Friday, November 12, 2010

Resume Cover Letter Help – It’s Been 6 Months and Still No Job Offers

This one is for those of you struggling to land that next job...and there are many of you out there unfortunately. Tough times require more diligent detail to your resume, cover letter and follow ups...and often none of that helps due to the sheer anount of competition out there for very few open jobs. Seemingly, there is no better time to tweak your resume or cover letter or your overall approach to your job search to breathe some new life and energy into your efforts. This article courtesy of a link posted of one of my facebook comntacts, was written by Casey Alexander off the boomersnextstep.com website. Enjoy!



Getting hired in a tight job market isn’t easy. The best way I found to get over the tight job market was by getting some resume cover letter help. I needed it. For some reason I had been sending it out for 6 months with nothing more than just call backs and a few interviews. I knew my cover letter wasn’t stellar but I didn’t think it was that bad. After I made some very serious changes to it, I started to see a change in the results I was getting.



I figured out that the resume cover letter help I needed was for the generic letter I was using. It was too simple and didn’t read very well. It just said, thank you for the opportunity and gave a little about my experience, almost the same information that’s on my resume. To change this I had to completely forget about the cover letters I had copied from the internet. I don’t know how many people use them but I wasn’t getting much out of them. I decided to use a cover letter generator that was recommended widely on the internet. I was afraid of getting the same results but with the money back guarantee I figured I had little to lose.



Making changes to the cover letter worked. I think the structure was better than what I had been using and the language on it was far from how I usually write. It was much more professional. I noticed I got more call backs. I don’t know if it was the letter of the fact that it was easier for me to send twice the number of letters but I did get call backs.



It wasn’t the end of my dry spell by any means. To further improve my resume cover letter, help was available through a good friend of mine who shared her tactic to stand out. She told me that taking it, in person and addressing it to the person interviewing helped her a lot. I didn’t realize how well that impacted the reader. It gave them the impression that I was serious about being hired by taking the time to go and meet the person in charge or hiring.



Another thing that worked really well was to tell them on my cover letter how I want to work for a solid company like theirs that offered the opportunity to learn and grow. I often checked the company website, if it was available and checked for any signs of the company being recognized for anything. If they were a little league sponsor I would find a way to relate to that. If it was for excellence in anything I wanted to know and make a reference to it on my letter. I wanted to send the massage that I was informed about the company and had done some homework on the place I wanted to work for. I did this to have my resume cover letter shine, it did help.



In my experience, a good cover letter has made a difference between landing the interview and not. That’s the first step, right? I catch the reader with the knowledge I have of their organization and a few other key tips I learned to incorporate into my letter. I’ve helped my sister and brothers with their letter and they’ve also landed the jobs. What I picked up made the difference on how I write my resume cover letters. Get all the tips today at Resume Cover Reviews, it can help you land a better job. (c) Copyright 2010 – Casey Alexander. All Rights Reserved