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IT recruiting

Write Better Emails in Your IT Jobs

Perhaps you already have your dream job.  You’ve worked with IT recruiters and IT staffing firms to find a position that’s a perfect fit for your skills and interests.  Now it’s time to go into the office and kill it.  How can you really knock the socks off your new boss (and of course the technical recruiters and IT recruiting companies that helped you get the job)?  How do you make your mark so you get excellent references for the next time you have to go searching for IT jobs? We’ll examine a few things you can do to really excel at work.  Today we’ll focus on a few ways you can write excellent emails.

In most IT jobs, you’re likely to be moving at a fast pace.  So the best employees are the ones who can write brief, effective emails.  Your bosses and IT recruiting firms will rave about you if your emails at work are short, to the point, and informative or easy to respond to.  To get your emails to this point, start by exercising a little restraint.  Email only when you can explain things succinctly.  If you can’t, it’s time for a phone call.  Next, try to bundle your emails.  If you have a few questions for a boss or colleague over the course of the workday, do your best to compile them into one email.  This will save the recipient time.

Next, go through your emails once before sending and try to cut out anything unnecessary.  In person, a little small talk is nice.  In email, it’s a pain.

Lastly, you may also want to try to break your email out into bullets with calls to action or questions.  Paragraphs are nice for a novel, but not for email.  It’s easier when things are in an outlined format or something close to that. Take these steps and you’ll be wowing your employers and IT recruiting

Why You May NOT Want Remote IT Jobs

Most IT recruiters and IT staffing firms are noticing a distinct uptick in preference for IT jobs that allow part or full-time remote work.  There are plenty of reasons whey IT recruiting companies aren’t surprised by this.  Remote work has plenty of benefits, IT staffing companies find pretty consistently.  Technical recruiters find parents of young children to be particularly interested in this kind of work because sometimes it’s compatible with child rearing and saves costs on daycare.  However, there are some reasons it’s worth reconsidering asking your IT recruiting agencies exclusively for remote work.

  1. Blurring the lines between work and home can be stressful. If your personal phone, your favorite couch, or your kitchen table become part of your new office, it becomes difficult to leave a bad day of work behind.  You may find it hard to disengage from work—either because of your own desire to just finish that last item or because a client can reach you at home all the time.  Either way, you can find yourself with a surprising lack of work-life balance.
  2. Your workspace can be distracting.  A home office has plenty of its own potential distractions, whether it’s noisy neighbors, kids who need attention, or a dirty kitchen you can’t stand not to clean.  You may find that the peace and quiet you expected when you jettisoned the office isn’t there at home.
  3. You may really miss connecting with your coworkers.  Not being at the office to chat with coworkers could have a few potential pitfalls.  You may simply be lonely, or it could actually be harder to work with your team.  Sometimes teambuilding is actually more necessary than you expect, and working remotely can reveal that.

 

Polishing your IT Resume and LinkedIn Profile– Language, Part 2

Last time we talked about how cleaning up the language in your Resume and LinkedIn profile will help to attract IT staffing firms and IT recruiters. In particular, we looked at avoiding using clichés to describe yourself (because they usually mean nothing to IT staffing agencies and waste valuable space on your resume or profile).  This time, we’ll focus on another way you can waste space with language and bore technical recruiters and IT recruiting companies: telling stories.

The best resumes, the ones IT recruiting firms are excited to submit to their clients, are the ones that succinctly display excellent skills and experience.  Resumes or LinkedIn profiles that ramble on, include long first person sentences, and contain full, detailed paragraphs, are the last thing IT staffing companies want to submit to their clients.

If your resume or LinkedIn profile looks like this, how can you fix it?  Start by breaking up your paragraphs into bullets.  Each bullet should contain a single idea, like “I’m skilled at these programming languages: C# and Java.” Now remove the any first person references and any excessive words.  Boil each bullet down to the simplest phrase you can.  For instance, “Skilled programmer in Java and C#.”  Repeat this process throughout your whole resume or profile until you have the sleekest, shortest version you can present to IT recruiting agencies.  This will win you far more attention from technical recruiters—and IT jobs!

 

 

 

Polishing your IT Resume and LinkedIn Profile – Language, Part 1

If you’re currently updating your resume and/or LinkedIn profile, you’re probably trying to find ways to make it more attractive to IT recruiters and IT staffing firms.  While IT staffing agencies are usually drawn to the content of a resume or LinkedIn profile, it’s worth it to try to make sure it’s the most polished version that you can present.  There’s a lot you can do to make your LinkedIn profile more attractive to IT recruiting companies, but today we’ll focus on the words you use to describe yourself.

