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How to Resign from Your Job and Leave on Good Terms. Hello New Opportunities!

October 5, 2020

So you’ve decided to call it quits and look for greener pastures.

In fact, you’re contemplating the idea of coming into the office with a resignation cake and putting it on your boss’ desk.

Peace out!

But—you’ve got to be careful. If you fail to quit your job gracefully, it might ruffle some feathers and prevent you from securing a glowing reference letter.

Take heart.

You’re a quick scroll-down away from learning how to say sayonara in class and enjoy the smoothest future you can have.

Look before you leap

Picture this:
You hand in your notice before you find a new job. Three months later, you keep spiraling downward into a jobless vortex and exhaust your lifetime savings.
Do you catch my drift?
The point is, always quit your job only after you have another offer in hand.
Below are three quick and dirty tips to help improve your hirability chances and prep for the leap.

Update your LinkedIn profile. Most recruiters look up prospective hires on LinkedIn before scheduling an interview. So, make sure your online presence is spotless.
Brush up your resume. Learn how to write a robust resume and read about small things like how to email a resume or how to format your resume for maximum impact.
Always provide a cover letter. Despite the talk in the industry that cover letters are dead in 2020, they aren’t. So always submit a cover letter along with your resume.

Do the three, and you’ll land a new job in a heartbeat.

Have the talk with your boss

I wouldn’t hire him again.
That’s the last thing you want your ex-boss to say to your prospective employer.
So—
Before you break the news to your manager, make sure you don’t goof and tell your peers you’ve decided to jump ship.
Why?
If your boss finds out about your plans through the grapevine, it’ll make you look bad.
So—mum’s the word and wait until after you’ve had the talk.
Below are a few rules for it:
First, don’t quit your job over email or Zoom unless your company is still working in a remote capacity. If you quit in person, you’ll probably enjoy the sweaty palms time, but it’s the only way to do it right.
When you do tell your boss you’re leaving, make sure to be polite and don’t vent about the job (remember, you need a solid reference letter.)
Lastly, focus on the positive aspects of your soon-past job and pick a few things to thank your boss for.
But—
What if they make a counteroffer or beg you to stay?
If more money can fix the problem, consider asking for a raise first, and see if your employer can match or exceed the offer.
If you’re quitting your boss and not your job, say you’ve already accepted the offer.
Pro tip: Give at least two weeks’ notice. Your boss will be grateful, as they’ll have enough time to prep the transition.

Pen a letter of resignation

Did you really need to write a letter of resignation if you just had the talk with your boss?
Well—
If you want them to remember you fondly or you ever need the job back, do it. Plus, it’s fairly easy to pen it.
Below are some rules for writing a resignation letter:

Explain why you decided to resign.
Give your exit date.
Show gratitude and say something good about the company or job.
Offer help with the transition.

Need a real-life example of a resignation letter? Check out this Hubspot guide.

Clear out formalities

You have got a brand-new professional life ahead of you.
But—
If you fail to sort out formalities with your current job, you’ll shoot yourself in the foot.
So—before you leave, there are a couple of things you need to do.
First, ask the HR team when you can pick up your last check and if there will be another one coming.
Next, check your company policy to settle matters with your vacation days. Do they vanish, or do you have to use them up before you can quit? Figure this out.
Lastly, make sure to return the company property (e.g., laptop, mouse, monitor, phone.) You wouldn’t want to come off as dishonest.
Do these things, and spare yourself the hassle later.

Bid adieu to peers

I need to warn you about him.
Sounds like a nightmare, right?
That’s what your peers might say when the new employer calls up your references.
So—
To avoid it, write a solid goodbye email to coworkers. Not only will they have a better memory of you if you do, but it’s also great networking.
Who knows, maybe one of them is holding a ticket to your future dream job.
Below are six tips to write a solid farewell letter to coworkers.

Keep things nice and short.
Always send personal emails.
Say something positive.
Don’t talk about your plans or brag about the new job.
Mention you want to stay in touch.
List your contact info.

Need a sample goodbye email to coworkers? Check out this Indeed guide.

So—what do you think?

There you have it.
A whopping five tips on how to quit your job on good terms.

Max Woolf is a writer at ResumeLab. He’s passionate about helping people land their dream jobs through the expert career industry coverage. In his spare time, Max enjoys biking and traveling to European countries. You can hit him up on LinkedIn.

