Looking For Work In Houston? 7 Steps To Landing Your Next Job
This step-by-step guide teaches you how to maximize your LinkedIn profile and land that job you want.
Summary:
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When it comes to looking for a job, it's still “who you know, not just what you know.”
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With over 65,000 job listings available on LinkedIn, maximizing your profile on the platform is the best way to get a job in Houston.
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Connect with the Houston Properties Team on LinkedIn. We're connected with over 5,000 professionals across all major industries within The Bayou City.
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Update your profile and let us help you find contacts from our connections.
Real estate can be a huge pain sometimes but The Houston Properties team manages to make the whole process so much easier. The quality of their expertise and services is top-notch, to say the least. In fact, the struggles of navigating the market seem almost non-existent with their team on your side. call them. - Lawrence, Google Review
Table of Contents
- Step 1: Focus and Get Started.
- Step 2: Get Some Useful Keywords.
- Step 3: Update Your Resume.
- Step 4: Update Your Linkedin Profile.
- Step 5: Ask for Recommendations and Join Groups.
- Step 6: Test How It Looks.
- Step 7: Reach Out.
Step 1: Focus and Get Started.
More than 30 million companies are listed on LinkedIn. Connect with the Houston Properties Team for a more comprehensive action plan on getting the job you want.
Here are 3 reasons why maximizing the use of your Linkedin profile can help with your job search immensely:
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LinkedIn is a great source to help you leverage all your contacts after you’ve written a great resume. It’s also a great link you can include in text messages when you’re asking people for connections.
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When you write your resume through LinkedIn, it’s easy to copy it into lots of other sites.
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LinkedIn also has an easy 1 click print function for hard copies.
Step 2: Get Some Useful Keywords.
Doing good keyword research is an essential part of building up your LinkedIn profile and resume. With the right keywords, your profile we'll reach the right people.
Good keyword research is the no. 1 way to get attention on LinkedIn.
Using relevant keywords can help your profile be more visible to companies and recruiters.
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Go to https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/ and type in titles or keywords of the jobs you think you want.
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Scroll through the job postings and make a list of two main things:
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Common keywords. List down about 20-30 good keywords.
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Bullet points of well-written major responsibilities in the job descriptions. For example: “Work
with our Professional Services Big Data consultants to analyze, extract, normalize, and label
relevant data.”
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Take a look at this LinkedIn series that highlights the keywords that employers are looking for that people don’t have on their resume. Make a list of the keywords that fit to later add to yours.
Need more help? Check out this guide to having powerful keywords in your profile.
Step 3: Update Your Resume.
When it comes to updating your resume, you don't need to innovate or look for something new. The key is to look at a couple of good ones online to serve as pegs.
We don’t need to reinvent the wheel here; simply look for effective job resumes that are relevant to yours. Doing this gives you both a sense of what’s out there, and which ones are appealing.
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Go to LinkedIn's search engine and type in the keywords from your list above.
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Look through profiles, and identify about 3-10 profiles of people who both:
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Currently have the job you want.
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Have a “good looking” profile page.
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Check out these lists of effective LinkedIn profiles:
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Check out their resumes to use as base models.
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With your resume pegs, researched keywords and descriptions, incorporate what works while writing your own resume.
Step 4: Update Your Linkedin Profile.
This step is where your hard work comes into use. All the research should take your profile to another level.
At this point, you should have two lists ready:
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Keywords and bullet-point lists that you found in job postings.
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A good number of effective job profiles.
Take the time to incorporate all the research you've done. Integrate keywords that fit and add the good bullet-point job descriptions that you found. By utilizing your hard work, updating your Linkedin profile should be a breeze.
Step 5: Ask for Recommendations and Join Groups.
The power of community can go a long way. Ask help from your friends and family for recommendations and join groups that are relevant to your field.
You can now go the extra mile and look for recommendations and groups to add to your profile. The more you improve your profile, the sooner you'll be ranked as a "Best Profile" on the platform.
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Identify 5 people who can give you recommendations. You can create a draft or a list of keywords and descriptions you want them to include to help them make more targeted recommendations.
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Don’t hesitate to ask family and friends. As long as they’re well-written with vital keywords incorporated, you can ask people you work with well or people you simply trust. Even us.
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Join relevant groups. Go to the homepage and search for groups using your keywords. Not only does this help your profile score, but you should also be able to learn from those groups and build more networks.
Step 6: Test How It Looks.
Before your resume reaches a recruiter, there's a big chance it goes through a computer first. Test out how it looks to make sure it gets to the right hands.
jobscan.co is an optimization tool that simulates how screeners see your resume and grade it according to how well it looks on a computer.
Run your profile through the site and modify keywords or bullet points until you get a passing grade.
It’s important to note that 90% of the time, a computer will read your resume first before passing it on to a person. This step ensures that you’ll get through that process with flying colors.
Step 7: Reach Out.
With your LinkedIn profile upgraded and ready to go, the last step is returning to traditional networking.
Now that you’ve tapped into your digital network in the most efficient way possible, the last step is networking the “old fashioned” way. Go through your contacts and make phone calls to look for possible leads.
Here’s a process I want to suggest:
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Make a list of contacts you have and call at least 10 of them a day. List down your family, your friends, people you’ve worked with. Gather all your contacts and try to reach about 10 of them in a day.
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Use a simple call script. Be straightforward. Don’t waste anyone’s time, including yours. What you need from them can be answered by a straight yes or no.
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Say thank you. Send everyone you called a "thank you" email. Even if they weren’t able to give you a lead, they’ll appreciate the gesture and remember you if something comes up.
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Compile your list of leads and request an invite to them on Linkedin. Send them a note introducing yourself, stating who referred you, and the reason for your email (they might know of a company in your chosen field looking for applicants in your chosen position).
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Repeat. With 70 calls a week, you should get one meeting for about 10-15 calls. Look up resources on making good first impressions and learn from each meeting you go to. Keep going until you get better. The more you get better, the closer you get to landing that job.
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