Probably the trickiest part of making a resume or LinkedIn profile that really garners interest from IT staffing companies is making it stand out.  It’s easy to write a resume that technical recruiters feel like they’ve seen a hundred times already. A powerful way to differentiate yourself to IT recruiting agencies is to make sure you skip using all the buzz words and phrases that everyone else uses – particularly in describing yourself.  You probably already have an idea of what some of these words and phrases are, but we’ll post a list below.  It may seem like a great idea to call yourself ‘passionate’ or a ‘team player’—you may actually even be these things!  The problem is that these words are so overused, they’re useless.  If you list yourself as ‘creative’ all you’re doing is wasting precious space on your resume or LinkedIn profile and boring IT recruiting firms.  Focus on listing your skills and accomplishments.  This is what they care about most.

Avoid these words on your resume or LinkedIn Profile:

Creative
Motivated
Passionate
Expert
Team-Player
Quick Learner
Collaborative
Hard-working
Driven

 

What to Cut from your IT Resume

If your resume hasn’t been attracting much attention from IT recruiting companies and IT recruiters, you may want to consider shortening it.  Sometimes, if your resume is too long, it obscures all the important experience and skills you have. Technical recruiters literally get lost in the maze of your resume– and usually IT recruiting firms will move on quickly if they can’t find what they want in a resume.  How can you make it easier for IT staffing agencies to see how great a candidate you are?  Here are two tips that are guaranteed to make your resume much easier for IT recruiting companies to navigate—and love.

Firstly, drop the objective and hobbies section.  Both of these sections focus on you and what you want.  While ideally a manager cares about this, they care much more about what the company needs.  IT staffing companies want to send hiring mangers resumes that focus more on what you can bring to a potential employer.  Take out everything else.  This means your objective and your hobbies.  You can make sure the position is what you want if or when you get to the interview stage.

Secondly, take out any extra awards or extracurricular activities from your school days that aren’t obviously relevant to the jobs you’re applying for.  If you’re listing activities or awards from school at all and you graduated more than a few years ago, consider removing these things altogether.  It’s more likely a hiring manager will be irritated you wasted her time making her read about your merit scholarship than it is that she’ll be impressed.  This is especially true if you graduated a few years ago.  Save the space on your resume for achievements at your past or present jobs.

Why You Should Cut the Flashy Things From Your IT Resume

If you’re posting your resume on boards like Monster, it’s easy to add flashy things to your resume like a special format or your photo. It might even seem like a way to attract IT recruiters and IT staffing agencies.  But the truth is, even if you’re a graphic designer, using flashy features on your resume isn’t going to appeal to IT recruiting companies and technical recruiters.  Why?

IT staffing companies and hiring managers want resumes with the right skills and experience.  When you spend more time creating a snazzy format or adding in your photo, you’re potentially taking way from your time to really craft and polish the content of your resume.  The worst case scenario is that even if you do take time to perfect and tweak the content of your resume and add flashy features, IT staffing companies might not know it.  They may skip right over your resume because often these kinds of gimmicks are used to hide poor experience and skills.  You may be running the risk of IT recruiting firms assume that your resume is actually worse because you’ve added a photo or unconventional format.  So don’t take the risk: save the time you would have spent picking and cropping a photo or creating a bright color scheme.  Use that time instead to focus on really editing your resume.  This is what will get you your dream IT jobs.

Do you Need IT Certifications to Land a Job?

If you’re currently searching for IT jobs, you may be wondering if IT recruiters, IT staffing companies, and hiring managers want you to have IT certifications.  Unfortunately, there isn’t a direct yes or no answer to this question.  You may not necessarily impress technical recruiters or IT recruiting firms if you have some IT certifications, while others could be a big factor in landing a job.  It’s easy to get confused with the 1900 plus certifications out there, so here are some tips for obtaining the right certifications to get IT recruiting companies and hiring managers to notice you.

Firstly, start by looking at job descriptions for jobs you’d like to hold one day.  Some of them will list the kinds of certifications they require or prefer.  Take note of them and how often they’re required or preferred.

Secondly, head over to LinkedIn and check out some groups that might be specifically catered to the jobs you’d like to hold one day.  Ask people about the certifications they have—or have chosen not to get.  Both are important to know.  If you don’t want to reach out to people directly, consider just checking out people’s profiles or the group discussions.  Both will probably show you a little bit about what certifications are useful and which ones are not.

Lastly, feel free to compare these notes with your IT staffing agencies.  Recruiters are likely to be happy to share their experience and what they’ve seen.  They can confirm if they’ve seen some of the same trends you think you’ve noticed in certifications.  It’s also a great idea to start a relationship with some IT staffing firms now, even if you’re not ready to search yet.  They’ll remember you when you are.

Finish Your IT Job Interviews Like a Pro

After preparing with your IT recruiters for IT job interviews, you’ll need to do some preparation on your own. Your best bet is not to just prepare to answer the questions your IT staffing companies tell you to expect.  You should also plan to be able to ask some questions of your own at the end of interview.  The answers to these questions can be important for you, of course.  But potentially more importantly, your technical recruiters and IT staffing agencies will be impressed if you can ask questions that leave a great lasting impression on the interviewers.  How do you ask a question that will land you the respect of your IT recruiting firms and possibly the IT jobs you’re interviewing for?  Here are some tips:

  1. Start your question by stating something that shows off your expertise in the field.  This will only work if you truly know of information that will impress your interviewers. For instance, you could say something along the lines of, ‘Since we’re seeing a trend in X, then how will it affect this role?’ You might try asking your IT recruiting companies if they think your question will be a good one to ask if you’re not sure.
  2. Use your question to show that you’ve done research on the company.  The trick is not to make the question feel like you already know the answer—or worse, don’t care about it.  Your interviewers will feel like you’re wasting time if your question feels like a hollow attempt to show off.  And your IT staffing firms won’t be too pleased with you either.
  3. Use your question to show that you’re excited about the job.  Again, the trick is to make sure your interviewers do feel like you’re interested in the answer.  Showing enthusiasm is important and so is asking good question that don’t seem like a waste of the interviewer’s time.

How to Be Likeable in IT Job Interviews

If you’re interviewing for IT jobs, you may be preparing for them by checking with your IT recruiting firms on what technologies to brush up on, what questions to prepare for, etc.  You may be talking to your technical recruiters about standard things like where the interview will be and at what time.  These things are important, but IT staffing agencies have found that it’s often equally important that you come across as likeable in an interview.  It’s hard to say exactly what makes somebody likeable, but here are two tips IT staffing companies would suggest you use that may help.

Be a little humble.  It’s possible to retain a confident, competent air but still show a healthy amount of humility.  The best team members, the ones IT staffing firms place over and over again, are open to hearing new information and new ways of doing things. They are far from arrogant, which makes them highly responsive to feedback, training, and acclimating to new workplaces and managers. Show off a little humility in your interview—it might just land you the job.

But don’t ‘humblebrag.’  A humblebrag is exactly what it sounds like: Bragging wrapped in an appearance of humility.  You’ve probably heard a few humblebrags before and disliked it yourself.  You’ll need to sell yourself in an interview, but it will make you come across as disingenuous and out of touch if you aren’t just direct about it.  IT recruiting agencies want you to be open and honest in your interviews.  If you’re good at something, say this directly.  It will get the point across better and will make you seem like the kind of person who is confident and socially graceful.  Both are imperative qualities in good hires.

How to Polish Your IT Resume: Part 2

Continuing the theme from our previous blog post, today we’ll continue to look at ways you can update your resume so you wow your IT recruiters, IT staffing firms, and hiring managers.  Last time we explored using more powerful words, but this time we’ll talk about why writing your resume with a different perspective will make it more attractive to technical recruiters and IT recruiting companies.

Often, a resume is written with the perspective of the person seeking IT jobs.  The objective is about what the job seeker wants. The bullets under each job are about the daily to-do lists the job seeker operated under.  While this all seems pretty natural, it’s not the best way to really grab the attention of hiring managers and IT recruiting agencies.  The best strategy is to write the resume from their perspective. Take out the objective—it’s hard to write about anything but what you as a job seeker wants.  This isn’t a hiring manager’s first concern—their first concern is what they want.  To really address what a hiring manager and IT recruiting firms are seeking, write out what you achieved under each job.  Give the most concrete results you can—even if you can give actual numbers like ‘Increased revenue by 10%.’  Talk about what your employer gained during your time there.  This makes it easier for IT staffing companies and interviewers to picture you in a potential job.  They can literally see you as a value-add for the hiring company.