This post was updated in September 2022

Too many candidates are failing to make a follow-up effort with employers after making contact with them. CareerBuilder found that 37% of job seekers don’t follow up with an employer after they have applied, and 57% of job seekers don’t send thank-you notes after an interview.

This lack of engagement can hurt their chances of getting offers and advancing in the hiring process. Here’s how you can guide job seekers to make the most out of their follow-up:

The job market is packed with job seeking hopefuls, and companies are placing an emphasis on higher goals to attract the best talent and keep them. Thirty-nine percent of 4,000 talent leaders surveyed in LinkedIn’s 2016 Global Recruiting Trends report agree quality of hire is the most valuable metric for tracking performance.

A high quality hire is defined as a new employee who receives positive reviews, and plans to stay onboard and grow with the company. Career coaches are striving to deliver these high quality candidates to employers.

Here are four traits of high quality hires and how to create them:

(This post was updated on 6/22/2020)

College graduates are quickly learning the high expectations for their first job out of college aren’t exactly going to be met the way they pictured. There are many perks they hope to find at their first job that end up missing.

It’s important for career counselors to fully understand the anxieties of college students and the extent of their expectations surrounding that all-important first job.

Once you know what those lofty expectations are, here are a few ways to handle them as their career counselor:

As a career counselor who helps college-aged individuals navigate jobs and internships, you know the importance of gaining relevant experience before graduation. But did you know the class of 2016 and other recent college graduates are having difficulties putting those experiences to work in the real world?

A Bureau of Labor Force Statistics survey found that the unemployment rate for 20 to 24-year-olds, the age when many have recently graduated college and are entering the workforce, is nearly twice that of 25 to 35-year-olds.

To help students succeed post graduation, here are a few tips to help your new job seekers land employment:

When people hear the term ‘etiquette,’ they tend to think of stuffy, formal dinner parties that involve too many forks, white linen napkins, and uncomfortable suits and gowns.

This discomfort and stress people associate with it is unnecessary. Etiquette is important to have in several settings, and it’s easy to learn. And one of the most important places to act appropriately is in the office.

In an April 2014 report from the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), companies listed professionalism in the top four competencies they consider to be essential in their candidates.

Proper manners in the office is not as simple as refraining from cursing at your co-workers or saying “thank you” to your team. Communication is the most important aspect of every company, and email is a major part of that.

For job seekers, email is usually one of the first modes of correspondence they engage in with potential employers, so learning how to write professional emails is crucial to the job hunt.

Let’s take a look at how you can help job seekers learn proper email etiquette:

An April 2014 report from the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) asked companies to identify the top competencies they consider to be an “essential need” in college graduates they are looking to hire. Among the top four career readiness competencies, critical thinking and problem solving topped the list.

Critical thinking is a vital skill to have in order to succeed in your career. It is in high demand because you use it frequently throughout each day in almost every aspect of your life.

Critical thinking is when you systematically process information to make the best decision and to gain a better understanding of things.

If you can develop this crucial skill and put it to good use, you will be among the top candidates in the talent pool. Here are a few simple steps to becoming a critical thinker:

This post was updated to bring you the most current tips and information in October 2020.

Goals are powerful tools for all of us — they act as a compass to help us navigate our way toward success. Setting them can be a challenge, and sticking to them and staying on course, is even more difficult.

Job seekers need to set career goals as they take steps on their journey through the job market. It helps with finding a good employer who will be a strong fit for them. A 2017 study from Gallup found that employees who can link their goals to the organization’s goals are 3.5 times more likely to be engaged.

Good news — sharing goals leads to better opportunities because it gives potential employers a vision for the candidate’s future and shows their motivation. But this all starts with creating a strategy of goal setting.

This is how you can help your candidates set career goals and find their target:

Hiring practices have changed dramatically over recent years, with several new trends completely redesigning the recruiting landscape. A major part of the hiring process is the interview stage, which has also seen an influx of different types and formats.

No two interview processes are created equal. You have the traditional face-to-face interview, the phone interview, the video interview, the panel interview — the list goes on and on. This can be overwhelming, especially considering that 52 percent of interviewers make their decision about a candidate in the first five to fifteen minutes of the interview, according to an April 2015 study from the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology.

How can you help job seekers prepare for all these interview variations? There are several obvious mottos like “be honest” and “dress to impress” that candidates can practice, but let’s take a look at interview tips that address common mistakes for each type of interview:

(This post was updated on 6/24/2020)

With businesses shut down due to COVID-19, about 20.5 million people were on state unemployment rolls in early June 2020, according to the New York Times. It was the 13th straight week that filings topped one million. This extended period of high unemployment brought a question to the minds of many workers: is this forced break in work a good time to think about changing careers?

Despite the popular advice of “following your passion,” job seekers should pause and reflect before changing career paths. The best thing to do is ask the right questions to identify what is meaningful, what provides value, what skills are transferable, and what a career change looks like in reality.

Here is what your job seekers should ask themselves before changing careers:

As the experts job seekers turn to during the job search, we all have go-to pieces of advice we dish out when they need support. But with so many changes happening in the way people find jobs, are some of our traditional job search tips becoming outdated?

Just as we no longer encourage job seekers to send out their resumes through snail mail, there is other advice we need to take out of our repertoire.  Here are four common job search tips we need to stop telling our job seekers: