Three new features to make your job search more organized

We’re excited to announce several new features that we just added to Huntsy.

Rearrange jobs. In addition to providing support for over a dozen new job boards, Huntsy now lets users rearrange the order of jobs that they have added via a simple drag and drop system. Want to make sure that you keep an eye on your favorite job listing? Drag it to the top with the click of a button! It’s simple, easy, and will make using Huntsy even more convenient than before. 

Edit jobs. But that’s not all! Notes can now be edited and deleted. If you forgot to include some key information in a note, there is no longer a need to create a new one. Decided that you don’t need the information in the note anymore? Delete it! 

Accept offers. Another new feature that we’re very excited about is the ability to mark that you have received an offer. You can add information about the job offer including rating, salary, number of vacation days, and other notes, all so that you can make the best decision on your future job. Accept or reject your offers to conclude your job hunt. 

We’re always adding cool new capabilities to the site, so keep an eye out for future developments. Got a suggestion for a cool feature that would make your job hunt simpler? Send us an email at hello@huntsy.com and we’ll work on implementing it. 

Happy hunting!

Jobs With Friends: Work Together To Get Employed Faster

Job hunting can be lonely; but, it doesn’t have to be that way. In our minds, job hunting should be a team sport. Here’s why: while many job listings have the same title and description, further research might reveal something about the department, company, or industry that makes the job not quite right for you—but makes it perfect for your friend! In that case, we think you should let him or her know. In fact, you should work together and help each other find the right opportunities: the more targeted jobs you read, the better perspective on the job market you’ll have. You can be pickier. You can spend more time focused on quality job matches, increasing your chances at an interview and landing an offer. Which after all is the point, isn’t it? Generally speaking, the more that friends and family share jobs with you, the greater number of opportunities you’ll be exposed to. This enables you to focus on the companies and jobs that interest you most and discard (and/or share) the ones that aren’t right rather than apply to them all in the blind. Better yet, your family and friends will know what types of jobs interest you so if they come across the perfect job, you can apply right away. Last week, we launched Job Sharing: a quick way for you to share job listings with your friends directly from Huntsy. You can share job opportunities over Facebook (either as a private message or a wall post), LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, and e-mail. From there, they can check out the job and add it directly to their Huntsy dashboard. Working together will help you and your fellow hunters not only find jobs faster, but will help you find the right jobs for you both.

Avoid These Two Extremes in Your LinkedIn Headline

Guest Post by Joshua Waldman.  There are certain areas, when training people on using LinkedIn, that always seem to cause controversy. The first area of controversy is about profile pictures. But the second, and I think most misunderstood area, is your professional headline. Your headline is the area just below your name in the top-most blue box of your profile. Every time you send an invitation to connect, or send an inMail, or comment in a group, your headline appears below your name. So assuming that your first impression with a recruiter is probably going to be on LinkedIn, those first 120 characters must have sufficient impact and clarity. In reviewing many LinkedIn profiles over the years, and more recently getting to know the recruiting industry well, I can tell you the key points you need to know when writing or editing your headline. First, there is no magic formula. I’ve seen LinkedIn trainers build apps and even invent mix-and-match charts to help you write your headline. It’s not that hard if you think about this from the point of view of your audience. After all, when you use social media, you are a publisher!

Write with Clarity

Remember that recruiters are busy. Some headlines are so nebulous and non-specific that it’s hard for me to understand precisely what that person does. A vague or overly creative headline causes two major problems. One, a creatively written headline probably lacks certain keywords or phrases that recruiters search for. Two, people looking to fill positions are busy people. They don’t have the time to translate the meaning of “I help companies with go-to-market planning.” You’ve got less than 10 seconds to get them to click on your profile from a search results page with a long list of your competitors. Here’s the fix: clearly and concisely state your job title as it is described by your target organization. If you are currently employed, you should also note this in your headline.

Write for Impact

While it’s important to clearly state your job title, there is no way your title will take up all 120 characters available to you in the headline area. And because the headline is your first impression, you have to find a way to differentiate yourself with a little personality. For example let’s take our earlier headline and spruce it up a bit:

Senior Marketing Executive experienced in go-to-market planning in the software industry with a knack for adding excitement to business solutions

Are You Addressing a Need? All this creative work is great, but it goes only so far if you haven’t uncovered the needs of your target organization. In our example, although it’s a great headline, it would fall short if this person’s target company doesn’t need a strong go-to-market strategy – what if what they need is a marketing analyst? Avoid the two extremes of too simple or too creative and give those recruiters a break. They will thank you for it!   Originally posted here.

