After sharing the memory of landing that Safeway job, I thought I'd share some tips on job hunting. While I am no expert on the matter, I feel that I could offer some advice from 6 months of job hunting.
A few of these tips I did not do myself during my two main stages of job hunting (well I am in the mist of job hunting at the moment but I'm not at a danger point), but I think if I did use them tips I may have landed a job earlier.
#01 - Make finding a job, your job.
Pretty simple, if you are unemployed with no other commitments like study or caring for someone, make it a full-time job. Wake up, have a shower, have breakfast, then once 9 o'clock clicks over, clock on and start looking. I feel if I had done this properly, 7-8 hours a day, 5 days a week, I would have easily found a job much sooner.
#02 - Where To Search
This is a toughie, as a lot of my searching was done via internet, which was silly. There are a few mediums out there, while internet is a major one, there is local newspapers, shop windows (which is actually a big one) and connections. When my friend said to walk down the street with resumes looking for ads in shop windows, I thought he was dumb. But one day I took his advice, well actually, he pretty much dragged me down a street with him, it turns out a lot of shops have their ads in their windows and no where else.
#03 - Don't Put All Your Eggs In One Basket
I did this a couple times where I applied for a job, thinking I would get it straight away, and stopped looking, or I got a interview and stopped looking before I was offered the job (B T W, I didn't get them jobs). What I effectively did was cut down my momentum, and missed out on other potential jobs for a job which I could have got. It is best to just keep going, keep going, even when you have 4 interviews, just keep going. You don't know for sure if anyone is going to give you job, so you don't quit until you land a job.
#04 - Take A Lower Job
If it comes down to it, take the plunge and accept a much lower job. I was getting desperate I was applying for McDonald's and KFCs thinking that if a 16 year old girl could get a job, so could I. Even if you take the low-level job, least you have some income while you search for a higher job.
#05 - Make A "To-Do" List
I do these lists all the time, in fact on one of my To-Do list, well a couple, I wrote "Make a To-Do List on....." But relating it to job searching, the night before, or during the day, make a list of things to do the following day, such as "Hand your resume into Frank at G&C Accountants" or "Look up Woolworth jobs" or "Ring Jennifer Bickmore regarding application" These lists keep your mind alert, and it also allows you to see what you have to do in a day, and at the end, see how much you actually did.
#06 - Do Big Things Early In The Day
What I mean by this is, in the morning, til about 2 in the afternoon, use this time to tackle the big job hunting. Which is don't spend 4 hours browsing seek for jobs, rather grab your resume, change into some presentable clothes and hit the town. No, don't go party, go into shops and business' and hand in your resume, ask for potential jobs, or hand in resumes personally to places offering jobs. Then once your energy is drained towards the end of the day, use it to circle ads in the newspaper, or look on seek or gumtree.
#07 - Let People Know You Are Searching
A lot of the time it's not what you know, but who you know. Sometimes your friends could possibly know of a job opening which you did not know about, or maybe they could talk to their boss about giving you a job.
#08 - Read Job Ads Carefully
I found this out the hard way. If you are looking for a steady income, be weary of jobs with OTE $80-100k or even OTE $30,000. I'm not if OTE means Opportunity To Earn or On Track Earnings, but basically these jobs are sale commission based. And if a job sounds too good to be true, 98% of the time, it's fake, or a scam.
That's about all I can think of at the moment, and if I com across more, I will blog it, rest assure. But a few of these tips helped me, find jobs (even the crummy ones) and now that I have wrote this out, I might put some of these to practice to find another job. At the moment I am packing shelves at a night time, but now I feel I want find a better job or either greatly reduce my hours there, or cut it out completely. I will do some updates on how it is travelling, and see if I am using the above 8 tips. Also google is your friend if you want more tips for job searching, the above was just of the top of my head, so do some googling and I'm sure you will find hundreds. And also, the above tips are for very generic job hunting, if you are looking for a $100k+ CEO Mining Job or something, I'm not too sure how helpful it would be to use the tips. Anyway that will do for now.
From The One They Call Anthony, This Is The Life And Times
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