No two people are alike so it makes sense that no two candidates are the same either.
Years of hiring for companies and hundreds of interviews with candidates have certainly ground this law of human nature into our heads here at entreQuest. Of course we wouldn’t want it any other way. Not only have we been lucky to meet so many qualified individuals with truly unique attributes, passions, backgrounds, and skill sets but we’ve been able to place many of them in positions with our partner companies.
Before anyone can get a membership to our pool of talent though, their resume has to catch our attention. One question that our recruiting team hears time and time again is how does one stand out in the stack?
If you have a connection, use it! If you can get a referral, do it! But even without networking, you can still rise to the top. You just have to apply yourself while applying.
Here’s an example of what we mean. We were recently contacted through our website by a young woman who graduated college two years ago and was looking for a job. Our recruiting team doesn’t receive the emails that go through our web contact form so this hopeful was already at a disadvantage having to get through the gatekeeper first before making it to the hiring desk.
She made it though. In fact, she made it all the way to the desk of our President!
How? Because she had spunk. Not the perky kind common among cheerleaders but that sophisticated energy that intrigues through natural enthusiasm and sharp presentation.
In her first two sentences, she managed to clearly state her purpose of contacting us AND demonstrate that she had done some serious research on our company AND make a witty joke. We couldn’t help but feel flattered by her sincerity and be enticed by her effort so we immediately reviewed her resume. Subsequently she was brought in for an interview.
With the job market as competitive as it has ever been, it’s not enough for unique, qualified candidates to just apply. You have to find a way to uniquely apply your qualifications. This doesn’t mean cracking jokes for the heck of it or submitting applications to every email address you can find on a company’s website. It does mean though that you'll have to use the best of your abilities before the interviewing even begins.
After all, they don’t say finding a job is a job in itself for nothing, now do they?!
Misti Aaronson is the Vice President of Operations at entreQuest and has spent years leading its recruiting division to make successful matches between client companies and candidates.
