Related Posts
I'm already tired tomorrow. 😴
Water filters HSA eligible?
Does paypal provides permanent work from home?
Hyderabad or Banglore which one to chose.
Deloitte experienced hires, who all received written offers and in process of visa/ onboarding, have you heard back anything about hiring freeze? Or recruiter asked you to delay joining date?
My visa got submitted couple of days back and waiting for decision. When I reached out to recruiter to give her an update and mentioned once there’s decision will discuss on the start date before putting my 2 weeks, she mentioned “Yes, we should talk before you put notice” - Am I overthinking? Deloitte
Additional Posts in Creatives
GSP San Fran or Leo Chicago?
Community Builder
How is it working in house at Nike?
New to Fishbowl?
Download the Fishbowl app to
unlock all discussions on Fishbowl.
unlock all discussions on Fishbowl.
You were at the same company for 20 years and they laid you off? Damn that's cold
Personally, I believe getting a job is all about connections. Especially these days. You must have worked with a ton of people, who like working with you, over the years. Reach out to them. Ask about freelance and full-time opportunities.
Applying to listed jobs may just put you in a pile of candidates.
Wow, and I’m amazed at how much has changed in 10 years 😅 I’ve applied to 30ish jobs, gotten 4 interviews and am in the final round for one now (🤞 🙏 ). I have not customized my resume but have written a cover letter that specifically addresses the skills listed and how my experience/passion fits those. If you do the LI premium trial, the AI cover letter writer is a helpful starting place
Coach
It’s all about your book and your connections. Sorry to hear about your layoff :(
Speaking as someone who actually gets good jobs on LinkedIn and prefers this approach to hitting up my connections for whatever reqs they happen to have a say in, the cover letter is wildly important. In your case, it's likely the most important thing.
Mentor
Look… everyone’s experience is different and different things work for different people. But if you stayed at the same place for 20 years and you haven’t looked for a job in that long, whooo boy… are you in for a surprise. Things have changed a lot. And not for the better.
In my personal experience, applying on LinkedIn jobs, has never yielded results. A few interviews here and there, but I’ve never gotten a job that way. If you have LinkedIn premium, you can see how many people apply. There are jobs that have several hundreds of applicants in the first day of being published. You’re probably better off buying a lottery ticket.
I mean, I still apply to many, because I guess you never know.
Every job I’ve had in the last 15 years, I never applied for. I was just found by a recruiter. Keep up and add as many recruiters as you can. Email them every so often. If you worked in the same place for 20 years, you probably didn’t meet as many people as you would have if you had hopped around several agencies. But I’m sure a lot of people who worked with you, moved on to other agencies. Now you have all those potential contacts there. Leverage that as much as possible. Even if it’s for freelance. And who knows, maybe you’ll find out that freelance is your thing.
At its most basic, an ATS is just a computer program that puts everybody's cover letter and resume in a clickable list. An Excel sheet could and sometimes still does carry out the same function. Some of these applications do include an option to attempt to rank applications by looking for keywords, but the keyword stuff is not super effective, most recruiters I've met refuse to use it as a result, and even the ones who do are considering the top few dozen apps, not just handing the job to the first guy on their list.
The closest thing you can usually get to "automatically rejected by the ATS" is when a human being programs in a question that filters out people with a certain answer into a separate folder that is lower ranked. In this economy, people in that second folder are pretty much eliminated, since HR has plenty of good candidates in the primary folder and will never get to the second.
But this kind of filtering is virtually always the result of a human being an idiot, not "the ATS." Think HR and hiring managers requiring experience for entry-level jobs or extremely specific experience with skills and niches that are easily learned, writing job descriptions that don't match the pay bands, asking for unnecessary degrees or focusing on college major for jobs that aren't at all related, or simply not knowing how to use the software and entering their preference for people with *at least* seven to ten years of experience in a way that actually cuts out anybody who has more than ten, etc. You're likely getting far more rejections from recruiters applying stupid rules that have nothing to do with the industry—or just being lazy and trying to hire from the list of people who applied on day one rather than read more resumes—than you are getting from "the ATS."
From personal experience, I recommend a two-pronged approach of finding work. Nothing personal (pun intended), but the odds are likely not in your favor with LinkedIn. I’m convinced applications get sent to a black hole. I believe it’s as important to uncover hidden opportunities by warming up your personal network the old school way. Best of luck to ya!
LinkedIn is good for networking with people, but frankly it’s terrible for job apps. By the time the job is posted, they’ve likely already found the 3-5 people they’re actually interested in offline.
It IS still good for connecting with people, however. Just don’t come off ungenuine.
Re cover letters, I try to send them as often as possible when submitting a blind apply (whether body of the email, Linkedin, or other applicant system). I try to tailor it to the role and/or company. I know many recruiters say they find them unnecessary and antiquated, but that is not a universal opinion - especially if you’re applying for in-house opportunities. You never know whose opinion is sitting on the receiving end, so do it as a fail safe.