Three Proven Strategies to Set Yourself Up For a Successful Job Hunt

Lots of people have been getting new jobs lately which is great news! But if you’re not one of them and you’ve been looking for a while, it can all feel a bit… deflating.?

There are plenty of people looking for jobs BUT 30% of travel industry jobs go unfilled. Hiring managers claim they can’t find the right people, and people cannot find the right jobs. This means there is a gap between what is available and what people actually want to do.?

We all know the job market in general and our industry in particular have changed in the past few years. COVID meant mass redundancies and now companies are rehiring.

There have also been a bunch of redundancies in the tech industry which includes our friends in travel tech companies. And this year I have heard of many redundancies and restructuring at corporate or global level in travel companies.?

Automation and AI have become part of our daily life. The new kind of “product manager” is taking over the old kind of product manager. This is especially true for operations staff but even for my commercial friends, with dynamic rates and connectivity becoming the norm, there is less “work” to fill our time and we need to get savvy about how we add value.

So when you’re job hunting, you may spend ages filling in online applications, just to get no response from the recruiter and not even the chance to have a chat.

Or perhaps you are reaching the interview stage but can’t work out why you can’t convince them that you’re the right person for the job. And no feedback there either!

It can feel like an exhausting hamster wheel, where you are expected to show up as your best self just to be rejected.?

Read on for some inspiration and options of how to make your job hunt more successful, and hopefully less tiring, in three main areas: networking, communicating your value and mindset.?

My #1 career tip

"You have to know yourself, your strengths, your values, in order to be happy. To me, the only progress is to be happy.

We can all progress in terms of job titles and salaries and having things, but that isn't going to change things if you aren't working on being happy at the same time.

So I always like to say that I don't have a plan. I'm actually someone who's very organized so this probably sounds ridiculous to people that know me. But if I look back 10 years, I was at Travco, I was speaking Spanish every day, I was traveling to Latin America.

If you'd asked me then where I wanted to be in 10 years, I would say "I'm going to go and live in Bogotá or Mexico City, and open an office for them. And I love Latin America so much; it's the only place for me"

Then I've just come back from five years in Singapore! I would never, ever have planned that, and I'm so happy with the way it turned out.

So I think if you have a very strict five year plan, you're really closing yourself off to a lot of potential opportunities. What's more important is to follow that feeling of "When do I feel buzzy and excited? What are the things I love? What brings me joy? How can I do 5% more of that, 10% more of that? What angle can I move in?"

We don't have to radically change careers to be happy, but if I can move five degrees in that direction and that makes me slightly happier, then you can gradually move to where you want to be.

No one knows at the beginning of their life what their career will be like at the end of their life anymore. So how on earth can people have a plan that really is beyond me!"

Listen here to the full podcast with Naureen Ahmed .

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