Aidan McCrea

Although a resume is a way of conveying your qualifications, it's also a way of showing your personality. The world of resume has changed in the recent years. In the past, a common resume technique was to keep it at a specified length or to exclude certain types of information. Nowadays, however, many of these so-called “rules” no longer apply. Here are some other myths that have recently been debunked:

1 Page Max

While maintaining brevity is important, self-editing yourself is not worth it. Back when resumes were handled in hard-copy form, employers and recruiters admonished job seekers to keep their documents to a single page. Obviously, you don't want something that is extremely long, however, with digital technology, making something longer isn't as cumbersome now.

The one-page resume can now be officially retired. With employers using applicant tracking systems, they can quickly and easily scan long documents for key information. Some information may even expect resumes to be that length.

Presentation/Formatting Doesn't Matter

The beautiful elements of creating a resume is the aspect of it that allows you to show off who you are. While doing this in an excessively formatted way is going out of style, adding some attractive elements is key. To stand out from other candidates, it's key to add imagery that makes your resume look styled.

Your best bet is to take some time and care with the presentation of your resume, just as you would with any other high-profile business document. Using color is another important element to help stand out from the crowd.

Using presentation and formatting is a very valuable tool to help display your experience. Your designed resume will help employers notice you.

Make it Brief

This may seem like it goes against the first step, but it doesn't. This point has to do with keeping your experience points brief, detailed and concise. While elaborating may seem better, but it's important to show employers that you can put your thoughts together in a concise manner.

When it comes time to find well-qualified employees for open positions in your company, you have a lot of competition for their attention. And you also have to persuade them that they do, in fact, want to find a job: Sixty-two percent of currently employed people aren’t even looking.

In today’s attention-grabbing world, your first reaction might be to think a shorter job description works better, but it doesn’t. In fact, longer gets more exposure, as does accuracies in description and simple language that helps people quickly understand what the job is, what your company is, and what your values are.

Want more details? This graphic can help.

Source: http://www.akkencloud.com/how-to-optimize-job-posts-for-maximum-exposure/

The biggest obstacle to employee engagement and successful business may be work/life balance, according to the Happiness Index 2016. The year-long study looked at many factors that go into happiness and employee engagement. The 5 factors they found to be most influential were:

1. Roles and responsibilities

2. Management

3. Team’s work/colleagues

4. Workplace/environment

5. Work/life balance

While big steps have been taken recently to improve the office environment and to improve employee happiness, there's a lot of things that can be improved upon. Active Listening It's rare to have an employee open up to a boss, but they do, you need to listen. These moments are so valuable because it gives both parties a chance to hear the true experiences of the other. Whether it's a monthly review or an exit interview, creating the opportunity for employees to talk earnestly about their experiences with your company Employee Feedback Doing a monthly feedback meeting with each of your employees is one of the best things you can do to improve your business and recruit more skilled staff. These meetings don't have to be extremely formal, but they do have to be consistent. Make it a part of your business schedule. It's also best to not do these meetings in a formal setting. Try to just catch up with employee on a lunch break or during a break at work. This will make them feel comfortable and provide you with the most honest answers. Establish Manageable Workloads Don't overrun your employees with work. It's your job as a boss to manage tasks, meaning that you need to decipher the valuable work from the useless. Employees will become very thankful if you just make them feel like you're looking out for them. Good leaders are ones who can quickly and easily manage people and their unique traits. Learn about your employees, it'll help in the long run.

A major part of your life is going to be spent learning about yourself. While you can get caught up in the ride a lot of the time, taking some time to do a self-evaluaton every few months is important. Understanding and knowing yourself is one of the most important skill's you can possess. Whether you're learning from success or failure, continuing to move forward and learn more about yourself is key. Once you fully understand your goals, fears, and ambitions fully, you'll become much more confident and self-assured. Here are some of the best ways to start your process of self-discovery:

Think, Process, Ponder

Being yourself is important, but knowing yourself is even more important. Discovering yourself can only be done after taking some quiet time to think and assess your life. Many people don’t take the time to assess themselves because silence scares them. For these people, it's important to find peace in a silence, and make time to think. It isn’t until you allow yourself to be alone that you can evaluate yourself and be completely truthful with yourself. Then, you will actually be able to see every facet of your life – the good and the bad.

Realize Yourself

While you may think you know what you want out of life, it's important that you evaluate your passions and skills every few months. Understanding what you're good at and our interested in, makes discovering your goals much easier to discover. Once you've finally discovered why your goals are what they are, you can look further inwards and see what gifts you bring to the world. Always keep in-mind that your passions and goals will change over time. This is a natural process, and something that shouldn't be feared. While your goals and passions develop, you'll clear the fog that often clogs up people's minds when considering their goals.

