Get Hired Now! summary

So your résumé is sorted. Great. But there’s something else you need to do before you’re ready to search for jobs: check out your online reputation.

A survey in 2018 by the online employment website CareerBuilder found that 70 percent of employers research candidates for jobs using social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Not only that, 57 percent of them decided not to hire an applicant because of the content they found.

Although it may seem otherwise, finding a job has never been easier. Long gone are the days of searching through classified ads in the newspaper, sending your résumé and cover letter through the mail, and waiting for weeks for a phone call or letter in response.

These days, job search tools and professional networking sites are what you need. But they aren’t all equal – only a handful of sites give you everything you need.

Strike while the iron’s hot – you know the adage. Well, when it comes to applying for jobs, it’s spot-on.

Take one recruiter’s experience. A vacancy arrived on a Monday morning, and the recruiter immediately approached two suitable candidates. The first said she was interested the same day, and the recruiter sent her résumé immediately to the employer. A phone screening took place that evening, she was interviewed on Wednesday, and references were taken up on Thursday. In contrast, the second candidate took three days to respond, but the recruiter sent his résumé in anyway. The hiring manager simply said they were already “too far down the road” to consider anyone else.

Job interviews generally last from 30 to 60 minutes. And how long do you have to make an impression? Just 20 seconds. Yes, that’s right: 20. Your clothes and behavior in those first 20 seconds play a huge role in whether you’ll get hired.

So what should you wear? Let’s start with what you shouldn’t: Don’t wear perfume or cologne. What smells good to you might not to your interviewer. And you never know – that scent you’re so fond of might just be a smell that triggers memories of the interviewer’s bad breakup!

The most commonly asked opening interview request is Tell me about yourself. This isn’t an opportunity for you to talk through your résumé, though. Your interviewer has read it. So counter this with a “magical first sentence.” Use the interviewer’s name, express interest, and pivot the conversation by talking about the company or the interviewer.

For example, you could say something like, “John, I’m really excited to be here because for the last ten years I’ve been working on marketing strategies, and what you do here is far better than anything I’ve seen before. How did you start to . . . .” You get the idea.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median US salary in 2020 was $56,000. Most people stay in a job for four years. So if you negotiated for just 5 percent more than the median, that would mean an extra $2,800 each year – an extra $11,200 in your pocket over four years, even without taking into account any annual raises.

Yet when ZipRecruiter surveyed over 50,000 job seekers in 2019, it found that 64 percent of responders accepted their first job offer without ever negotiating.