🙂 Nailing Your Job Application Roadmap

TalentGeist Newsletter

Immediately-actionable career insights for ambitious individuals.

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What a MONTH! Our team has been packed with running university career workshops (for ~30 unis across Asia-Pacific) and launching our first cohort of Work Simulation Program; apologies for the silence on this newsletter 😅.

With that being said, welcome to the 350+ students/professionals who joined us in the last month! If you’re new here, feel free to check out our past career insights, at least some of which should be immediately impactful for your career :).

For today, there’s no hyper-specific topic, but rather, I’d like to give a concise overview of the job application process. We’re still getting a lot of questions on this, so thought I’d clarify over a post.

At a high-level, there’s just 3 areas that you need to nail to land your dream job (okay, easier said than done 😂):

1) Resume

2) Interviews

3) Networking

However, none of these live in silo. For example, even if you get past the resume-screening process, 50%+ of your interview questions will STILL be based on your resume (walk me through your resume, tell me about X experience on your resume, why did you move from company X to company Y, etc.). And, after each networking conversation, you should share your ‘perfected’ resume with the industry professional so they can send it around to their colleagues.

Similarly, don’t treat networking as simply a box you tick — treat each conversation as an ‘informal’ interview. If you impress the person you talk to, they may recommend you to the hiring manager…..thus, even if your resume was rejected at first, the hiring manager could pull your resume out and give you another chance. OR, the person you networked with might say ‘don’t bother talking to this person; I spoke with them already and there’s nothing impressive about them.’ Of course, you’re in a tough spot if that happens — even worse off than if you had NOT networked in the first place!

Here’s how I would structure our fellows’ career planning roadmaps:

• Step 1 – perfect your resume (literally dissect every bullet point)

• Step 2 – get your interview prep to ~80%

• Step 3 – ‘go-getter’ networking (build strong rapport with 8-10 industry professionals who will bat for you)

• Step 4 – scale job applications

  • Step 4b – tie up loose-ends (e.g., get interview prep to 100%)

• Step 5 – regularly review application status & deep-dive on each interview

• Step 6 - post-offer action items (e.g., salary negotiation)

Since everyone’s career support needs are different, please check out our previous career insights and/or respond directly to me on this thread with bespoke career questions you have. Happy to help where possible.

Best,

Vincent (LinkedIn)