Most of the hiring managers or HR managers usually do phone screen before they shortlist the job applicants. They want to make sure that the candidates’ credentials fit the role. Before they contact the candidates, they first go through the information stated on the resumes.

Fact No.2:

The hiring managers or HR managers are usually attracted by those resumes which are well presented, well structured and logical with no typo errors. The job applicants stand high chances to be called for interviews if their resumes are easy to read.

Fact No.3:

During the interviewing process, the candidates are assessed based on their fits with the roles, the companies and the teams.

Fact No.4:

Resume is an important tool during the job search process. It is more appropriate if you always keep your resume up-to-date. Your past achievements are required.

Fact No.5:

Those companies who value, engage and empower their employees will never make rash decision when hiring. Don’t be too happy if the employers hire you on the spot.

Fact No.6:

Being a job seeker, it is not proper for you to be too aggressive. Do not call the potential employers everyday to find out the status. If you do so, you will definitely annoy them.

Fact No.7:

Follow-up is essential. After you have completed the first interview, you are advised to drop a thank-you email to the hiring party.

Fact No.8:

Please bear in mind that it is not possible for a company to send a rejection letter to every single candidate due to the high-volume of resumes received. Hence, if you haven’t received any call from the companies for 2 weeks, you can assume that you are not a suitable candidate for the particular position.

2. You get a jump on the competition: Many recruiters use Twitter to post job openings in real time as soon as they receive them. It takes a lot less time to type a 140 character job description than it does to post a one pager on dozens of job boards and listservs. How does this help you? If you’re following the best recruiters in your industry, you’ll get first jump on those job openings. In this increasingly competitive job market, any advantage helps.

3. You can establish yourself as an industry expert: By using your Twitter account to tweet relevant and interesting industry articles and commentary, you can catch the attention of other go-getters in your field. Recruiters are always looking for what’s new and now, and if you can establish yourself as an industry expert, that will do more for your professional reputation than a resume ever could. Who do the top employers want to hire? Experts.

4. You get more “face” time with recruiters and employers: Recruiters see thousands of resumes a week and get hundreds of calls. Their least favorite people are the ones who call them twice a day, but they forget about the ones who only call once a month. Twitter can help you strike a good balance between nagging and silence. No recruiter will talk to you four times a day every day, but they’ll have no problem reading and re-Tweeting your Tweets and comments and thinking of you when a quick hire is needed.

5. You can quickly build a professional network: If you want to quickly find the big Twitter hitters in your industry, all you have to do is look at the people your recruiters follow. Recruiters follow the people who make the industry news and who will get them the most up to date information. If you direct message, retweet, and reply to these industry leaders, you can build a powerful professional network quickly.

Keep track of these contact people past that initial follow-up time frame. It is common for resumes to get misplaced, and a company’s employment needs to change over time. For this reason, it is perfectly acceptable to resubmit cover letters and resumes every couple of months if needed. Most of the recipients won’t remember that you contacted them a couple of months prior, and of the few who do remember, most will not take offense. Any who do take offense are people who have no need for your professional skills and whom you are therefore unlikely to come into contact with in the near future.

A professionally constructed and operated campaign will proceed in two stages:

Stage One: A deliberately targeted approach to a selected group of companies. You should have identified these “superdesirable” places to work when you conducted research on your long list of potential employers. You will continue to add to your primary target list as you find new job opportunities in your daily research efforts. Although this may be your primary target list, at the start of your job search you are building this list along with a list of contacts within the companies, so you may not be sending e-mails to these companies right away.

Stage Two: A saturation-bombing approach to all possible employers in your target industry. You won’t know what opportunities exist without trying to find out, and this will start to generate some activity.

Here you should start with an e-mail/mailing to one or two contacts within a target company, then repeat the mailings to other contacts when your initial follow-up calls result in referrals or dead-ends.

Once your campaign is in motion, you will begin to receive responses to your mailings, as well as be able to schedule interviews from your follow-up calls. When this happens, your focus will change. Those contacts and interviews will necessitate follow-up conversations and letters, and you will have to spend some time preparing for interviews.

This is the point where a lot of job searches stall out. People get so excited to have an opportunity to interview that they stop everything, because they want to believe that this interview will materialize into a job. Of course, that doesn’t always happen, and if a person does not keep up on his job search, there will be no new interview activity. For this reason, it is essential to keep your job search activity up to date to generate an ongoing flow of interviews, since you can’t tell which interview will yield the perfect job offer.

The more contacts you make through your mailings, the more follow-up calls you can make to schedule interviews. The more interviews you do, the better you will become at the whole process. The better you become at the interviewing process, the more job offers you will get. The more job offers on the table, the more choices you will have in deciding the path for your career.

