Five Reasons You’re Not Getting Calls From Hiring Managers by Jen Hubley Luckwaldt

Do you feel like you’re sending your resume into a black hole? It’s not necessarily because your experience is lacking. You could be the most qualified candidate in the world, but unless you hone your job search strategy during the pre-interview phase, you’re never going to get a chance to talk to a hiring manager.

If you’ve been job searching for a while, and your inbox is full of dust bunnies, here are five things you might be doing wrong:

1. You’re concentrating on applying online.

Up to 80% of job openings aren’t advertised, according to Steven Rothberg, founder of job-search website CollegeRecruiter.com. Instead, they’re filled internally or through employee recommendations. If you’re focusing your search on job boards and corporate job listings, you may only be seeing as little as 20% of the potential market.

The better bet is to concentrate on building your network. The more people you have in your corner, the more likely it is that you’ll hear about one of these unadvertised opportunities. Better yet, you’ll have someone to vouch for you to the hiring manager.

2. You’re not creating targeted resumes for each position.

Hopefully you’re customizing your cover letters instead of sending everyone the same generic letter, but your resume should get some tweaking, too. Of course, it’s easier to write your resume once and send it out for multiple job openings, but that sort of blanket-application process isn’t very effective.

Put yourself in the shoes of the decision-maker in this scenario: Do you want to hire the person who’ll take any job, or the one who appears genuinely excited about the particular job you’re hoping to fill? The enthusiastic candidate is more likely to appear like a good fit — and thus more loyal. It’s expensive to hire and train employees. Companies hope to make a good choice from the start and keep their workers on board and productive for as long as they need them.

3. You’re not using resume keywords.

When you apply online, your resume most likely enters an applicant tracking system, a software program that stores and sorts resumes, and allows recruiters and hiring managers to search them by keyword. Fail to include the right resume keywords, and you’ll never come up in their search.

How can you find the best resume keywords? Start with the job description.

“The buzzwords they’re looking for will usually be apparent in the job posting, so be sure to review them to make sure you have touched on most, if not all, of the keywords that are most relevant to each position,” writes Alison Doyle at About.com.

You should also include any keywords related to your skills, education, and job history. Don’t leave out terms just because you think they’re obvious. You might assume that everyone knows that a landscape architect probably knows AutoCAD, for example — but if you leave out that information, your resume might not make the cut when a recruiter searches her database.

4. Your social media profiles are working against you.

According to a CareerBuilder survey, 60% of employers used social media to screen candidates, and 21% said they were specifically looking for reasons not to hire a candidate. Don’t give them that reason.

If your online presence looks more like a Bud Light commercial, you might want to think about updating your privacy settings. (Although even that won’t necessarily save you: 36% of employers said they’d asked to be friends with candidates on social media. Cleaning up your profiles entirely might be best.)

On the other hand, not using social media at all can also work against you: 41% of employers said they’d be less likely to interview someone if they couldn’t find information about them online.

5. You’ve let the hiring manager know how old you are.

It’s illegal to discriminate against a worker based on their age – at least, after the age of 40 – but that doesn’t stop some companies from doing it anyway. At the hiring stage, it’s often easy enough for people to figure out how old you are, based on graduation years or outdated terminology in your resume (e.g., “webmaster”).

Remember that your resume is the highlight reel of your career, not a blow-by-blow account of everything you’ve done since graduation. If you’ve been in the workforce for a while, it’s perfectly all right to drop a few barely related early jobs from your CV. And definitely take off that graduation year if you think it might be holding you back.

The Secret to Overcoming Job Hunt Procrastination by Laura Leigh Clarke

The pressure is on. The job hunt has begun, and with it, the anxiety over how long you’re going to have to replace your income and whether you’ll make your next set of bills.

Going after a new job is a huge inconvenience, and even if you’re in the fortunate position to still have the job you’re looking to replace, you may still be feeling a degree of trepidation about making a change.

