Tools for Job Hunting

"Hi! This is Tine Buechler from Business Growth Training and I am here today on behalf of Expert Village.com to talk about your other job search tools. Most of us are very familiar with our resume. We know the value of our resume and we immediately when we are looking for work, think I must get my resume together. But there are a series of other job search tools that you should have well prepared before you launch your job search. First of all, you should draft a cover letter. A cover letter should be written for a specific employer. One cover letter suits all? Certainly does not. Your job of your cover letter is to tell this employer how your skills match this company. So each time you write a cover letter, it should be done differently. But to start with you should have developed a draft, a format that you are prepared to work with. The other is a thank you or follow-up letter after you have had an interview. After somebody has spent a great deal of time helping you with your job search, you should draft a thank you letter, have it prepared and then it is ready to go. You just need to make a few changes and then you can send it out. Other documents that you need to have depending upon the position that you are looking for, you can have another document. For example, somebody that works in the computer field might have a separate sheet that identifies technical skills, platforms that they have worked on and programs that they have worked with. For myself because I am a trainer, I have identified different kinds of training that I have done for different companies and it is a separate sheet. It’s not my resume. It’s just a list of companies that I have worked for or training that I’ve done. It’s a supplementary document that validates my resume. You might have professional development and there might not be room on your resume for that. So you would have an extra document for that. These are extra documents that validate in cross reference to your resume. The other thing that you need to do is if you have letters from your customers saying how well you’ve done, you might want a copy of that. That might be a good document to have in your dossier. If you’ve had evaluations, performance appraisals that were particularly positive, you might want a copy of that. These are all documents that cross-reference and validate your resume and as part of your marketing package are very valuable."