Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Finding a job by reversing the roles

In times when jobs are harder to find, you need to stay active on your resume and constantly check job postings to stay current. In the last few months, I've been reading mostly job boards, about a few times a week, looking for job roles that I match, checking the requirements, skills they request, and type of work. I also note if the company type, if it's a start-up, contract position, or contract to hire, including job title. 

It's really interesting and if you have read What Color is your Parachute? the best method to find a job is by working in reverse order. How does that work? First, you need to think about the need for the job? When there's a need for a new job position, often times it's requested by a hiring mananger, who then reports the opening to the HR department, then is posted on the Internet, which you might see and reply to. The problem is that you're applying for a job to the person who might have the least amount of knowledge for the job, then filters the contacts to the hiring manager.

Not to mention that you may be the perfect employee, but you need to filter past many hands and departments, it's more difficult than just having the right skills to get the interview. When thinking about this problem, I think about the other side, from the hiring manager's perspective.

For the hiring manager, they know what to look for and what they want in an employee. The skills required and the function this person may do in their role. But it's another thing to sort out the people with the actual skills versus the people who may over rate their skills on a resume, as anyone can add mention a technical phrase to a recruiter to get an interview. So now, the hiring manager will now need to filter out all of these resumes, and usually a long task of finding the right person.

The big problem I see of this is that there's a large communication problem between the two main parties, the person who wants a job and the hiring manager who wants to hire someone. With many parties in between, it's a common issue that while you may be the perfect person for the job, a person down the chain of the hiring process may have other ideas. It could be as simple as you are not experienced but still have the knowledge, or maybe you understand product X but they are looking for someone who knows product Y.

It's very confusing, and often times I think that the hardest part of finding a job is getting past the hr department, as their role is often not to hire someone but to filter out those who do not match the job perfectly. Not to say hr department is easy, trying to become an expert for many departments in a company and filtering out the correct people is an incredible difficult job.

I think keeping this in mind is a good thing to remember when writing a resume. Often you need to really show what you can do and remember that the resume is the first item a hiring manager will see of you. It's really hard to show myself based upon a piece of paper, but considering the amount of time people can spend on each resume, it's the best to be honest and place your skills clearly. Also remember to tune your resume for the job as your applying for.

This means that if you're applying for a job working with customer service, highlighting your customer service skills will be better than listing other skills (but those might be a close second). The idea before was that you would make one resume as a "one size fits all" approach but now it's a resume by job idea that I feel works best. In some cases, I had recruiters call me for one job role which I had skills for, and ask if I could do these tasks. Since I didn't list the skills by the actual name on the job description they were reading from, the recruiter asked me a few questions then told me I probably don't have the skills and wished me luck on my job search.

I recommend that if you're looking for a certain job role, make a resume especially suited for the job. Then if you have another secondary job role, make another resume for that. I think this is somewhat the idea in fishing, as one lure might work ok for catching fish in a large lake but having multiple lures will work even better as different fish might be attracted to different types of lures.

Rob




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