Ron Abate’s Top 5 Tips for Job Hunters

One of our featured alumni in Knights Shining Bright, career consultant Ron Abate ’97, shares his top five tips for Knights who are looking for a job opportunity.

1. Build your network of contacts: family, friends, neighbors, professors, coworkers, social acquaintances, etc. Why? Because more than 80 percent of all jobs filled are not filled through advertising – they are filled through networking! It pays to know someone working in the industry in which you are trying to find employment.

2. Do your job! “Wait, what?” you may say? That’s right, your job is to actively seek employment. How serious is a recruiter going to take you when they ask what you did for 6 months between graduation and the interview, and you don’t tell them that you were either working somewhere, or actively seeking work. If you tell them that instead you decided to go on a trip to Europe or South America because “you owed it to yourself” to do something fun as a reward for graduating, you may have just eliminated yourself from the competition. Employers are looking for people who really want to work.

3. Keep records of communications: record the date and time, whether it was phone or email/text, and the topic. This will help you to remember when you start receiving multiple offers to interview. Yes, this will eventually happen!

4. Have more than one resume. The resume is your key to an interview, and the interview is your key to a job offer. If you use the same resume for different job openings, you are just submitting junk mail. Each resume must be tailored to the job for which you are applying. Match the key words and phrases in the job description for which you are applying to your tailored resume. Be flexible in the type of jobs you are willing to do.

5. Use your name as the file name when you save your resume! It is frustrating for me as a hiring manager, to receive multiple resumes, and find that more than half of the people named their file “resume.doc.” It becomes so much easier for the hiring manager, HR specialist, or recruiter when you give that file name your name. This also helps us to remember your name more easily, and to associate your name with the skills in your resume.