Having been able to take the time to draw breath, evaluating things and relaxing a little, it will also be time to take another look at what and how jobs are being applied for. It is worth remembering that any job is better than none at all and, looking for a preferred position is easier when already working somewhere.

Freshening up a resume is always a good idea too, whilst tailoring it to suit a position exactly is always advisable. Covering letters and supporting evidence should also have a good deal of time spent on their creation.

It may also be time to think about gaining other skills, qualifications, or experience. In this regard, seeking outreach charities and organizations in the local area can be of great benefit; not to seek service from, but to offer service to.

Another excellent way to boost prospects is to use every possible avenue open to crack the job market. Though online job boards are used by most jobseekers these days, a very small percentage make proper use of alert services and recruitment news emails to be in a position to send an immediate response to a new vacancy. Above everything else perhaps, is remembering that looking for a job is a full time job in itself. As such, organizing each day around the task will help a great deal and, further than this, keeping to regular working hours will help the transition when the position finally comes along; which it will with perseverance.

Even if it isn’t goofy, an email address could potentially torpedo your job search before you even get it off the ground because the one that you are using doesn’t project a professional image. If you have to create a new ‘professional‘ email, then do so, but don’t forget to check it. Sometimes, candidates get so caught up checking their social email accounts that they forget to open up their business one… only to find a message from an employer dated 3 weeks ago waiting for them.

You can pretty much bet that opportunity has already passed and is now a dead end. Lack of response means the employer is moving on to the next candidate. It’s now up to you to conduct a quick review and see if your email address needs triage help, stat. Here are some key email address-naming tips to help you in maintaining your professionalism on your resume:

1) Stay away from things that might tip off your age. Avoid year of birth, graduation, or age references. Oh, and mentioning that you are a member of a retired persons group. It’s illegal, downright despicable, but yet difficult to prove – employers are discriminating against people because of their age, so you should make sure to remove age references completely.

2) Avoid political, gender, or religious references. You may be very passionate about a particular belief, cause, or affiliation, but you don’t need to be in an employer’s face about it. After all, they aren’t hiring you for what you believe… they are hiring you for what you can DO.

3) Be careful about health references too. Being a cancer survivor is great, but if you let an employer know that before you get to the interview, their concern about health care costs might cause them to ‘lose’ your application… if you know what I mean. Seriously. It can and does happen.

4) Keep It Simple, Stupid. If you have an email address that looks like some kind of code and doesn’t make any kind of logical sense, create an easy one to type into a message. No one likes peering at their keyboard to hunt and peck out a random assortment of letters and numbers.

5) Safest bet? Your name. Your name as the email address is your best bet. If you have a common name, then add some random number or variation that still makes it clear that this is your name.

Make sure to remove any and all objections an employer might find in your career materials and documents when making an application. Your future could depend on it!

1. Who is going to be reading my answers, and for what intention?
2. What are these questions really asking me?

The Monster resume builder is a perfect example of a screening tool used to aid the employer. To start a My Monster account, it is required to fill in the fields for name, address, career level, and degree. Although the initial required information is similar to other types of job sites, Monster allows you to maintain five different resumes/profiles. This is a helpful feature for people with skills in more than one professional area. When job sites allow you to have multiple resumes/profiles, you should take full advantage of it. Make some of your profiles very broad and others very specific to increase your visibility to potential employers.

The Monster resume builder is a good example, because it is fairly conventional in the way that it breaks the profile and resume into thirteen distinct areas, including Career Objective, Target Job, Target Location, Salary, Work Status, Skills, Personal References, and Education. Most job sites will ask you to address the same or similar subject matter in registering and creating online profiles.

On Monster, one of the first screens you will be asked to complete includes “Title” and “Career Objective”. Monster offers examples to assist you in answering these questions. Using the advised answers is not in your best interest. Never lose track of the fact that employers pay Monster to save them time in recruiting by screening you out. Monster asks you to list a job title and to describe the type of position you are looking for under “Career Objective”. If you want to be screened in and increase your visibility with potential employers, you need to think beyond the question. Every field that is filled out on the job site is a keyword opportunity. Rather than completing the “Title” field as “Computer Programmer,” the space can be used to list relevant job skills like languages that you speak, software, and systems that you know.

The “Objective” field is capable of holding up to 2,000 characters – that is roughly half a resume worth of usable space for adding those valuable keywords. Again, following the examples provided by Monster would not be in your benefit. The site’s examples list a two- or three-sentence objective statement. A better use of the “Objective” space would be listing your professional profile, accomplishments, language, software, systems expertise, and any other relevant information from your resume. While answering the questions, you are essentially rebuilding your resume, so it is essential that you use an abundance of keywords and highlight your past professional success stories.

