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When you are searching the job market for work, you are competing against many other people who want the same job. Many of them may have the same qualifications as you or may be even more qualified than you are. How do you make yourself stand out and become the kind of person that a company would want to hire? Here are a few tips.
Work on Your Appearance
Before the potential employers even see your resume, in many cases, they will see you first. If they call you in for a job interview, you need to be ready and looking your best. That means you should be wearing suitable clothes, preferably some of your best clothes. There will be people who could benefit from buying new clothes for their job interview just so that they look presentable.
In most cases, it would be wise to wear the same kind of clothes you would wear to a formal event. Make sure you don’t have too much skin showing, and ensure that your hair is clean, tidy, and attractive. Guys, make sure your facial hair is neat, if you have any. Also ensure that you smell nice, taking a shower before the interview and using deodorant, perfume, or mild cologne to make a good impression.
Your appearance is very important, and potential employers will often make hiring decisions based partly off of how you look. Even if that doesn’t seem fair, it’s entirely true.
Check Your Resume
Even if you have a nice-looking resume, you should always check it over and update it if it has been six months or more since the last time you tweaked it. You want to ensure that your resume is attractive and matches the current resume style. You should also ensure that all relevant information is on there and any new additions to your achievements or interests are provided. It is always wise to give your resume a look before a job interview, just to be sure that you didn’t miss any mistakes or leave out any important information. Check the address and contact information a couple times to be certain that they are up to date and that there are no mistakes there.
Clean up Your Socials
In this age, you need to think about your social media presence in relation to any job you are applying for. Even if your Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube pages may have nothing to do with your job, those are areas of your life that are public, and they could cause embarrassment for your employers. You may not need to worry about social media if you are working a low level position, but any kind of management, public relations, or other partly public job posting will often require the company to look at your social media.
You should get rid of anything embarrassing or potentially offensive you don’t want them to see. You should also limit who can see certain posts. Fixing any issues there can be as simple as making your profile private for friends only. As long as you don’t accept any friend requests from employers, you should not have to worry too much about what is on your social media.
Think about your socials from their points of view, though, and consider if they might find issues with anything that you have posted or any details on your profiles. If you really want the job, you will consider every aspect of your life that the potential employer could be looking at. Those posts or videos you published in a fit of emotion or without much thought may come back to bite you, if you are not careful.
Make Your Home Tidy
Another aspect of your life that may not be given much thought when it comes to applying for a job is your home. In many cases, it won’t matter how clean or neat your home looks when you are trying to get a job, but other times, it will be very important.
More often, companies are choosing to do video interviews and may hold video conferences as well. If there is any chance that this will happen, then you want to take time to clean up your house, particularly any room you might use for work as an office space or anywhere you might want to conduct a video job interview.
Take the effort to clean up your house or consider hiring a Seattle, WA company to do professional cleaning for you. Even if you never have to do a job interview over video from your home, at least you will have a clean house to go back to.
Why does a tidy house matter to employers? If they see your messy home in the background as they are conducting an interview, they may think that you are disorganized and sloppy. They may suspect that you will carry those same traits over to the workplace, and no employer wants that. If they have a choice between two similar candidates, and one of them has a messy home, they will choose the neater person. You have to do everything you can to make yourself an appealing candidate, and if that means cleaning your house to land the job, then it will be worth it.
Final Thoughts
If you know that the job market is competitive where you are looking for jobs, then you should be doing everything in your power to be a good candidate that companies still want to hire. We hope that this article gives you some ideas about where you can make changes and where to focus your attention, especially if you have been struggling to land an interview or you have had some interviews go poorly. There may be some things you can change to make yourself a more appealing candidate, but these are all areas you could improve. Why not take a look at these areas and see if there is room for improvement?
