Ever wondered how some of your friends get the coolest jobs and they’re not even that good? Or you keep wondering why you were never called for an interview, even though you’ve applied to several job positions for the last few consecutive days?
The answer is simple: your physical or digital resume is not good enough. The physical is the traditional one, where you get to handwrite/print a piece of paper which contains everything an employer needs to know.
The digital resume is basically your online presence. The fastest way employers can get to you is by leveraging social media channels. So if your online presence looks unprofessional, there are quite good chances that your traditional (sent) resume won’t matter.
Now even though the title of the article talks about the “secret” formula, I’m here to break the ice and tell you that there’s no secrecy when it comes to landing awesome jobs. You see, most people (including you) might perceive work, jobs, and even success as something that might or might not come.
You wait for an article like this to give you the “secret” pill to success, a concept which suggests the instant possibility of a better future, without any work.
How to Actually Build Your Way Up to The Top
You need to start perceiving yourself as a business. Now think…what do most successful businesses do best? They spread their name around, sell their products and services, and most importantly, they create a brand image which will always suggest their own unique name.
In your case, a professional who’s looking to build a career, you need to consider the following aspects:
- What talents do you have that others don’t?
- What makes you remarkable and basically a good choice for the employer?
- What have you practically done to improve your expertise and professionalism?
- How can you benefit the companies that you will work for in the future?
Figure out the answers to these questions as soon as you can! If the answers are somehow disappointing, if you notice that you’re ‘not good enough’, that’s a big warning sign that you need to improve yourself.
Improving Your Online & Offline Resume
As I’ve already suggested, creating an effective resume that instantly convinces employers to give you a shot for an interview is not going to happen overnight. You need to commit to improving your image over time. The best mindset is this:
You need to be extremely patient but focus on speed as much as you can. If it didn’t make sense to you, let me explain: most of the major successes happen as a result of lots of work and patience. Your resume is the same: you need to build skills, prove results, and create authority.
Here are some quick insights that should improve the next resumes that you’ll send. The job marketplace tendencies always change, so these tips are extremely relevant for 2017.
They’ll help you judge what could work best for your own situation. Keep in mind that each domain of activity has its own twist, so you need to judge if these strategies are possible in your own niche.
Show Your Social Media Presence
Smart employers are always looking at your social media channel in case they’re interested in what they’ve previously seen on your traditional resume. Now, in order make their life easier, add your LinkedIn, Facebook, and/or Twitter professional account.
In case you’re using social media only for fun and communication, you can’t add this up. I’d suggest building professional pages and posting interesting links which are related to your niche. If your social media presence gives the impression of professionalism, you’re improving your chances of being called big time!
Emphasize Human-Only Skills
Nowadays, technology is replacing a lot of skills that until now only humans could have. The digital tools and apps that are showing up on the market each and every day are revolutionizing the way things work, and they’re definitely changing the job marketplace’s dynamics.
Employers will mainly look for people who are technical at something. Being a pro on one skill is better than being a newbie at 10. Now – if you possess qualities that computers cannot replicate and skills that can only be leveraged by humans, emphasize them as much as you can.
Display Emotional Intelligence Skills
Emotional intelligence has become an extremely discussed topic nowadays. The “IQ” score slowly starts to fade away after numerous studies have revealed that a person’s “IQ” can change as they’re improving their mental abilities. But the “EQ” concept is different.
It refers to extremely different skills and concepts such as self-awareness, empathy, or emotions management. People who show high degrees of emotional intelligence are always welcomed with open hands by their employers. Figure out and list those emotional intelligence traits and see the results blooming in no time!
Use a Professional Service
There are different services that have already managed to help thousands of professionals like you. I’ll list just three of them, the ones which I’ve actually tested myself:
- CareersBooster.com – the place which helps you take care of every possible aspect that’s related to your personal image and to the resume writing and editing process.
- VisualCV – visual content is on the rise, and this service gives you choices to plant visually stimulating content throughout your CV.
- Vizualize.me – similar to the above, this service creates visual CVs that could make a huge impact.
Choose the service you like most and work on the design of a resume until you’re satisfied with the end product. Work with professional tools to assist you in resume creation process is actually s smart choice.
Conclusion
Do you want to build the best resume ever? You need to work hard, gain experience, gain skills, gain knowledge, and only then…only then you should consider how to make everything look better.
Until you don’t take action towards your personal development process, you can’t expect for great things to happen. Once you have something to show, landing good jobs will be a piece of cake!
