It took me an entire year of job searching before I nabbed my ideal role. There was a fair bit of angst, the turning down of some offers, dealing with a lot of rejection and of course, chasing interviews. Prior to this, I had only ever applied for roles through the conventional approach of submitting an application in response to an advertisement. When this approach didn’t yield enough results, I had to branch out and create my own opportunities. Here are some of my learnings.
I joined LinkedIn in mid 2010, alongside roughly 70 million other users. Since then, LinkedIn has grown from strength to strength and now boasts over 250 million users. This post would seem almost irrelevant save for the fact that I know plenty of friends and colleagues that aren’t signed up. In my opinion, there is very little risk compared to reward, when weighing up whether to invest some time to set up an account. Here’s how LinkedIn has helped me.
I’m hoping that if this post stops just one terrible email from going out, it could prevent just one stressed out employee from finally losing their marbles and stabbing their colleague through the neck with a Bic pen.
Copying half the company into your email
This should be avoided for many reasons. First of all, it could give the impression that you are incapable of discerning the appropriate audience for your communication. Or that you don’t value people’s time. Also, people could start ignoring your emails assuming that they’re irrelevant if you are a habitual over-CC-er. Yep, that’s a thing. Personally, the worst thing is when I’m suddenly copied into an email chain where I’ve had little or no prior involvement in the topic being discussed. Do you want me to action something? If I don’t respond am I taken to have been consulted? I’ll also sneak the good old ‘Reply-all’ into the category of ‘think before you hit that’, alongside people who go to night clubs regularly but don’t ever dance. (more…)
That Career Girl 