Personal Portfolios
If you're looking for a new job and frustrated by a lack of interviews, don't assume that all you need to do is spif up your resume. Candidates often place too much emphasis on their resume and not enough on the other facets of a job search, such as researching industries, organizations within the industries, departments within the organizations, and the hiring managers within those departments. Candidates should also place more emphasis on researching themselves.
What do I mean by researching yourself? I mean that you should really understand your competencies, interests, and values. What are you good at? What do you like to do? What is important to you? Too many job seekers focus only on their competencies and end up in jobs that bore them or work for organizations which have different values than does the employee.
A great way of exploring your competencies, interests, and values and then communicating those to an employer is to prepare a personal portfolio. While many career sites either don't allow candidates to create personal portfolios or charge money for them, CollegeRecruiter.com encourages candidates to create them and we do not charge anything to candidates for our basic personal portfolio.
If you've never put together a personal portfolio, invest an hour or two. While the results should not be shocking to you, the process should force you to focus your energy on finding the right position for you, rather than just finding a position for you.
The personal portfolio will walk you through the creation of a cover letter, which will provide you with an opportunity to illustrate your accomplishments while defining your career goals. You'll provide answers to commonly asked interview questions, which will also help you make a great first impression on your next interview. You'll create a list of your current references and can even send to them a link to your resume so that they can be prepared to discuss it before they're called by a potential employer. To help you paint a complete picture of who you are and what you have done, you'll also add links to showcase your work, depict your affiliations, or highlight your professional activities. Finally, you'll have an opportunity to add a photo to your resume, which can be helpful for those who are pursuing modeling, acting, or other such positions where your appearance is relevant.
Quite simply, the CollegeRecruiter.com Personal Portfolio is a service that we believe in and that we believe all candidates should use.
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