Just Until Payday

The Internet offers huge opportunities for a job seeker, but also presents several potential challenges. It also adds several complexities, and a lot more matters to consider…and be careful of.

Job hunting needs to be thought of as a highly personal, extremely directed marketing process where you are the product. Your resume is an advertisement. Your extended network is your source for job information.

So where does the net fit in? At AA-Careers, we recently posted a job on a popular job site and got over 650 applications in a calendar week. For one position. That’s increased competition for jobs.

Had a suitable candidate contacted us before we ran the posting, they could have secured the job before having all that competition. How? By knowing someone at our company who became aware of the job prior to posting. Everyone knew 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 how you submit your application as well. 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 manager would. By eliminating resumes where the objective didn’t match our job description. By rejecting 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 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 sites give you a feel of what companies are 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 easily you can be investigated 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 sway 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!