Fast Company: “How Do I Get Noticed…”
By Kurt Schmidt In Blog, News On April 4, 2014
Lolly Daskal’s Fast Company response to a job seeker who is struggling to get noticed contains some really good advice. While I’m not excited about everything in her first tip about which is designed to slip past automated software screenings, the rest of her points are solid. I’m a huge advocate of finding hiring managers and other decision makers and doing your best to start dialogues with them. I’m not sure about “snail mail” but personal approaches can show that you’re doing more than just cutting, pasting and blasting emails. Emphasizing training and experience are great if you are speaking directly to the hiring manager’s needs but it is also important to be careful not to slip into “blind selling” mode and include things that may not be relevant. Network more and have strong recommendations – yes, true, excellent, do it!
One quote in her post really stands out: “Continuing to do what you’ve been doing will probably produce the same results.” This is true and it goes back to the very opening of the post, the candidate who sent in the question states that she has applied to over 100 positions in a 7 month period and hasn’t made any progress. First, only a 100 in 7 months? Is this really a search or a casual hobby? She needs to pump up the volume of activity to be sure. More importantly, she has to improve her quality and approach.
There’s a misnomer in the title and tone of this article that is really critical to conducting a successful job search. It’s all about attitude. Getting “noticed” is a very inward looking way to approach this. What this candidate should be striving to do is to be “relevant.” She should try to honestly figure out if her qualifications are relevant to solving the problems or pursuing the goals that created each job to which she is applying. Once she’s determined that her skills are indeed relevant, she needs to break her relevance into specific solutions that will demonstrate exactly how she can help the hiring manager who owns the job. Then she needs to contact them directly and bring solutions – show them that she can really add specific value now. It will take more research and a passive / information gathering approach to build dialogues, relationships, and find real people to talk to. Time that is much better spent than just blasting out resumes and filling out applications.
A job seeker’s goal shouldn’t be to “get noticed” as much as it should be to “become relevant” – to the job, to the challenge, to the hiring manager. How do you make yourself relevant? Not by hyping your experience blindly but by doing research to figure out how you can bring value to the situation.
