With competition for jobs more fierce than it's ever been, I've been thinking a lot recently about how jobseekers can improve their chances of getting a role. Sure, there are a million and one things you can do to your CV and interview techniques that will persuade would-be employers to give you the gig, but a lot of the most important improvements you can make tend to happen before you've even started applying.
Finding the right job is something that I've noticed a lot of people just aren't very good at. This might be down to a simple lack of understanding when it comes to using search terms or, for a lot of people, it centres around a scattergun approach of applying for far too many jobs in the hope of landing one. With the latter, it often ends up that people spend less time than they should on each application, with the effect that they get nowhere fast.
As I've said before, I started at totaljobs but a few months ago. For me, this was quite an unusual way to find a job - seeing a job for a jobs board on the very same jobs board. Saying that, it made it easy for me to demonstrate my knowledge of the company, as I had obviously been using totaljobs to look for jobs. However, my experience helps demonstrate why so many people fall before they've even reached the first hurdle.
As with so many job types, the role of content manager is known by a whole load of different names. I'd been searching for tags like 'editor', 'journalist' and 'writer', but 'content manager' wasn't really on my radar. Thankfully, totaljobs has a section at the bottom of every job ad showing relevant tags, and this is how I picked up on the advert for the job I eventually got, but I've found that not enough people use tools like these to help themselves, and instead choose to focus solely on a specific job title with a tunnel vision-like focus.
Even if you don't have access to tools like these, the key is to widen your search as much as possible, within reason, to include as many suitable jobs as you can. If you work as an electrical engineer, then searching for other engineering disciplines will do you no harm, but trying to find jobs that apply to you within the accountancy fields will probably lead you to a dead end. Remember as well that recruiters are human; they choose a job title based on their views, and these can often be slightly different from the terms you would use.
The perfect job is out there for everyone. With so many jobs available, and so many people applying for them, the key is making sure that you can find the gem in the rough.
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