Faint At Heart

A modern job hunting campaign is by nature quite complicated. While the net has offered a variety of new channels, it also creates increased competition for choice jobs and potential challenges for job hunters.

Job hunting needs to be thought of as a personal, highly targeted marketing process where you are the product. Your resume is an ad. Your extended network of colleagues is your source for information and opportunities.

So where does the internet fit in? At AA-Careers, we recently posted a job on a popular job site and got hundreds and hundreds responses in a calendar week. For a single opening. That’s increased job hunting competition.

Had a suitable candidate contacted us before we posted the ad, they could have secured the position prior to having all that competition. How? By knowing an employee at our office 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 removed with a swift triage process. How? The same way any employer would. By passing over resumes where the objective didn’t match our job posting. 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 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 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 issue to be aware of is how quickly and easily you can be looked up on the web. As we Googled several job hunters, we ran into some MySpace comments that were in questionable taste. Nothing crazy, but enough to tilt our thinking 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!