Why Work With Us? Hot Tips to Enhance Recruitment On ApartmentCareers.

By Apartment Careers Team
October 16, 2020

Your Why Work With Us section on Apartment Careers is a dynamic tool exclusive to employers with an Enhanced Profile. This blank slate is your opportunity to show job seekers, investors and competitors what your company is all about. Here’s what you need to know about your Why Work With Us section and how to use it to your advantage.

Where Is the Why Work With Us Section in the Employer Center?

Once in the Employer Center, click the “Employer Profile” card > “Company Story” > “Details” on the top navigation.

Create Custom Sections to Showcase Your Company’s Unique Employer Brand

How to rename your tabs:

Add up to five tabs for your audience to explore. Select the tab you want to name and enter a name in the “Section Title” box.

What to name your tabs:

These tabs should represent your employer branding initiatives as well as highlight your company culture. We recommend tabs like “About Us,” “Culture & Values,” “Testimonials,” “Community Involvement” or tabs dedicated to a department you’re hiring for, e.g., Engineering or Sales.

What to Say in Your Why Work With Us Section

It’s tempting to simply copy and paste content straight from your company website or Facebook page into your Why Work With Us section, but it’s important to write for your target audience on Apartment Careers: potential employees. Tell them what your company is all about and what makes it different. Use “you” statements. Job seekers want to know how they’ll fit in and grow with your company.

Other ideas of what to include in your Why Work With Us section:

Diversity & Inclusion: Show candidates your initiatives and goals that advocate for a diverse, equitable and inclusive workplace with a new section on your profile dedicated to D&I. Update your D&I tab now.
Hard-to-fill roles: Build out a whole tab dedicated to engineering, or sales, to influence these candidates.
Office location: If you’re doing a hiring push in one location or just opened a new office, it may be worth building a new tab.
Grad and Intern Opportunities: If you have a grad or intern program, tell your candidates about it!

A few other ideas include – an open letter from the CEO, upcoming events or employee testimonials!

**Adding Photos to Your Why Work With Us Section**

Don’t tell your audience why you’re a great place to work, show them! Use one of our optimized templates or create your own custom template.

How to add photos:

Select image as your media type
Drag and drop your image or upload. You can use PNG, JPEG or GIF Files. Be sure to resize the photos so they are under 5MB and under 600px in width.

Which photos to use:

The best photos spotlight your employees, show off your office space and showcase day-to-day activities as well as special occasions like offsites or in-office celebrations. Photos are a great way to give your audience a glimpse into your company. We recommend adding one to three photos per tab.

Here are a few examples of great photos in Why Work With Us sections:

**Adding Videos to Your Why Work With Us Section**

Engage your audience by adding video to your Why Work With Us section.

How to add videos:

Select video as your media type.
Upload your video to YouTube or Vimeo.
Copy the embed link from Youtube or Vimeo, it can be found under the share button on YouTube or Vimeo.
Paste the embed code into the “Video Embed Code” box

Which videos to add:

Any video that speaks to job seekers and focuses on culture, values, day-to-day activities or benefits at your company is appropriate. Be sure the video you add fits with the theme of the tab it lives under. For example, you wouldn’t put an engineering-focused video on your “About Us” tab. Product videos or commercials aren’t appropriate for your Why Work With Us. For best results, keep your messaging targeted to a job seeker mindset. We recommend no more than one video per tab.

Managing the entirety of the employee lifecycle should include protocols for the offboarding process.

October 19, 2020

By Stephanie Anderson

Terms like “onboarding” and even “pre-boarding” have made their way to the forefront of focus for many businesses as the war for top talent continues for many organizations. But one topic heard about less often is that of offboarding.

The idea of a business making a great first impression, setting the stage for the entirety of a prospective employee’s tenure, is critically important. But what if the impact an organization makes when an employee departs was just as powerful?

Offboarding is the last opportunity your organization has to show employees value. Former employees are destined to be a part of your organization’s word-of-mouth marketing. How they perceive your company, especially in their final days, will be shared with their friends, family and even strangers on the internet. Following is guidance on how to make a significant impact during a staff member’s final days of employment.

