How to land a job during the first quarter of the year

I sat down with my COO Eric Nunes, and we analyzed our data and over a thousand calls with Job Seekers during the past 2 years, here is what we learned: The first and third quarter of the year is when employers are on fire with posting new positions, especially at the times we are in during the pandemic, the economy is rebuilding, and recruiters are working 24/7 to place candidates. This is a very exciting time to apply. 

If you're like most people, you probably make New Year's resolutions with the best of intentions. But by February, many of those resolutions have already been forgotten. This year, don't let that happen to your job search.

After landing hundreds of offers for my clients and generating over 10 million $ in salaries, I decided to write a book. It outlines 4 main areas that you need to focus on to have a successful job search. 

1) Mindset 

2) Branding 

3) Networking 

4) Interview Prep& Salary negotiation 

1) Mindset

Are you feeling discouraged in your job search? You're not alone. It can be tough to stay positive when it feels like you're sending out resumes and getting no responses. After talking to over 1000 job seekers, I learned that the biggest commonality that they all have is the challenge of dealing with failure, rejection, and ghosting. 

I want you to understand that it is part of the process. Michael Jordan missed 10,000 shots during his basketball Career, Muhammed Ali lost over 5 times, Jeff Bezos built failed businesses. Failure is a part of success. Get ready for failed interviews, bad feedback, offer rejection letters, and not nice people. It's coming and it is okay. If you learn how to deal with these things, the job search will be 10X easier.

"It's easier said than done" that's what you might be thinking right now, and it's true! because when you are in that dark place, it is hard to get out of it. But... How can you build a stronger mind so that you can better deal with the negatives, let's go through it?

The first thing that I suggest to all my clients is to block out 30 mins in the day for a daily routine. Many studies have shown that the first hour upon waking up sets the whole tone for the day. (ARTICLE) , and what do most people do? grab the phone and open up social media or email. Which is the worst thing you can do! why? because we already have so many things that will stress us out throughout the day, why add more? Instead give yourself that time to take care of your mind and body and do these 3 things: Mediation, Journaling, and exercise. I go through these in more detail here: ARTICLE

2) Branding 

According to the dictionary, the definition of branding is: the promotion of a particular product or company by means of advertising and distinctive design. In the job search, you are the brand, and how do you build that brand? Having an ATS optimized resume + A magnetic LinkedIn profile + Creating accounts on all the top job boards. 

Having an ATS optimized resume

The old school days of hiring managers reading your resume are gone, nowadays they use the ATS (Applicant Tracking System), a software that 98% of fortune 500 companies use to find job candidates [[Source link?]]. The ATS looks for keywords that convey two main things: key qualifications and key (technical and non-technical) skills. After doing over a thousand calls with job seekers I learned that about 80% of them had problems getting interviews, all due to the ATS, and they didn’t even know what it was or how it works. The first and easiest step is to go to www. jobscan.co, this platform will guide you through it and help with the details

A magnetic LinkedIn profile

LinkedIn is now the number one most used platform for landing jobs, 87% of all company recruiters use LinkedIn to find job candidates. [[Source link]] You want to have a strong presence on LinkedIn starting right now. Jobscan. co also has a LinkedIn optimization tool

Creating accounts on all the top job boards. 

In the last two sections, we worked on the resume and LinkedIn profile. The last part of the puzzle is the job boards. The top 10 job boards according to betterteam.com [[Source link]] are:

1. Indeed

2. Monster

3. LinkedIn

4. ZipRecruiter

5. Monster

6. CareerBuilder

7. FlexJobs

8. Google for jobs

9. Lensa

10. Ladders

After you have your resume ATS optimized, go on to these websites, create a profile, upload the resume, and make it public. This is a complete game-changer and will tremendously boost your visibility for multiple reasons: 1) The ATS software works similarly as SEO (Search Engine Optimization), which simply means that when recruiters and hiring managers are looking for candidates with a similar background as yours, they also use a google search.

The more profiles you have, the easier it will be for them to find you. Let’s say for example a recruiter is looking for project managers. Your name will appear much higher on the search list, simply because you have your resume uploaded on multiple platforms. 2) When you have profiles on these websites, recruiters and hiring managers will automatically start to reach out to you whenever they have a job that is matched with your background. This will increase the number of interviews more than you can ever imagine.

3&4) Networking, Interview Prep& Salary negotiation 

In these two previous articles, I go into full detail about Networking and Interview Prep: ARTICLE 1, ARTICLE 2

Use the 4 points as a blueprint for your job search so that you can avoid making mistakes and it will tremendously boost your job search success.