Want to narrow your job search, do it yourself
It’s time to marry two job-seeking concepts together. First, trying to match your resume, cover letter and even your job interview to the job description for the job in question. Second, developing your personal brand to assist in focusing your job search on those things you’re good at.
In both cases, that’s sound advice.
A little bit of job, a little bit of seeking
The first concept – matching your resume to the job description – has many adherents and has proven to be successful for many people. If they want a certain amount of experience, be sure to make your years of experience stand out. If they want someone who works well with people, focus their attention on when you led a team, or collaborated on some projects.
In other words, give them exactly what they say they want.
The second concept – personal branding – helps job seekers identify those traits, abilities and capabilities at which they excel so that they can focus on promoting those characteristics during their job searches.
So how to marry those two concepts together? Try writing your own job description. In this way you can identify those types of activities and responsibilities you enjoy the most and, presumably, for which you are best suited. Then, as you proceed through your search, you can zero in on those job descriptions which most closely match the one you’ve developed yourself.
The likelihood of you finding a perfect match between your description and one in the real world are admittedly slim. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t more aggressively pursue ones are close approximations.