Showcase your work, who are you
Who you really are will come through the work you produce.
Modern-day resume doesn’t give an employer any idea as to what sort of person you are.
Employers care about is what type of person you are. They want to know whether you are an “owner mentality” or a “follower mentality.”
They want to know if you’re confident in your abilities, but also open and humble enough to learn – whether or not you’re teachable.
They want to know if you handle conflicts, how big your ego is, and whether or not they can trust you to make good, genuine decisions.
Skills, in themselves, are not valuable.
Skills are only valuable when they are used by people who have the emotional competency to use them effectively.
The modern-day resume is nothing but a list of skills. It lacks information on the person behind those skills – who you are, what you believe in, and what drives you forward in life.
It’s who you know, not what you know that will get you that job
With so many job applicants, it may just be easier for hiring managers to find someone they already know from their own networks.
Recommendations from a friend of a friend are also common.
It may be just a waste of time to go through hundreds of resumes that look alike and may even be inaccurate.
In some industries, advertising for a job is just a compliance, tick-of-the-box exercise. There’s no choice to do one advertisement for a job vacancy for the sake of public relations.
The sameness of many resumes will not do you any favors. Hiring managers will just switch off after a while.
Some companies have employee referral programs where employees can refer or recommend candidates to their HR or hiring manager and get rewarded when that person is hired. Getting to know these employees can be handy to increase your likelihood of getting hired.
Strive to add or create value for others
If you manage to have coffee with a hiring manager, shot him an email a few days later with a detailed business proposal that will add value to his business – it’s your FREE 90-day business plan (aka your resume) of what you would do for the business if you got the job!
The more specific you are in your business plan the better the chance of securing that job.
Demonstrate that you’re capable of delivering on your promise!
This active no-strings-attached job hunting strategy shows true initiative and commitment on your part. It demonstrates how you have found solutions to problems and applied your knowledge and experience.
It’s not just in theory or head knowledge like most job applicants.
While the other candidates took the easy way, you have invested time and effort in showing your true self to your future employer by delivering actionable and valuable action items that solve problems.
It will no doubt take significant time and effort on your part to research the problem, develop solutions and to document them.
Remember, you have to be different from other job applicants.
Unfortunately, this will be the new norm when we have a mismatch between the number of job applicants and the number of available jobs.
Knowing that people will always take the easy way out, you are really taking the road least traveled to gain a competitive edge over your competitors (i.e., other job seekers).
The key here is not to have any expectations for payment or a job in return for your 90-day business plan.