- Resume stalking can help job seekers identify patterns that can set them on the right career path.
- A Harvard career advisor recommends using LinkedIn to study professionals with cool careers.
- He also gives advice on how job seekers can narrow down roles they might be interested in.
It’s tough out there for Gen Z college graduates.
In addition to a slowdown in hiring making it difficult to land a job, there’s also those who don’t know what they want to do or, if they do know, how to actually get there.
That’s where resume stalking comes in.
“Patterns are all around us,” Gorick Ng, a Harvard University career advisor and the author of “The Unspoken Rules,” told Business Insider. “And knowing what the patterns are for your desired career path can help you take a more direct path.”
Ng encourages job seekers to be ambitious by focusing on the companies they are interested in and simply Googling the company name plus “leadership” to pull up the C-suite bios. For every person whose career sounds interesting, look up their resume by searching in Google with their name, company, and title, plus “LinkedIn.”
Then read their LinkedIn page top to bottom. Look at what companies they’ve worked for, what roles they’ve had, how long they stayed at each job, and in what order. See if they list any further education or specific technical skills, he said.
“Do this enough times with enough people and you’ll soon have a good sense of what it takes to follow in their footsteps,” he said.
If a job seeker is not sure what companies or industries they are interested in, Ng has some recommendations on how to narrow it down. He recommends job seekers ask themselves three questions.
First: “Which words sounds cool to me?” Ng has a list of more than a thousand companies with early-career programs that can be sorted by industry, so job seekers can quickly select those that sound interesting, such as “technology,” “consulting,” or “hospitality and tourism.”
Second: “If I look around my daily life, what brands/logos do I see that seem interesting?”
Third: “What city do I want to live in?” If a job seeker knows where they want to live, they can specifically search in Google for major employers in that location.
Once a job seeker has narrowed down some companies that seem interesting, they can try out the LinkedIn stalking and take note of any patterns to narrow down their job search.
Ng said job searching is like playing the board game Battleship.
“In Battleship, you’ve got rows and columns — and the game is all about guessing which row and column the opponent is hiding a ship. In career navigation, you’ve also got rows and columns — it’s just that the rows are ‘functions’ and the columns are ‘industries,'” he explained.
Functions are specific departments at a company, like sales, marketing, HR, or product development, while industries are groups of companies that work in a specific sector.
He said the key to finding the career you want is nailing the intersection of the function you want to do and the industry you want to work in. Pouring over the resumes of people who have found what that ideal role might be for you can help you figure out what it actually takes to get there.
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