8 Effective Job Search Tips

If you’re changing careers, industries or just looking for your next role, it’s important to know what you want, and what you’re looking to leave behind.

Having a clear picture of what you’re looking for will help you build a job search strategy and help you apply a job board’s various tools to find the types of positions that you want.

First impressions are important. Take some time to review your resume and any online profiles you may have. Make sure all the information is up to date, written in an active voice and uses data to highlight your achievements. For example, instead of saying, “I helped support the sales team in earning higher revenue,” you could write, “I supported the sales team and contributed to achieving $5k in additional revenue.”

Just like your resume and cover letter, working strategic keywords into your profile can help it show up for recruiters if it’s scanned by Applicant Tracking System (ATS) software. Take a minute to research some of the ways you can optimize your online profiles for ATS software. Including a skills section, reviewing similar job descriptions for common keywords and writing your profile in simple, clear language are good ways to begin. 

Sure, you can comb through a company’s careers page in search of the perfect position, or you can use an aggregator to do that for you. Job aggregators like Indeed, SimplyHired or LinkedIn pull job postings from thousands of organizations, allowing you to browse more options at once and customize your search.

If the job you’re looking for is a specifically skilled position in a particular industry, you may want to focus your search by browsing a more targeted job board, rather than trying your luck on a more mainstream platform, such as LinkedIn.

Be aware there might be multiple job titles for what you want to do, depending on the company. Wording might vary slightly or be in a different order, so try searching for different combinations.

Using filters can help you narrow down your search by showing you only the results that fit your desired criteria: a specific title, full- or part-time work, a particular distance from home, whether the job is remote, onsite or hybrid or the level of the position. 

Setting up alerts for the job titles you’re interested in can help you stay on top of things even when you’re not actively searching. Websites like Indeed let you set up alerts for titles and locations, and LinkedIn has the added feature of opting to let recruiters know you’re looking for work.