Right now, I’m assuming many of you are looking for a job or trying to land a new one.

And the harsh reality is that the Job market is still quite difficult this year, with UK Government statistics released yesterday showing unemployment at 5.2% in the last quarter.

But this hasn’t stopped members of our community from kicking off the year on a high note. We’ve already received nearly 20 job offers, and it's only February.

From mid-level talent through to recent graduates. Across industries such as Investment Banking, IT and Project Management, amongst others. This was a client we worked with in late December who got back to us last week about an offer

Now I’m not some sort of genie, and a lot of credit goes to our clients’ hard work and consistency. But the strategy and approach we’ve given them has helped them differentiate themselves in the job market.

And our sole purpose is to help as many of you kickstart your career, so we’re going to share 4 insights we provided today

1) Change how you look at your CV

I’m not going to spend time talking about structure, bullet points and all that. What I’m talking about here is changing how you view your CV.

Your CV is a sales page - thus, you need to adapt it to only include things that support your case for being the best candidate for the role.

That doesn’t mean including everything you’ve done. It means being selective with what you include and doubling down on achievements and impact from your previous roles, which are relevant to what you’re applying for - so no talking about teamwork on your CV if you're applying for a data analyst role

Once you start positioning your CV like this, your call rates will rocket. See Naomi for example, below

2) Moving away from mass applying to networking

Yes, sounds weird, but let me explain.

Applying for roles directly is now leaving your interview chance to a lottery. Especially in a market like this, flooded with candidates.

What you need to do now is find a way to stand out - and this can be done through networking strategicallyon LinkedIn

Now I don’t mean just basic networking. I mean intentional networking with 3 types of people: Recruiters, Hiring Managers, Employees

Before applying for your next role, I want you to 1) find the hiring manager or 2) connect with an employee, jump on a call and aim to get a referral

This is what Labake did after our CV + job search strategy session, and here was the outcome:

3) Focusing on building a sustainable job search routine

Now I know that job searching at any stage of your career is tiring and energy-draining. But applying for 50 in one day, then 10 another day, doesn’t work in the long term.

The first thing I do with all the clients is understand their current work/life situation in order to build a job search routine which is sustainable, and they can do consistently for 4 weeks, as that is the amount of time you’ll need roughly to start seeing real progress

So my tip to you is to find a routine where you can 1) Apply for 10-15 jobs a week, where you do targeted outreach to employee/hiring manager, and 2)reach out to 10-15 recruiters a week (We’ll have our job search strategy doc on our career resources hub soon!)

Starting next week, I want you to start implementing these 3 things and let us know in 4 weeks how your job search has improved!

I’m hoping this was helpful and gives you a starting point, but if you feel like you need further support with this, feel free to jump on an intro call with us or leverage our services below