Career Advisory postgraduate studies – after the sixth weekend
What are your strengths from the employer’s point of view? Why should they choose you from among all other candidates?
Will they see – at first sight – what makes you unique when they look at your CV? Why should the decision maker give you 15 minutes, although their company isn’t recruiting right now? These are challenges of clients that a career consultant has to deal with every day. The sixth weekend of the Career Advisory postgraduate studies was devoted to preparing an effective CV and a LinkedIn profile from a job search perspective.
Preparation of an effective CV for humans
The first day of the sixth weekend was led by Anna Zadrożna who focused on the topic of how to make an effective CV to reach decision makers (potential bosses) and generate interviews.
Anna covered the process of preparing a CV using concrete examples and demonstrating the different stages of the process: preparing a catalog of questions to collect data for the CV, making a draft version of the CV, then a draft including the answers of the client, the elements of a CV session as well as formatting and proofreading.
During the meeting, Anna also showed the different forms of professional summaries, e.g.:
- Key areas with evidence
- Professional bio
- Unique storyline
- Bio with evidence
- Horoscope
- Non-standard
We also did a so-called “recruiter test” which showed how important a well-written “profile summary” is for those looking for a job.
LinkedIn while looking for a job
The second day of the sixth meeting was led by Sandra Bichl, who shared her knowledge around LinkedIn as a job search tool. The statistics say, there are above 15 million job ads on LinkedIn and this platform is used by min. 87% of recruiters. This means that each candidate should have an optimized profile for the LinkedIn algorithm, to be more visible for the target group.
Sandra showed the students a perspective of a person who searches for candidates on LinkedIn by typing “keywords” in the platform’s search engine. The algorithm shows firstly people with wanted skills, so when creating a profile, it is worth to remember about target group:
- Other users = people
(recruiter, decision-maker, hiring manager) - LinkedIn algorithm (keywords!)
These things can also help users optimize their profile:
- Analysing the job ads in the light of keywords and required skills
- Filling out the job search settings (in two places!)
- Setting right job ad alerts
To sum up, the key to success is a good, optimized LinkedIn profile. Sandra covered also user personas and explained some aspects of the LinkedIn algorithm.
On that day, our guest was a Head of UX, a former client of Career Angels, who shared with students her perspective of using a Career Consultant during a very hard time of her life. She shared the difference between what she expected and what she actually got.
Reflections after the sixth meeting
“I need to work on my own CV”.
“A lot of my beliefs about a CV were wrong”.
“I didn’t know that preparing a CV is such a complicated process”.
“During this weekend, I’ve learned how important it is to have a proper strategy when crafting a professional summary during the CV writing process: when writing it, you need to remember the final decision maker – that makes it much more effective, catches the eye and encourages to read the rest of the CV”.
“Thanks to preparing a good CV, the client also increases their self-confidence”.“I didn’t realize that LinkedIn is such an important platform in job search processes; the presented statistics surprised me.”
“I realized how important it is to follow trends and the changes the LinkedIn algorithm, to effectively advise clients on the profile optimization who are active on the job market”.
“Despite the fact that I recruit on a daily basis, I didn’t think of filling out the LinkedIn profile taken that into consideration: using the right keywords and defining profile settings”.
We will keep you informed about our students as well as the progress of our studies.
The enrollment for the 2022/2023 academic year has opened:
- study in Polish – details of the program
- study in English – details of the program
PS. read more about the other meetings:
Are you interested in this field and you don’t want to wait for the next edition? Follow information about our courses – also in-house – on this page:
https://careerangels.eu/become-a-career-consultant/
