I Lost My Job! What am I going to do? Steps 4, 5 and 6

If you’ve recently lost your job, spent time grieving and taken care of your immediate mental and physical needs Video PART 1, then it’s time to get back to work. Arming yourself with a compelling, easy to read resume and inviting LinkedIn profile will be covered, but we’ll start with the most important step, how to obtain the information you’ll need for both.

I strongly recommend clicking the video above for a more detailed and entertaining lesson on how to ready yourself for the Salesforce Job market.

STEP 4 – Understand Your Successes and Shortcomings

Most resumes look like a calendar and a bunch of job descriptions had a baby. Not good! Compelling Salesforce resumes and LinkedIn Profiles are accomplishment focused, meaning they state how ones work affected the overall business. They are rife with results and outcomes, are easy to read and highlight your specific successes and characteristics.

There are three ways to understand your successes and shortcomings. Here they are in order of credibility.

– Guess. This is a last resort when all resources and research has failed. Not recommended, but it’s better than wheeling out your dusty old document.

– Review past performance reviews and management coaching sessions, including quarterly, or annual 360 reviews. These can be a great source of information for adjectives that convey your work style, reliability, diligence, efficiency, technical competency and so on.

– Contact your more recent managers and team leads. The absolute best and most credible way to obtain information on what your real value was to the company and a deeper understanding of what you need to work on. Imagine you’re in an interview and you’re asked “What will your references say about you?”. When you pipe up and share “My boss and I just connected last week. I’d reached out so I could understand how I should be applying myself while off of work to become an even more valuable employee. They shared I sometimes stick to a problem before asking for help a little longer than I should. They also said I was one of most reliable and conscientious Salesforce developers they’d ever worked with and I’d be their first call if they need to build a team again.”
Powerful stuff….if it’s true!

Be sure to press them for honest information that you can really use. Managers who simply provide lip service or tell you what they think you want to hear are useless. Hold them accountable to the truth so you can learn, grow and validate your best qualities.

Step 5 – Update your Salesforce Resume

Most people have average resumes. Get yours into A shape by starting with the tips covered in the video.

Step 6 – Update your LinkedIn Profile

Watch the video to learn how a few basic tweaks to your profile can help you in the job hunt.