Spring is around the corner. The snow is melting, the birds are chirping, cars are spinning in place less often, and while you’re glad the weather will be warmer, you’re also aware of that thing nagging at the back of your brain. It’s that thing that always comes with the shift from cold to warm: spring cleaning. But I’m not talking about cleaning up your home, I’m talking about cleaning up your job application credentials and professional profile.
Spring isn’t necessarily known as the season of the job search, but it’s still a good idea to clean off the dinginess every few months, so this blog post will be a reminder for you. Here are a few steps you should be taking every few months to make sure your professional profile is as fresh as the first day it was saved to your desktop.
Hopefully in the last few months you’ve made some progress professionally, so go through your resume and add all those new skills you’ve picked up. If you are at the exact same place you were four months ago and don’t have a legitimate excuse, it’s time to seriously re-evaluate your job search.
Refresh your job sites:
The newest information shows up first in search results. That’s just the default setting of those things and they’re not changing anytime soon. While you can’t change a machine unless it wants to be changed, you can learn to work around the rules. Go to all of the job sites that have your resume listed on them and remove your profile for a week. Then pop it back up. This will refresh your data and put you back in the game.
Social Network Purge:
Same as cleaning up your resume, you need to clean up your online profiles as well. Make sure everything is up to speed, make sure you’re following all the right companies, and maybe update your photo. The more recent the better; no one likes being lied to.
Those are the three most important spring cleaning tips to start with. There are other things you can do, such as brush up on your interviewing skills (especially if it’s been a while since the phone rang). What you do is up to you, but if you take anything away from this it’s that you need to constantly be improving yourself and your profile to stay ahead of the game. That’s just something you should apply to every part of your life.
Do you freshen up your job search credentials year-round? If not, you should! Come clean in the comments below.
IMAGE: Courtesy of Flickr by go_greener_oz
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