Cover Letters Galore

While I apologize for the hiatus, I do not apologize for what has been keeping me so busy! I have been working full time on multiple projects, starring in a show, and working full AND part-time, taking care of a sick family member, and plan a move, all while trying to maintain my social life. It is exhausting but I love the rush. But enough about my complaining, I have a personal blog for that.

This post contains four GREAT tips in writing cover letters. Since I am planning a move, I must start looking for jobs and internships to pursue my career. I figured because I was in the middle of writing my cover letters, I'd help my readers with their's. 

I found this article here. It is by Jessica Holbrook Hernandez, an expert resume writer, career and personal branding strategist, author, speaker and President/CEO of Great Resumes Fast. 

Tip #1: Address a Specific Person
Your cover letter should always be as personal as possible, and this is made easier by addressing the person who is in the position to hire you.  If that person’s name wasn’t listed in the job posting, take time to contact human resources to find out who it is.  You’ll be happy you did!
(side note: never start a cover letter with To Whom This May Concern. SO unprofessional.)

Tip #2: Lead With an Interesting Fact or Solve a Problem
Your introduction is undoubtedly the most important portion of the cover letter.  It dictates whether the manager will be interested in reading the rest of your document.  A great way to introduce yourself in your letter is to market yourself with a statement that addresses a problem that you are ready to solve.  You could also share an interesting fact about yourself to entice the manager to read on.

Tip #3: Show That You and Your Industry Are a Perfect Match
As you move through your cover letter, it’s important to show that you know your industry.  For instance, if you are in the biotechnology field, consider adding specific keywords like laboratory data, protocols, or even cGMP studies if they fit.

Doing this, along with giving examples of how you can help further the industry as a whole with your wealth of experience and knowledge, is crucial.  But ultimately, your job is to show that you understand what the company is looking for in a candidate—and that you are the person it needs to get the job done.

Tip #4: Mention Unique Strengths or Awards
Before you close out your cover letter, it’s important to reiterate your strengths and emphasize that you’re the absolute perfect person for the job.  You could add information about any specialties you have in your industry or mention recognition [you have] received.

(side note: if you are applying online, you definitely want to make sure your cover letter highlights your skills with keywords such as "team player," "experience in [what they're looking for]," "professional appearence." When an online application gets sent in, the resume and cover letter is then scanned for key concepts - education, contact info, skills & experience.)

Aside from these tips, here's a bit of my own advice.

• Keep it short and sweet. While you want to catch an employer's attention, you also want to keep it and tie the deal. Employers strongly dislike sifting through page after page of resumes and cover letters, more often than not, they have a pile of others' to go through. I have heard of employer's tossing resumes into the trash for being "too long." You want to go in the "Contact" pile, not the garbage pile.
• Research the company and the audience. Look at their website, their Facebook posts and the tone, Look at LinkedIn, analyze what type of articles they share. When you write your cover letter, discuss what you find attractive about the employer and what you feel its strengths are. 
• Mention any connections. A few years ago, I applied for an internship at a start-up company where I would be doing networking with companies around the Pittsburgh area. I had previously interned at another company where I was in charge of throwing networking events. During my interview at the start-up, I mentioned the previous company I had worked for, and I saw the HR manager get a huge smile. He then said, he was planning on getting a hold of the company to gain some networking tips. How perfect was it that I was an inside source? I was offered the internship a few days later.
• Follow-up. Let them know you will be contacting them in the future. Depending on the hiring process, two weeks is a good time to follow-up. It is a proactive approach that shows initiative. 

Do you have any tips you have found to be successful? Any questions or comments? Please share!

SEO in Job Recruiting

I recently wrote this piece for an internship position I am interviewing for. I had to write it semi-quickly, and needless to say, I am quite proud of it. It's all about using Search Engine Optimization for job recruiting. Although I am training myself in SEO, this came as a beneficial report even to me. I hope you enjoy it. Feel free to leave any comments or questions for me!