Communicate the Change. Employees want to feel valued; preparing to leave a company is no different. It is important for the company to announce when an employee has given notice and thank the exiting employee for contributions made during their tenure.

Create a Checklist. It is critical to ensure that the exiting employee receives clear instruction concerning expectations prior to departure. A checklist of expectations should cover standard items like return of keys, transition of job duties and removing access to company systems. Other items such as the cessation of benefits ending and receipt of last paycheck also should be addressed.

Celebrate the Employee. When a departing employee gives notice, there will be emotions that, left unchecked or unacknowledged, will dampen the overall employee experience. While not convenient for all parties, the exiting employee has made their choice for reasons of their own and careful consideration should be given to ensure that this decision does not sway your opinion regarding their work ethic or the quality of work produced during their time with the company. Instead, the employee should be celebrated for their accomplishments and progress achieved. This may be social time spent together with the team or sending a thoughtfully crafted, handwritten card. Whatever the budget allows, make the time to send a message with impact.

Conduct an Exit Interview. It is insufficient to treat an exit interview as an item to be crossed off a to-do list; rather, focus on the information shared within the interview and dedicating effort to understanding how it can applied to improve the organization (further information below). Determine whether the company has the resources to conduct the interview in person or on a survey. Offering both options to exiting employees may increase the percentage of interviews completed.

Analyze Turnover. It is not enough to just gather feedback from departing employees via exit interviews, instead, the information gained should be applied to identifying enhancements and changes to company programs, where applicable.

There will be employees who leave for reasons outside of the organization’s control, such as moving out of state, graduating college, a life-changing event such as marriage, having children or death, or simply a change in career. These are unpreventable of course, but the real strategic understanding can be learned from employees leaving for reasons like compensation, poor leadership and lack of growth potential. It is up to the organization to leverage that information to identify where improvements can be made.

Offboarding Is Critical to Future Success

As your final opportunity to show exiting employees how much they are valued, make sure to put a strategic offboarding program in place, understanding that it will evolve over time as feedback is received. Removing negative energy and administrative burden from your offboarding process will allow you to review its effectiveness and help you put the employee at the center of the experience, to the great benefit of the organization.

Consider offboarding as risk mitigation for the organizational reputation, in that first impressions are important, but so are final impressions. Everyone suffers from recency bias, in that we instinctively bestow greater importance on recent events (offboarding) rather than past ones (onboarding). Additionally, everyone generally gives more credence to word-of-mouth recommendations. When considering both in conjunction, a departing employee with a positive offboarding experience is more likely to speak highly of the organization than they would otherwise be inclined to absent strategic offboarding efforts.

Stephanie Anderson is NAA’s Industry Operations Manager, and can be reached at sanderson@naahq.org.

Why Craigslist May Be Your Customers’ Most Expensive Recruiting Tool

Written by TONY LEE

When asked to pinpoint their most significant threats, respondents to the 2014 IAEWS-Job Board Doctor Global Benchmark Survey didn’t rank Craigslist in the top three. However, they did list the commoditization of job postings and the growth in “free” job sites as key areas of concern, and Craigslist has certainly had an impact on both. The following is the first of a two-part post that addresses the Craigslist challenge by looking at the site’s shortcomings from an employer’s point of view. – ed.

Craigslist has built a reputation as a great resource of free and low-cost classifieds online, especially among company recruiters operating with limited budgets. But as the years pass, it’s become clear that relying on Craigslist to fill local job openings may require more time and money than its reputation suggests. In fact, in many cases, using a traditional job board is a more cost- and time-effective strategy than posting on Craigslist.

From the early days of the site, Craigslist has offered a very easy method for posting listings: you simply select a city, then a category, open an account and post your job. This ease of use was a breakthrough in the often complicated online recruiting space. Over time, virtually every online job board has created an equally easy posting method, typically relying on e-commerce to generate revenue from each job posting.

Free also was the clear differentiator between Craigslist and most other online job sites. As founder Craig Newmark liked to explain, his goal was to help boost communication between communities of visitors, not generate revenue. Eventually Craigslist began charging for job listings in many markets, which Newmark explained as a great way to filter out fraudulent and frivolous job postings.