No matter what your personal circumstances or what scenario has thrust you back out into the job market, job hunting comes loaded with a number of pressures. If you’re feeling the strain — and the inertia that often goes along with it– there is something you can do to make the whole process much easier.

First, know that you are not in this alone. 

Feeling Stuck Is Normal

Feeling resistance over doing what you need to do is actually related to the various pressures you’re under.

On the one hand, you want to pay the bills, and you have the fear of not being able to do so pushing you to move forward, to take action, to brush up your resume and put yourself out there.

But on the other hand, you also have pressures that cause you to hang back. Mobilizing for the job hunt is a massive pain in the butt. You have so much to put in place. You have applications to write, companies to contact, telephone interviews and surveys and aptitude tests and screenings to pass. On top of all that, at any stage in the process, there’s a big risk you will be rejected. And boy, do we do crazy things to avoid that feeling of rejection — even when we think we’re pretty resilient.

The thing is, no matter how confident and unaffected by others’ opinions you may think you are, being already under pressure will make you more sensitive to things that would have, on any other day, been water down a duck’s back.

Even though logically you know it isn’t personal and you can’t win every job, when you’re knocked back for a position, that haunting worry that you aren’t good enough rears its ugly head and can put even the most confident of professionals into a funk. Between this and the pressure of having to get a job, it’s not surprising if you’ve ended up procrastinating and putting off doing what you should be doing.

But what can you do about it?

When you can’t do what you know you should do, look at the pressures pulling you in different directions. 

Take Out the Pressures Before They Take You Out of the Game

The trick to handling all of this is to become aware of the anxieties and pressures pulling you all over the place. Even though all your pressure might be pulling you in the direction of getting that job, this in itself is a pressure and something that will zap your energy and make it more difficult to do what you need to do.

I know what you’re probably thinking: You just need to send out more resumes or land one more interview or get one more thing done. The reality is, very little will shift in the outside world until your inner world changes — regardless of how much effort you put in. (Like this thought? Tweet it!)

It all starts with understanding that inner world. 

How to Slay Job Hunt Pressures

The solution to your problem is to become aware of all the factors pushing and pulling you when it comes to getting a job. The easiest way to do this is to grab a pen and paper and apply this simple two-step process:

Step 1: Create Two Lists

The first list is all the reasons you need to get a job, and the second list is all the reasons you don’t want to get (or are avoiding getting) a job. If you manage this easily, you may want to hone this down further and do it for a specific job you’re in the process of applying for.

The first thing this will do is give you an awareness of all the factors at play and give you some clarity on your own motivations. You wouldn’t be the first person to have an a-ha moment as to why you’re finding everything so hard. You may even spontaneously re-evaluate the jobs you’re applying for once you look at your real motivations.

At the very least, you will see the mixture of necessity and fear, and your own deeper desires for what you want in your life, come to the surface. 

Step 2: Remove the Pressures

Now you need to take these pressures out of the equation, simply by experiencing fully the feelings associated with them. The reason fear and pressure have such a hold over us is because we try to battle on without really feeling them. This just wears us out and eventually makes us feel like giving up.

If you want to have 100% of your energy available to you for your job hunt, you’re going to have to let go of wasting energy keeping your feelings in check. The way to do this is to go through each item on your two lists and simply sit with the feelings each one produces.

Let’s say you have “need to pay bills” on one list. Just feel for a moment how that makes you feel. Maybe you notice a sensation somewhere in your body, like a heaviness in your chest or throat. You may feel it as a pressure in your heart. However you experience it, simply stay with that feeling and lean into it. In a few moments, you will notice it begin to ebb away, as if it were never even there.

Do this for each item on the list, spending several minutes on each until you no longer feel anything. By the time you’ve completed both lists, you will be feeling much lighter, much freer and more able to focus on what’s really going to get you where you want to be.

