How Do I Optimize My Chances Of Getting In The Door?
This is a sort of follow-up to my previous article asking for help in how to land a job as a fresh college graduate. The consensus was that I needed to either develop a very specific set of skills or try to get in with a smaller company as a generalist and work my way up. At this point in time I'm realizing that I can't really afford to spend the next several months not really making money while I try and train myself into a more focused job candidate, so I'm looking to take the second path of getting in with a small company and developing my skills and abilities through job training and hands-on experience.
My question for you, the JoeUser community, is what sorts of strategies do you employ when job hunting? What do those of you in hiring positions look for in applicants that would make them stand-out as worth interviewing? I know a lot of you are in computer related fields and might know people who are recently entering the IT workforce from college. What helped them get that first job? What helped you get your first job? If you have friends who are job hunting right now, what sorts of search strategies are they employing?
Currently I'm doing a near daily search of sites like CareerBuilder.com and Monster.com in addition to Penn State's various job systems, sending off anywhere between 1 and 10 or so applications a day. I'm applying for everything from general help desk/tech support (I've realized that setting that job as "below me" was flat-out stupid at this point in my career and given the current economy) to more specialized jobs in areas I'd like to go into (Network Security for example). I'm looking for jobs located anywhere from my town (State College) to California, Texas, New England, Florida and everything in between. Relocation is not an issue for me at all.
As I said in response to the featured article on interview skills, I'm pretty good once I get to the interview stage, it's just a matter of getting there that I need to figure out. I need to find a way to optimize my search and increase my chances of getting noticed.