How to Get Noticed by Hiring Managers (In A Good Way)

When you’re job hunting, a large part of your workday (for finding a job is in itself a full-time job, if done correctly) will no doubt be spent answering advertisements for the kind of jobs you want, usually online. Since there are hundreds of job-seeking websites these days, you can be forgiven for thinking the most practical way to handle all the openings is to just fire off a resume to each and move on to the next one. However, I have found that taking a bit of extra trouble (as most professional job-hunting advisors will tell you) to show that you actually know something about the company and the people there can go a long way toward making your application stand out...and get past the initial screening-out of candidates, which is often done automatically by software or an outside service.

The personal computer and the Internet have made searching for work a whole lot easier than it was in my early career (back in the prehistoric mists of the 20th century), when you had to rely on newspaper “help wanted” ads, cold phone calls, postal mail and shoe leather. What follows is a list of some of the things I’ve done in my own job search that have given me good results, in terms of getting someone to actually call or email me back and offer to give me an interview, in person or by phone/video conference. I hope some of these tips can be helpful to you if you’re one of the millions still in need of full-time work, even as the government reports data showing near-full employment across the US economy. 

• First, put your best foot forward with the single most crucial tool of your job search: your resume. While there are a ton of resources online offering advice on how to make resumes look good (both format and content-wise), making a small investment in a career counselor can really make a difference. I went a few years back to see a career coach named John Long, who works out of Atlanta at Two Roads Resources (www.exploretworoads.com). He gave me some tips on how to structure my resume in a way that highlights the good things about my experience and downplays any deficiencies, in a clean, easy-to-read format. It has gotten my foot in the door far more times than would have been possible if I’d just done it on my own. I can’t recommend him highly enough; but if he’s not convenient to you and/or affordable for your budget, there are many others you can find online. Staffing services (which used to be called “temp agencies” or “employment agencies”) such as Manpower, Kelly Services and Randstad, and field-specific ones such as Aquent/Vitamin T, Staff Zone and Flexicrew, can also help you get your resume in top shape and market you to employers. Some of them even offer free skills training and tests you can take to certify your proficiency—or gain some, if you don’t already have it. 
• Make sure you have copies of your resume in at least two or three formats to upload to a website when applying. Microsoft Word format (.doc and .docx), Adobe Acrobat PDF (.pdf) and Rich Text Format (.rtf) are the ones I use, and most sites will accept at least one of them. You can even use a JPEG image of your resume (.jpg) as long as it’s made at a high resolution (150 dpi or greater) so as to be readable when printed out. For some extra kick, design yourself a snazzy logo and letterhead (or ask/pay someone to do it for you...like, oh, I don't know—me?) and use it on both the resume and cover letter.
• Find out more about the company offering the job. Search Google for the company’s name and city, and chances are you’ll see a postal address and phone number listed to the right of the search results. If it’s not, one of the results should be the company’s own website, where you can usually find this information in a page labeled “Contact Us” or something similar. Copy this info to your job-search log (you are keeping one, aren't you? If not, start now), so you can contact them directly to follow up within a week or so after applying if you don’t hear back. In this age of the Internet, there’s really no excuse any longer for not at least having some information about a company and its work before contacting them or going into an interview—especially not in a phone interview, where you can sit at your computer and have the info in front of you while you’re talking to the interviewer.
• Search the company and its employees on LinkedIn. The firm’s own site may have the name and title of the person most likely to be making the hiring decision for the job you’re seeking. If you can’t find it on their site, search LinkedIn for the company name and click the button “See all ### employees on LinkedIn” that appears on the company’s LinkedIn page. Once you see the list of employees, filter it by location using the buttons on top so you can isolate the people working in the city where the job will be located. In my case, being a graphic designer, I look for titles such as “Creative Director,” “Marketing Manager” or “Vice President for Communications.” Use the Human Resources or Recruitment director only as a last resort; s/he will already be sorting through dozens, if not hundreds of applications like yours—that’s her/his job. You want to get past HR to the actual hiring decision-maker, whenever possible.
• While we’re on the subject of LinkedIn, if you don’t have a page here, get one NOW…and if you do, spiff it up as much as possible. It doesn’t cost you a cent (unless you decide to spring for a monthly subscription to the site’s Premium service), and it offers many features designed to show you off at your best to prospective employers. Many of them are members, and most companies of any size these days have corporate pages on the site as well. Ask friends and co-workers who may also be members of LinkedIn to give you recommendations to display on your page. About an hour’s work on Day One of your job search can pay big dividends as the search goes on. It also helps build your professional network, which is one way to tap into the vast “hidden” market of jobs that aren’t advertised, but filled through referrals from people already known to the hiring manager(s), or from within. Writing articles for LinkedIn (like this one), using your experience and expertise to generate readable, useful copy, can also get you noticed by others who may want to offer you work as a result; the more articles, the better.
• Tailor your resume (or at least your cover letter) to the job. Make sure your resume contains references to the specific skills and types of experience the employer has listed in the job ad. If this is already the case, or you don’t want to spend time constantly re-writing your resume, compose a cover letter with a first paragraph that mentions the job title and at least one or two of the requested qualifications. (Example: “I have read that you are seeking a Graphic Designer. As a designer with prior experience in the manufacturing sector, I would like to apply for the position.”) As long as the rest of the letter is written in your own authentic voice and contains broad information about your background (this is another area where career coaches/counselors can help), you can use the same basic letter over and over again with only occasional extra modification. Have a letter written for the specific manager ready to upload to a job-hunting site or to the company’s own hiring page, or a text-only version ready to copy and paste into a field on the application page.
• Use the information you gained online about the company and hiring manager in your cover letter. Head the letter with today’s date, then the name and postal address of the company, then “Attn.:” followed by the name and title of the hiring manager. If you’re not absolutely sure this is the person making the hiring decision, you can add “or to whom it may concern” after the name/title. Then begin, “Dear Mr./Ms.” followed by the person’s surname; you don’t want to presume by prematurely using their first name before they've gotten in touch with you directly by phone or email.
• If a job-hunting website offers skill tests, take some. For example, Indeed has a suite of quizzes for just about every type of job as well as “soft” skills that are common to most jobs. Most of them can be taken at home or on any web-enabled computer in just a few minutes. A high score gives you verified proof of your proficiency in the skills required in a job ad, which can then be shared with the prospective employer. And when employers respond to your application with a request to take one of these tests for them, if you’ve already done so, Indeed will share your previous results with them—which means you don’t have to take the test again! I’ve saved a lot of time that way. If your results aren’t at least “Proficient” or “Highly Proficient” at first, take the test(s) over again and study up to get there.

When you can show employers that (a) they and their company are more than just one more job ad to you, and (b) that you are something unique in the deluge of applicants they have to wade through, your chances of getting face or phone time with them go way, WAY up. Above all, don’t get discouraged, as easy as I know it can be; right now, openings are going begging all over the USA and it’s definitely a job-seeker’s market. Remember, you may have to go through a thousand “No” responses to get to one “Yes”…but all it takes is one.