Take your time with this exercise. The results can be truly transformational —  not just for your immediate career and job search, but for the rest of your life. 

Share What You’ve Found

The final step is to consolidate what you’ve learned. Take a moment and share in the comments some of the anxieties that have come to mind as you’ve been reading this. If you’ve had any a-ha moments, feel free to share those , too.

8 Things to Know if Your Job Search Skills Are Rusty

Be prepared for a longer, more intense and less personal application process 

than before.

By Alison Green | Contributor March 7, 2016, at 8:52 a.m.

You may be asked to sit for additional interviews, including conversations over 

the phone, via video and with a wider range of interviewers. 

If you're gearing up for a job search but haven't pulled out your resume much 

in the last decade, brace yourself for some changes. Job searching has changed 

in some significant ways in the last 10 years, both in terms of what the experience 

is like for candidates and which strategies are effective and which have fallen 

out of favor.

Here are eight of the biggest changes you should be prepared for if your job hunting 

skills are rusty.

1. Hiring often takes longer than it used to. If you're used to companies 

placing an ad, interviewing candidates and making a hire all in the space of, 

say, a month, you might be in for a shock. Companies increasingly are taking 

months to hire. Some companies still move quickly, but don't be surprised if 

you hear back from companies months after you initially applied, or if weeks 

go by before you hear back after an interview.

2. You may be asked to interview more times than in the past. Many 

employers are adding additional steps to their hiring process – phone interviews 

before meeting in person, multiple interview rounds with a wider range of 

interviewers, including peers and managers several levels up, requests for 

presentations, skills assessments and other homework assignments.

3. Nearly all applications must be submitted online now. If the last time 

you job hunted, you were still looking through job ads in the newspaper and 

mailing in your resume on thick bond paper, know that times have changed. 

Today the vast majority of jobs will direct you to apply online, often refusing to 

accept paper resumes at all. This can be more efficient (and will certainly save 

you on postage), but it can also mean wrestling with ornery electronic systems 

that aren't designed with candidates' ease in mind.

4. You might be asked to disclose an uncomfortable amount of information 

to get your application reviewed. Online applications regularly require applicants 

to share their salary history, references and even Social Security numbers, 

often refusing to accept applications that don't include this information. And this 

is all before you've ever had a chance to talk to a human.

5. At the same time that the process has become more intense, it's also 

become less personal.  With companies asking candidates to invest so much 

time and energy in longer, more involved processes, candidates are often treated 

surprisingly impersonally. You may interview with a company, possibly even several 

times, and then never hear back from them with a final decision. It's increasingly 

common for companies to not bother sending out rejections, or even to respond to 

direct requests from candidates for an update on where the hiring process stands.

6. You might be asked to do an initial screening by video. Some companies 

are asking candidates who make an initial cut to answer prerecorded questions by 

video before moving them to an interview with a live person. This can be frustrating 

for candidates since it means investing time in an "interview" without being able to 

ask their own questions or get a feel for the job or company culture.

7. Resume conventions have changed. Don't just pull out your old resume from 

10 years ago, update it with your last job and assume it's good to go. Modern resumes 

have jettisoned the old-fashioned objective at the top of the page, the formerly 

ubiquitous "references available upon request" statement at the bottom and the rigid 

rule confining you to one page. You're still limited to one page if you're a recent 

graduate, but otherwise two pages are fine.

8. The old advice about following up on your job application to show 

persistence no longer applies. If you remember being told to call to check on 

your application after submitting it or to stop by a company and ask to talk to the 

hiring manager in person, remove those strategies from your modern job-hunting 

playbook. These days, busy hiring managers are annoyed by aggressive follow-up. 

And stopping by in person risks signaling 

that you're out of touch with how modern offices work.

Pursuing Minimalism...

