As a jobseeker, keeping up with your competition can be tough, exhausting, and complicated. In the days of social media, blogging, and the overall increase in online activity, candidates are now required to meet even more criteria in order to stand out during the recruitment process.
Here’s a few tips to help make you stand apart from your competition, in order to attract attention from the recruiters who can make your dream job a reality.
START A BLOG
As an expert in your field you should want to share your expertise with those who are interested. Don’t give away any secrets, but talk about your methods and processes, make it fairly obvious that you know what you’re talking about.
Having established a foot on the career ladder you will have already gained experience of what people will be interested in hearing and/or reading about. Structure your experience into cohesive documents and consider publishing them on a modern platform, such as a blog. From here you can post across all social media platforms and begin to develop a reputation as an expert in your field of work, provided of course, your writing is both engaging and insightful, whilst not giving away too many trades secrets. Talk about your methods, processes and anything else that a recruiter might be interested in that is specific to the job that you want to be headhunted for. Most importantly, make it obvious to people that you know what you’re talking about!
BE WARY OF SOCIAL MEDIA
Social media can be fantastic for building up a following for platforms such as a blog, but beware, it can also have a seriously negative effect on your career prospects if handled without the right attention.
These days, the large majority of recruitment in major UK sectors takes place across social media platforms, with employers and recruiters easily picking up your contact through LinkedIn. In most cases, these recruiters will run a background check on you via your personal Twitter, Facebook, or Google+ to see if you are who you say you are.
As inconvenient as it may appear, if you are looking to get the attention of the best recruiters out there, you should look back at your history on these platforms and consider tidying up anything which you believe misrepresents you on both a personal and professional level.
Make sure you spend the necessary time it takes to polish these, making sure they make you look recruiter-friendly.
PERSISTENCE: DON’T OVERDO-IT
Whilst advisable in many other walks of life, persistently contacting recruiters and employers isn’t necessarily the way to go when trying to get their attention.
Like us all, recruiters are usually very busy – and if they aren’t you don’t want to be working with them. This means that it’s likely that recruiters will contact you at pre-determined times during the recruitment process.
Traditionally, recruiters like to have the proverbial ball in their court so that they can dictate the play.
If you are more inclined to persistently contact someone to get what you want, then you may suffer from annoying a recruiter who simply may not to have to put up with you to do their job properly. Remember, you want to impress a recruiter, not frustrate them by bugging them all week long.
Therefore, the next time you pick up the phone, or your laptop, consider taking the more humble approach of waiting for them to contact you. The recruiter will respect you for being patient whilst maintaining the control. After-all, you will have to work with them respectfully if they are to offer you the chance of landing your ideal job.
