Everyone has that one dream job they yearn to work with all their being. Some might know it now. For others, this manifests later.
Either way, the discourse on how to land your dream job rages one. There’s a whole industry that’s dedicated to helping people achieve their career goals.
However, you should know you can do it all by yourself. I’ll give you a bare bones strategy to get this done.
Table of Contents
Prepare Yourself
Before you even open the job site, take a moment to consider what lies ahead of you.
Physical and mental preparation protract your endurance, especially when you’re in a competitive field and can potentially face long months without employment.
Create a customized resume and cover letter
A rookie mistake you should avoid at all cost is sending out a generic resume and cover letter. A recruiter can tell when you’ve just sent the same application to them as well as everyone else.
The better strategy would be to begin with a master resume, which brims with all your skills and achievements, as well as a cover letter template. However, as you target a specific position, edit down your resume to highlight the skills and previous experience that makes sense. Same with the cover letter. Write it in a language that appeals to the company.
Prepare To Network
Jobs don’t grow on trees and don’t readily fall in your lap as soon as you figure out what you want in your professional life. The best leads come through the grapevine and it’s on you to determine how far that grape vine will reach.
Networking is the number one skill you should cultivate.
Have Realistic Expectations
Dreams are fragile things. Pursuing them leaves us vulnerable in ways we can’t imagine and life’s not exactly kind to big dreams.
If there’s any lesson you should learn quickly, it’s to curb your enthusiasm and temper expectations as much as possible. You might not get your dream job. You might actually find that your dream job is not all roses every single moment. You might even find out that this line of work is just not for you. These are the risks you ought to know you’re taking on.
After all, it’s a job. Ups and downs come with the terrific. Hard work lies ahead – both to land the job and keep it!
Start Early
Approaching your work life on autopilot leads to significant disappointment further in life when you realize you’ve not made much progress or developed any skills. Instead, you’re in a dead-end job and don’t have quite the resume to migrate to a better industry or position, when you do realize what you want to do with your life.
It’s best that you’re actively thinking about your career choice and pursue dream employment even when you don’t consider yourself worthy. People regularly change their careers. The fantasy life with a 40-year tenure at a single company has no place in today’s world.
What Tools To Use?
Every successful job hunt begins with a solid foundation. The choice of tools as you embark on a journey through the job market affects your outcome before you even click send on your first job application. Preparation remains the best strategy towards earning a spot in your dream company.
So where does one begin?
Create a list of jobs that meet your criteria
Having a dream is good. That’s a general direction. Knowing exactly what that dream is and what you want out of a job at this stage in your career is better. You also have to know your realistic changes of landing a lofty position. The lower you are in the industry food chain the more climbing you have to do and the path of progression is not necessarily linear.
Formalize your skill set and job criteria by writing them down in a list, and use that list to narrow down the job postings that align with your goal. What are your strengths? What are the job perks? What are the skills you wish to develop? All this goes into your list.
Use RSS Feed Reader
We’re done with the old-fashioned and move onto 2021 solutions. Digitalization and automation are your friends, so don’t shy away from productivity tools. RSS readers have proven their use and flexibility time and time again. With RSS feed readers, it’s a set-it-and-forget-it arrangement. They are easy to use and you can subscribe to any job-related feeds that update automatically. If you’re using Inoreader, you can do this through the browser extension, which detects available RSS feeds while you’re on the page.
Another strength of RSS readers is that you can do a lot of prep work on companies, what they’re up to and get a lot of advice on how to approach job applications. Inoreader has one of the best discovery tools on the market, which makes it reliable and suitable for a number of other tasks such as data gathering and media monitoring.
Check On Companies’ Websites
Those particularly determined to work in *this one company* (though ideally you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket) ought to turn into a bit of a stalker. Use your RSS reader (see, it’s very useful) to monitor official social media counts, blogs and newsletters. With Inoreader, you can set up specific alerts for when posts and updates with the keywords of ‘job opening,’ ‘hiring’ and ‘position’ appear in your feed.
Take it one step further and add the personal accounts of managers, recruiters and other notable employees to remain in the loop.
Be active on LinkedIn and apply From There
No news here. LinkedIn works as long as you know how to play the social media network to your advantage. Do your due diligence on what makes a worker profile attractive to a recruiter. Update your credentials and skills. Post a fresh, professional photo. Of course, use the site. Although you might appear in job searches, you can’t rely on chance.
Join industry-related groups and pay attention to any job offers. Remember when we said that you have to be prepared to network a lot? LinkedIn is where you should sink as much time and effort as possible.
