USAJOBS: It all starts here

I’m starting this blog from scratch today, and so naturally I wanted to make sure that I led off with the most important thing you’ll need to know in order to land a federal job:  the USAJOBS website.  If you haven’t already added USAJOBS to your list of bookmarked sites, go ahead and do it now.  No, seriously:  I’ll wait.

Some federal agencies are still holding on to their own individual web portals for new applicants, but all federal jobs will initially be posted on the USAJOBS website.  If you haven’t already done so, make sure you’re taking at least a few minutes every week to browse through the job listings on this site.  Spending more time on USAJOBS will get you familiar with how the site works, and this in turn will make it much easier for you when it finally comes time to submit an application.

One of the most important features to pay attention to is the different methods you can use to search through all of the job postings.  If you’re not open to relocation, you’ll probably find yourself searching primarily by location.  This can be either by searching for the city closest to you, or within a certain distance of your zip code.  If you’re more fixed on a certain type of work and don’t care where you end up, you might want to search primarily by the series number.  This is one more reason to browse the site, so you can take note of the job series that interest you.  Searching for 0083 jobs, for example, will bring up all of the available Police Officer positions around the country.  6610 is Small Arms Repair,  0510 is Accounting—the list goes on and on.  You’ll never be able to memorize them all, so just keep focused on the fields of work that you’re qualified for.    

One last step you should start working on is building your resume, and uploading it into the USAJOBS system.  It’s fairly easy to cut and paste data into the forms, so you should be able to work from any existing version that you have saved.  USAJOBS lets you save several copies of your resume in case you’re applying for different types of work, which is a nice feature (and one that I’ll discuss more in my next post!) 

Take the time to master the USAJOBS site, young applicant.  Once you learn the ins and outs of the system, firing off applications will become a very fast and streamlined process.  All you have to do after that is just sit back and wait for the phone to ring!