Looking for a Job Using the Web to Your Advantage
A modern job hunting campaign is by nature quite involved. While the web has offered a variety of new channels, it also creates increased competition for choice jobs and potential challenges for job hunters.
Job search needs to be thought of as a personalized, highly targeted marketing process where you are the product. Your resume is an ad. 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 600 plus responses in a calendar week. For one job. That’s increased competition for jobs.
Had a great candidiate contacted us before we ran the ad, they could have landed the position prior to getting all that competition. How? By finding someone who knows an employee at our company who became aware of the job prior to posting. Everyone knew about of the job for at least 14 days before it was posted. Who in your network might know of a job that’s coming available soon?
Be sure to check your cover letter and resume 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 fast-paced triage process. How? The same way any employer would. By eliminating resumes where the objective didn’t match our position description. By eliminating candidates whose cover letters gave us causes not to hire 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 eliminating candidates who didn’t bother to spell check their cover letter and/or resume.
So the great news is that job boards give you a sense of who is hiring, and for what kinds of jobs. But once those positions are posted, the competition is intense. You can still compete, 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 downside to be aware of is how easily you can be investigated on the net. As we Googled several job hunters, we ran into some Facebook comments that were in questionable taste. Nothing larcenous, but enough to rock our thinking about who to choose.
AA-Careers provides a extensive 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!