How To Get Hired Faster During COVID And For More Money
Although the job market is tough right now especially for those without a lot of real world work experience, I’m going to tell you exactly what us hiring managers want to see on your resume and why we’ll pay you more for it. As a hiring manager for a Fortune 500 company for the past 7 years, I’ve hired over 3,000 people so I have quite a bit of experience determining who’s going to be a good employee from a bad employee simply by looking at a resume. Furthermore, I talk to a ton of hiring managers so we can each learn from one another and hopefully never bring on a bad hire again. WIth that being said, I’m going to provide you with exactly what we want to see on your resume so that you can get hired faster and for more money.
Apply for jobs that are actually hiring
COVID has flipped the business world upside down. A lot of companies have frozen their hiring. So, as mentioned in my last email (take a look at it if you haven’t’ read it yet), for you to get hired you need to be applying to jobs that are actually hiring. Everyone is going digital right now so you need to make sure you are tailoring your search to somehow fit this very very needed skillset (especially in digital marketing as I mentioned in my last article). There are very few types of jobs that are hiring right now, so you need to be strategic in your approach for any of the below to work as it doesn’t matter how good your resume is if there aren’t any jobs in that field.
Alright, now that we got that out of the way and you are focusing your energy in roles that are actually hiring, let’s go over the 3 main things us hiring managers want to see in a all-star caliber resume:
Match Your Resume to the Job Experience Required
As a hiring manager and then the new employee’s boss, there is nothing I want more than a person who has already proven they can do the job. This eliminates a lot of the unknowns for us in how you’re going to perform and I won’t look like a bad decision maker in hiring you because I went off of data (your resume). Furthermore, the more you meet the exact requirements, the easier it will be to train you and the sooner I’ll be able to go back to my more regular hours without the added stress of training a new employee.
We receive hundreds of resumes for each open position. This is not uncommon for job postings as LinkedIn and ZipRecruiter has made it easier than ever to apply quickly to a bunch of jobs. So, we need to weed out resumes quickly and the first cut we make is by looking at who doesn’t qualify based off of their experience.
What can you do to change this? Go online right now and get 15 jobs that interest you. Write down all of their job requirements. You’ll clearly see some overlap here and some of the requirements will show up time and time again. Determine if you can stretch and “rebrand” any of the prior work you’ve done to fulfill these requirements so that you can check off that requirement.
Once you have finished doing this, you’ll be left with a list of requirements that you don’t have any experience with. You now need to find a way to bridge this gap by gaining real world work experience to fulfill these shortcomings. You can do this in various ways such as:
Starting a side hustle through a 3rd Party App (dog sitting, dog walking, renting your car)
Use your marketing knowledge to grow your side hustle business in terms of reach online and specifically do something that focuses on your shortcomings in skills and apply it here. Your goal isn’t to turn this into a big money venture. Your goal is to see how to use these skills and your knowledge in a real world setting. Reading about how to do something and being able to actually do it are 2 completely different things. Doing is much harder than knowing how.
Starting your own small business
This is a much more complicated process but it is by far the quickest way to learn pretty much everything you need to know about marketing. However, like I said, this is pretty complicated so I’d recommend sticking with a 3rd party app and just try to hone in on the shortcomings you have on your resume. If you do decide to go this route, use platforms such as Shopify, Etsy, and Amazon to help you get something up and running quickly.
Internship/Apprenticeship
Try to do your best to find one that is going to let you actually get these specific skills you’re trying to acquire. Your best bet will definitely be through a family or friend connection as most internships not only take a really long time to get, but they also usually only give you the left over work and not necessarily the things you want to learn.
Consider offering your services for free to a small company in your neighborhood and let them know that it appears they need some help in their marketing department and you’d like to do x, y and z for them (these will be the skills you’re missing).
Job Prepped
If you want to be trained by a marketing expert who has trained over 3,000 marketers for a Fortune 500 company and then also get real world work experience without any cover letters or applications, then try Job Prepped. The best part about Job Prepped is that not only are you going to get real world work experience immediately, but you’ll also be coached and guided on how to perform the tasks that YOU choose you want experience in. It’s the quickest way to get the exact experience you need to get hired for the job you want.
If you can apply one of these methods, and get the appropriate skills needed for the job, I know as your manager, my life will get a lot easier hiring you rather than someone I need to do a lot of training with. You making my life easier is definitely worth shelling over additional company money and we almost always will (especially since it’s not our own money). So, show me how you’ll make my life easier.
Show me your characteristics in your resume and at your interview
We all want employees that are creative, that are hustlers, that are resilient, and those that can turn a negative situation into a positive one. These are the people that we want to go to battle with. We don’t want complainers and lazy people. By gaining experience in these new and creative ways, you are showing all of these traits that we absolutely love. Don’t just leave them on your resume, but emphasize this once you get your interview. State how you didn’t initially have the requisite work experience and you knew that it’d be hard with Covid to get experience through a regular job. So, you got creative and figured out other ways to continue to grow your skill set to ensure that you could make yourself a better and more productive person each and every day despite what was going on in the world. If this doesn’t shout out winner, I don’t know will.
Research your hiring manager
Last but not least, you want to make sure you can relate in any way possible to your hiring manager and those that are interviewing you. Just like you, we want to work with people that we like and that have similar interest. Check us out on Facebook, LinkedIn, and if your boss is really outdated, Myspace….See if we have any mutual connections or any similar interests and try to work that in the interview somehow. If we hire you, we’re likely going to be spending a lot of time together so “fit” is important. Plus, the more we like you personally, the more you’ll likely be able to get in terms of salary as we’d much rather work with someone who is fun and friendly than Angela from The Office.
There you have it. Focus on these 3 things and you not only will get your job quicker but you’ll surely be able to get an extra $5-10k more in salary.
Founder of JobPrepped
Joseph Blanco, Esq. rapidly climbed the corporate ladder and was leading a team of 500 sales and marketers by the age of 29 at a Fortune 500 company. He has hired and trained over 3,000 sales and marketers over his career. He has now taken his years of great experience teaching and training sales and marketers directly to young professionals to not only teach them how to be successful in marketing, but more importantly, also giving them real world work experience immediately as work experience is the #1 thing young professionals need to get hired.
