Presignify

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

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

So where does the web fit in? At AA-Careers, we just posted a job on Craigslist and got over 650 applications in a week. For one opening. That’s increased competition for job openings.

Had a strong person gotten ahold of us before we posted the ad, they could have secured the job before getting all that competition. How? By finding someone who knows someone at our company who became aware of the job prior to posting. Everyone knew 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 application matierials 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 fast-paced triage process. How? The same way any manager would. By passing over resumes where the objective didn’t match our job posting. By passing over candidates whose cover letters gave us reasons not to hire 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 candidates who didn’t bother to spell check their cover letter and/or resume.

So the good news is that job sites give you a feel of who is 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 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 downside to be aware of is how quickly and easily you can be investigated on the internet. As we Googled several job hunters, we ran into some personal web pages that were in questionable taste. Nothing crazy, but enough to swing our thinking about who to employ.

AA-Careers provides a broad 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!