Finding a Job Using the Net to Your Advantage
The Internet offers huge opportunities for a job seeker, but also presents several possible challenges. It also adds several complexities, and a lot more things to consider…and be careful of.
Job hunting needs to be thought of as a personalized, extremely directed marketing process where you are the product. Your resume is an advertisement. Your extended network of contacts is your lead generating machine.
So where does the net fit in? At AA-Careers, we just posted a job on a popular job site and got 600+ applications in a week. For one job. That’s increased competition for job openings.
Had the right person gotten ahold of us before we ran the posting, they could have gotten the position before getting all that competition. How? By finding someone at our office who became aware of the job prior to posting. Everyone knew of the job for at least 11 days before it was posted. Who in your network might know of a job that’s coming available soon?
Be careful how you submit your application as well. When we did an analysis of the 650 resumes, we found a large number of errors. 63% of the applicants were easily taken out with a fast-paced triage process. How? The same way any hiring manager would. By eliminating resumes where the objective didn’t match our job description. By eliminating candidates whose cover letters gave us causes not to employ them, like "I know I’m overqualified but I really need a job". By eliminating prospects whose documents that didn’t open properly. And by rejecting prospects who didn’t trouble to spell check their cover letter and/or resume.
So the great news is that job sites give you a feel of who is 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 written 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 issue to be aware of is how quickly you can be checked on on the internet. As we Googled several job hunters, we ran into some personal web pages that were in questionable taste. Nothing illegal, but enough to sway our thoughts about who to choose.
AA-Careers provides a broad 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!