Are you ready to be recruited?
So, you’re ready to make your next move and advance your career? Before you embark on what can be an intense and lengthy process, it’s important to take some time and fully assess your reasons for leaving and what you want from your next role. The following checklist will ensure you’ve considered all the angles and have done the necessary ground work to start the search process:
- Assess your real reasons for leaving your current employment
- Determine if you’ve spent long enough and learned as much as you can in your current role
- Evaluate what you enjoyed most about this role and what you least enjoyed
- Generally assess what you’ve most and least enjoyed about all the roles you have had in the past
- Consider what types of bosses and organizations suit you best/ least suit you
- Think about the types of companies you want to work for in terms of size, sector and values
- List the industry sector or sectors you want to explore.
- Determine what type of opportunities you want to pursue
- Assess the skills you bring to the table
- List why a potential employer would hire you
- Identify your strengths and weaknesses
- Ask your friends to tell you what they consider your top 3 strengths to be and, (if you can take it,) your areas of weakness
- Start updating your resume and ensure it doesn’t come across like a cut and paste exercise where you’ve just added the details of your current role. Look at the overall resume and ensure it flows and is visually consistent.
- Highlight your achievements in your resume and be able to talk about them
- Accurately reflect your responsibilities in your resume, while a small percentage of “fluff” is OK, 90% needs to really demonstrate what you have done.
- Step back and evaluate your overall resume – are you proud of it? Does it do you justice?
- Consider how much you want to make
- Assess what you want to learn
- Map out a plan for where you are going to search for a new job
- Ask friends/trusted colleagues how they found their last role, what they know about different employment agencies and whether or not they know of any great opportunities.
- Determine what job boards you will frequent and develop targets for how often you’ll visit them — daily? weekly?
- Consider the last time you interviewed and develop a plan to brush up on your skills.
- Write the resume and start the search