"The space in which we live should be for the person we are becoming now, not for the person we were in the past."  -Marie Kondo

"Sell your crap, pay your debt, do what you love"  -Adam Baker

Life after the Fastlane by Patricia Dietz

So you've hung up you're business attire and settled back for a little peace and quiet.  Retirement doesn't have to be full of activities and projects, it can be an opportunity to recharge, and reinvigorate the senses.  It's a time to let go of the stress of commuting, and deadlines, and office politics and take some me time.

De-stressing and de-compressing are essential to your enjoyment in retirement.  When I retired it was great.  I no longer had to get up at a gawd awful time in the morning to make my commute before rush hour, I didn't have to think about what to wear, and since I was also leaving the "part-time military", I was so happy not to have to give up anymore of my weekends.  I didn't have a lot of things planned for retirement, I just wanted to spend more time with my husband and work on things around my house that needed doing.  I started a garden and took care of the yard.

It wasn't until a year or so later that I started to get a little bored.  During the year I had travelled to Hawaii to visit my daughter and my granddaughters.  My husband and I took a trip to Missouri to visit his mother, and we visited friends in California.  All of that was very gratifying and we enjoyed it but who wants to travel all the time, I don't like to fly anymore since it has become such a hassle, it's an all day affair to take even a short flight in these days of jam-packed smaller aircraft and heightened security measures.  I like my home and I guess I've become a bit of a homebody.

Volunteer work is always an option to stay involved.  I found some things I like to do so that filled up some of my time.  Hobbies are a nice distraction, I don't paint or do pottery or anything like that but I did some craft things and I also learned this crazy game called pickle ball.  I love racket sports so it was a good fit, but the rules to this game are ridiculous.

Everyone has to define their own retirement and what it means to them.  In short all I can say is stay active and stay involved.  You always hear the stories about so and so who retired and was dead within the year.  A frightening thought I know and I'm sure it's just a coincidence that retirement and major illness or sudden death just happened to occur at the same time.  You are as young as you feel so get out there and live a life that you have earned and hopefully you've planned well and can thoroughly enjoy it.

What Your Resume Should Look Like in 2016

• Daniel Bortz @DanielBortz
 

Jan. 11, 2016

    

Job seekers, give yourself an edge with some modern touches.

“In today’s job market, your resume needs to immediately stand out,” says Dawn Bugni, a professional resume writer in Wilmington, N.C. Attention spans are at an all-time short, with hiring managers spending just six seconds looking at a resume before deciding whether the applicant is worth further consideration, a recent study by TheLadders found. (That’s if a human looks at it at all; before your application even reaches a hiring manager, it usually has to make it past an automated applicant tracking system.)

As hiring continues to increase, job seekers will face stiff competition this year. Follow the tips below to make your resume shine in 2016.

Like this resume? Click here for a downloadable template. (Resume courtesy of Wendy Enelow.)

1. Enhance your contact information.

Put simply: hiring managers are busy; make their job easier by hyperlinking your email address so that you’re only one click away, says Wendy Enelow, co-author of Modernize Your Resume: Get Noticed…Get Hired. Bear in mind that you expose yourself to identify theft if you include your full mailing address, says Enelow, so only put your city, state, and zip code on your resume. Also, use active links to your LinkedIn profile and any other social media accounts that are fit for recruiters.

2. Make the page “pop.”

Depending on the industry, you can distinguish your resume by punching up the design, but exercise caution: a graphic artist, for example, has more creative leeway than an accountant.

Enelow’s co-author Louise Kursmark recommends using color to make your resume unique. To stay professional, consider making only section headers blue, for example, and leaving the rest in black, Kursmark suggests. And replace the outdated Times New Roman with a more modern font such as Cambria, Calibri, or Georgia, Enelow says. (As standard typefaces, they translate well between operating systems.)

3. Ditch the objective statement…

Today’s hiring managers aren’t concerned with what is it you’re looking for—they’re focused on finding the right hire. Thus, “the objective statement has become obsolete,” says Tiffani Murray, an HR professional and resume writer at Atlanta-based Personality On a Page.