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a common term that seems to be surfacing more and more as of late. So what is it exactly? SEO is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's natural search results (what appears under Google’s recommended results, not the results that are paid for on the side). The more frequently your website appears on search engine sites (like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.) the more visitors it will receive from the search engine's users.  SEO considers how search engines work, what people search for, the actual search terms or keywords typed into search engines and which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience. Most companies and organizations use SEO for their blogs however, it can be beneficial to use it for job descriptions and advertising. The primary goal in job recruiting is to drive increased traffic to your career site and reduce your dependency on expensive paid job boards.

There is a specific recruiting SEO Optimization Cycle that starts with reviewing hiring needs, your keyword search, the site creation and submission, the creation of talent landing pages, job optimization distribution, candidate capture and delivery, and, finally, traffic and ranking reporting, before starting back at square one.

 Review of Hiring Needs

A true optimization process needs to start by defining what your hiring needs are for the next 12 months, not just what jobs are open today. For example, if you are accepting Spring 2013 Internship applicants and it is October, it is best to have the application available as soon as possible. This way is most beneficial in receiving a greater volume of applicants over a longer period of time.

 Keyword Research

The most common way to use SEO is by publishing a number of different articles on your website that can include any number of keywords that are relevant to the position you seeking to hire, and this will be identified by the search engine when they carry out a scan of your site, which will often lead to a higher ranking among the results for people Googling or browsing Bing for one of those terms, specifically. Your primary goal is to not only have the occurrence of the keywords more frequent, but to have more applicants clicking on your page and applying for the position. 

 Site Creation and Submission

There are many aspects to creating a comprehensive SEO career micro site: logo, colors, navigation, keywords, daily sitemap creation, back linking (from your career site and other strategic sites online to increase your popularity). Your content should include meta descriptions, short phrases that describe your content. Most meta descriptions contain 1-2 sentences, are less than 160 characters total, use action words, use keywords about the content- yet don’t over-use keywords, as you still want the sentences to make sense to your candidates. 

Even better SEO for your site creation, you can use keywords that help with searches, and those searches can help bring traffic to your blog. Be careful, though – you might get dinged in the search engines if you try to use a keyword not in your content. This would be similar to keyword stuffing, which you also want to avoid.

If you are using your own photos to promote your business, you might use a watermark (copywright) to prevent people from using your images without permission.

Did you know sites like Pinterest use the alt tag in photo descriptions for pins? Use these tags wisely and in such a way that helps you better describe what you have written and also how your photo relates to your content. You can also use Twitter to post links using hash tags with your keywords.  For example, the keywords I am looking for right now are “recruiting” and “social media,” a tweet from your company may read: “Not sure how to survive in the #socialmedia #recruiting era? Here is the perfect guide: http://on.mash.to/OJyFyR (via @mashable).”

 Creating Talent Landing Pages

Candidates often do not type your company’s name into Google or Bing when looking for careers. They typically search for a job based on location and job function or title, i.e. “Erie Public Relations Practitioner,” “Los Angeles RN.” 

If you aren’t showing up on job searches like these, stop hiding and get found online. Your candidate search has to require landing pages, meaning, when they type their specific search into Google, Google will find the pages that match that search. By having “Talent Landing Pages,” your company will be provided with a recruiting platform that helps you deploy an interactive recruiting strategy that beats job boards like Monster or FindHire. Your company is branded with your custom URL, current logos and style, and it has the ability to capture passive job seekers via e-mail capture or RSS feed.

 Job Optimization and Distribution 

Optimizing your jobs means including your branding and navigation into every job, along with inserting the top searched key words. You’ll also want to automatically distribute your jobs to classified sites, and powering your email and RSS feeds to your internal and external community.

 Candidate Capture and Delivery 

Redirecting candidates into your Applicant Tracking System, or ATS, is one of the most important steps. Job postings inside your ATS are invisible to search engines and can’t be found by the candidates you want to reach. Not only do you want to land candidates directly to your “Apply Here” page for the specific job, but you want to know where they were referred from online (essentially to see where you are getting the most hits from). Also have easy job agent tools to capture passive candidates that aren’t ready to apply just yet, so that they can return in the future. These tools would be asking for the e-mail address so that they can receive more information of other open positions in the future, or give them the opportunity to save their resume on the site, so when they are ready, it’s already saved in your online database.