Discover your Passions

Pursuing a passion is never a bad idea. You'll learn more about yourself in a day pursuing a passion then you would in a year working in a position you hate. One thing many people don't do is focus on their passions in every facet of their life. All this means is that people don't try and work their passions into other areas of their life. Whether you're bringing it into the workplace or back home, having elements of your passion throughout your life will make you a happy and healthier person. Passion produces effort, and continuous effort produces results.

Ask For Help

Asking others what you're good at is important to helping make this process easier. Although some peoples opinions should be disregarded, many will offer valuable input into elements you should focus on in your life. Sometimes those closest to you can make deciding what you pursue much easier.

Maintaining happy, engaged employees is the key to running a successful business. Although lost in many workplaces, creating and maintaining engaged employees is oftean a matter of taking a few simple steps. While feeling underpaid can be an issue for some employees, feeling underappreciated and ignored is the larger culprit as to why many employees become dis-engaged in their workplace. As a manager, it's important to keep in-mind that it's part of your role to keep your employees happy, satisfied and interested in their current roles. Whether it takes more encouragement, more appreciation or even more help, there are 9 key steps to keeping employees in your workplace engaged and successful.

Thanks to Casemore & Co for providing with the infographic. For more information on their customized training programs, check them out on Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin.

This survey is a font of knowledge for anyone in the business of hiring. It’s full of interesting tidbits about how today’s jobseekers are using social, and how recruiters are responding. Jobvite’s survey is free, but you must give them your info in order to access it… and it’s really long! If you don’t have all day, then check out:

How Recruiters Are Using Social Media in 2014 This article is a summery of Jobvite’s survey, highlighting the most salient of its findings for you, so that you can save a little time and effort. For a more visual summery have a look at MediaBistro’s blog post:

73% of Recruiters Spending More on Social Networks This article is full of beautiful, sharable graphics. Like this one…

Job Seekers Rely on Facebook, But Recruiters Prefer LinkedIn It seems like everyone’s on a Jobvite kick this week! This article from Human Resources Online interprets the results from Jobvite’s survey to better understand the social media disconnect between recruiters/human resources and jobseekers. The author shares some interesting thoughts and ideas about the survey, instead of just summarising its findings.

What Everybody Ought To Know About Social Recruiting

Identify, Follow, Share, And Engage, these are the key factors for effective social recruiting according to Alexandra Vornle. Her article is a wonderful follow up to all this research as it provides simples steps for anyone looking to make their hiring process a little more social.

Is Your Social Recruiting Cart Before The Application Horse?

Or, if your application process sucks, then no amount of social recruiting can save you. Katrina Collier’s article is an excellent reminder that the process of directing candidates from your Facebook job ad to the application “landing page” is as important as the ad itself. She goes on to provide some excellent tips for improving this part of the recruiting process. It’s a must read! For more great advice about improving candidate experience I highly recommend our recent article:

3 Tips For Improving Candidate Experience From a User Experience Designer

Happy link loving and stay social!

The world of recruiting in 2017 is extremely complicated. With so many outlets for ads, engagement and contact, companies have to be extremely weary of the spots where they advertise their specific positions. With more and more companies and recruitment agencies moving towards mobile, it's important you have a strong understanding of the scope of your recruitment efforts. Rather than keeping your focus on recruiting software that is automated and integrated, employers are poised to put more effort into the work environment and employee engagement. The focus of organizations on predictive, recruitment software's has truly changed the recruitment game in so many ways. Here are a few predictions for more changes coming to the recruitment game.

Engagement

Employee engagement is obviously important to your organization. Having engaged employees and candidates means putting an effort to have a solid approach to the work/life balance and career management. Applicants want to hear about how your workplace will help allow them to live a fulfilling life outside of work, as well as inside. Advertising the benefits of your position will be a huge part of being a great recruiter in 2017 and beyond.

Analytics

Analyzing and measuring your recruitment efforts is incredibly important part of any recruitment efforts. Just like anything else in business, you need to measure just how impactful you're being with your efforts. Imagine recruiting software that more accurately indicates which of your candidates are likely to be strong leaders or the best cultural fits before you extend an offer based solely on answers to standard interview questions. Using this trackable software is how companies can make sure they’re getting the right hire and/or fixing actual problems rather than perceived problems.

Social

Social integration is now the name of the game in the software industry. It's a must-have with any program, and that's no different in the recruitment game. Utilizing your social platforms as a way to promote your postings and jobs is a perfect way to find many great candidates. Many recruiting softwares now provides an opportunity for social engagement through the tool itself – in other words, built-in social media management features. 2017 will be a big year for finding your next impactful hire. Make sure you're ahead of the game by following these trends and find a way to exploit the system.

Entering the workforce can be daunting, but keeping everything is one of the major keys to success. There’s a lot more to becoming an efficient and appreciated part of your new company then just being a hard-worker. Unless you’re a surgeon or first-responder, you’re not saving lives at your job, so first of all calm down. Taking this attitude will go a long away to creating success for yourself. Just try relieving some of the self-imposed pressure from your work and see how things turn around. Below are some other great ways to make a lasting impact in your new position.

