How To Land The Career of Your Dreams: Career Tips From Real Harbor Freight Recruiters

Your resume is your chance to make a compelling first impression, so it’s important to make every word count! This is your opportunity to highlight your proudest accomplishments, past duties that align with your skills and passions, and any measurable or quantifiable results from your work.

Our recruiting teams take notice when a candidate demonstrates attention to detail and a standard of excellence. Therefore, it’s important to ensure your resume has some basic foundations, such as:

• proper spelling, grammar, and punctuation,
• consistent fonts and sizes throughout,
• and a balanced use of text and white space.

This way, you can optimize the space you have available and keep everything easy to read and comprehend.

Also consider the information you want to share: don’t just share your duties, share any measurable or quantifiable results those duties led to. Tell a full story, but keep it brief with about a sentence or so per bullet point. Ultimately, you want a recruiter to feel confident and excited to share your resume with hiring managers!

It’s easy to overlook certain aspects of yourself when writing a resume, because the focus is normally on mentioning your prior responsibilities and employers. However, it’s always important to highlight key technical and professional skills to recruiters so they can understand your background even better before a screening.

Even if you’re just starting a career journey or feel out of your depth in your search, you likely already have many valuable technical skills to include in your resume, such as cloud collaboration, basic computer skills, social media and internet knowledge, basic to intermediate math skills, or remote communication skills. Be sure to dive deeper into these skills in the relevant portions of your employment history as well as during your interview so you can give the hiring team the full picture of who you are.

Where your resume was your opportunity to tell your story in written form, the interview is now your opportunity to be a storyteller and present who you are in a more multi-dimensional way. 

Our Harbor Freight recruiters are looking for candidates with confidence, so it’s important to be knowledgeable about the story you want to tell. Stories include relevant examples of your work history, your struggles and successes, and any leadership examples (if applicable). 

Elements of strong stories and concrete work examples include:

• The goal/objective for you to accomplish
• The challenges you faced along the way
• How you addressed those challenges
• What resulted?

You should be prepared to articulate the “whys” – Why have you made the specific choices you have in your career journey, and why are you excited to join this new company and role?

Be sure to articulate specifically what career growth looks like for you.  “Growth” can mean something entirely different depending on who you are and where you are in your career journey, so consider sharing an example of the type of functional work that would entail growth for you that you may not currently have the opportunity to do.  

Take the time to practice your storytelling skills with a family or friend to gauge your clarity and effectiveness. These skills can be strengthened over time, so remember to keep practicing!

At the end of every interview, our recruiters and hiring managers will ask you if you have any questions for them. Although they’ll make their best efforts to inform you about the role and the team you would be working with, it’s likely that you’ll be curious about a few other topics, so be sure to take this opportunity and ask! Have about 2-4 relevant questions prepared related to the job responsibilities, the team’s dynamics, or the company itself. Our recruiters appreciate answering your questions because it shows you have an active interest and commitment to the role, which is always a plus.