Word It Wisely

How you word things changes the way people perceive you. This applies to a cover letter, a resume, an email and so forth. Make sure that your wording matches what you are trying to say and showcases you in the best way possible. You don’t want to not land that dream job because you didn’t word your cover letter as professionally as you should of, or have your resume not adequately represent you because instead of putting “Lead Recruiter at Search Solution Group, where I helped to find over 200 applicants careers” you wrote “Recruiter at SSG, helped find jobs for people without them.” Make yourself sound amazing while also being clear and concise. Don’t use abbreviations! Assume, like your high school teachers always said, that whoever is reading over your information is an alien who knows nothing about you.

Wording is especially key in your follow-up email to a job interview. You want to make sure that they know in a few short lines that you are really interested in the position, you have a lot to offer them and are appreciative of the time they took to look over your qualifications and interview you. Nothing says, “Don’t hire me!” like a lackluster follow-up email (or none at all) that expresses no gratitude or further interest in the job. Even though you’re not face-to-face, write the email as if you were talking to your boss at that moment. Make sure you don’t sound too robotic or scripted. Show your interest without being annoying, meaning two follow-up emails should be your limit and they should be well spaced out. If they are going to contact you they will, if not…too bad for them…or you, more likely it’s too bad for you…

Just remember: Wording, Wording, Wording is KEY!

Cover Letter Conundrum

Hate to break this to you, but your cover letter stinks. It’s not your eloquence, or your experience, it’s the whole idea of a cover letter to begin with. Recruiters and hiring managers see thousands of resumes and do not have the time to read your page long description of your hopes and dreams. This is a tough lesson to learn, but it’s an important one: KEEP IT SIMPLE!

Today recruiters and hiring managers use resume and cover letter screening tools in addition to reading them. What these tools do is look for keywords in your resume to match up with what they are searching for. Only some screening tools read cover letters and 80% of recruiters and hiring managers skip to resumes without bothering with cover letters.

However, do not skip the cover letter. Some recruiters and hiring managers won’t look at a resumé if it doesn’t have a cover letter. It’s a tricky beast to tame, but you can do it if you follow these expert cover letter writing tips!

• Salutation: Skip the whole ‘Dear Sir or Madam’ BS. What that salutation shows is that you were too lazy to find out the hiring manager’s name. If you need to, call the company and ask for a name. If you can’t be bothered, or you can’t find it out, skip it all together and get to the point.
• Short & Sweet: Plan on having saying everything you have to say in one paragraph. Like we said, recruiters have zero time so make it easier for them.
•  Name it: Make sure you mention the name of the company in the first sentences of your letter and why you want to work there. Keep it truthful and sincere because recruiters and hiring managers are like sincerity bloodhounds and will sniff out a lie in a flash.
• Mobile Friendly: The fantastic recruiters at Search Solution Group do work even after hours and outside of the office. Making your cover letter mobile friendly ( meaning short and neatly organized) gives your cover letter a higher chance of actually being read. No one wants to have to zoom in and scroll to read anything, much less a cover letter.
• Typos:  Read your cover letter and resumé a million times before hitting send. If you have terrible grammar and a sordid past with typos, have someone trustworthy read it for you.
• Be Eye-Catching: After a cover letter has been deemed worthy by a screening tool, the recruiter still wants to be convinced why yours is the one to pick. Being straightforward and sincere are good like we said, but taking it a step further and asking a good intelligent question is another way to get a recruiter to call you. However, as much as you want to ask,  it can’t be a question like, ‘how much travel is there?’ or ‘what’s the pay?’.
• Refer To Your Resume: By making a quick reference to your resume in on of your few sentences of your cover letter, it makes the recruiter subconsciously look at your resumé which brings you a step closer to being called!
• Sign Your Name: If this is a paper cover letter, you better sign it at the bottom. If it is an online cover letter, type your name. It’s simple, but a surprising amount of people forget to put their name on the letter.

Typos.. grrrrr.

Once you get far enough to become a candidate for a job with our recruiters at Search Solution Group, you will get even more advice for your resumé and how to present yourself best on paper. We know that you have Top Talent and our recruiters will make you even better!

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Why You Aren’t Successful (And Never Will Be)

Whoa whoa, calm down!  We were just kidding.. sort of. The whole ‘You won’t be successful thing’ is actually contingent on whether or not you follow these pieces of advice that are often disregarded, but are straight from the Search Solution Group recruiters and are not to be ignored.

On your road to success, you’ll get advice from your mother, your sister, your neighbor, and anyone who has a mouth and a brain. People love to give advice (and not all of it’s good), but here are 10 pieces of career adviceyou should actually follow!

1. Read Everything You Can Find: Not only does reading give your grey matter a good work out, reading is the easiest and most fruitful way to gather new ideas and relevant career advice ( like this blog)!  Reading autobiographies of successful people is a good place to start and can seriously elevate your success by giving you inspiration and new ideas.
2. Get Organized: No one is going to want to work with you if you are disorganized. Getting yourself into the habit of writing lists and organizing those lists based on priority is the first place to start. You list style can be  based on color coding, actual coding, a smart phone App, or a million sticky notes. Finding a system to keep you organized will show in your work and home life.
3. Find A GOOD Mentor: In order to be successful, you never ever EVER want to work for someone who is not going to encourage you to be the best. Finding good mentors that won’t let you fail are important to find. If you aren’t getting that type of mentor at work, look towards professional and social groups. It’s a matter of finding someone who you respect that would be proud of your successes and pick you up when you fail. A good place to start in your mentor search is within LinkedIn groups specific to your industry.
4. Prove Your Worth:  In order to be successful you need to be able to show that you aren’t afraid of doing anything to get results. You need to make yourself DO something instead of just talking about your dreams all day. Look at all the movers and shakers of the world.  Gary Veynerchuck took his father’s liquor store and turned it into a successful online wine store by thinking out of the box and actually DOING it!   You can’t be too afraid to fail and not take risks because taking risks often pay off the most.
5. Don’t Burn Bridges: Keep every solid contact that you have ever made. Burning bridges when leaving a job or not working with a company can be detrimental to your future success. You never know when you may need advice or help from a person, so the best advice is to always be professionally cordial  to everyone you ever work with ( or don’t work with).
6. Follow Up: Making initial contact with a company you’re interested in, or a group you would love to talk with might seem hard, but it’s actually the easiest part of contacting a person. You’ve introduced yourself and given your pitch, but now is not the time to sit idly by. Follow up! Email them and call them and make them see why it is beneficial to them to work with you. You may get shot down, but it’s better to try then to wonder what could have been.
7.  Ask For Help: If you have a problem and need help, just ask for it! The most successful people have failed in their lifetimes and had to ask for help. Don’t let your pride get in your way.
8. Get Some Sleep: The Human brain needs sleep. No one really knows why the body snoozes for a portion of each day, but science shows that without sleep, illness follows. Achieving a good sleep schedule will do wonders for you during the day.
9. Work/Life Balance: There comes a time when a little bit of relaxation is necessary to your success. Just make sure that you aren’t going out drinking every night. That won’t leave you with a fresh mind in the morning.
10. Look to Other People’s Needs: Be a problem solver for others and you will become wildly successful. Henry Ford needed to solve a supply and demand problem for his cars so he invented the assembly line making him wildly successful and a household name for the past 100 years.

Just remember this quote attributed to Karen Lamb, “A year ago you may wish you had started today”, and get out there and do something today to  make yourself successful!

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