Common mistakes you make when job hunting

You have a good work record but nobody is looking at your Resume and more so, you haven’t gotten even one interview. Maybe your online job hunting is going badly because you are making some of the  common mistakes made by people hunting for  jobs. We are going to discuss each one of the them, and I believe after reading this post, you can fix them.

You are sending out standard and boring CVs

Before sending your CV for a job opening carefully scan the offer and put keywords repeated in the offer in your CV, this way you will increase your chances as the company will think you are the ideal person for the position because you have used the same language.

You haven’t kept your job hunt a secret 

Except for rare exceptions, you should keep your job hunt a secret. Announcing on social media like on your Facebook wall, that you are fed up with your job and that you are looking for a new one, can have repercussions especially with your supervisors and even co-workers besides if somebody wants to hire you, and looks at your Facebook and finds out that you rant and rave about your job, you may lose serious points.  For LinkedIn, you should immediately disable the option, ”share profile updates” under the privacy settings of your account. Anytime you change your position on your profile { including the position you want for your next job}, your contacts will receive the typical, ” congratulate …”, It is unlikely that your boss would congratulate you on your next job.

You haven’t researched the company enough

During the selection process a company will use nice to describe themselves, but does this company you are interested in hiring you actually maintain those exceptional values? You need to research on how they treat their employees. Check out their corporate webpage on Facebook or Glassdoor, a page that lets you search reviews of companies from their employees (current or past). This can help you save yourself falling for something you aren’t aware of. You can also take a more journalistic/detective based research. The goal here is to understand the company’s actual situation and if it is really aligned with what you have planned for your next job.

You aren’t taking 100% advantage of online resources 

There are a quite a number of online tools that you can use in your search for a job e.g. LinkedIn,  YouTube video tutorials or even asking your Twitter contacts. 

You are still looking for work on Monster and job sites 

Monster and other types of online job boards may help you find the type of skills asked today from companies in the sector that interests you or keywords to use in your CV to stand out but that is the far as they go, right now they are not the best places to look for jobs.  Nowadays, if you want to get a job online, all the action is either on LinkedIn or any social network with most of your contacts.

You go to the job interview without any preparation

Before going to your next interview, it is important to improve your non-verbal language ( Both yours and how to read the interview’s body). You can learn this from YouTube videos and also you need to  prepare for specific questions and how to respond like questions about the company, your strengths, weaknesses, your contribution to your current company etc.

Lastly, you didn’t clean up your social media profiles 

Companies are increasingly looking at social media profiles of potential candidates. Watch what you post on social media and adjust your privacy settings.  An unfortunate photo, a comment written at a bad time or you venting about your previous job can destroy all your previous efforts to get a certain position.

Related: Common mistakes that most job seekers make