Searching for a job can be an exhausting process for even the most determined of individuals. Going through each job description and tailoring a multitude of different covering letters for various roles only to be left disappointed and wanting to give up when you get a rejection email is a gruelling experience.
Fear not, there are ways to combat the pressure of applying for different graduate roles that can help you to stay focused on the job at hand. Here are 7 ways student and graduate recruitment app, Debut think will help you to survive the job application process and keep you sane during a pretty tough time.
1. Stay calm
It’s easy to wind yourself, and others around you, up when you’re job searching. The worst part is usually waiting for a reply from the company you have applied to work for, as some businesses don’t even let you know your application wasn’t successful and just let you work it out for yourself! Try to stay calm though; some organisations take a great deal of time to reply to job applications and even if they do and it’s not great news, just keep looking forward.
2. Tailor your CV
Tailoring your CV will help you survive the job application process in two ways. First of all, it breaks up the monotonous form filling and clicking you’ll be doing as you apply for job after job. It will get your brain working and get you excited about the role you’re applying for. The second way it helps is that your time spent applying for jobs will be cut dramatically as you are much more likely to be able to nab yourself a great job.
For example, if you’re a graduate looking for a role in the broadcast journalism field, you may want to scrap some of the part time sales experience you have listed on your CV and instead replace it with skills you have learnt that will specifically help for your chose career path; like interview technique, using specific editing software and camera work.
3. Take breaks
As obvious as it may sound, your body and mind do need to rest on occasion and there really is no reason to push yourself to the absolute limit when job searching, especially if the lack of rest is causing you to lose concentration when writing applications. Set yourself a limit of 5 job applications at a time with breaks in-between. We don’t just mean a 5 minute break to the kitchen either; take the dog for a walk, go for a country drive or meet a friend for a coffee.
4. Keep notes
You may notice that, as you start searching for jobs, a lot of them have online forms to fill out which require you to answer the same questions over and over again. This can be an extremely boring and monotonous task. An example of one of these repetitive questions posed by companies online might be “Tell us what makes you unique?” which apparently merits a 300 word answer for each application you fill out. One way to prevent descending into madness is to keep some of your answers in a word document, tailoring the text as and when you have to.
5. Be yourself
This will again help prevent you from going insane, letting yourself add some colour and personality to each application will help things stay fun and light-hearted.
6. Listen to music
Watching TV while applying for jobs is never a good idea, it usually ends up in you accidentally writing out something you just heard on Jeremy Kyle. Listening to music, specifically music with no lyrics, can be calming but can also keep you motivated and stop your attention from straying elsewhere.
7. Treat yourself
After a day of applying for jobs, remember to treat yourself to something new, like a new top or album download, you really did earn it!
