Find your niche ?
Before beginning applications, it is important to understand what your niche is.
It will help you focus your search on roles that are best suited to your skill set. It will also help better your application-to-interview ratio, which will lead to more successful processes and offers in your hands!
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HOW DO YOU FIND YOUR NICHE?
There are three key things you are aiming to understand when you are trying to find your niche.
Write down your answers to the questions below and use them to help you understand where your skillset shines and what your specialty is.
·??????? What are your most recognised skills?
·??????? What are you interested in doing in the future?
·??????? Have you used more Power BI or Tableau?
·??????? Are you better with Python or C++?
·??????? What industry has most of your experience been in?
·??????? Or what industry do you want to get into?
·??????? Are you focusing on technical or management roles?
· Hands-on or hands-off?
All these questions are important in understanding what your niche is.
OPTIMISING YOUR PROCESS
Once you have found your niche, concentrate most of your attention on creating a CV that reflects your experience, wants, and needs.
Update your LinkedIn profile to reflect your latest experience and turn on “Open to Work”.
If your “Open to Work” was already on, you want to turn it off and on again once you have updated your profile.
This will notify recruiters who are looking for your specific skillset and you will get people reaching out to you through there.
Adding your CV to job boards such as reed.co.uk, jobserve, cvlibrary, and similar websites can mean that recruiters and talent acquisition teams can find you from simple keyword searches while you are spending your time applying to other roles.
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APPLYING TO ROLES
Once that is done, you should focus on completing applications that best match most of your newfound niche and future aspirations.
It doesn’t have to be an incredible number of applications.
It is too often that I receive applications with less than a 30% match on skillset/requirements.
Unfortunately, there is not much that can be done with those applications. Of course, I am not suggesting that you only apply to 3 roles that are an exact match to your skills. But hone down the roles that you are most interested in and pay more attention to those.
Spend a little extra time on those applications, make sure that your CV and LinkedIn profile align with the specific role requirements.
Make your skillset clear at the top of your CV, by creating a “Technical Skills” section, but also make sure to repeat those tools/keywords throughout your CV whenever possible.
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TAKE YOUR APPLICATION A STEP FURTHER
Reach out on LinkedIn and connect to important decision makers of your target companies with a quick message once you have applied. Make sure to read the job description before doing so and be certain that you have more than 60% skillset match to the requirements.
Your message doesn’t have to be 5 paragraphs, or extremely personalised. But I wouldn’t use the template that LinkedIn has, as it’s used by most applicants and will not make you stand out.
A simple message will do the trick.
“Hi Maria, I have just applied to x role. It would be great to discuss further over a call, so I can give you more information about my background and skillset.”
It is important to note here that different people like different things.
This approach might work for me, but it might not work for another recruiter as they are looking for more personalised messages, or they might be looking for messages that explain more about how your skillset matches the requirements.
There is no “one size fits all” message in the application process, which is why I wouldn’t spend too much time coming up with one, unless you can “reuse” it for more applications.
CONCLUSION
Put more attention, time, and effort into roles that better fit your experience, background, and future aspirations. Your application to interview rate will go up, you won’t spend as much time on unnecessary applications and receiving constant rejection.
Streamline your process, and get better results!
Reach out to me on [email protected] with any questions!
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