So you have got your work visa, congratulations! You now find yourself in the city and country that for the last months or even years you have been fantasising about.

Now comes the straight-forward part of the whole process, finding a job. This should be easy right? Well after passing all the government criteria for a work visa, you should be over qualified for any type of work that you wish, that’s the theory, and I hope for many of you that things glide seamlessly from one continent to the other, for the others here is a ‘Global Visas Speed Guide’.

Cover letter

Evidence suggests that employers are still very much interested in cover letters. A popular myth still reigns about their importance however, there is every chance that they will not be looked at until your CV has passed the initial screening of CV’s for example, although past this stage and they are a handy tool for giving the employer more information.

Stick to the facts, this isn’t your time to go all Michael Aspel on the employer; they do not need or want an autobiographical history of your life, as interesting as it might be. They want to know why you are suitable for the position and what you are able to offer them.

Stay away from ‘negatives’, the employer doesn’t need to know about your falling out with your old boss or why you have had such a large gap in between employers. Stick to the pros rather than the cons, and leave the explaining to the interview stage, this also gives you longer to think of some tall stories as explanations.

Resume

Organisation, or if you are in the States organization is the ‘key that will unlock the door to success’[1]. On average employers will spend a whooping 10 seconds skimming your CV, so they need to be perfectly executed. Poor planning of your resume could cost you an interview. ‘Fail to plan, plan to fail.’[2]

If you have any worries about this then using a template is an excellent way of getting this right, or if you want to make doubly sure of success with your job application, why not hire the services of a professional? These days resume writers and very competitively priced and deliver an excellent service, recommended.

Tools

• Professional Resume Writing Services

• Job & Career Sites

• Resume Distribution Services

For information and services of any of these tools to aid you in the search for gainful employment, type each of them into the magic search box.

Beyond the basics

So you’ve followed every step to the letter of the great ‘Global Visas Speed Guide’ to getting a job, and still no luck, what is going wrong? FYI for every hundred CV’s you send out you should get ten job interviews, of those ten you should get at least one job offer. If this isn’t you then do not despair.

In this technologically advanced time that is governed by the electronical mail it is easy to simply mass send out what would equate to stacks of CV’s. This is possibly what you are doing wrong, get back to the old school and send out your CV’s by post, also make sure they have a cover letter tailored to the specific job.

As you are now using snail mail, another great way to make your resume stand out is to use a different coloured paper; you are probably using white, as everyone else does. Imagine how much you would stand out from the crowd if you used blue or red!

Another step on this technique is to use different sized paper, thinking outside the box I know, but have you ever tried to shuffle a bundle of papers of different sizes? Imagine the employer doing the same thing and your CV is there within the heap, appearing as if by magic among the hundreds of others.

Inside information, make friends with people already at the company. This is ultra dedicated but could well work as people tend to gravitate towards people they already know.

3 sneaky tips

• Send your resume with a gift, bribery is a wonderful way to get into the hearts of whoever you desire, why should getting a job be different, human nature is not that complicated.
• Send it recorded delivery, that way someone has to sign for it, making it look even more special. Chances are the HR department won’t sign for it, though it will reach them with the ‘special delivery’ sticker still affixed.
• Stick a post-it note on the last page saying something like, ‘This one’s good, M x’. The CV is most likely being screened, a post-it on the last page saying something along these lines might get through to the interviewer, the theory is that they will see read it and think that the person screening has affixed the note. Who’s M? I don’t know, nor will they probably, but they just might be fooled.

Good Luck from Global Visas x

[2] Some guy, ‘Book of clichés’