4 Tips to Get Noticed in Your Job Search
We are fortunate to get a lot of interest from people who want to work for our company. This is definitely a good thing, but it also comes with the challenge of sorting through all those people who have signed up for our fan club or applied for a job. Here are 4 tips for anyone interested in getting noticed by our company.
1. Have a super-fast response time.
The last thing we or any company wants is for you to reach out showing interest and we send a prompt response and don’t hear back from you for days. It’s like when you see an ad for a company and then call them to come bid a job at your house and they set up an appointment but then don’t show or call. Hello… you are running ads telling people to use your company and they appear to be willing to pay you. We want people who are available and excited for the opportunity to share in our mission.
2. Spare us on the business talk.
Some companies might enjoy reading a book about your business experience. We want to hear more about the last charity you volunteered for or the last customer thank you card you received rather than how you helped decrease operating budgets for blah, blah, [enter intimidating business talk here] blah. This might not be the case for most companies, but we care more about your behavior and your match to our culture. The other things are great and all businesses can utilize smart and successful people, but those things are just expected from you if you get hired, so we can save discussing those until you are in the door.
3. Study the company.
Some of the best interactions with people looking to work for us have come from people who had researched our company. We’ve even had a few discussions with people who told us a few things we didn’t even know about the company!!!! This one is important because it shows the company you want to work for that you have taken the time to research and make sure it’s a place that you want to be. The interview process is just as much for the candidate to decide if they like the company as it is the other way around. If you know nothing about the Core Values of a company, it would be really hard to know if you wanted to work there. We even had one person apply and then when we reached back out to him, he asked what company we were with. Strike One!
4. Stand out or…
A lot of companies that offer perks and a cool work environment have little to no trouble getting people to apply. Their challenge is picking the right person from the stack of applicants. There are unlimited ways to stand out to a potential employer, but make sure you focus on the values of the organization. Use those to guide you in your quest to stand out. If a company prides itself on being super healthy, you might want to avoid catering in KFC for people interviewing you. (If you do cater in KFC, make sure you get extra sporks. You can never have too many!) Ask yourself what you would want someone to do to stand out to you in an interview. What are those couple of things when the hiring manager is trying to remember who was good out of the 20 interviews they did that day? What will stick in their mind about you? You better figure it out or you will be left to figure out why you felt like you knocked the interview out of the park (baseball pun), but still didn't get the job.