You are not always limited to a single answer, even in the case of check boxes. You should always test the site to see if it is possible to select more than one answer. Don’t ever assume your answers are limited to only one, even when the directions on the screen indicate that you are.

We all dread the salary requirements on an application or profile. Although the salary field is sandwiched between two “required” fields on most job sites, the salary field is not required. This means that you can, and should leave it blank. In circumstances where you are not able to leave the salary field blank, it is best to use a range, not a single figure.

On many job sites, you are asked to describe your ideal job and given a space that can hold up to 500 characters. Rather than answering the question, you should use this space to add more keywords to your profile. Keep in mind the screener is searching and retrieving candidates from a list of keywords that have been put into the system. The more keywords that appear in your profile, the further up on the list of matching resumes yours will be placed, and the more likely it is that your resume will actually get to a place where an actual person will see it. You should write in this space, “Job with opportunity to use…” then follow this statement with a lengthy list of pertinent keywords.

When answering questions relating to relocation, don’t make a snap decision. Only answer this question if you have to; and if you do, choose the broadest option possible. Even if you are able to list several preferred location, don’t. It is much wiser to keep your answers broad. A company or recruiter that is only interested in local candidates will utilize the address provided on your resume as a search parameter.

Even if you and your family are very happy in the city where you live, it is most wise to select “No preference” to questions related to your willingness to relocate. The situation that you are so happy about now may change in the future. Also since you should now have your Career Management/ Job Search database up and running, you should be able to store all of these opportunities for future consideration. Besides, any jobs that you interview for but reject, will serve as practice at honing your interview skills.

It is important to always read the small print on job sites, when completing online profiles and questionnaires, since the directions about the fields that are and are not required can be contradictory.

An additional common section on questionnaires pertains to work experience. It is likely that you will be given the opportunity to list all of your past jobs in chronological order. Your goal here is to build your online resume, not write a chronological narrative of your work history.

You should always utilize the work experience fields of questionnaires to put in descriptive stories about what you have done. Sometimes, you have to list responsibilities. For this, you should list your responsibilities and relationships with supervisors, then add achievements and keywords that are applicable to the context.

Also, recruiters and employers frequently look for candidates who are currently working for or have worked for specific companies or industry competitors. To make the most of their desire to hire a candidate with knowledge of the industry, make sure to take the time to list partners, customers, and companies that you have done business with. If you removed the specific information relating to your current employer from your resume, you can add that information to this list. It is most likely for you to come across online questionnaires and profiles in the following situations:

* Registering with a recruiting firm
* Posting your resume on a job board
* Applying for a job at a company
* Registering on a job site

In each situation, it is necessary to consider who is asking you the questions, and what they are looking to find out by asking the questions. Every audience is either trying to screen you in or screen you out, so carefully think about your response. You should always read the site instructions, and avoid answering questions relating to salary and relocation if possible, and add as many keyword to your profile as you are able.

These online profiles and questionnaires can affect your job search the same way your resume will. You need to treat this process with respect, and not rush through it. Make sure to spell-check and proof-read anything new that you are writing, and only post on websites that allow you to update and change your information at any time.

How often should you follow up with recruiters?

Get in touch with management recruiters whenever something significant has occurred in your career. If you relocated or can relocate, made a job change, received a promotion, these are all good reasons to get back in touch with recruiters, versus just calling to say hello.

Should you approach more than one recruiter at a time?

Yes. It’s always beneficial to have a broad and robust network, so you can get different perspectives and feedback. There will be different opportunities in different places. Be targeted about who you’re reaching out to, though. It’s important to build relationships with those who specialize in your area of expertise, because they will be working on searches likely to interest you the most.

How do you stand out among others when contacting a recruiter?

I’m always impressed by someone who is clear about what they want in their next career move. Candidates who have a high level of confidence and energy generally stand out. They know who they are and what they bring to the table and they show that they’re really interested in the next opportunity and what the next step might be. Full disclosure, feedback and returned calls are musts if you expect a recruiter to work diligently with you.

Should you tell the recruiter how much you currently make?

Candidates who are unwilling to share their current compensation with me or the hiring company will not have my attention for long. It isn’t helpful to withhold this information because compensation is a key component of receiving an offer. You want to have an open and honest dialogue with your restaurant executive recruiter, because that’s how he or she can best support you and their client.

What’s the best way to talk about your pay expectations?

