The Internet offers huge opportunities for a job seeker, but also presents several potential challenges. It also adds some complexities, and a lot more things to consider…and be wary of.
Job hunting needs to be thought of as a personal, very aimed marketing operation where you are the product. Your resume is an ad. Your extended network is your lead generating machine.
So where does the internet fit in? At AA-Careers, we just posted a job on a popular job board and got over 600 responses in a week. For a single job. That’s increased competition.
Had a strong person gotten ahold of us before we posted the ad, they could have landed the position before getting all that competition. How? By knowing an employee at our company who became aware of the job prior to posting. Everyone knew about of the job for at least 7 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 fast triage process. How? The same way any employer would. By passing over resumes where the objective didn’t match our job posting. By eliminating prospects whose cover letters gave us grounds not to employ 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 prospects who didn’t bother to spell check their cover letter and/or resume.
So the good news is that job sites give you a feel 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 issue to be aware of is how quickly and easily you can be checked on on the net. As we Googled several job hunters, we ran into some personal web pages that were in questionable taste. Nothing crazy, but enough to swing our thoughts about who to hire.
AA-Careers provides a encompassing 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!
