Folksonomics

A modern job search campaign is by nature often intricate. While the web 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 personalized, extremely targeted marketing process where you are the product. Your resume is an ad. Your extended network of colleagues is your lead generating machine.

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

Had a strong person contacted us ahead of our posting that ad, they could have secured the position prior to having all that competition. How? By finding someone who knows someone at our office who became aware of the job prior to posting. Everyone knew about of the job for at least 8 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 swift triage process. How? The same way any hiring manager would. By passing over resumes where the objective didn’t match our job. By rejecting candidates whose cover letters gave us grounds not to hire them, like "I know I’m overqualified but I really need a job". By eliminating job hunters whose documents that didn’t open properly. And by eliminating job hunters who didn’t bother 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 positions. But once those jobs 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 thing to be aware of is how easily you can be investigated on the internet. As we Googled several candidates, we ran into some personal web pages that were in questionable taste. Nothing larcenous, but enough to swing our thinking 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!