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 careful of.

Job hunting needs to be thought of as a 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 leads.

So where does the net fit in? At AA-Careers, we just posted a job on a popular job board and got 600 plus applications in a week. For one position. That’s increased competition for jobs.

Had a great candidiate gotten ahold of us ahead of our posting that ad, they could have secured the job prior to having all that competition. How? By finding someone who knows an employee at our office who became aware of the job prior to posting. Everyone was aware of the job for at least 10 days before it was posted. Who in your network might know of a job that’s coming available soon?

Be sure to check your cover letter and resume carefully! When we did an analysis of the 650 resumes, we found a large number of errors. 63% of the applicants were easily eliminated with a speedy triage process. How? The same way any hiring manager would. By eliminating resumes where the objective didn’t match our job posting. By eliminating prospects whose cover letters gave us reasons not to engage 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 eliminating candidates 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 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 potential problem to be aware of is how easily you can be looked up on the internet. As we Googled several job hunters, we ran into some MySpace comments that were in questionable taste. Nothing insane, but enough to swing our thinking about who to hire.

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!