Job Search Using the Web to Your Advantage
December 22nd, 2009The Internet offers huge opportunities for a job seeker, but also presents several potential 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 operation where you are the product. Your resume is an ad. Your extended network of contacts is your inside source for information and job leads.
So where does the net fit in? At AA-Careers, we just posted a job on Craigslist and got 600+ responses in a calendar week. For one position. That’s increased competition.
Had a strong person gotten ahold of us ahead of our posting that ad, they could have gotten the job prior to having all that competition. How? By finding an employee at our company who became aware of the job prior to posting. Everyone knew about of the job for at least 8 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 fast triage process. How? The same way any hiring manager would. By passing over resumes where the objective didn’t match our position description. By rejecting prospects 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 eliminating job hunters who didn’t trouble to spell check their cover letter and/or resume.
So the great news is that job boards give you a feel 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 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 investigated on the net. 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 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!
