Once you are ready to return to work or even half way there, start putting yourself out there via Social Media, especially LinkedIn. In our blogpost from yesterday, we speak on how to create a fantastic LinkedIn profile to land your dream job. Read it here. But once you have created that profile and presence, and are looking for jobs, know that LinkedIn provides a set of tools that can be put to great use to help you in your quest.
Some of those are -
1# Open to recruiters
Go to the ‘Career interests’ section on your dashboard and update your status as ‘Actively Looking’. Click the ‘Let recruiters know you’re open’ button ON. There are some other options to further refine what you are looking for.
Update this section and viola! You greatly increase your chances of turning up in shortlists
2# Give your contact details
At this juncture where you are looking for jobs, please don’t be shy with your contact details. Please update your email ID as part of your profile so recruiters and others can get in touch with you. It is important to put yourself out there and leave all channels of communication open
3# Network
By this time you should have a list of the companies and roles you want to work in. Do some research and get to know who the decision makers for these roles are, and make every effort to reach out to them.
In order to do that, make use of any common connections you have, and when you do reach out, do mention those connections as a starting point to let the person you are reaching out to soften a bit towards your cold reach-out.
Finally, don’t be clinical in your actual message i.e. don’t just attach your resume or your cover letter and expect those to do all the talking. It is perfectly fine to attach a resume, but if you want that person to look through it, you have to first establish a connection.
“It could be something personal, something interesting about you. For someone who is looking to return after a break, it could be as simple as putting that factoid about themselves, upfront, proudly.”
4# Ask for a referral
Job postings on LinkedIn provide the facility for you to reach-out for a referral. Around 50% of recruiters say referrals are the primary source of quality hires and if you receive a referral you're 4x more likely to hear back from a recruiter
5# Create Job Alerts
LinkedIn allows you to create job alerts, where you enter your criteria and it will send you an alert every time a job listing is done that matches it. What better way can there be to make technology work for you!
All these efforts will most likely spill over on other social media as well. Update your Facebook profile, and you will start getting relevant job ads from companies using Facebook as a hiring source. The other advantage to putting in some effort into your Facebook profile is that recruiters and hiring managers often go and check the profiles of the people they are interviewing, to get a sense of their persona. So make sure you put something that reflects you in a positive light.
We hope this article will aid you in your hunt for jobs. Also don’t forget to sign-up for platforms such as FlexiBees that can help you get back to work with meaningful, relevant and flexible work opportunities.
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We at FlexiBees have placed such talented career returners like you across a variety of functions & skill-sets like Marketing, Digital Marketing, Public Relations, Investment Banking, Inside Sales, Business Development, Technology, Content Writing, Graphic Design, etc. We are committed to creating meaningful options for you. Go to https://jobseeker.flexibees.com/ and register with us, so we can reach out to you when we get any requirements that match your skills.
