Effective Advertising and Info Management

The Internet offers huge opportunities for a job hunter, but also presents several possible challenges. It also adds great complexities, and a lot more matters to think about…and be mindful of.

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

So where does the web fit in? At AA-Careers, we recently posted a job on a popular job site and got 650 responses in a week. For a single position. That’s increased competition for job openings.

Had a great candidiate gotten ahold of us ahead of our posting that ad, they could have landed the job before running in to all that competition. How? By finding an employee at our office who became aware of the job prior to posting. Everyone was aware 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 taken out with a fast-paced triage process. How? The same way any hiring manager would. By rejecting resumes where the objective didn’t match our job. By eliminating 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 prospects 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 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 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 checked on on the internet. As we Googled several candidates, we ran into some personal web pages that were in questionable taste. Nothing insane, but enough to tilt our thinking about who to choose.

AA-Careers provides a comprehensive 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!

Comments are closed.