Joshua Waldman, author of Job Searching with Social Media For Dummies, is recognized as one of the nations top authorities in Social Media Career Advancement. To learn Joshua’s secret strategies for shortening the job search and getting the right job right away, watch his exclusive video training here: http://careerenlightenment.com/training

Do I really need a cover letter? Yes: it’s called e-mail.

It’s 2012: e-mail is the cover letter.

Recruiters and career counselors advise to include a cover letter with each job application. However, today’s cover letters look a lot different than those of even a few years ago.

When resumes were chiefly submitted in hard-copy, a cover letter was essential to breathing life into an applicant’s resume as it only tells half of the story. But, as business communications went digital, so did resumes and cover letters. Now with the Internet, applicants face new challenges in shaping their online presence on a cursory Google of their name.

For you, the medium change means a messaging change: instead of attaching a cover letter and a resume, consider your e-mail the cover letter and include within a link to your resume (which Huntsy can provide you), your portfolio, or any web presence that would be useful for the hiring manager to know about.

If my inbox is any indication, many people still choose to attach these cover letters in addition to resumes. In most cases, there’s little need to include a separate cover letter let alone a separate resume. In fact, providing an e-mail with both resume AND cover letter attached seems redundant, if not a bit ridiculous. It demonstrates the candidate as out-of-touch in the modern workplace.

A word of caution: in some old-school industries and at many large corporations, submitting both cover letters and resumes in addition to any e-mail application is still standard and expected practice. Call their HR departments (because these sorts of companies all have HR departments), they’ll let you know of best practices.

When in doubt, a ‘traditional’ resume PDF attachment to your e-mail will always suffice.

Cover Letter Tips: How to write a good cover letter by counterexample

When you can’t find an introduction or mutual contact, a well-written and directed cover letter can take you from a nobody to the employer’s newest hire. However, most cover letters read like this:

Dear Person,

I am a smart, handwork person writing in response to your advertisement for this really cool job I found on some random Internet job board that I’m going to cite here mostly to make this paragraph seem longer (because you probably don’t care so much about how I found out about this position since you posted it online). I’m reasonably sure that my experience lends itself to the position. Just in case, here’s a list of everything that I’ve ever done in the hopes that you may find one piece of it interesting and invite me in for an interview.

…and so forth…

Yours truly, Lazy Job Hunter

It’s a good thing you are not most people. Cover letters like those above (which are often written as e-mail messages) are discarded without hesitation. Although, at the start of every job search, nearly every candidate writes themselves a template that looks just like that. Unfortunately, in nearly every case, it gets the applicant nowhere. Put yourself in a recruiters shoes: if you received a cover letter like this, would you even bother reading the resume? Use the cover letter to demonstrate how your unique skill-set (because whether or not you believe it, you are unique) can help that business succeed. Figure out how and let them know. Like this:

Mr. B. Wayne,

I understand you are looking for an associate partner and thought to introduce myself. I have extensive training in Karate, Gymnastics, and Gadget Engineering which I’ve been employing in my moonlight vigilante. Over the last two weeks, I’ve stopped 3 crimes in progress and nabbed two robbers during their getaway. Recently, I have been looking for a way to take my activities to the next level. You seem to share an interest in ridding Gotham City of its evils, so I would like to meet with you and discuss how we can best work together.

Yours truly, J. Todd

PS. I am very discreet.

You will have much greater success applying to jobs if you take the time to think about why that opportunity exists, figuring out how your skills and abilities can meet that need, and then telling them—plainly—how you can help them achieve their goals. Good Hunting.

Hunting Blind by Bubba Atkinson

by Bubba Atkinson http://bubbafindsajob.blogspot.com/ 

I stopped looking for jobs and starting hunting, hunting for the job that I would love. When I started the job search, it was painful slogging through all of the different job listings, all while completely unsure of what I wanted to do. But now, I’m hunting for the job I know I want, and I wanted to share with you how I got here, because it is not nearly as hard as it may seem. For too long, I became comfortable with where I was in life: I graduated college a few years ago and struggled to find a career-oriented job in town as I made enough money to get by while waiting tables in a restaurant. I knew this lifestyle would not sustain forever with the goals I had in mind for the future, but it was working for the moment. I became somewhat scared to seriously look for jobs; why would I want to disrupt something that was not totally broken?

