Bill Gates said that "Patience is a key element of success." He must have had the job seeker in mind. You've found a job listing that truly speaks to you. You update your professional resume, making sure there are no mistakes. You write up a perfectly crafted cover letter. You proofread everything one more time just to make sure you haven't overlooked anything, and then you send it off to the email address in the hopes that you'll get a swift reply.
Then you sit and wait. And wait. And then you wait some more.
For most job seekers, this is the worst part of the process, suffering through that seemingly interminable gap of time between sending out a resume and getting some acknowledgment that your decision to apply for the job was not in vain. After all, what else is there to do but wait?
Actually, there are several more steps you can do in order to try and give you a little more control over whether or not you resume gets a response. Perhaps they might not always work, but it's better to be active than to just sit there at your computer constantly hitting the refresh button hoping for something to happen.
1) Use social media outlets to create an online presence. Once your resume is received by the hiring manager you sent it to, they are sure to do a quick Internet search to see what they can discover. Make sure you have a Linkedin profile, or something similar to it, and that it is current and up-to-date, matching the information you have on your resume. This process will give you a second chance to sell yourself to potential employers, as well as providing a form of confirmation that the picture you painted in your resume and cover letter is an accurate one.
2) Try and put a name to the email address. Just as the people who placed the want ad are likely to check you out online, so too can you check them out and find out a little more about them using the same techniques. If you can get a contact name of the person doing the hiring at the company you just applied to, it couldn't hurt to contact them directly and let them know that you applied for a position at their company. Personalizing communication in this way can help make sure that your resume gets a look.
3) Reach out to other companies in the field. You aren't likely to be the only one who applied for that job, and there's a good chance that the person who gets the position in question, if it isn't you, will end up being someone who works for a company that does the same thing as the one you applied to. If that is the case, get yourself to the front of the line by preemptively applying for a possible opening in a similar position there.
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