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Is Your Resume Hurting Your Job Search?

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Your resume often provides a hiring manager with the first impression of you. You have a page or two to convince them your education, skills, and experience make you best qualified for the role. The manager will be more inclined to contact you for an interview if they believe you have what it takes to be successful in a role.

Follow these resume writing tips to help you land a job.

Select a Professional Font

Use a basic, clear font that is easy to read. Examples include Arial or Times New Roman. Also, keep your font size between 10 and 12 points. Plus, make sure there is a minimum of white space so the hiring manager focuses on your information.

Include Keywords  

Find keywords from the job description to pepper throughout your resume. Pay special attention to the keywords showing what the employer is looking for in an ideal candidate. Emphasize the skills, requirements, and qualifications you have that make you best equipped for the role.

Share Relevant Information  

List only the information that pertains to the job you want. Because a hiring manager probably will skim your resume, you want them to see you have the required education, skills, and experience to do the work.

Focus on Your Accomplishments

Point out your top three or four most important achievements in each position you held. Include the numbers used to measure your success for each accomplishment. You may want to include written feedback on your work performance or acknowledgment from your manager on reaching a goal.

Choose Active Verbs

Include power words such as “achieved,” “earned,” or “completed” throughout your resume. For instance, “Led multiple team projects and effectively coordinated group tasks.” This helps the hiring manager visualize your productivity and engagement at work. These aspects are important for securing an interview.

Proofread  

Read your resume aloud several times to see how it can be improved. Pay close attention to your spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Also, ask a family member or friend to review your final draft before submission. They may point out something you missed or suggest a better way to share your information.

Talk with a Recruiter

When you partner with a recruiter from RightStone, they can provide resume advice and much more to help with your IT job search. See which jobs interest you today.

How to Stay Focused at Work

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Whether you are working remotely or at the office, it can be hard to maintain focus throughout the day. The increasing use of technology is making it more difficult for the brain to concentrate on one task at a time. Fortunately, with the right mindset and practice, you can train your mind to stay present longer.

Use these tips to improve your focus throughout the workday.

Reduce Distractions

Take away everything you can that interrupts your thought process. This includes turning off your email and text notifications, closing your social media pages, and shutting your office door. Clarify that unless there is an emergency, you are not to be disturbed during work time. You need your environment to be as quiet as possible to be productive.

Prioritize Your Tasks

Create a list of your most important work for the day. Rank each item by its level of importance. This lets you focus first on what absolutely has to get done. Set a timeframe to accomplish each task. Completing one item at a time lets you feel less stressed about what you need to accomplish later.

Focus on One Task

Direct your attention to one item at a time. The brain is not designed to multitask. Moving from one focal area to another takes time to adjust. Doing this in rapid succession results in greater errors and poorer quality of work. Instead, fully complete one task before moving to another. You will more efficiently complete it and feel motivated to move to the next item.

Train Your Mind

Engage in brain training activities that improve your cognitive abilities. Two excellent examples are meditation and yoga. Instructing your mind to be more disciplined helps you pay attention to the work you need to complete each day.

Take Regular Breaks

Schedule time throughout each day to rest and recharge. Your brain needs time to disengage. This is especially important if you are stuck on a task and need time to think through a solution. Leave your work area to take a walk, read a book, or listen to music. During your lunch hour, eat healthy foods, talk with coworkers in the breakroom, or connect with your family. Come back ready to tackle the rest of your work for the day.

Maintain Adequate Sleep

Be sure to get enough deep sleep every night. This helps you remain in your best physical and mental state. You stay alert, engaged, and productive.

Find Your Next IT Job

Focus on finding your next IT job through RightStone. Visit our job board today.

Leaving a Job with No Future

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If you are passed over for a promotion you truly deserved, it may be time to find a new job. After all, you cannot stay in the same position indefinitely and advance along your career path. If you are not finding the room to grow with your current employer, then you need to begin finding a new one now.

If you continue to be passed over for promotions, implement these guidelines to determine when a good time is to leave your job.

Consider Your Last Promotion

You typically should be promoted after 18 months to 2 years in your current role. This timeline may be less if you discussed it before being hired. If you have been in the same position longer than 2 years and have no opportunities for a promotion, you should find another employer.

Look at Colleagues’ Promotions

Determine whether similarly qualified colleagues with the same level of experience as yours have recently moved up. Also, find out whether IT professionals in comparable roles at similarly sized companies have been promoted faster than you. If they have, then you need to begin your job search today.

