If you’ve had an executive or management position for some time and now find yourself out of work, replacing that job can be challenging. It’s difficult sometimes to completely explain everything that’s been involved with your last position and demonstrating your skills and abilities to a new hiring manager. Here are some tips that might help with your executive job search and hopefully land you a comparable position.
For one thing, during your executive job search you’re going to need to remember to be as professional as possible. It’s surprising how often an executive forgets professionalism during a job search. This might be due in part to the fact that they’re used to giving the orders and now they find themselves on the other side of the desk, needing something from someone else. But it’s important to remember during an executive job search that you need to be professional and courteous to everyone you meet, including the receptionist, the hiring manager’s assistant, and so on. Very often these people talk about candidates after they’ve left the interview and if a hiring manager finds that a candidate has been less than professional to the staff, the executive job search won’t include a callback from that company! So be professional at all times, including before and after the interview.
You also need to make sure your resume is topnotch during an executive job search. You might not have updated your resume in years but you need to be sure that not only have you included your most recent position but that your resume format is what hiring managers expect now. Resumes are done very differently now than they were in the past. Usually they have an introductory section that lists a candidate’s intangible personality traits that are important especially during an executive job search. These traits might include strong leadership skills, problem solving abilities, an open and engaging personality, ability to work within a team, and things such as these. Very often executives and managers need to have these skills in order to do their jobs effectively but these traits are very difficult to express any other way. During an executive job search you must have your resume formatted this way to include these traits and positive personality points.
It might also be recommended that you have a professional go over your resume and make sure it’s prepared properly for your executive job search. The amount of money you might pay to have someone do this is well worth landing that executive or management position. If you don’t know a professional writer you can go online to freelance sites and post the project and allow professionals to bid on it. Remember too during your executive job search that you might need to take something that pays less or has less authority than your previous position. This will keep you working in the interim but also might open the way for advancement in a new company.