Have you ever encountered this embarrassing situation? You’ve got a call to invite you for an interview; while feeling very excited, you forgot what that job was about… What’s worse, when you tried to revisit the job advertisement, the page has already expired!
trick to transform your job hunt
Your job hunt is indeed a Project, and to make sure a project runs smoothly and effectively, you need project management measures in place. so setting up a basic system to track and record all your applications is essential. Your Tracking Worksheet should include these items:
Therefore that simple trick to transform your job hunt progress is:
Set Up a Job Hunt Tracking System & Analyse It
Part 1: Setting Up the Tracking System
To begin with, you’ll need a basic system to track and record all your applications which should include these items:
- Key Facts of Job Applications (industry, company, job title, department, job ad, etc)
- Current Status and Progress (includes timing of application and responses from companies)
- Name of Interviewers, background, points to note
- Interview Questions, and summary notes of how you answered them
- Your Reflections
- Results/Remarks
Peter Drucker said, “you can’t manage what you can’t measure”. Only with tracking and reflections in the process, you can review and identify patterns in what you have done right, and not so right. That ‘s how you can pinpoint what exactly the issue is and improve over time.
The tracking system doesn’t have to be very sophisticated. An Excel + webpage saving apps like Pocket or Evernote could do well.
Part 2: Analyse & Diagnose
When you have started tracking your progress by far, you can start to identify common threads in your applications. For example:
Scenario 1: Your ratio of application to interviews is < 1:30
You have sent out a lot of applications (say 100) but only get 2 interview invitations by far. It implies something went wrong with your Resume, Cover Letter or Application Logistics.
Get a friend or a Professional Career Coach to review and provide pinpointed feedbacks to your resume and cover letter. You can also use tools like Jobscan to evaluate the matching rate of your resume to the job descriptions. If you get a matching rate < 60%, there are high chances that your resume was trashed by ATS (recruitment robots) automatically before it even meets the eyes of a Recruiter. Time to get a Resume Makeover!
Scenario 2: Most of your application stops at First Interviews
If you do get interviews, then your resume should be doing OK. Usually, the first round interviews are conducted by the HR as the primary screening, and if you don’t pass them, you really do have to power up your interview techniques. I have scripted out the best answers to the Top 25 Most Common Job Interview Questions which you can adapt accordingly, as well as advanced interview strategies. Download my Best Selling eBook to get started.
Scenario 3: You cannot close the deals after several rounds of interviews
If this applies to you, you are doing great so far! Everything throughout the interview process seems to be fine and you feel confident after each round of interviews. However offer calls just haven’t come along. If that’s the case, re-evaluate your interview performance by the following metrics:
- In terms of technical skills, have you successfully demonstrated (not just stating in resume) to the interviewers that you can meet at least 80% of what the job required?
- In terms of cultural and team match, did you build rapport with the interviewers, and able to let them see you as one of their supportive, coachable team members?
- In terms of personality strengths, have you shown how unique you are as a person, your confidence in your ability to thrive in the role, as well as your passion in joining the company?
You see, if you have never tracked your progress, you’ll only let your frustration and disappointment build up, which would only lead you to a downward spiral. With measurements, you gain clarity and most importantly, you can see how far you’ve grown over time! So let’s get started!
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