How To Cloud-Base Your Career Materials

You’re scrolling through job listings over your lunch break, and suddenly you see your dream job. Naturally, you want to apply immediately—but then you realize your career materials are all on a zip drive you left at home. And that means you’ll have to wait until you’re back home before you can fill out an application.

Cut your response time

While there’s nothing wrong with keeping your career materials on a zip at home, it can be inconvenient and delay your application. If, on the other hand, you store your career materials in the cloud, then you have everything ready to go (give or take a couple of cover letter tweaks) and can respond to an interesting job listing as soon as you have a few minutes to yourself.

Preparing your career materials

We all know that you should tailor your résumé and cover letter to the position you want. Depending on how broad your job search is, that can mean focusing on different strengths. For example, if you’re a PR professional, you might be interested in working for a startup—but maybe you’d also consider a position with one of the nation’s top PR agencies. To maximize the efficiency of using the cloud, prepare résumés and cover letters for each of the positions you’d consider. Remember: if something else comes along, you can always tweak your materials later.

Uploading your career materials to the cloud

There are two main methods for cloud-basing your materials. First, you can use a cloud storage provider to simply store the documents. According to Reviews.com, the best providers with free options are DropBox, Google Drive, and OneDrive (free with Windows). From here, you can share your documents with others, or send them along as attachments to emails.

You can also use them to populate online applications—which brings us to our second method: saving multiple résumés and cover letters to your accounts in aggregate job boards such as Monster and Flexjobs. When you apply for a job, you can select which materials to use from your uploaded documents.

Once your career materials are in the cloud, make sure to review them monthly so they’re always current. That way, you’re ready to respond right away when an interesting opportunity comes along.

Sources:

http://www.reviews.com/cloud-storage/