Five Small Job Search Tasks You Can Do While Watching TV
Whether you’re actively looking for a new job or just exploring your options, a job search can easily take up all of your waking hours. Spending 18 hours a day thinking about how to take the next step in your career is a surefire way to build up stress, worse interviews, and burnout — plus imagine missing the TV.
Taking breaks and taking care of yourself is critical throughout your job search, but I understand if it feels even more stressful to go cold turkey. With that in mind, here are some tips on simple yet effective job search steps you can take while watching TV.
Update your location on LinkedIn
LinkedIn is one of the biggest tools recruiters use to find talent. We can use LinkedIn Recruiter to filter many different variables, including by location. If my company can only hire in a few states, I will only look for people from those states. If I’m looking for someone who can come to the New York office, I want to filter out people who live outside the allowed distance (unless they’re signaling they’re open to moving; more on that later).
If your location is still set to where you lived 6 months ago, you may be missing out on your chance to be discovered for related opportunities. If you’re worried about sharing too much about where you live, you can just share your general city area. You will still be caught looking!
Get ready to work on LinkedIn
LinkedIn’s Open to Work feature allows you to send various signals to recruiters who can view your profile, and you can also hide your Open to Work status from recruiters who work for your current company. You can show how actively you are looking for a new job, whether you are ready to move (which is taken into account in those search filters that we talked about above), what positions you are interested in and many other variables.
If you haven’t set your status to “Open for Work” yet, you can easily do so from your LinkedIn profile while also seeing who’s dropping out of this LegoMasters episode. If you’ve already set up, use the ad break to double-check if the settings are what you want them to be – are you more focused on one particular type of work right now? Are you really no longer interested in moving, or have you changed your mind about taking a position in the office? Keeping them up to date will help increase your chances of being found for the right roles for you.
Double check that all of your profile pictures are eligible for the job.
If you’ve returned to the job market after a few years, you may have forgotten that 6 months ago you changed the profile picture in your personal email (which you now use to apply for jobs) to a meme or a weird picture of your pet – ask me , how do I know. While an unusual profile photo certainly won’t make or break your candidacy, it’s best to have your plain old photo displayed when sending a thank you email. If you don’t have any recent photos you’re happy with, an old photo will do, or you can just delete it.
Remove outdated and/or irrelevant experience from your resume.
This can be a little painful, so it’s best to do it with a welcome distraction from a new episode of Abbott Elementary . Removing old jobs or internships from your resume and LinkedIn can be surprisingly emotional, but the reality is that keeping irrelevant or very old jobs (or internships) on your resume doesn’t do you any good. In fact, it potentially detracts from the more relevant story you could tell about your career. While I did get paid as both a dog walker and a transcriber, those jobs are not directly relevant if I’m looking for a job as a recruiter. Also, I can still mention them in interviews if they become relevant.
This doesn’t exactly apply to those who have established themselves in their careers or walked a linear path to their current state, but if you’ve tried several different jobs and industries on your way to your dream job, it might be worth deleting some that no longer apply. .
Remove unnecessary data from your resume
It can be difficult to keep up with changing resume norms and expectations, not to mention ensuring that your resume always matches your own experience. You probably have a few things you could remove from your resume now to make room and not distract the recruiter from the most important details. Consider removing:
- Your home address (no company sends you physical correspondence about work anymore)
- Your photo (it may introduce bias)
- Your GPA (if you just graduated from college, this figure is much less relevant than your actual work experience)
- Extremely specific skills that are not relevant to the job you want (I can tell you from experience that reading how much weight you can bench press won’t help you gauge if you’ll make a good software engineer, for example) .