Career Advisory postgraduate studies – after the sixth weekend
What are your strengths from the employer’s point of view? Why should a decision-maker devote 15 minutes of their time to you even though their company is not currently conducting a recruitment process? Will they see what makes you unique after taking a look at your CV? Why should they choose you out of so many candidates? These are the client challenges that every career consultant faces on a daily basis. The sixth meeting of the Career Advisory postgraduate studies was about preparing an effective CV for humans and a LinkedIn profile for job searching.
Preparing an effective CV for humans
The first day of the sixth meeting was led by Anna Zadrożna who focused on creating an effective CV that will reach decision-makers, i.e. potential bosses, and thus generate job interviews. Anna discussed the process of creating a CV using specific examples, and she distinguished the following steps: preparing a catalog of questions to collect information for the CV, creating a CV draft, then a CV draft with the client’s answers, as well as the components of the CV session, formatting and proofreading.
During the meeting, she also drew attention to various forms of professional summary, such as:
- Key areas with examples
- Professional bio
- Unique storyline
- Bio with examples
- Horoscope
- Non-standard
We also performed the “recruiter’s test“, which proved the importance of a well-written professional summary in the process of job-hunting.
On this day, we had a guest speaker – a Managing Director from a construction industry, who shared with students his experiences of working with a career advisor and the challenges he had to overcome during the job search process.
LinkedIn for job searching
The second day of the sixth meeting was hosted by Anna Mady who focused on LinkedIn as a job search tool. As the statistics show, this platform is used by at least 94% of recruiters. This means that every candidate looking for a job should have a profile optimized for the LinkedIn algorithm in order to be more visible to their target group.
Anna presented the perspective of a person who searches for candidates on LinkedIn by entering “keywords” in the platform’s search engine. The algorithm first displays people who have the skills the recruiter is looking for in their profile; that’s why it’s worth remembering the target group when creating a profile:
- other users – people (recruiter, decision-maker, hiring manager)
- LinkedIn algorithm (keywords!).
Other actions that can help the users optimize their profiles include:
- analyzing job ads in terms of keywords and required skills
- defining job search preferences in profile settings (in two places!)
- filling out application settings for job ads.
Therefore, the key to success is a good, optimized LinkedIn profile. Anna also discussed the types of users and characterized in detail selected aspects of the LinkedIn algorithm.
Reflections after the sixth meeting
“I really liked the practical aspect of the classes: we did a lot of exercises that allowed me to immediately use the online brand assessment tool.”
“Meeting the guest speaker was extremely inspiring for me: it was very interesting to learn what surprised him in the job search process, its duration, what tools and methodology he used, and the fact that his efforts were reflected in reality.”
“After today’s meeting, I’m leaving with a handful of information regarding LinkedIn and profile building, and I realized that I need to take another look at my profile in order to improve it.”
“I’m beginning to convince myself to be active on LinkedIn: to take care of my network, profile and how others see me. Whether I like it or not, the world is heading in this direction and I have to take it into account.”
“I realized that it was important to test the tools on myself first.”
“I found that educating the client is very important; what I am familiar with (like ATS systems) may be new to the client.”
“I was particularly impressed by the exercises, especially by “googling” myself and by mutually assessing our own presence on the Internet. This allowed me to look at myself “thrilled” and from a different point of view. I discovered some things about myself that I didn’t expect to find on the Internet.”
PS. Read more about our other sessions:
PPS. Are you interested in this field and don’t want to wait for the next edition? Follow information about our courses – including in-house – on this website: https://careerangels.eu/become-a-career-consultant/
