You may well have heard the saying before. If you don’t have a job right now and you’re looking for a role, then the best approach is to treat the search like it is, in fact, your job. There’s wisdom in that, but you might wonder, like many, what exactly it means. Here, we’re going to look at the skills, techniques, and tools that can help give you an edge, ensuring that you’re putting in both the efforts and the smarts that can make you a much more attractive candidate to companies.
Make It A Consistent Part Of Your Day
One of the most important parts of treating your search like a job is that you make it something that you do every single day. You do not necessarily have to make it a 9-to-5; indeed, that might be an easy way to burn yourself out. However, you should schedule out and timeblock parts of your day to research companies, apply to roles, and network with other professionals who may be able to lend you some advantages. Structure brings focus and reduces burnout or discouragement. Use a calendar or planner to track progress and set daily or weekly goals, like applying to five jobs or reaching out to three contacts. Turning the process into a routine can also help to remove a lot of the nerves around putting yourself out there.
Keep Working On Yourself
Don’t spend all of your time looking for new jobs if you have the ability and time to work on yourself, as well. Devoting time during your day to improving your marketability is a real investment in your future career, whether it’s through continued education, focused certification courses, or even volunteering and working on your soft skills. Skills-based hiring is one of the major trends in today’s job landscape, so building up those hard skills can make you a much more desirable candidate. Just make sure that you’re updating your resume and LinkedIn with the fruits of your efforts.
Optimize Your Resume
There’s nothing more important than a good resume. You won’t get your foot in the door without one. Aside from keeping it up to date, you should be sure to adapt it to the role that you’re applying to, focusing more on the skills, experiences, and qualifications that matter to every individual company you apply to. What’s more, you should adapt it to modern hiring practices, such as the use of application tracking systems. ATS-optimized resumes can help you get through the automated processes that often see clients falling at the first hurdle. Usually, you have to get past these digital gatekeepers to even get your resume in front of a real person.
Track Your Applications
When you finish applying for a job or attending an interview, you shouldn’t simply forget it. You should keep a spreadsheet to track every application, making a note of the role, the company, when you applied, how far you got, whether you followed up, and what the outcome was. It can help you better learn from your failures and identify patterns in hiring, such as who is more likely to respond faster, and whether past networking can lead to interviews. You should treat it like a pipeline, a systematized approach to analyzing your own efforts. It can also help you remember to take the next step, like getting in touch with someone after an interview (providing you haven’t let it too long.)
Networking Is Part Of The Job As Well
Do not think of networking as an optional extra, it is very much an important part of getting your name out there. Whether you’re doing it physically by attending meetups and industry events, or online through LinkedIn, webinars, and networking groups, allocate some time each day to building your network. Don’t forget to tap into the network that you already have, as well, reaching out to former colleagues, employers, or even clients who might be able to lend a hand or put a word in the right ear. Don’t simply start by asking for a job, however. See what value you can offer them, or ask for their insights or advice on whom you could look a little further into. Networking opens doors, but rarely does it work immediately. You have to water those plants before they bear fruit.
Treating your job search like a job effectively means actively putting in the effort to make it your primary career focus at the moment. It doesn’t mean that you have to put in a full-time job’s worth of time into applying, but rather that you take the time to give it your best effort.