Five ways to use technology to supercharge your graduate job hunt

Today’s five minute read from BrighterBox has five quick tips to maximise your graduate job hunting efforts.

1. VIDEO CVS

Filming a video CV helps you stand out from the crowd - and with good quality camera phones and fast internet connections there is just no excuse not to. 30 seconds of you talking about your background and what you want to do can convey so much more about your personality and enthusiasm than a written CV.
 

2. SOCIAL MEDIA

Use LinkedIn and Twitter to follow relevant careers advisors, employers, hiring managers, and key industry influencers. Engage with them, read their posts, make use of the social web to get in front of the right people and keep absolutely up-to-date with the industry where you want to work.
 

3. GOOGLE RESEARCH

Never go to an interview or send an application blind. Find out all you can about a company before you send an application or meet them, and in particular about the person hiring for the role. There will be huge amounts of information on Google so make use of it and stay on top! A candidate who can reference a recent news story in an interview or who knows who to address an application to will score big brownie points.
 

4. YOUR OWN WEBSITE

It’s free, it’s easy, and it looks slick. Setting up on Wordpress, Squarespace or similar is a must for any digital-focused graduate job hunters and highly recommended for others too. You can share more key information than a traditional CV allows and do so in a way that is more engaging than a couple of A4 pages of text.
 

5. MOBILE

We all know that job hunting is pretty much a full-time job in itself. So make the most of any time you spend travelling or waiting by using your mobile to help with your search. Most job sites (including BrighterBox, naturally) are optimised to work on handheld devices, so you can jump on your smartphone and start picking positions you want to apply and use the time on your laptop to perfect your application.