Learn from Criticism

You learn quickly that you can take on every piece of criticism you receive at your job. Having said this, taking note of certain constructive criticisms can help you grow as a worker. Whether in a word document or just in a notebook, a few quick notes reviewed at the end of each week is all this needs to be. As a bonus, try asking the person that criticized you to elaborate on their thoughts so you can grow even more.

Ask General and Specific Questions

This flows directly from the last point. Whether you’re receiving a compliment, criticism or just a tip, always ask for a quick explanation. This can even be done over email if the moment doesn’t feel right for a direct in-person question. If it’s your first job out of school this is even more important. Just learn and take on as many tasks as possible.

Develop the Ability to Adapt

The office environment can be a difficult one to adapt to. Whether it’s the work, politics or something else you’re struggling with, adapting to your new job can be difficult. To help in this process put out extra effort to get to know every one you work with in a business context, as well as personally. Try observing your own interactions and seeing what you can improve upon. Trust me, this will help you adapt much faster than you would otherwise.

Maintain your Personal Life

A key to being a productive worker is having a good attitude. While some people can live their lives without a personal life and still have a great attitude, most of us can’t do that. This is why maintaining an illustrious personal life is so very important. Do your best to keep up friendships and family relationships. Don’t let your work take over. On top of your friendships, try picking up an activity if you don’t already have one. Getting some energy out after a long day’s work will help you be more productive the next day.

An engaged workforce is key to creating a successful business. Through the engagement of your workforce, you’ll reap rewards through increased production, more inspired work and a much more jovial workplace environment. Engagement isn’t easy to develop. It must truly be cultivated by a leader who is truly motivated to create success and produce results. There are a number of ways in which leaders can do this, but the following three are the most important.

Inspire Genuine Connection

Connecting with your employees is the best way to spark up production and a more positive office environment. Aiming to have a genuine relationship with each and every employee in your office should always be your ultimate goal. Showing you care about your employees can come in many forms, it all depends on the employee and the situation.

Give

A lot of keeping your employees happy is about making sure they have everything they need to succeed. Making sure your employees are fully trained and prepared for their work is huge part of being a manager. However, providing them with material items isn’t enough, you also need to attend to their emotional and social needs. It’s also a great idea to have visible and achievable goals for each employee. Providing them with markers of their own success will provide them a great boost and will continue to push them to succeed and drive forward.

Acknowledge Employees

A compliment from a manager can be worth its weight in gold for an employee. Although simple, this basic acknowledgement is a strong way to encourage employees to go above and beyond their basic duties. As a manager, creating and maintaining a positive workforce is the most important part of your job. Make sure you focus on creating an environment that helps motivate and inspire your current employees.

A period of unemployment doesn't have to be a slow time for your career development, in fact if the time is spent wisely, it can be hugely beneficial for your career. Unemployment gives you a great opportunity to examine your skillset, your potential job opportunities and your career goals. Whatever your field, there’s always opportunities to continue to work even without classic 9-5 employment. Here are some tips that will help you spend your unemployment improving yourself and your chances of finding the perfect career opportunity.

Take up a volunteer position

While simple, this rather easy solution for the boredom of unemployment can be an incredible catalyst for future opportunities and growth. Whether you’re interested in getting involved with a not-for-profit or a professional association, these positions are plentiful and will provide you with great connections and references. Also, anytime you’re able to do extra, different work, you’re bond to learn new skills that will help you develop. Make sure you take advantage of any opportunities that come your way, or better yet, seek them out!

Attend

Finding events in your community to attend and network with fellow job seekers and employers is a no-brainer for anyone unemployed. These events are often put on by community centers and can, obviously, be extremely beneficial. As a quick tip for attending, do your best to show up with business cards and other work samples to make sure employers remember you.

Start a Blog

Whether industry specific or simply personal interest based, starting a blog can help you create a more developed personal brand. Also, having a blog can be a perfect addition to your application package. Most employers expect new hires to have some kind of online presence outside of basic social media pages. Do remember that any blog you create needs to be appropriate. Having something NSFW is okay, but make sure you keep it password protected, or better yet, don’t associate yourself with.

Treat your unemployment like a full-time job

It’s tempting to lax into a lull during a time of unemployment. This can harm you in many ways, but the biggest is just that it takes you out of your routine. Try your best to maintain your work routine while unemployed. In saying this I mean continuing to get up early, shower and spend all-day working on bettering yourself and finding a job.

Exercise

Keeping fit while unemployed is all about maintaining your motivation. It’s important that throughout your period of unemployment you maintain your fitness routine. Aside from staying fit, it will improve your mood and allow you to continue to stay positive.