Thursday 26 April 2018

📅 35 Smart Things to Actually Do and Not Do at Job Fairs

Can you get hired at a job fair? You can if you follow these tips.

35 Smart Things to Actually Do and Not Do at Job Fairs

Photo by Filip Bunkens

I've been to many career fairs, both as a job seeker and as a speaker and advisor.

When looking for a job, I would typically come to the fair early in the event, dressed well and holding a binder or folder with resume copies. Once inside, I'd scan the room (or fair map) to decide which companies to visit. Then I'd head first to whichever company stand had the shortest line of waiting job seekers.

I came more or less prepared, yes, but too often I arrived with the wrong mindset: I basically treated the fair as a simple item to check off on my job search to-do list.

Instead of aiming to really push my job search forward, I would ultimately just go through the motions of handing out all the resumes I brought with me, trying to get it all over with and get out of there as soon as possible, without truly taking advantage of what was going on around me.

Sound familiar?

The main reason why job fairs are good for jumpstarting your job search is for meeting company reps, but they can do so much more IF you know how to take advantage of everything they have to offer.

Here's a list of 35 job fair do's and don'ts for success at your next fair.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Free bonus: Download JobMob's Job Fair Success Guide with over 60 job fair tips.

Before the job fair

Do fill in an online application form in advance if the career fair organizers requested that you do so.

Do dress professionally. For guys, that means ironed shirt and pants, possibly even a jacket and tie. For girls, that's a pressed skirt or pantsuit with sleeves and necklines that are conservative.

Don't wear jeans or flashy jewelry.

Do have many copies of your resume with you to distribute. Needless to say but I'll say it anyway, make sure the resume is up-to-date. Bring a work portfolio too in case of snap interviews.

Don't give out rumpled copies or anything less than crisp CVs, which is why I usually brought a folder or binder.

Do come with note-taking gear – a smartphone, or a day planner and pen. If a recruiter offers you a meeting or interview, immediately update your agenda with the date and time in front of that person, which builds your credibility and makes you look professional.

Don't try to commit that information to memory and risk forgetting it, which would be very unprofessional.

Do have a small backpack or briefcase to hold any business cards, flyers or swag that companies give you.

Don't carry about a plastic bag from a local supermarket with your resumes inside. You'd be surprised.

Do prepare in advance and have clear goals for the job fair. If you know which companies will be at the fair, research them by visiting their websites and seeing if they have any open positions that interest you. If so, learn about the business and be ready to answer questions when you meet their representatives.

Don't make unrealistic goals. Walking out of the fair with a job contract in hand would be one of them. Even interview invites are often unlikely, but it is realistic to get hiring manager contact information that you can act on later.

Do make a sales pitch for yourself, also called an elevator pitch: a 30-second infomercial about you. Practice saying it to other people. When you're comfortable enough, you'll get the hang of tweaking it on the fly as you discuss yourself with other career fair attendees.

Don't wait until the last minute to do follow these pre-job fair tips but even that is better than not preparing at all.

During the job fair

Do arrive early to take some time to develop a plan of action for your time at the fair.

Don't bring up the fact that you arrived late if it happens.

Do talk to as many people as possible within reason – bearing in mind that quality is more important than quantity – since networking is an important element of any job fair.

Don't interrupt other people when they're talking at company booths.

Do look directly at recruiters and listen to them.

Don't answer your cellphone when talking to any company representatives.

Do smile, be friendly and try to relax. Bring a friend if it will help break the ice and make it easier for you to approach the company tables.

Don't come to the fair and expect that people will approach you or call out at you like in the shuk (Israeli marketplace, or bazaar).

Do take note of whom you submitted resumes to, for following up later.

Don't give out your resumes to uninterested companies just for the sake of doing so. You may run out of resumes sooner than you think.

Do request business cards. Write down who you met and where on the back of each business card you receive, and in front of the giver. If they have none, ask for their contact information and note it.

Don't just stuff the business card in your pocket as if you're doing the giver a favor by taking it from her.

Do visit companies that you are unfamiliar with e.g. because you didn't know they'd be at the fair. If their representative asks, give them that reason and say that you normally would have researched them otherwise.

Don't pretend that you know their business. They'll notice sooner than you realize.

Do ask when is best to contact the company after the fair and write it down.

Don't ask and then forget or otherwise miss that contact deadline.

Do stop and reflect midway through the fair. Have you accomplished any of your goals? If not, what do you need to change before the fair ends? Otherwise, what's left to be done?

After the job fair

Do follow up any job opportunities that you discovered at the fair. Email is good, telephone is better.

Don't call during lunch hour or any other inconvenient moment.

Do send thank you letters with copies of your CV, especially if you ran out of CVs during the fair.

Don't pester these new contacts or be too insisting and appear desperate. Be courteous of the recruiter's time.

Do take a look back at your performance. Did you reach all of your goals? What did you do well? Where could you improve for next time?

Don't browbeat yourself. Everyone has bad days. What's important is to learn from your mistakes. Behind every success story is a list of failures.

It can be easy to have a successful job fair if you take the time to prepare for it and act professionally throughout. You'll leave a good impression and might even find your dream job.

