With a ‘killer résumé’ and a fabulous motivational or cover letter you can still fail at getting that job. Many job seekers never get to know what hit them. Many don’t even try to look for the loopholes in their job hunt.
With prevailing corruption in the job market, failure to get job hunt fundamentals right is a suicide mission. Job hunting is serious business thus when choosing references one has to be precise as not all former and or current colleagues can be entrusted with this.
Like your typical hunting, it requires strategies and smart execution of plans. Otherwise even with all the resources in place, failure is guaranteed. And relying solely on luck must never be an option.
Think of hunters in game reserves. Say bear hunters. Even with proper arrows, without understanding the behavior of bears, danger is inevitable. Trouble is sure.
The behavior of the bear determines strategies to adopt, which are likely to differ with those used for other animals such as lions. This means understanding the trends in the job market is a non-negotiable for success in the job hunt.
Some get lucky and are hired using their contacts or networks. Some go to the extent of buying jobs. Some, though with no success known to me, visit traditional doctors.
People go out of their way to make it in the fierce competition within the job market. Some have successfully lost all hope of ever making it. Yet, after all is said and done, with right necessities at your corner, any job seeker can succeed.
What must any hopeful job hunter do? Here are few suggestions:
1. After reviewing a post, get your CV in shape. The post should say what is required of the applicant. Give them what they want. Do assume you know and can offer something better. Let you CV communicate just that. Putting a lot of things on the CV at once, may seem a smart thing from you but sometimes less is more. Having lots of things to say is fabulous, but keep more of those for the interview.
2. Ever composed a business proposal? Here’s how we do it: first have your ideas brainstormed. Study templates and choose your best fit, which will depend on your necessary information. Remember the idea, is to present a marketable idea to investors. In the same way, your cover letter is your marketing tool. Copious amounts of time must be spent in drafting one. Unfortunately, cover letters are afterthoughts to many job hunters.
3. Something a great majority never do is follow up. Ever thought of enquiring about the status of your application? Asking hiring managers whether you were successful or at least put on the waiting list never crosses many of our minds. Whenever we do not hear from employers, we automatically assume the worst. Either corruption made its move or we are not good enough. All the time we took preparing the applications goes down as wasted.
Failure in doing these right, will compromise your chances of being employed always. Hurrying over all these will betray you. Procrastinating is treacherous in the job hunt.