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Pursuing a tenured faculty position is like no other job search. It is time and labour intensive. If you’re completing a PhD, and seriously contemplating an academic search, the best time to start is before you’re ready to go on the market. Passed your comprehensive exams? Successfully submitted your dissertation proposal? If you are considered a PhD Candidate, rather than a student, you might want to start prepping your application package.

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You know what your resume looks like. You’ve written, edited and read it enough times to be able to almost recite it from memory But do you know what it looks like after you upload it for a job application and it has been parsed by an Applicant Tracking System? ATS isn’t just about keyword searching. Heck, we could all accomplish that by using a keyword search in Word. ATS reads your resume and makes judgments about you based on the document you share with it.

So what does it look like? One of my clients recently uploaded his resume to a service that provided him with an insider’s view of his resume after ATS parsing. Here are the lessons from this experience:

There’s a lot of work that goes into a successful job search, and depending on your field or level, a search may demand a big time and effort commitment. Looking at everything you should be doing may leave you feeling less than excited at the process. If you’re like me, procrastination isn’t even second nature, it's business as usual. Here are 4 quick productivity tips & resources to help keep you on track and that will have you feeling like an accomplished job search pro.

In a good job search, you should be pursuing leads, networking, doing your research, and actively engaging with the process. The keyword in that last sentence was actively. In a great job search, you’ll also be an attractive passive candidate. What’s the difference? In an active search, you’re doing all the legwork to make things happen; as a passive candidate, you make yourself attractive to recruiters and employers hoping that they will seek you out and make an offer. Passive candidates are often already employed or engaged in something, so this is a fantastic strategy if you aren’t necessarily looking to leave your current role in the next five minutes. Combine the principles of active and passive searching, and you’ll be amazed at the results.

Want to know more? I shared tips and strategies for this session in my blog post for the Beyond the Professoriate conference. You can read it here. http://beyondprof.com/2015/04/16/reverse-engineer-your-job-search/

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