Newmark added that keeping the posting fee low – $25 to $75 dollars per month depending on the city – allows Craigslist to retain its position as the low-cost provider compared to the major job boards, a position the site actively promotes (http://www.craigslist.org/about/job_boards_compared). Low pricing also helped Craigslist cement its relationship with the demographic that the site cultivated from its beginning: teens, students and singles who relied on the site to help them find cheap furniture, a used car, a new partner (for the night or forever) and an entry-level job.

Yet, 18 years after the launch of Craigslist, the site is losing effectiveness as a recruitment source under the weight of its own success. Job seeker traffic has grown exponentially in most Craigslist cities through the years, and the still shaky hiring market for many job seekers has accelerated that traffic growth. At the same time, the growth in job postings has stalled in many cities in parallel as other recruiting alternatives have emerged.

The result, say recruiters, is that every Craigslist job posting is inundated with applies, and given the demographics of the typical Craigslist visitor, that influx of applies has created a backlog of work. Instead of receiving 30 applications for a position, among which one or two may be worthy of an interview, companies of all sizes report receiving hundreds of replies within 24 hours of each posting. Yet the number of qualified candidates who apply remains the same or has fallen for many positions, recruiters say, which translates into multiple hours spent reviewing an overload of resumes searching for the needle in the haystack.

This issue is a familiar one to anyone who has posted a listing of any kind on Craigslist. Since all listings are posted in reverse chronological order, the newest listings get the most prominence. When a company posts an opening for a receptionist on a Tuesday at 10am, the window for responses to roll in starts at 10:01am, but typically ends later that day as other postings push the receptionist listing further and further down the queue. While it’s true that search results pull in older listings, those results also show in reverse chronological order, so the receptionist job falls below new listings for receptionists each time another job in that category is posted.

The problem is exacerbated in markets where Craigslist charges for job postings. If a gas station posts a listing for a mechanic for $25, and none of the applicants in the first 24 hours is a good match, the likelihood that the station will receive a relevant application through the rest of the 30-day post is very small, recruiters say. To refresh the flow of new applicants, the station must re-post the job for another $25 to have the listing jump back to the top of the list. In some cases, employers post jobs four and five times before attracting a qualified new hire. At $25 or more per post, Craigslist becomes an expensive option fast, not to mention time-consuming given the flood of unqualified applicants, say recruiters.

To be continued in part II.

73% Of Professionals Don’t Love Current Positions

38% of participants said their job was “okay, I guess”
35% of participants said they hated their current job
27% of participants said they “REALLY love” their job

Hampton, N.H. (May 12th, 2015) – CAREEREALISM, a career advice and employment branding site, published the results of its 2015 career satisfaction survey, through which its audience of 1M+ monthly readers were polled. Readers were prompted to share their level of satisfaction with their current job and/or company.

CAREEREALISM compiled the results and found:

38% of participants said their job was “okay, I guess”
35% of participants said they hated their current job
27% of participants said they “REALLY love” their job

“With 73% of participants not in love with their current position, the reality that the majority of a company’s employees are open to a new job should be a major concern of every executive team today,” said CAREEREALISM founder and CEO J.T. O’Donnell. “Is your company prepared to handle unexpected turnover?”

“If employees start quitting for better jobs,” she continued, “are you ready to mobilize a recruiting strategy to find their replacements? And, how long will it take you to train new hires so they reach the productivity levels of the employees you lost? The message is clear right now: workers are dissatisfied, and that can put any company at risk of being negatively impacted by turnover.”

As you can see, it’s important for a company to select job candidates based on who they think will fit into their company culture. Once a company is aware of what makes their company a great place to work, they will look for job candidates that they know match that specific culture; making them more likely to love what they do every day.

If your company is interested in learning how to make your company culture awesome or is seeking resources on the topic, please download this free ebook.

About CAREEREALISM

CAREEREALISM, a privately-held career advice and Employment Branding company, was founded in 2009 on the belief that “every job is temporary.” The purpose of the site is to help people solve their career and job search problems. CAREEREALISM connects the top talent with the best companies by telling stories that showcase what makes a company’s culture unique. The company is the leading online destination for career advice and employment branding intelligence. With extensive experience in career counseling at large companies, founder J.T. O’Donnell has created an organic platform built to share experiences, provide feedback, and suggest how companies can reveal their talent brand. For more information please visit www.CAREEREALISM.com.