Hi All,
thought I would share my experience around my job search in the last 4 months. Some rough details to my situation coming into the job search:
- Almost 30ys old, swiss
- Engineering BSc
- 5ish years of work experience
- EFZ in technical area
- Looking for roles in the technical area with a business part like MS solutions consultant/project engineer/process engineering/manufacturing engineer/IT infra management/digitalisation
- Left a company that was laying off all of the Swiss workforce.
- Looking for a role in greater zürich metro area
The amount of rejections that I got was initially quite frustrating since they were rather quick and generic rejection emails. Therefore I tried to add more of the keywords into the CV that I need, as well as adding them to the Skills section on these myworkday websites for applications to avoid any automatic filtering. I would say I have a clean professional CV and where necessary spend some thought on the motivational letters, 50-60% AI with some personal touches. Since I was looking for a role that combines technical experience with some kind of business aspect like consulting, i would get the feedback often that the missing consulting experience was the factor for not continuing. I mostly searched for jobs on LinkedIn, a bit on jobsDOTch.
My takeaways from the 4 months that it took.
- Spend some time thinking about the names the roles could have that match your experience, these days companies like to fluff the role names.
- When invited for an interview, spend time to come up with good questions for the interviewer, what keeps you at the company/does this role solve an issue or is it expansion
- I found it to be easier for me to adapt myself when clearly knowing if the company is smaller more local or larger and international
- After every interview i would follow up same day not later. Even if rejected I would follow up, thank and show my interest for the future. I found the saying of "you meet everyone twice" to be true so many times in my life so I want to leave all interactions in a good manner
- If you feel that theres a personal topic in common with the interviewer during introductions, inquire about it, show curiosity, it makes everything else easier and less formal
- When receiving interview invitations, I'd look up all parties on linkedIn to see how long they've been at the company and what their background is, I'd reference their experience also when asking questions
- If the application form asks for salary expectation, write down what you enter, in case you get asked to confirm during the interview.
- I had a bad experience with brain teasers in one interview, after that i made sure to do mock brain teasers with chatGPT, which works really well
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Sad_Bad4999