These days finding a job is no easy thing!
Although, and despite popular belief, it never really was particularly easy to begin with.
But yes, it is much harder now and this could be due to two major things. Firstly, the current economic climate, naturally, but also secondly the fact that as time passes there are more and more of us looking for work.
In this article I try to list some steps that should help you to find work, please feel free to comment if you agree or disagree, or if you can think of other pointers that you have found to be useful in your own experiences.
Alas, I have no magic advice that will get you the job you dream of, but I do have several steps that should help your chances.
They worked for me and they will, I hope, very soon work for my partner too (though we are currently on about step four of the below, so time will tell…).
1 – Motivation
You must force yourself to stay motivated. There is, on my part at least, a strange tendency to lose interest when applying for a job. I will exhibit a flurry of enthusiasm early on certainly, but this will quickly wane to a half-hearted effort; very few things are as boring to me as my own CV, my own cover letter!
You must avoid this. You must steel yourself to the fact the job-seeking is itself a full time occupation; the sooner you realize this simple fact the sooner you will meet with success. An hour here and an hour there… this may be sufficient for a person already employed and toying with the idea of “moving on”, but it will not work if you are currently unemployed… realistically, you should be considering six to eight hours of hard work each day!
Somehow you must approach the project under no illusions: it will be hard, will be lonely, and it could drag on for a long time; but you must stay motivated and optimistic. Hard work will, eventually, pay off.
2 – Organization
Absolutely key! The chances are that you will be applying for many positions, the first will be carefully selected and researched by you, but three weeks later with eighty applications sent off you need some way to monitor the progress of each, even the very positions you applied for may be indistinct in your memory.
Closely linked to this is the time saving benefit that good organization has: you will need several versions of your CV, you will have produced many cover letters, and archived properly these could form five or six basic templates, a veritable library of your achievements at your fingertips.
I have found that a simple excel spreadsheet with columns showing Date Applied, Position Applied For, Contact or Agency Applied Through, Version of CV Used and Cover Letter Used (these latter two can simply reference CV/Letters) is all that is needed to keep track of it all.
This allows you to maintain control very easily, to know where you are with things at any one time.
You could also add a short comments/notes section to each row of the spreadsheet so that when the phone does ring you can quickly locate the relevant application and refresh your memory.
3 – Where to Look
The web is an amazing tool and virtually all efforts will begin here. However you should not forget about the other media used to advertise vacancies: local or national papers, magazines or professional journals, job centres and recruitment agencies, to name a few. You should make a concerted effort and try to use as many channels as possible. It is also not unthinkable to approach companies directly: identify the correct department and send an email enquiry with your CV, this is sometimes a long shot, but well worth a try.
It is very easy to fall into the trap of sitting at home and logging onto one recruitment website and sending the same CV to twenty “vacancies”, but this is only one potential source of employment and you really should look into others as well.
4 – Do the Tedious Work Properly
You should continually amend your CV and Cover Letters, preferably creating unique and tailored versions for each application. This can take time and be excruciatingly boring, but in many cases your application will be decided purely on your CV so it is better to apply to fewer positions, with as much attention to detail as possible, than it is to apply to many with an “it’ll do” attitude.
5 – Be Flexible
The dream job may simply not be attainable at this stage. By all means begin with applications for the positions you really want, but equally be prepared to lower your sights slightly, or even to consider different (possibly, but not necessarily, related) fields. Do not narrow your scope, be flexible in areas that you can be flexible in. This will help your chances by simply allowing more opportunities to fall within your horizon.
To summarise though, I believe that the ultimate key is simply in perserverance and motivation.
If you do not give up you will succeed!