Write Down Your Contributions

Make a list of all the ways you provide value to the organization. This may include routinely helping to finish projects or making material contributions that lead to success. Use this list to determine whether you should be at a higher level than you are. If so, begin applying to positions that fit your skills and experience.

Talk with Your Boss

Meet with your manager to discuss a promotion. Prepare to talk about your contributions, achievements, and qualifications to move up. See whether your boss supports your request or provides concrete guidelines to be considered for a promotion. If not, begin your job search after work hours.

Enhance Your Skill Set

Find ways to gain or enhance the skills required for the job you want. This may include engaging in additional training, taking a class, or gaining certification. This can be beneficial in landing your next IT role.

Find a Higher-Level IT Job

Let a recruiter from RightStone help you find an IT job in line with your skills, experience, and interests. See which jobs are available today.

How a Staffing Firm Can Assist in Your Job Search

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Finding a job can be stressful. You may spend hours finding and applying for roles that fit your skills, experience, and interests and not hear anything. Or, you might interview for a position you truly want, then not receive a job offer. Fortunately, there is a way to reduce the time invested in finding a job you enjoy.

Discover how working with a recruiter from a staffing firm can help you land a job.

Access to the Hidden Market

Partnering with a recruiter lets you find job openings you would not be able to on your own. Because the recruiter builds solid relationships with hiring managers, the managers often turn to the recruiter to fill job openings not shared with the general market. Or, the recruiter may talk with a manager about the creation of a role based on their business needs and your skills and experience. This means you face less competition when interviewing, increasing your odds of receiving a job offer.

Insight into the Job Market

A recruiter lives and breathes the job-search process every day. For instance, they remain current on changes in the market, including the need for a particular skill or experience, to maximize your search results. Also, because a recruiter continually increases their knowledge of the market, they can negotiate a competitive salary, benefits package, and perks on your behalf. Plus, their ongoing experience with market changes means you receive practical advice on what to expect and how to proceed.

Coaching  

Partnering with a recruiter involves additional guidance with your resume preparation, the interview process, and more. For instance, because the recruiter has close relationships with hiring managers, the recruiter knows what each manager likes and dislikes and what they are looking for in a candidate. You gain additional insight into which information to include on your resume, what the manager’s personality is like, and how you can personally connect with them. This increases your odds of being offered a job and creating a long-term professional relationship.

Feedback from Employers

Working with a recruiter provides you with input from the interviewers you meet with. This means you can gain feedback about your performance. If you are not right for a role, you can use the information to enhance your job search and receive more favorable results.

Partner with RightStone

Find your next IT job with help from a recruiter at RightStone. Visit our job board today.

Automation – Future of IT

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Automation has been a regular topic of discussion for well over a decade. Even still, the world has not yet felt its full effects.

While there’s no doubt that automation impacts jobs, automation also presents opportunities for IT professionals. Before you can harness automation to expand your career, you first need to look at the applications.

What’s Automation Doing in IT?

Automation is part of the software revolution, and it’s made the jobs of IT pros easier to bare. Automation makes monitoring simpler and allows you to skip the manual sifting through files. These realities align with the predictions that found automation would first take over repetitive, manual work that primarily requires following the same program.

Although it’s possible that tech support jobs, in particular, will be most subject to automation, it’s unlikely that these roles will evaporate. Instead, the tasks themselves will change, and there will be a smaller cohort of people doing them.

However, automation isn’t going to do everything for you. It won’t take over from non-routine or non-standardized tasks.

What Should You Do Next? It’s All About Skills

Automation itself isn’t here to take IT jobs. However, if you want to remain relevant, you do need to adjust your skills accordingly.

The IT field is already facing a huge skills shortage in general, but some of the automation skills that are increasingly in-demand include:

  • Network automation skills
  • Configuration management software experience
  • Troubleshooting
  • Scripting

Of course, if you know how to work with automation or contribute to it, then your skills will be particularly in demand.

Finally, there’s evidence that applied technology skills (ATS), or skills that focus on integrating new technologies, such as data analysis, will remain at the forefront or recruiter and hiring managers’ minds.

You Can Survive Automation

Automation reduces the need for highly repetitive tasks, which means jobs associate with repetitive and easily programmable tasks are at risk. However, automation isn’t AI. If there’s a deviation in your processes or they’re not standardized, then they require a human to run them.

You can survive automation by focusing on upskilling and reskilling to progress through your career. Because while you can’t control tech developments, you can learn how to use and protect them.

Are you looking for a place to practice your new skills? RightStone is placing candidates in IT roles right now. Get in touch or browse our list of available jobs.