Question of the article

Which job fair tips have worked well for you in the past? What new ones will you need to try next time? Tell us in the comments.

More job fair success tips

Free Bonus

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  • 25 Reasons Job Fairs Are Not a Waste of Time
  • 35+ Job Fair Success Do’s and Don’ts
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Thursday 19 April 2018

⌨ Online Job Applications: All You Really Need To Know

How to apply for a job online and get it.

Online Job Applications All You Really Need To Know

Photo by Ben White

This is a guest post by Dean Giles.

Have you heard it lately? Ask just about anywhere how to apply for a job there, and you will hear, “You have to apply online. If they are interested in your application, they will call you.”

And some people say that applying for jobs online doesn't work. Why? Because online job application puts all of the power in the hands of the employer—and it cuts down the time and money needed to handle job applicants, because employees don't see most of the applications.

You see, when you fill out the online job application, your application enters a database of applications, also called an applicant tracking system (ATS), other times called “the resume black hole.”

How many times have you heard of people filling out dozens or even hundreds of online applications without even getting one response back?

Automated systems sort and process the applications. If your application isn’t processed and brought to the top of the list of applications, it simply won’t even be reviewed by human beings.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

How to get through the automated filters

So the question is–what do you need to get to the top of the automated list, and get past the autobot filters designed to weed out applicants before HR or anyone else needs to spend any time on it?

You will need three things:

  1. Use exact keywords and phrases
  2. Find job openings that closely match your skills and abilities
  3. And… a system that works in reverse—a system that only has you apply for a job after you have gotten the response. Yes, you heard me right. To succeed with the online job application, you need only apply for the jobs that you already have a response for.

The experts and gurus will tell you that you need to apply for a lot of jobs. The logic is: the chances of getting a job goes up with every application you submit. But I don't buy it. You spend hours getting the resume and application just right. You fight with the submission process, then you wait. And for what? Intense silence on the other side.

Your hopes are actually dashed with every online resume that you fill out. You can't hold out real expectations when you haven't had a response from the last 35 applications you have submitted, now can you?

Then pretty soon you are looking for ways how to fill out job applications out faster. You are cutting corners sending the same resume to every offer, leaving every field blank that isn't expressly required. But what will an employer see if they actually do look at that application? Someone who can't even complete a whole form? Will that application actually help your chances of getting hired, or would it just hurt them?

What would your chances of being hired actually be like if you knew your application would be reviewed by a real person? How much more time and detail could you put into the application, and how much better would it be?

Contemplate those questions while we address the other two things that you need to get your resume seen by real people.

1) Use exact keywords and phrases

If you don’t have the exact keywords and phrases that the automated system is looking for, your application will fail. It is that simple. For an example, I will assume most everyone has done a Google search before. In the Google search window, a person will type in a search term and Google will deliver a list of possible sites that relate to the term that you typed in. Although the algorithms are different, the automated applicant tracking systems have, at their heart, the very same mechanisms and return to the employer’s agent, the HR person or company recruiter, a list of applications that have all of the specific keywords and phrases that they are looking for.

The irony here is that many people will have the experience and prerequisites expected, but will not be in this list of top qualified candidates because the automated systems just won’t find their application.

Use the job description to get the exact keywords that are being searched for.

2) Find job openings that closely match your skills and abilities

As was pointed out, the automated systems are looking for specific keywords and phrases, it is easiest to match those keywords when you are applying for jobs that you really do qualify for. But, where do you find those perfect jobs that you are looking for?

Finding the right jobs requires knowing where to look, and how to get the right help finding the job opportunities. It is estimated that the big job boards such as Monster, CareerBuilder, and etc. only account for 4 to 8 percent of all hires in the US. What that means is that the majority of the jobs available are not on the big job boards. You can learn exactly where to look for the right jobs, and how to access the “hidden job market” where the competition is significantly less, and odds are much greater in your favor for getting hired.

The secret is in networking and the right tactics to find the people inside that are influencers and can help you.

Finding just the right job opportunities will cut down the frustration factors immensely and actually improve your chances of interviews and job offers.

3) Only apply for the jobs that you already have a response from

The process that works is actually the reverse of the common logic. Don't apply until someone there is expecting your application.

Most people think that online job application means that you can’t contact the company, and that there won’t be any human interaction until you win the job application lottery and your name is chosen. Frankly, this attitude keeps most people from making the short list at the companies that they are interested in. If you have the first two things mentioned above, then you need to let a real person know it.

Companies often hire people who are a known entity. They are friends of someone in the company, or have worked with someone in the past. This is where the saying comes from, “who you know matters more that what you know”

No place is that more evident than when it comes to getting hired. As it turns out, knowing who to contact and how to contact them is a key component to becoming that known entity, and gaining a foot up on your competition.

Most people go about contacting someone in the company in a completely wrong way. They hear this phrase again and again, “if they choose your resume, you will get a phone call from them.” That is usually the last thing anyone hears from the potential employer’s company. Finding the right people to contact and contacting them in the right way will make a big difference with the employer interest in your online job application.

