Job Hunting Using the Web to Succeed
The Internet offers huge opportunities for a job hunter, but also presents several potential challenges. It also adds some complexities, and a lot more matters to consider…and be mindful 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 is your lead generating machine.
So where does the net fit in? At AA-Careers, we recently posted a job on a popular job site and got 650 responses in a calendar week. For one opening. That’s increased competition for job openings.
Had a strong candidate gotten ahold of us before we posted the ad, they could have landed the position prior to getting all that competition. How? By finding someone who knows someone at our company who became aware of the job prior to posting. Everyone was aware 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 sure to check your application matierials carefully! 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 swift triage process. How? The same way any employer would. By rejecting resumes where the objective didn’t match our job posting. By passing over prospects whose cover letters gave us causes not to engage them, like "I know I’m overqualified but I really need a job". By eliminating job hunters whose documents that didn’t open properly. And by rejecting job hunters who didn’t bother to spell check their cover letter and/or resume.
So the good news is that job sites give you a sense of who is hiring, and for what kinds of positions. But once those positions are posted, the competition is intense. You can still try, if you have a well thought out 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 potential problem to be aware of is how quickly and easily you can be checked on on the web. As we Googled several candidates, we ran into some MySpace comments that were in questionable taste. Nothing illegal, but enough to rock our thoughts about who to hire.
AA-Careers provides a all-inclusive 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!