…and lead with a summary.

To capture the hiring manager’s attention, start your resume with a short professional synopsis that states your years of experience, job history, and big career achievements. Instead of labeling the section a “summary,” use the header to highlight your area of expertise, says Enelow.

4. Guide the reader’s eye.

The Internet has changed reading behavior, says Kursmark: “People don’t read top to bottom anymore. They’re constantly skimming and looking at different parts of the page, and if you don’t structure your resume to appeal to that, a lot of good material will get overlooked.” Therefore, use bolded text to ensure your achievements stand out.

5. Beat the robots.

 Many medium and large companies use software to weed out candidates. Your resume will need the right keywords to get through, so mirror the language of the job posting, advises Bugni, and pay attention to detail. “Changing something as simple as ‘customer service’ to ‘client relations’ can get your resume approved or rejected,” she says.

6. Forgo a “skills” section.

Weave your talents into your work experience. “Employers are looking for more than a list of skills,” says Murray. “They want to know how you’ve applied them.” The exception: It’s beneficial to have a designated section when applying for a skills-based job that requires specific qualifications, such as an IT specialist.7. Maximize your real estate.

7. Maximize your real estate.

 Despite what you may have heard, you don’t necessarily need to limit your resume to one page. “A resume is as long as it needs to be to convey value. And not one word more,” says Bugni. That said, a two-page resume may be appropriate for someone with 30 years’ experience—not for a recent college graduate. To conserve space use bullet points, active verbs, and industry-specific acronyms, and don’t state the obvious (e.g., including “references available upon request”).

About Me (or Why should I be your Coach?)

I started working at a fairly young age, at 17 I joined the Army.  This bold move was prompted by the desire to get away from my smother and also to get the GI Bill for college, which was going away with the end of the Vietnam Era.  Emotionally I wasn't ready for college yet, I needed to grow up a little bit.

The best laid plans have a way of being re-routed by life.  While in the Army I met my husband, got married, got pregnant and got out of the Army.  And soon after Lindy was born, I started college at the University of Colorado.  4 years later I graduated with a Bachelors Degree in Political Science, a commission as a 2LT in the Army and a three year active duty commitment.

After three years at Ft. Carson, Co, I embarked on a career in government.  I worked for 13 years for the City of Los Angeles mostly with the Bureau of Engineering and as a Vet I was eligible for a buy back of 5 years of active military service toward my city retirement.  (If you haven't picked up on a theme here, the opportunist in me is always looking for an opportunity to benefit me).  That gave me 18 years vested toward a lifetime retirement paycheck starting at age 55.

I maintained a parallel career in the Army Reserve.  After going in and out of the Reserves I finally buckled down and completed 20 "good years" for another retirement.  Retiring from the Reserves however cost me my civilian job as it was tied to my military service.  I was fine with that though, I was ready for a break and to spend time with my husband and visit our grand kids.

And that brings me to now.  Let me step back for a moment, I got my Masters degree in Psychology in 1993 while working for the City.  When we moved to Texas I took some counseling courses with the plan of becoming a Licensed Professional Counselor, but I didn't complete the program.  So without a license I was kind of stuck, I couldn't be called a Counselor or Therapist.  Then I read about Coaching - Life Coaching in particular, and a light bulb went off.  I didn't need a license to Coach, and I could help people.  I switched focus to Career Coaching because I know something about it and quite frankly Life Coaching is difficult to market.

I have a passion for working with people especially older displaced workers who have found themselves forced into buyouts and early retirement but want to keep working.  Also people who have had extended periods of unemployment and have sort of given up on finding a job.  My goal now is to help people focus on what will give them worth.  Perhaps there is something you've always wanted to do but didn't think you could or perhaps you are a budding entrepreneur.  I want to help you find that calling and seize the moment.

Allow me to be your coach and together we will unlock your potential.


Patricia Dietz