The real problems of today’s job search happen to be in the new online job application process and all of the baggage that it introduces, rather than in the lack of jobs or the current economic conditions.

The prevailing system for getting hired simply doesn't work. When you reverse that equation and start by contacting someone at the company, you can start seeing results immediately.

Question of the article

Are online job applications a necessary evil for job seekers? Tell us your online job application story in the comments.

READ NEXT: 🔍 How Smart Job Seekers Do Resume Keyword Research

About the Author

dean giles portraitTwenty one years as a Project Manager gave Dean Giles a lot of experience on the interviewing and hiring end of the job market. One company acquisition and a subsequent reduction-in-force, put him on the opposite end of that equation. He quickly found that the automated online job application mechanisms had pretty much high-jacked the hiring processes. He found that the hiring process for most people is completely broken and that what he had learned over 21 years had to be applied in new and creative ways. Dean now strives to help people find employment and use the new technologies to their advantage.

This article was originally part of the Over $6000 in Prizes: It’s The 6th Annual JobMob Guest Blogging Contest, which was made possible thanks in large part to our sponsors:

WebHostingBuzz WebHostingBuzz is a reliable web hosting company with the servers hosted at multiple US and Europe locations and over 30,000 happy customers worldwide.

Subscribe to JobMob via RSS or email and follow me on Twitter for more great insight on filling out job applications online.


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Friday 13 April 2018

💻 Top Computer Skills Your Resume Needs Today

These are the computer skills most in demand right now.

Top Computer Skills Your Resume Needs Today

Photo by Jesus Kiteque

It used to be that unless you were a software engineer, some kind of designer or in telecommunications, computer literacy meant you were familiar with the basic parts of Microsoft Office: Word, Excel and perhaps PowerPoint.

All that's changed.

Today, almost no one asks about basic computer skills. You had just better have them once you finish school.

Instead, every profession now has specific software tools and platforms that are critical to doing a job well, which is why recruiters require them in job openings, and which is why you need to have them on your resume.

Whether you're considering a new industry or looking to make yourself a better candidate, use this list to learn what you need to learn, both in specific software skills and types of software because companies will often require experience with a given tool “or tools like it.”

Here are top requested software skills in demand by industry in 2018, according to job listings on Indeed.com in the United States.

Computer skills in demand by industry in 2018

Just scroll down to find your industry, or leave a comment to ask for it to be added.

Accounting

Business / Finance

  • Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP): Microsoft Dynamics, SAP, Sage, NetSuite
  • Databases: Oracle, SQL
  • Microsoft Office: Excel, PowerPoint

Business Intelligence and Data Analysis

  • Data science: Matlab, Stata
  • Programming languages: VB.NET, Perl, Scala
  • Data visualization tools: D3.js (Javascript), Tableau
  • Microsoft Office: Excel, Visio

Graphic Design

Human Resources

HR and recruiting software tends to be a platform or package that does everything such as tracking applicants, managing payroll, employee databases, evaluations and more.

The more requested ones are:

Law

Marketing

Real Estate

  • Property management and asset optimization: Yardi, YieldStar
  • Microsoft Office: Excel, Word

Sales

  • Customer relationship management (CRM) software: Salesforce, Zoho CRM
  • Databases: Oracle, SQL
  • Microsoft Office: Excel

Software Development

  • Programming languages: JavaScript, SQL, C#, Java, PHP, Python, VB.NET, HTML/CSS, TypeScript, Ruby, C++, C
  • Revision control: Git, Perforce, Subversion (SVN), Mercurial
  • Databases: Oracle and PL/SQL (or just ‘PLSQL'), MySQL, MariaDB, Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL), IBM DB2
  • Frameworks: Bootstrap, Ruby on Rails, AngularJS

About this list of industry software skills

The list was compiled by drawing up a list of suggestions from people in industry forums on Reddit, skills surveys, business software directories such as Capterra and of course, from job listings on Indeed.com.

A skill was then added to the list if it appears in at least 100 open jobs on Indeed, although most of the listed skills appear in over 1,000 open jobs as of right now.

As the list is meant to be of the software skills most in demand for the above industries, don't use it as an exhaustive list of what's needed by everyone in that industry.

Far from it.

There are many jobs that only require some of the listed skills for that industry, and there are more software tools and packages that didn't make the list because they don't appear in enough Indeed.com job openings, which means they aren't in high enough demand.

This list is also not comprehensive. It's 100% certain that there are other highly-in-demand skills that didn't get included simply because I didn't hear about them, but feel free to suggest more in the comments below and I'll check if they should be added.

The list isn't perfect. Indeed's search engine doesn't make it easy to distinguish a skill's demand in one industry when it's in demand in multiple industries. Also, sometimes a software package can be labeled as both e.g. a CRM and a Marketing Automation tool, but to keep the list readable, I had to choose a sub-category in each case.

Wherever parts of Microsoft Office appear and reappear, it's because intermediate or advanced level knowledge is required.

Question of the article

Which computer skills did you expect to see in the list? Tell us in the comments.

READ NEXT: 115+ Resources for Showing Off Your Work Skills

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