Copa – I also have a different education background to what I work in. It definitely does bring up questions but I see that as a positive because then I can uniquely position myself and have a distinct advantage. As for your LinkedIn, you should definitely have a more accomplishment focused set of achievements under each job. However, it’s really important to have a cover letter type summary that attracts the right type of people. Start working on a good summary and use key words for the job you are looking for so recruiter filters will get to you.

I agree with most of that but I’d say if you’re going to find out who the recruiter is, do that *first.* and go through them. A recruiter doesn’t want you applying on your own. They wouldn’t get their fee that way.

Sorry, I don’t.

I’m definitely seeing that the jobs recruiters are reaching out about are not advertised online. Probably because 1) they have the recruiter handling the search so they don’t need to post, and 2) the recruiter doesn’t want some great candidate getting into the funnel if they didn’t put them through.

One of the companies is west-coast-based but looking to build an office in my city on the east coast and need someone to build a team, but there’s no indication of that anywhere as I’m researching them online.

I think for more junior roles or people right out of school, casting a wide net by applying online is more what you do as part of your search, but the more experience you have, the more it makes sense to just use recruiters and network, or focus a much greater percentage of your time there than on online applications.

Lunch with your mom? Or some family member who is in town?

My mom went through a phase a few years ago where she was “retired” but didn’t have enough to do, and she decided we’d go to lunch every 2 weeks. She’d drive to my office. People can’t really question it when it’s your mom.

Maybe you can say something like your heat broke and you have to wait for repair guy. Anything that needs fixing or delivering, they generally give you a few-hour window so it ends up being a half-day thing. It seems normal in the workplace because it happens a lot.

So I’m in in-house recruiter so I have experience with this! First off, there is a difference between an in-house and agency recruiter. In-works for the company. An agency recruiter is fee based and will present you to multiple opportunities. Agency recruiters are great, but you typically needs to be more experienced or in a niche or in demand field to get companies to pay a fee for you. Depending on the size of the company, reaching out to an in-house recruiter or hr person is a waste of time. I work on 100-200 job openings so I don’t have time to respond to individual inquiries about specific jobs. If you call, I will not call you back. But, if you find out my email address and send a resume along with the position or job number, i’ll quickly review and if qualified i’ll forward to the correct hiring manager, basically putting it to the top of their pile. I also never read cover letters and most hiring managers don’t either. We’re always going to interview the best candidates the most experience. If you don’t have experience in the area you’re applying for, you need to leverage your network and contacts to get an interview. No amount of a beautiful perfect cover letter is gonna get you in the door if you don’t have someone vouching for you. Now, this is for a established companies is decent sized cities. We get hundreds of applicants for each opening. At smaller companies or in smaller cities with less competition a good cover letter could probably work wonders. And, maybe calling HR would get you in the door. But always, your best bet is to get directly to the person hiring. If you use linkedin reach out directly to the hiring manager, or someone you think might be the hiring manager and/or ask them to point you in the right direction of who to talk to.

As for what to tell your current company, lie lie lie. Everyone does it, you need to. Tell them you have a doctor or dentist appointment. It’s great because if you need to go back for another in person interview or follow up call, it’s super common to have a second appointment soon after for both the doctor and dentist (getting blood work after your routine physical, getting a filling after tooth cleaning, etc.). And, keep doing what you’re doing with trying to get first interviews early in the morning or late at the day, then lie about the longer panel interviews that are less flexible with scheduling.