SoFi Blog

Got big plans for your career in 2015? The good news is there should be plenty of opportunity – if you know where to look and how to position yourself accordingly. That’s what the latest SoFi Quarterly Employment Trends report revealed when we released it at the end of last year (the full report is available to SoFi members – contact me for details).

Do you ever wonder if potential employers are Googling you before they even invite you in for a job interview? Well, wonder no more – because in most cases, the answer is yes.

Employers will often do online due diligence before making contact with a candidate. With the amount of info that’s publicly available online today, they can use the web to do everything from vetting credentials to identifying potential risks related to faulty hires.

As a career counselor and career coach, one of the most common questions I hear from clients is how to improve a resume.  While there are plenty of tips and best practices out there, I find that a lot of job seekers get tripped up from hearing too much advice about what to include, how to format things, etc.  Clients often say to me, “Someone told me to do this, but someone else told me to do that – which one should I do?”

It’s a fair question, but it’s one that always raises a red flag for me.  Why?  Because I don’t think job candidates should spend excessive time and effort on their resumes.  And that’s exactly what all this well-meaning advice causes them to do.

Want to know the secret to an effective job search?  Here it is: There is no secret – at least not one that works for everybody.

Are there best practices?  Absolutely, and you probably already know most of them.  Are there wrong ways to go about it?  Yes, and they’re pretty obvious, too.  But if anyone tells you that the secret to getting a job is “doing X to your resume” or “doing Y with your LinkedIn account,” they’re missing a critical point – which is that every candidate is different and therefore needs to take a different approach.

Every year around this time, I notice a slowdown in the number of phone calls I get from job candidates.  Some of it has to do with people taking time to relax and enjoy the holidays, but I think it’s also due to the myth that December is a bad month to find a new job.  Many candidates simply take a whole month off from their search because they assume that employers are doing the same on their end.