You may have the dilemma of what to do or how to accelerate your search.
What needs to be done first?
What should I avoid?
Who can I turn to for help? What is the best investment of my time and money?
Having a clearly defined professional brand is no longer optional. Employers want to know what differentiates you from your job-seeking competitors, not how you’re the same.
They want to see hard skills linked to your softer ones, indicating who you are, what you’re like to work with, and how your strengths will translate to dollars for them.
Your resume needs to be a targeted, brand-reinforcing, career marketing communication. Supplementing your resume with a professional bio, a compilation paper, and digital documents is key to success in job search today.
A strong online presence is also essential when in job search mode. You may not feel comfortable putting yourself out there, but without an online identity, you don’t exist and may be completely invisible to recruiters and other hiring managers who source and assess candidates by what they find about them online.
You need to transform your portfolio of career documents into a LinkedIn profile that’s a magnet for recruiters and hiring decision makers. But LinkedIn is just one critical component in building an online presence and leveraging social media.
Having a solid, continuously nurtured network is like having health insurance for your career. Your real-life and social networks need to be ever primed for you to tap into for new opportunities, introductions, and hot leads and to help you penetrate the “hidden job market.”
Become the CEO of you.
Think of yourself as a company of one—YOU, INC.
If you’re actively job hunting while unemployed, finding a job is your new nine-to-five job. You have to devote full days to launching and managing your job search campaign—if you want to land the job you deserve.
Overall, you need to change your thinking and the way you approach career management in the digital world, whether or not a career transition is in your immediate future.