Dart Folk

A modern job hunting campaign is by nature quite involved. While the internet 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 highly personal, very directed marketing process where you are the product. Your resume is an advertisement. Your extended network of contacts is your source for job leads.

So where does the net fit in? At AA-Careers, we recently posted a job on a popular job board and got over 600 responses in a week. For a single opening. That’s increased competition for jobs.

Had the right person contacted us before we ran the posting, they could have landed the job before 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 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 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 removed with a fast-paced triage process. How? The same way any HR professional would. By rejecting resumes where the objective didn’t match our job posting. By rejecting prospects whose cover letters gave us causes not to hire 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 passing over job hunters 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 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 honed 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 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 insane, but enough to swing our thinking about who to employ.

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!