Spring recently arrived, at least here in Washington, D.C., and with that a whole mess of spring cleaning. This year, as you clean your apartment, car, and reassess your New Year’s resolutions, consider spring cleaning your job search in the process. You may not think about it as you pound through resumes, cover letters, and video interviews, but paring down your job search materials, and your job search tactics may be just the caffeine shot of energy your job search needs.
First, do a thorough cleaning of your resumes. For your basic written resume, clean up your language, make sure that all subjects and verbs agree, and no stray punctuation remains. Pare down jobs which don’t impact your current job search. A resume cluttered with unnecessary experience draws the eye away from the key experience in which a potential employer may have interest. Consider doing the same with your video resume. Did you get a new look recently, do some volunteer work, learn some new skills? Use spring to film a new video resume. and let your new skills or freshly minted look shine through in a fresh video resume.
After you’ve cleaned up your resume, do the same with your job search folder on your computer. There are always things to reference from in past cover letters, but it can feel invigorating to start anew. Clean out job search folders, getting rid of old cover letters which won’t lend themselves to your current job search. Just clicking delete on the jobs you didn’t get will help alleviate some of the burden and help you look forward to all the possible jobs you can get.
USA Today offers more suggestions for how to spring clean your job search, with an emphasis on networking and where to look for jobs.
Sometimes your job search needs a little cleaning. Wipe away the grim, bleak outcomes of the past, and start all over again. You don’t need to completely reinvent yourself, or your job search, just use the spring to tidy up a bit.
Tell us, do you have any spring cleaning tips for your job search? Weight in below!
IMAGE: Courtesy of Flickr by Ashley Campbell Photography
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