The Importance Of Career Consultants

Following up from my last blog about keywords, I went to the Larimer County Economic and Workforce Development Center in Fort Collins. I had been able to contact a Career Consultant there, whom I had sat down with before, and had the good fortune that somebody had cancelled an appointment with her that I was more than happy to take on. 

My Consultant has been and continues to be friendly, helpful, patient and an example of what more people need when looking for a job. She was able to go over recent job listings I had applied to and helped me better identify keywords. She then went through the couple different resumes I have when I submit to a lot of different places for the same job title, and suggested style upgrades and where to place keywords. She even read through a cover letter that I had sent and showed me what was fine and what needed work. She did this all in one hour, and she was explaining the why and how of this the entire time so I fully understood why it mattered.

So now I have a better understanding of where I need to work on my resumes and cover letters, and I've been working on the upgrades. I have a better grasp of how to identify keywords (because it turned out I wasn't as good at that as I thought), and how to better integrate them into my resumes and cover letters, which I am also working on.

Would I have been able to look all this up online and figure it out myself? Maybe. Would I have been able to look all this up online and figure it out myself in one hour? Absolutely not.

Career Consultants are working with people every day from every walk of life to do one thing: help those people get better chance at getting employed where they want to be employed. They know the trends of resumes for certain career types, and know about resources that are at their fingertips but would take you an entire day of careful googling to find. They also can make suggestions that, in your stressed state of trying to find work, would not readily come to you.

If you have gone to Career Consultants before at you county office, make sure to thank them for all their hard work. If you haven't gone there, and you are looking for a career change, or just need some help with your resume, or your cover letter, or your interview tactics, I encourage you to make an appointment. They are there to help.

The Anxiety of Radio Silence and The Keyword Game

Being in the job market is stressful. There are companies to research, job listings to comb through, applications to fill out, people to contact for follow-ups or more information about the company, emails to set up interviews, phone interviews, in-person interviews, and thank you notes to fill out. Along with that, there are resumes for various positions in the career track of interest to tweak, cover letters to write, and practice for interviews which may or may not ever happen.

The worst is, after all that work, all that effort, to be met with radio silence. Apply with your best foot forward, with what you think is your strongest resume and cover letter, send the follow-up inquiry a couple days later, and yet...nothing. No response. The anxiety of what wasn’t good enough swiftly follows if you can’t shake it off and go to the next job.

I keep thinking of search engine optimization in relation to job application systems, fueled by keywords, which HR departments use to “help” them whittle down which resumes they actually look through to determine who gets an interview. As far as I understand it, have all the specific keywords HR has programmed in for that particular job, and the resume is sent to the department for consideration. Don’t have enough keywords, and your resume could be categorized as unfit for the position and HR doesn’t even see it.

I have filled out hundreds of job applications so far, and I’ve had over a dozen interviews, either in person or via phone. Some of these interviews went well (though not well enough to be hired), some interviews did not, but I was happy for the experience they gave me all the same. The anxiety I can’t shake, the thing that makes me wonder, late at night as I research yet another company, is this: if it wasn’t for the keyword system that HR departments have adopted, how many more interviews would I have been offered? Followed immediately by: if it wasn’t for this system, would I have gotten a job already?

Then the last, most pressing question: if that is the game HR managers are playing via keyword system, what is the best way to game that system to my advantage? After all, if I’m going to have to play by these rules, then I should figure out a way to consistently win and acquire an interview. The ultimate win state is to acquire an interview that lands me full-time employment.

Let the games begin.

-A.M.W.