Over time I imagined that my post-restaurant working life would be comparable to working at Initech, the miserable software company in Office Space. I soon became too fed up with my restaurant job; tired of my lack of substantial income, tired of smelling like French fry fat every night, but mostly disgusted with myself because I was working in a job with no room for growth. I decided the problem was that I was stuck in my comfort zone and that was keeping me from finding a job—a career—that I would love. I swallowed my pride and told everyone I knew that I was looking for a job and to help me figure out what I could do to move forward. Most jobs come from referrals, so what better way to figure that out than to ask your friends? Social Networking helped me get the word out, and hundreds of people took notice while dozens upon dozens responded. Through those conversations, I discovered exactly what I want to do. Now, those same people are the ones helping me make contacts in those industries. Without the guidance of these people, I might still be slogging through job listings for one of those miserable jobs I was afraid of. I’m no longer scared of how may career may turn out.

You may be an open book, but people still judge you by your cover

Rightly or wrongly, a sloppy resume tells prospective employers and hiring managers you, too, are sloppy. Conversely, a well-formatted resume can make you stand out like the top candidate you are. In some industries (finance and banking, in particular), there’s a cultural expectation that resumes (or as they might say, a “curriculum vitae” or CV for short) are buttoned up and traditionally formatted. But, for the rest of us, a bit of design panache might be the difference between the ‘no’ pile and the ‘interview’ pile. Most word processors, like Microsoft Word and Apple’s Pages, have resume templates that you can use. (The Pages application has some rather nice ones.) But, it may be worth it to you to give your resume a professional design treatment. If you don’t know a designer or can’t find one, take a look at Loft Resumes. They transform your trusted black-and-white resume and make it, well, pop.

Professionally-designed aren’t for everyone or every occupation (in some industries, like finance, submitting a heavily-designed resume may come off as a negative), but for any applicant who wants to impart a sense of uniqueness and creativity, a unique and creative resume will certainly communicate that. Regardless of how you choose to format your resume, always spell-check it and get a few set of eyes on it before you submit it to a prospective employer.

Sometimes, You Have To Create A Job

Guest Post By Amber Gordon. 

These days, it can be hard to find a great job. Like many people these days, I’ve had to settle for second-best. (Bills do not pay themselves, you know.) However, just because you aren’t working at your ideal job, it does not mean that your quest for happiness in the workplace is over or impossible. Myself, I’ve taken on some interesting jobs to pay my bills: I’ve diced vegetables in an organic food store and have spent hours behind a desk and headset in a soul-sucking telemarketing position. It’s grueling, but, it’s not the only way. Sometimes, you have to convince someone to create a job for you. A few weeks ago, I applied for the Community Manager position at an Internet company. When I received an email asking for an interview, I could hardly contain my happiness. I went into the office nervous, yet determined. The interviewer asked the standard, “tell me about yourself” questions. (Or, more accurately, “Pretend I haven’t seen your resume.”) After some other standard questions, my interviewer told me the job had changed since I had applied and was now more of a marketing role. He was also very upfront with me, and said he didn’t feel I was a perfect fit for that specific position. I felt my heart beat fast, and my brain started thinking faster as I felt the interview coming to a close. I knew that I could make a difference for this company if only given the chance to prove myself. So, I asked what other positions were available, suggesting they could try me out and, if things worked out, hire me for a full-time role.  They politely declined my offer, but to my surprise, appreciated my persistence and asked if I had any interest writing a post or two for their blog. You’re reading one of those posts right now.

My situation may not directly apply to yours, but if you genuinely want something, interviewers will sense that and may, in some cases, give you a shot, even if it’s not the job you originally applied for. Experience is important, but passion, professionalism, and persistence can go a long way to overcome any shortcomings in your resume. If you believe and can prove you have valuable skills, your chances of getting someone to take a chance on you improves greatly. Some general tips that have helped me:

• Be Determined - Giving every interview your best effort.  If you aren’t suited for the current role, ask if they have another open position better suited for your skills. Suggest one if they come up empty.
• Be Versatile - Market yourself as someone who is willing to learn. Be humble.  Even if you don’t know at that moment what is desired, if you are willing to learn it will significantly help you look more attractive to the person on the other side of the table.
• Be Prepared – You won’t be able to identify the tone of the interview until it’s happening.  If you prepare yourself for anything, you’ll be ready for anything. (As a point of fact, when the interviewer asked if I’d consider writing for the blog, I pulled out an already-prepared list of potential blog topics. They weren’t anything remarkable, but the fact I had prepared some thoughts beforehand was.)