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As someone else mentioned, networking and referrals are huge! My company prioritizes referrals and knowing someone in the company goes a long way. For interviews, do your research and practice! Write down your answers to the standard interview questions and figure out a good answer. Formulate it into the STAR method for a response, and then practice answering the question until it sounds natural. Even if I've answered the same questions over and over, I'd still do a refresher before an interview so it all rolled off the tongue. Make sure you have talking points on why you want to work for them. I usually researched the culture, checking their websites for things like their core values or mission statements and then making sure it was known what specifics I learned that made me interested in working for them specifically. Have questions for them! You might not actually have any, but they want to hear them. My go-to questions were usually about workplace culture and dynamics. It shows that I was looking for the right fit and not just a random job. It comes across as someone more committed to a new place. For resumes, have multiple take a look at what you have and tweak it. Preferably people in your industry. Take a look at job postings and use some of the buzzwords for what they are looking for. Tailor your resume. If a job specifically mentions complex international travel, you make sure your resume reflects you can do complex international travel.
And my biggest advice is to fake it til you make it. Confidence goes a long way. Say they have one specific thing they want, and you don't have that experience, but you're intelligent and know you can figure it out. Don't say you don't know. Research what they want and see what you can learn to help you get through the interview. No one wants to hear you don't know something, but know you can figure it out. They will pass on you for someone who says they know the skill already. Case in point: I had never booked travel for my execs. I worked at a nonprofit centralized in one state and only dealt with that state. But I've booked my own personal travel and knew it wouldn't be that hard. I looked up the commonly used travel arrangement platforms and told employers I was familiar with Concur and used that to book travel. Before, when I said I didn't use a specific platform, I never moved on in interviews; after I switched and said I used concur, I moved on every single time. When I got the job, I figured it out, and no one ever knew otherwise.
Mentor
Thank you for your very robust pointers! Def going to be taking notes for whenever next I am job hunting
I have a friend who was looking for a long time and finally found a job. He credits his eventual success to persistence, he really just kept plowing away. But he said what he thinks helped him a lot was that he refined his searching, applying to fewer jobs, but working on each approach. He'd write customized cover letters, and also customize his resume within reason. He said it was time consuming, but he thinks it ultimately worked.
Mentor
I've heard good things about really customizing resumes. Very time consuming but seems to be worth it
I landed my role earlier this year after looking for many months. The thing that finally got me the job was a friend of a friend who put in a referral for me. It wasn't even someone I knew but they were a previous coworker of my friend and I just went out on a limb. I got very few interviews during my search but I think almost all of the interviews I got were from referrals
I was laid of in September and had a new role in October, I feel very fortunate. Here is what helped me:
1. Hired a resume writer. The amount of phone screens I received doubled and the amount of interviews I landed from those screens also doubled. I also got a lot of comments on how well my resume was put together. A good resume writer is expensive, it’s a couple hundred bucks, but this is the single best investment I’ve ever made for my career
2. I created an electronic and paper portfolio that consisted of a customized cover letter for the role I was interviewing for, recommendation letters, and my resume. I turned it into a PDF with labeled sections that I emailed to the hiring manager in advance of the interview or handed to them in the interview, this also got a lot of traction and positive feedback. It appeared to make me memorable bc no one else was doing it
3. I networked, I contacted former colleagues, I made friends with new people and recruiters on linked in. I signed up and attended hiring events. Actually the networking on LinkedIn is what led to my new job. This is also true of my last role.