What Are You Looking For In A Job?

Products & Services

what are you looking for in a job?
Chris Crum just wrote on the way LinkedIn looks at the ‘State of Student Recruiting’ and says, “there are over 39 million students and recent grads on LinkedIn, and thousands of companies waiting to recruit them.” Of course, there’s a nice infographic and lots of numbers with visual imagery to help you see what the majority of students are looking for in employment goals.
Not surprisingly, the top things that matter to the 18-30 year old category is work/life balance, compensation/benefits, and a strong career path. They are least interested in company vision, flexible work arrangements, and being valued by their employer. I think that if you did similar surveys in different age groups, they’d come up with different priorities because the things you look for in a job depend on what is happening in the rest of your life.
Flexible work arrangements, for instance, are prioritized by people who have responsibilities at home that cannot be delegated. Being valued by your employer starts looking big when you spend years at a job where your contributions are not appreciated. Company vision might not matter at the beginning of your career, but after a while you think about a bigger picture and where your values align. These things don’t necessarily overtake the work/life, compensation/benefit, career path priorities, but they might.

Job recruiters should target your priorities

If you are looking for a job with certain priorities in mind, working with a recruiter who is going on the majority vote can be frustrating. You are on different wavelengths and the recruiter will not be connecting you to the right jobs for you.
This is why Professional Resume Services does things differently with our Recruiter Resume Distributions. Our process targets your preferences and we match you to the recruiters who meet your requirements in industry, position, salary, etc. The database we use is consistently updated and capable of filtering to your unique parameters.
If LinkedIn has over 39 million students and recent grads competing for a job in thousands of companies waiting to recruit them, there’s a lot of stuff to wade through to find the job that has what you are looking for. Recruiters help narrow things down, but they will keep the majority’s goals in mind. We can connect you to the recruiter who will target your priorities.
 
 
 

Tips For The Reality Of Working At Home

Work/Family Balance

tips for the reality of working at home
If you’ve been dreaming of being able to work from home and have finally started to live the dream…
the first month of working from home is a reality check.
This is the time you figure out what will and will not work for you. You might have set up your working space according to cute ideas on the internet and discovered that you hate actually working that way. You may realize that you need to get dressed in order to be productive. You certainly will discover that everybody (including you) thinks you can do all the household chores as well as your job.
Working from home does not mean you can “do it all.” It means you can be flexible in figuring out what works best for you and your family, but some things will still need to be delegated or eliminated from your lifestyle.

  • Get everybody’s input on what is important and prioritize the top three for each person. One couple’s list looked like this: wife wanted laundry kept up, kitchen neat, and bed made. Husband wanted laundry kept up, living room neat, and cookies always in the cookie jar. So the family priorities were laundry, picking up once a day, making the bed in the morning, and keeping cookies around.
  • Everybody living in the home has a job. Let little kids make their own beds and put their toys away. They get better at it the longer they do it by themselves. Really!
  • Relax standards. Health & safety hazards are important, but perfectly folded towels aren’t.

Working from home means you CAN do a lot more! Most of the time you have the flexibility to move the laundry from washer to dryer during the day or keep an eye on something in the oven. You can plan work times around naps or get a mother’s helper a few times a week. Every family has different needs, and those needs change as its members grow. The reality of working from home isn’t like a daydream, but it is the best choice for many families.
 
 
 
 

Newly Wed And Newly Working — Tips To Make It Work

Work/Family Balance

newly wed and newly working -- tips to make it work
Getting married means adjustments in your life. Often, there is a new address; always, there are attitude shifts. A new job has many of the same challenges as a new marriage, and sometimes both appear in your life at the same time! The challenge of training, learning to live or work with new people, and adapting to a new schedule at home and the job can be intimidating. Here are some tips to make it work:

  • Give yourself permission to mess up. It’s like someone gave you a beautiful, shiny new trumpet and now you have to learn how to play it. The first few attempts for every trumpet player sound pretty bad! Any trumpet player will tell you that there’s a lot of practice and a lot of mistakes involved with learning to make music. Marriages and new jobs are the same way — nobody does it perfectly the first few times they do it, no matter what ‘it’ is.
  • Look at the big picture. Every hour is part of a day, every day is part of a week, every week is part of a year, and every year is part of a life. The bigger your perspective on your marriage or your new job is, the less stress you will feel about smaller parts of it and the easier it will be to see how those smaller parts fit.
  • Prioritize. It isn’t possible to have every important thing be the most important thing; there will be times you have to choose. A schedule helps a lot here, so the priority can change if you are at work or at home. Expect to mess up here, too, because it takes a while to figure out what works for your new family or job.
  • Don’t take on any new challenges for a while. Now is not the time to learn a new language. You are already learning a new life and/or a new job, so your energy is limited.
  • Realize that “this, too, shall pass.” Do you remember how completely intimidating starting at a new school was? How about learning how to drive? You are at the beginning of a steep learning curve, but it will get better every day.

Some of the same characteristics that help you with a new job help you with a new marriage. These “trainability factors” really apply to just about every area of life I can think of. So if you are at the beginning of a kind of scary new phase of life, relax. It will be worth it!