The Savvy Marketplace

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

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

So where does the internet fit in? At AA-Careers, we recently posted a job on a popular job site and got over 600 applications in a calendar week. For a single job. That’s increased competition.

Had a suitable candidate gotten ahold of us before we posted the ad, they could have gotten the job before running in to all that competition. How? By finding an employee at our company who became aware of the job prior to posting. Everyone was aware of the job for at least 9 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 grounds not to employ them, like "I know I’m overqualified but I really need a job". By eliminating candidates whose documents that didn’t open properly. And by passing over 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 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 thing to be aware of is how quickly and easily you can be investigated on the web. As we Googled several job hunters, we ran into some MySpace comments that were in questionable taste. Nothing larcenous, but enough to tilt our thoughts about who to employ.

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!