How To Do Effective IT Job Hunting
Penned for every frustrated IT girl or guy.
Like most recruitment, IT Recruitment is pretty well busted. It hasn’t changed much since the advent of the major online job boards around the year 2000. That’s 17 years of melee involving mostly play by numbers approaches blended in with a lot of spray and pray.
It doesn’t have to be like this. You can improve your odds.
As an IT consultant – whether you’re a web developer, software engineer, cloud architect, business analyst or project manager – there are a few simple tenets you can apply to your career shifts which will make your life a lot easier.
1) Never shut the door totally on new opportunities. They say Never Say Never. In this case I say Never. The best time to move is when you don’t need to move. Do not read this as advocation for job hopping – complete the core of hwat you were hired for, and complete it well – your recommendations are going to be the engine of your career progression in to the future.
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2) Establish relevant social profiles, definitely including LinkedIn, and request recommendations when the recommenders have your work fresh in their minds.
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3) When you do your LinkedIn profile, create a compelling and concise executive summary at the top. It’s the first thing most people will read. It’s also often the only thing people read. Include some passion statements that focus on why you do what you do.
4) Share domain / sector relevant information regularly. You are busy and you’re maybe not inspired to generate your own content regularly. That’s fine. You can still make sure you get seen a lot in people’s feeds when you share good information about your industry. You can always add a short caption about your opinion relating to the piece you are sharing.
5) Build a real relationship with several respected recruiters who actually specialise in placing people with your particular skillset. Generally if you have a good relationship with at least 4 or 5 of them you will hear about job opportunities reasonably regularly. And yes, there is always a small handful of good technology recruiters in your geography, you just need to find them via contacts and web searching, then screen them yourself. If they ask a lot of open questions and listen more than they speak, they may be worth dealing with.
6) Ensure your LinkedIn profile lines up with your CV.
7) Your CV should not be longer than 3 pages. The job of the CV is to get you an interview, not get you the job. The CV should have a personal executive summary that makes it crystal clear what you are great at, and what you believe. Each position should outline what you did to make your team successful. Focus on achievements, not tasks. It’s tempting in Technology recruitment to just plant hundreds of keywords – it is more effective to only include the technology you are actually good at utilising already.
8) Include community contributions and personal projects only if you are proud of your work and it is complete or close to complete.
Apply these general career management practices to your month to month IT career and you ill get luckier, a lot more often. At CoTalent we understand that we aren’t always going to be able to help you on the first contact, so we focus on building relationships based on an understanding of who you are, your skills, goals and interests. From there we can remain relevant to you when we present IT Jobs or Project Services Jobs to you.