As you talk about what you’re looking for in your next role, it’s OK to share your expectations. That’s important for executive recruiters to know, because the last thing we want to do is take up your time or our client’s time if we’re not all on the same page. Share what your expectations are and add to that why you think they’re warranted based on the skills and added value you’d bring into the new position, not just because you “want to make more”.

If you’re not happy with a salary offer, what’s the best way to indicate this?

This is why it’s important to build relationships with recruiters, so you can be comfortable with being candid and straightforward about pay. Recruiters are there to help you be successful in the negotiation process.

What are some other things to avoid when developing a relationship with a recruiter?

If you say you’re going to send additional information (references, etc.), then follow through. Not following through can be a deal-breaker, because it can give the impression that you’re not interested in the opportunity and that’s how you conduct yourself in business. Restaurant managers can be extremely busy, and we understand that. What you need to do in that case is drop a quick note to say you’re not able to get to it today, but will ASAP.

Recently it took a restaurant manager candidate several weeks to follow up on an opportunity, and by that time it had already passed to another candidate who did make the time. Meanwhile, someone who was very interested in a different opportunity called and said he wouldn’t be able to follow up on a client’s request for three weeks because he was busy working on a training program rollout. The client was so interested in learning more about the candidate that he offered to wait until the candidate could resurface.

If interviews are going well, don’t stop looking elsewhere. The budget may disappear, another candidate may appear, the chemistry may be off with a key decision-maker that only gets involved at the end of the interview process. Even if the offer does come through and you do accept it, the other interviews will serve as building blocks for your network, data points for your negotiations, and springboards for your next search.

This is the era of 24/7 job search, where your next search starts as soon as you finish this one. I don’t mean that you send out resumes and schedule job interviews on your first day of the new job or even shortly thereafter. But I do mean that you don’t ever stop managing your career — keeping an updated resume, maintaining your network, being aware of opportunities (even if that means referring other people instead of yourself). Work your job but also work your career: the person who works a job has things happen to them; and the person who works a career is ready at a moment’s notice to deal with an unexpected restructuring, layoff, or golden opportunity elsewhere.

To always Press Forward means that you take control over your career. It takes work and a shift in mindset, but once you do it and experience the power of having choices, you will never go back to the old-style, timid job search. With a tight market, old job search techniques just don’t cut it.

When you submit your resume to a job posting it is:

Scanned by the company’s scanning software to look for keywords that have been linked to their job description

1. Resumes that have the keywords are then weighted against the other resumes
2. Only the resumes deemed weighted appropriately are viewed by company personnel
3. A decision is made which resumes are a motivational fit for the company and candidate
4. A few resumes are selected for phone interviews to determine who will receive face to face interview
5. After candidate is selected and job offer accepted all other resumes are put in an active file for 6-12 months

When you e-blast your resume to 10′s of company’s your chances are similar to pulling the arm of a slot machine in a casino. You will surely hear colleagues state how it worked for them. But they are the minority in this case because it is not a method to depend on, but many candidates still do it. We hear how they have sent out hundreds of resumes and not receive calls or responses. If this sounds like you, then you know how frustrating this can be.

What should you do? Look for job openings as you have done in the past. It is always effective to have someone hand deliver your resume to the hiring manager. If this does not work, look to social media to help you in this situation. Find someone on LinkedIn who works for this company and determine how you are linked to them and ask for an introduction. Now you are able to personalize your resume and address it to a person rather than to “whom it may concern”. Work with recruiters to help you identify the right company and opportunities.

We know it is extremely competitive finding meaningful employment but using effective methods should really help you get on track to finding a job.

Job seekers rush through making the letter without taking time to analyze their message, or proof what they write. They think that it’s the resume which is far more important than the cover letter. An excellent letter is the window of your resume. It will give the employer a glance of what you are offering and he likes what sees then he will be interested in opening your resume. Some hiring managers say that an impressive, compelling and letter made them open a resume of a job seeker. An excellent cover letter should make a prospective employer want to talk to you.

So what comprises an excellent cover letter? Here are some tips.

Highlight yourself to fit the job criteria. Focus on your unique and exceptional qualities. Make sure that it is concise, strategic and persuasive. Read the qualifications needed by the prospective employer and make yourself stand out by showing that you have that unique ability for that job.

KISS. Keep it straight and simple. Be careful that you don’t use acronyms, jargon, buzzwords or anything over the top. A suggested length is not more than a page. It’s the best way for your cover letter to shine and make a good visual impression. Avoid using too long sentences.

Proofread. Make sure that you check your cover letter for spelling, grammar, and overall readability.
Avoid colorful fonts. This is not an art assignment. Use black on white and keep it professional.

And finally, use a professional looking paper. It would really affect the overall effect of your cover letter.