Searching for a new job can be tricky. Amid finding roles that fit your career goals, navigating online applications, and perfecting your resume, a career search often feels like its own full-time job. Partnering with career search professionals is a surefire way to fast-track your success. By building a team around your career search efforts, you invest in proven, shared skills that protect your time, allow access to expert-level feedback, and steer you along the perfect path toward landing your dream job.

Career Search Team: Career Consultant

One of the most effective ways to achieve your career goals is by taking leadership of your career search, evaluating each of your options, and absorbing as much professional insight about the job market (and your specific role within the job market) as possible. Career consultants are excellent resources for people looking for targeted, transparent, unbiased feedback about professional growth, opportunities, and strategy. Career consultant sessions cover topics like:

• Narrowing down your ideal job role, especially when leaving or entering a specific industry
• Mapping out a 5-year career plan, including aspects of your career like commute, pay, leadership roles, and long-term goals
• Identifying your personal values and how they relate to your career search
• A thorough review of your skills and opportunities for growth
• Interviewing tips, salary negotiation tricks, and workplace conflict resolution
• Exploring job opportunities even when you can’t check every box in the job posting

When recruiting a career consultant for your career search team, don’t be afraid to ask for a free sample session so you can learn a little more about the person’s consulting style and methodology. Ask questions about their goals, successes, experience, training, and references. Try searching for local career consultants on LinkedIn or by speaking with local friends, family, and coworkers for referrals. 

Career Search Team: Resume Writer

A professional resume writer is the best way to perfect your resume, communicate your career achievements, and showcase your natural talents to prospective employers. Professional, independent resume writers translate your personal experiences into tangible, metric-based bullet points that capture the eyes of potential employers and help you stand apart from the crowd during your career search. Investing in a professional resume writer is proven to earn better job offers, specifically in terms of salary and benefit packages. Adding a professional resume writer to your career search team helps you:

• Craft numbers-based data around your professional accomplishments
• Direct potential employers to specific, pertinent examples of your work during interviews
• Create your own brand with unified cover letter, resume, and LinkedIn packages
• Tailor your resume to specific roles, especially when you’re new to the industry
• Mine your memory for important dates, examples of growth, and successes
• Remove the fear around what to write so you can focus on finding perfect job matches

A professional, independent resume writer becomes a partner on your career search journey, invested in your success and long-term goals for years to come. They offer so much more than a free resume template you’d find online; with years of experience writing resumes specifically for your ideal employers, professional resume writers prove their value and worth time and again by consistently landing better, higher, more aligned job offers for their clients.  

Career Search Team: Life Coach

Life coaches offer a holistic, all-encompassing approach to career search achievement. They operate in the personal sector of assistance, meaning they’re more concerned with all aspects of your life than with one aspect alone. While your career is an undoubtedly important piece of who you are, it is only one element of a series of elements impacting your success as a whole. Life coaches help by:

• Evaluating whether your career goals align with your other life goals
• Identifying career goals that either match or contest your personal values
• Taking spirituality, self-care, life planning, and life vision into consideration when considering new careers
• Promoting mental health development and confidence exercises to bolster all areas of your life, including your career
• Mapping out specific actions you can take to further your goals and holding you accountable to those actions and goals
• Exploring the impact you wish to have on your career and guiding you toward professions that encourage such impact

Life coaches help clients connect the dots between all facets of life. Instead of just focusing on a job search, life coaches expertly guide you toward discovering the reasons why, when, and how a career change would benefit and impact other areas of your life. They offer a whole-person, bird’s-eye-view of how the steps you take today in your professional life will resonate against the various pathways and goals you have for the future. 

Career Search Team: Online Assistance

While the perfect career search team typically includes at least one real, living human being, online tools offer easy, accessible ways to improve your efforts with minimal investment. Programs like The Headshot Wizard provide easy, photographer-free headshots for team photos, LinkedIn profiles, and online portfolios. LinkedIn itself is a fantastic online tool for building your career search team, as it offers instant access to employer-attracting features and limitless networks. Together with a professional career coach, resume writer, and life coach, online tools round out an exceptional way to improve your career search success rate and free up your time and energy so you can focus your attention on finding, applying, interviewing, and landing jobs. 

At Zoetic Resume and Writing Services, I partner with my clients to create professional, attention-grabbing, expertly-written cover letters, resumes, and LinkedIn profiles. Together we identify your areas of strength, growth, and potential and transcribe your experiences into clear, memorable examples of how you are the best answer for your target employer’s most prominent issues. Hand the difficult task of capturing your ideal qualifications on paper over to a professional who understands your job industry, the overall career market, and how to land job interviews. Connect with Zoetic Resume and Writing Services here to learn more, and if you’re in the market for an experienced career and life transition coach, my friend and professional peer Sarah Rose from Fresh Rise Coaching specializes in helping find the next right job for you by getting to the root of your individual needs, goals, and lifestyle.