- Learn from the competition – complete a website evaluation checklist for at least three competitors and use the results to evaluate your website
- Establish an atmosphere of constant conversation and communication between HR, existing and new employees to create a company culture that’s harder to complain about
- Educate and communicate with your team about what to do when employees hear or see something that might affect the company’s employer brand.
- Use free survey tools to create and automate surveys to get a constant assessment of employee sentiment in the company
- Update your exit interview strategy to specifically include opportunities for employees to vent their grievances in person rather than taking their negative feelings with them when they go.
Guess which department would be tasked to handle all these?
That’s right, the same HR department that are your resumes are going to. This may even be in addition to their existing work load on other spectrum of HR such as payroll, learning and development, compensation, etc.
Attention Deficit
With a hundred and one things heading in your way, the HR probably has issues finding time to even visit the loo. And just like many other departments in every organisation, they turn to automation to keep their sanity in tact.
That lead to the prevalence of Applicant Tracking System or ATS. With it, applications do not get read by people. Instead the machine will “read” it first and advice the HR users how they rank these applications.
So the HR won’t need to read every single resumes and only go through the ones that ranked high.
If your resume isn’t ranked favorably by the ATS, chances are it won’t get read and hence you won’t be getting any response from the employer.
Hacking Your Way Around The Problem
Albert Einstein ever said “if you keep doing the same thing over and over again and expect different results, that’s insanity”
The same would apply to any career search approach.
You need fresh ideas and unconventional tactics to get around the current mine field.
I call these career hacks. You can use them immediately and they are really easy to apply.
1. Optimize the keywords in your resume
The key reason why your resume is getting any response for you is because the ATS said so. If you know what they are looking for, you could easily hack your way to a high ranking and gain readership of your application by a human being.
To do so, just head over to JobScan website.
JobScan provides a web tool that will compare the keywords in your resume versus the job description. In less than 2 seconds, you would have a detailed report on the keywords you should carry, the ones that are missing and the repetition for each of them.
Although not every ATS will be using the same algorithm, you can safely assume everyone of them would be using keywords as a mean of measurement.
So if you could get the right keywords in your resume and ensure they appears the same number of times as the job description, you would stand a high chance of getting recommended by the ATS.
And that means an actual person reading your resume.
2. Be Creative
During my days as a recruiter, I see hundreds of resume per day. Each and everyone of them look similar after a while.
But once in a while, one in a unique colorful design will come in and make me spend a bit more time to read through it and admire the amount of work that was put into piecing this together.
Check out this creative resume by Nina Mufleh that oozes her passion about the company Airbnb.
She made it look like the Airbnb website. But what was most beautiful about it was that it didn’t go on and on about her past enormous (or not) successes.
Instead, her resume communicated what she felt about Airbnb and what she hoped to contribute.
She thought she’d be good at marketing, operations, and business development. She thought she’d be OK at coffee.
The website went viral. Airbnb tweeted about it and she got all sorts of calls from companies she hadn’t contacted.
Nina Mufleh didn’t get a job with Airbnb but instead she is currently working with Upwork.
This approach would only work if you have a very specific target in mind.
You don’t have to start learning web design right away. What you might want to test out straight away is using design elements to attract more attention to your application.
Consider turning your bland and boring black-and-white resume into an infographics. And it could be done easily.
Just head over to Vizualize.me and open an account.
Here is my resume in infographics format:
How does it look?
Or would you prefer to showcase your professional journey as a presentation deck instead?
Head over to SlideShare Professional Journey Builder. You would need to have a LinkedIN account to make use of this.
Slideshare will grab the data from your LinkedIN and piece it into a deck. Like mine below:
3. Backdoor Approach
If you are still not getting any response by now, you probably are barking up the wrong tree.
Unless you are applying for a role within the HR department, your potential supervisor would be from another. So instead of getting through that tiny little crack of the HR door, why not approach the gates of the hiring managers?
You probably would be thinking of LinkedIN right now. And that is the right place to start.
But sending invites to connect is one thing, having them to accept is another. Most people I know don’t log into LinkedIN regularly.
So how do you improve your response rate?
Other sites would tell you to write a customized LinkedIN invitation and you should.
But you also need to notify them about the invitation that you sent. The problem is most people connect their gmail or yahoo with their LinkedIN. And they probably check those accounts once a month.
You want the alert to go to their work email instead. Here is how:
1. Head over to Email Hunter and register for an account
2. Install the Google Chrome extension once you logged in
3. With that installed you will see something new when you go to your LinkedIN
And Email Hunter will recommend to you his possible email address. This is possible by searching the internet for traces of similarities and piecing them altogether. And chances are it would be their corporate email address.
With their email address on hand, you could go ahead and add them as a connection and select Other. You would be prompted to key in their email address. Enter in the corporate email address you just identify via Email Hunter.
This way your invitation to connect will be sent to their corporate email address that they probably will check hourly instead of their gmail account which they do so once a month.
Conclusion
In the new economy, there are simply too much noise. You need to take unconventional approach to stand out from the rest so you can get yourself in front of decision makers who can help turn your efforts into results.