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Health & Fitness

The Job Hunter's Toolbox: Starting your Job Hunt, by Rob Sauls

Rob Sauls is a native of Barrow county and lives in Jackson County. He enjoys helping adults in transition find their perfect job/career.

The Job Hunter’s Toolbox: Starting your Job Hunt

 

Rob Sauls, AKA the Job Hunter answers your job hunting questions.

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Question: “Rob, How/where do I start a Job Hunt?”

Rob’s answer: Hunting for jobs is different from job hunting a few years ago. Some of you may remember the “good ole days” when there were more jobs than job hunters! Jobs- real jobs with benefits and perks- were everywhere. Job benefits and perks may have included: full health care (paid by the company), great retirement plans, and stock options, company cars and all the latest gizmos you wanted and sometimes needed to get the job done. Some places even offered free massages! Have you noticed times have changed? The “good ole days” are ancient history and the being able to walk out the door and down the street to a new better paying job is a joke. The monster is dead, hot is now cold, and the fox has lost its tail!

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Go even a couple of decades back and you could cruise the classifieds in the newspaper. I have a friend who answered a blind ad in the paper and is still with the company 25 years later. In today’s job market, that is almost unheard of!

The internet and the newspapers are still valuable aids in your job hunt, but don’t sit back and wait for the contacts to start rolling in. On Google, type n the word jobs and you will get back close to a billion opens in about 0.035 seconds. Buy a newspaper and the help want ads are few and with very specific qualifications (usually this means that the employer already has someone in mind, but policy dictates the jobs must be posted).

The first step to start your job hunt is to create your Job Hunter’s action plan. You need to have, at least, some ideas about what you want to do. You will also need a resume and to be prepared to write a cover letter for each of the jobs you apply for.

The Job Hunter’s Plan:

Write a resume or be prepared to complete job applications. There are job banks, job search engines that search the internet for listings and combined jobs from multiple sites, niche job sites that focus on a specific career field or geographic area, networking sites where you can connect with hiring managers and where recruiters can find you, and ways, like writing a blog, to create an online presence that helps build your career.

Next time: Creating your Job Hunter's Network.

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