5 strategies for landing dream job
1. Know What You Want
If you don’t have a goal in mind, it’ll be awfully difficult to set your path to get there. Before you start combing job listings or working on your resume, it’s important to know what your goal is here. This is especially true if your dream job is a bit of a stretch, professionally. Winging it won’t get you ahead here.
If you’re having trouble deciding what that dream job can be, there are fun tools like this interactive dream job quiz that can help you speed up the thought process by taking your interests and offering real-world odds of getting a related job. (Sadly, it turns out my odds of becoming a TV-watching spy aren’t super high.)
If you’re not sure about how to juggle what you want to do versus what you’re qualified to do, career coach Laura Berman Fortgang has some great advice about how to cut through the noise and figure out what you want to get from your career:
2. Know Your Value
Experience is a great attribute to have in your job hunt, but it’s not the only one. You also need to look at the quality of that experience: the skills and knowledge you have accumulated over time. Whether you’ve been working for 1 year or 15 years, you have steadily built your skills and your professional value. When you’re crafting your resume, think about using a format that showcases your skills, instead of using the traditional chronological format where you list your jobs, working backwards.
3. Job Requirements as Guidelines
If you think of the job description requirements as more of a starting point than an ironclad list of requirements, it can help remove some of that mental block to applying to a job that may be a reach. While some things may be nonnegotiable (such as particular skills), other things may be more flexible if you have equivalent skills or experience. For example, if a job description calls for a Bachelor’s degree but you have an Associate’s and a number of skills related to the job, don’t let that scare you off. Just make sure you emphasize the qualities and skills that you do have to support the job description.
4. Set Your Story
Everyone loves a good story — and hiring managers like a story that shows how great a person would be for this particular job. Your resume is the snapshot of your skills and professional experience, but your work doesn’t end there. You need to help set the narrative. Are you the savvy underdog looking to trade up your skills for experience? Are you a bold career-changer looking to translate your skills and experience to a new industry? Your resume doesn’t tell a reader everything about you — just the highlights. This is why a cover letter can be essential, even in these days of automated submissions. Not only is it a chance to add more key words (more on that in a bit), but it lets you add some color and context about who you are, and summarize why you’re such a great fit for this position.
If you don’t have tons of experience, it’s also a way to start the conversation about how your skills bridge a potential experience gap. Give the reader a reason to keep reading, instead of flipping ahead to the next resume. Work on your elevator pitch, which is a quick, succinct headline that answers three questions: who you are, what you do, and what you’re looking for. That’s the line you can hit in your cover letter, in a summary statement/ objective on your resume, and again in the interview. This is your chance to set up your brand.
5. Outsmart the Resume Robots
There’s a good chance that the first reader of your resume/application package isn’t even human. No offense to the robots out there, but this is not ideal if you’re trying to punch above your weight class, professionally. The smartest thing you can do here is know exactly what the company is looking for — and you have the job description right in front of you to help you do that. Make sure your resume and cover letter are hitting the key words that jump out of the job description — especially the ones related to experience, education, and skills. You want to make sure that your high-priority keywords match the way they’re presented in the job description.