 Page Ranking 

Now that you have your jobs “indexed” on Google, your next and most important step is to make sure you get ranked in order to win traffic, and make your SEO strategy a success. Where do you need to be ranked to win? Only 75 percent of candidates will not go past page two in Google search results, and the first five search results yields 82% of all the clicks. Most candidates won’t even scroll to the bottom of the results. 

It is crucial that you measure the elements of your online strategy, but do know what sources are referring the best quality candidates to your career site, and where you rank. SEO providers should be able to provide you with monthly or weekly reports of where your keywords are ranked on their search engines, along with exact visitor and applicant tracking.

Lessons for Gen Y From the Senior Workforce

Lessons For Gen Y From The Senior Workforce (via A Hire Calling)

Gen Y job seekers have recently received a large amount of flack from the older generations, being labeled as the generation that has postponed growing up, living at home, and even lacking driver’s licenses. Studies even show that younger Americans have seen a 68 percent drop in their net worth,…

What Each Presidential Candidate Means For Your Job Search

What Each Presidential Candidate Means For Your Job Search (via A Hire Calling)

The following is a guest post by Mike Cushing. Tonight is the second presidential debate. With unemployment hovering just below 8 percent and the economy still recovering, it is no surprise this election has essentially come down to jobs and job hopes. Recent job numbers may suggest things are improving…

Still looking for top talent? Let RemarkableHire help!

Resumes and cover letters provide some insight into a potential job candidate’s skills and experience, but these documents are, in their very nature, biased. Any job seeker is going to claim they’re highly qualified--and that means resumes don’t always offer a clear picture of a candidate’s abilities. For employers, this often leads to poor hiring matches and greater turnover rates.

That’s why a new website, RemarkableHire, is offering a way for recruiters to gain a comprehensive view of their candidates. The site assesses a candidate’s performance on online communities to gather social evidence of their talent. Here’s how it works: When tech talent contribute to online communities like StackOverflow, GitHub, and Dribbble, there are numerous ways their peers can implicitly endorse their work, in the form of likes, follows, or votes of approval. RemarkableHire scans this data and gathers it to provide an unbiased, collective view of the capabilities of these professionals.

By putting a social component into the hiring process, recruiters can gain a comprehensive view of a person’s skills and abilities, as evidenced by their interactions with their peers. Now, employers can locate candidates who may not actively be looking for work, but are the top contenders in their tech communities and may be open to new opportunities.

Check out how RemarkableHire can enhance your current recruiting strategies by clicking here!

Let FindHire find the right Recruit for you

Hiring for small businesses can seem like a huge undertaking, especially if you play more than one part in your company. But it does not have to be. With the Web-based ATS platform, FindHire, recruiting and hiring has never been easier.

With FindHire, you don't have to waste any more money on bulky tracking systems, recruitment agency fees, or pricey recruitment schemes. There are affordable and high-quality systems available that will replace these old strategies. FindHire helps you post jobs and search, screen, and interview candidates all in one user-friendly platform. Browse candidate profiles, see their application history, salary requirements and comparisons to state and national levels, as well as fine-tuned analytics on your job postings. It's all there.

The best thing about FindHire is that it's great for those of us that are on-the-go (and, really, who isn't these days?)  You don't have to be in the office to access this software. It's all Web-based, plus there's an iPad app available to make things even more mobile-friendly.

Its time-saving hiring process is why FindHire is used by companies smaller and larger, such as Skype, Staples, and Mcgraw-Hill Education. So put on your recruitment cap and let FindHire help you save money and become more productive and smart in your hiring process.

Check out how FindHire can help boost your businesses hiring process and start hiring with great candidates with ease here!

Tired of Social Media (via http://meltingposts.com)

Running a small business can be tough. The main challenge is trying to find time to get everything done. If you have a small team you can delegate tasks but as a manager most of the main responsibilities lie on your shoulders.

You spend you time serving customers, taking orders, arranging delivery, managing finances and the list goes on. So wasting time is the last thing you want to do. But when it comes to social media this is exactly what a lot of small businesses do – waste time. Eventually becoming tired of it all and unable to make any progress.

