Tactical Job Hunting

In today’s context, maintaining a job portal presence is important for job seekers. This is especially so in Singapore, where competition in the employment landscape is very high due to the influx of foreign talents. If you are actively looking for greener pasture, make sure you have a clear strategy in mind. Below is a sharing by Randy Lim, a recruitment consultant at GSI Executive Search. Randy can be contacted at [email protected] or [email protected]Job hunting can be a chore, and it can be quite a tedious process as well, and you’ll be surprised how much time and energy taken up to find a decent job. Here are some practical action that can be taken to better manage the whole process and experience.

Email
Have a dedicated email account for the job hunt, this way you can channel all your information, interview details, contacts, job portal alerts here.

On a more psychological sense, it can help to channel your energy and motivation the moment you open this email account, tell yourself to focus on the job search, not distracted by emails from Facebook, Twitter and other social media alerts.
Of course, please have a professional email address, enough said.

Excel spreadsheet
Open an Excel Spreadsheet.The point is database management. Create a couple of grids on the vertical axis with a couple of suggestions: ‘Date’: ‘Company’: ‘Job title’: ‘Contact Person’: ‘Email’: ‘Contact Number’: ‘Remarks’

Well, this is to help you collect your efforts in an expeditious manner and track your job search progress. So when you get a job alert from your email, say from XWY company for a Technical Specialist, you can drop these details in and also include the source and URL if you want to.

Then input into the remarks part your actions e.g. ’email sent’ or ‘ contacted, interview arranged’
And continue to run the list down.

Alternative spreadsheet
You can also create another spread sheet page for Recruitment Agencies and Search Firms, this will help you manage and track how these agents are helping in your search (or not!) and also keep in touch with them with regards to the roles you’ve spoken to them about and other opportunities, Let this be your Rolodex of agencies contacts. Of course, please use the email you’ve created for the job search effort.

The End Result
So as you run down the list, you can track your job search activities, where you found this job from, and who have you liaised with. This sequence can help you avoid applying for the same job twice, which will suggest to your prospective employer a lack of clear thought process.

By and large, you can also see a trend in the job market and which company has repeated job postings and which companies and search firms are moving and have more roles, where it is hot and where it is not.

Paperwork
You might want to print out the job description posted on the website, or job portal and keep a hard copy of it. Well, that is me, old school, URLs does get shut down and you’ll lose the Job Description (JD) but when you print it out, you’ll have it forever.