Resume stalking helps job seekers identify patterns that can set them on the right career path. Career advisors at Harvard University recommend using LinkedIn to research professionals with impressive careers. We also advise job seekers on how to narrow down the roles that may be of interest to them.
The situation is tough for Generation Z college graduates.
In addition to the hiring slump making it difficult to land a job, some people don’t know what they want to do, or even if they know how to actually get there.
This is where resume stalking comes into play.
“Patterns are all around us,” Golic Ng, a career advisor at Harvard University and author of “Unspoken Rules,” told Business Insider. “And knowing the pattern of your desired career path can help you take a more direct path.”
Ng encourages job seekers to focus on companies they are interested in and be ambitious by simply searching for the company name and “leadership” to search for executive biographies. If you’re interested in a career, search for “LinkedIn” in addition to your name, company, and job title on Google to explore resumes.
Next, read your LinkedIn page from cover to cover. Find out what companies they’ve worked for, what roles they’ve held, how long they’ve been at each job, and in what order. Check to see if further education or specific technical skills are listed, he said.
“If you do this enough times with enough people, you’ll quickly learn what it takes to follow in their footsteps,” he says.
If job seekers aren’t sure what kind of company or industry they’re interested in, Ng offers some advice on how to narrow it down. He recommends job seekers ask themselves three questions.
Number one: “Which words sound cool to me?” Ng has a list of more than 1,000 companies that offer early career programs, categorized by industry, so job seekers can choose “Technology.” , “Consulting”, “Hospitality and Tourism”, etc., you can quickly select companies that look interesting.
Second: “When you look around your daily life, what brands or logos do you find interesting?”
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Third, which city do you want to live in? If a job seeker knows where they want to live, they can specifically search for major employers in that location on Google.
Once you’ve narrowed down a few companies that a job seeker might be interested in, you can try LinkedIn stalking and note patterns to narrow down your job search.
Ng said job hunting is like playing the board game “Battleship.”
“Battleship has rows and columns. And the game is all about guessing which row and column your opponent is hiding their ship in. Career navigation also has rows and columns. It’s just that the rows are ‘functions’. There is, and the column is ‘industry’,” he explained.
A function is a specific division of a company, such as sales, marketing, human resources, or product development, and an industry is a group of companies that operate in a particular field.
He said the key to finding the career you want is figuring out the intersection between the job you want to do and the industry you want to work in. It may help to skim the resumes of people who have found the ideal role for them. Understand what it actually takes to get there.