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Most typical small businesses have presence on social media. But look at their Facebook page and you realize that it’s deserted. Apart from a few pictures, posts and an old event, the only thing this page has going for it is a handful of customers and friends who have joined the page on the night of the grand opening. It’s the same story on Twitter. Yes you have a few posts but they are just that, few and far apart. I bet your customers have some questions and you have cool stuff happening all the time and as almost all of your customers use Facebook and Twitter why not leverage them?

It all starts with providing a good reason for why your customers should connect with your brand on social networks, not once but again and again. Knowing your customer preferences is key to providing valuable content, but it doesn’t stop there. Constant monitoring should be carried out to establish how customers needs are changing and what they are expecting from this channel now as opposed to last month. Effective brand engagement is directly linked to the value customers take away from the branded social experience and how closely their expectations are met.

Its quite fascinating that marketing on social media has so many promises. If done right it can be extremely effective. It also very efficient and allows for fast growth rate. Your customers use these sites on daily basis and they are constantly discussing product experiences and researching purchase decisions. But before you drop everything and rush to the nearest computer you need to know that your business’s social media engagement requires time an nourishment in early stages.

Strategy is key to becoming successful on social medial. It’s all about networking and ongoing conversations with your customers. It’s probably the easiest place to find new leads, tell them about your brand and turn them into valuable customers. You can’t just promote your business and products all the time, in fact it is the biggest reason why customers un-follow brands online – because they talk about their products too much. There is nothing wrong with promoting your business, heck that what you are here for. But it’s not what you do, but the way you do it. Strategy is key.

So how do make sure you get the most out of social media?

• Know where you need to be.

Location is very important in business, so being on the right social media channels is the first step. For this you need to look at what sort of business you have. You probably already know what market segment your customers are in. This helps figure out what social networks most of your customers use. You need to be where they are and where they are talking to each other.

Remember it’s also important to engage on channels you are comfortable with. If the channel doesn’t feel like a good fit, if its not something you can commit to sticking with over a period of time, if it doesn’t suit you for engaging on regular basis, then think again before you start, create a noise, then abandon the channel, which would be worse than not starting in the first place.

• Write for your customers not yourself.

In order to have a meaningful dialog with customers you need to know what they are talking about. Think about questions you hear every day from your customers. Discussion board are old but they are still useful. You need to look at what people are talking about on discussion boards. A good place to start is Yahoo. Look through your home page on Twitter or Facebook, answer some questions, ask for feedback, say something inspiring.  You need to have great stories to tell to your customer. If you don’t have great in house story telling skills or a social media whiz kid on staff, you can still attract ideal customers online.

Small businesses can develop ways to get great things they do in the real world and turn them into valuable content for their website. An example of this can be how you’re helping customers to solve problems and achieve goals. You can focus on sharing unique how-to information on social media website popular with your customers. You need to give your company a personality on social media. Ask customers questions and feedback, they are more than happy to share, you just need to be asking the right questions.Their feedback can give you ideas for promotions, offerings or new blog posts.

• Provide an incentive

People love deals and they love shearing them with friends and family. Recent surveys show that offers are one of the top reasons why people follow brands on social network sites. By giving them something exclusive you can make them feel special, don’t forget to encourage them to share this offer with friends on Facebook or Twitter. It’s a great way to build your brand and increase your following fast.

• Have something good to say.

You know it, content is king and social media is an ongoing conversation so if you don’t have anything good to say you will never stand out. You have to add a variety to you posts, make them more dynamic. By this I mean add links, pictures, videos, articles, run contests and share good content.

People love good heartwarming quotes, they also like humor, but remember to keep a good balance. Share stories of your customers and get involved. Your followers are your online community, make their experience fun and worthwhile for them. The benefit of doing all this is that it creates conversation and positive attitude about your brand, what more can you ask for?

• Keep Going

1. If Your Business Does Not Have A Social Media Presence Then Your Business Is Invisible
2. Only Social Businesses Succeed In Social Media
3. Using Social Media to Find Business Contacts

Find original post here.