Looking for a Job Using the Net to Your Advantage
A modern job search campaign is by nature quite complex. While the web has offered a variety of new channels, it also creates increased competition for choice jobs and possible challenges for job hunters.
Job hunting needs to be thought of as a personalized, very directed marketing operation where you are the product. Your resume is an ad. Your extended network of contacts is your source for job leads.
So where does the web fit in? At AA-Careers, we recently posted a job on a popular job board and got 600 plus responses in a week. For a single job. That’s increased competition.
Had a suitable candidate contacted us before we ran the ad, they could have secured the job before getting all that competition. How? By knowing someone at our office who became aware of the job prior to posting. Everyone knew of the job for at least 9 days before it was posted. Who in your network might know of a job that’s coming available soon?
Be careful to check your application materials thoroughly before submitting them. When we did an analysis of the 650 resumes, we found a large number of errors. 63% of the applicants were easily eliminated with a speedy triage process. How? The same way any hiring manager would. By eliminating resumes where the objective didn’t match our job. By passing over candidates whose cover letters gave us grounds not to engage them, like "I know I’m overqualified but I really need a job". By eliminating candidates whose documents that didn’t open properly. And by eliminating job hunters who didn’t bother to spell check their cover letter and/or resume.
So the great news is that job sites give you a sense of what companies are hiring, and for what kinds of positions. But once those jobs are posted, the competition is intense. You can still try, if you have a well honed resume, designed to appeal directly and clearly to the recruiter. And if you have practiced interviewing – so you don’t stumble at a critical point.
Another thing to be aware of is how quickly and easily you can be checked out on the internet. As we Googled several candidates, we ran into some personal web pages that were in questionable taste. Nothing crazy, but enough to rock our thoughts about who to hire.
AA-Careers provides a comprehensive set of services for Bay Area job seekers, providing our clients a personal career consultant, a managed job hunting campaign, modern tools like a personal website, video, highly targeted resume, and much more. Let us know if we can help you.
Be careful out there, and good hunting!
